of Latin and Greek in the teaching of French and German. This has
certainly been a blessing for the teaching of English. But I would
strongly argue that it wasn’t the great teachers of English, such as
Jespersen and consorts in the direct method area which created the
teaching of English in a different spirit, but the social changes and mod-
ernization to which the story of English has been knitted and which
created a social environment in which Jespersenet al.could start from
afresh.I myself see a similar gradation: therefirst seems to be a tendency of
innovation in second language teaching (Dutch/German/Swedish as a second
language), then in EFL, and then in foreign language teaching. For Dutch,
this has led to a disparity between Dutch taught abroad, which tends to be
very traditional, and Dutch as a second language, which embraces new
approaches more easily. Within foreign language teaching, EFL tends to be
more innovative than French or German as a foreign language. Paul Meara
sees a similar trend in the UK:“I think AL has influenced EFL teaching a
lot, but, in the UK at least, it has had a minimal impact on foreign language
teaching.”
Thomas Ricento sees little impact:
I think that research has tended to have limited application. For exam-
ple, if you look at the articles in theFocus on Formbook, edited by
Doughty and Williams (1998), the various conclusions from the research
is something like“some things we do in the classroom may make some
small difference for some students in some contexts.”That is about it.
Good research, but of very limited practical usefulness in terms of
teaching practices/pedagogy.According to Jasone Cenoz,“the influence of AL on language education is
limited because most research on AL can’t be applied to language education
programs”. Says Alastair Pennycook:“Poor research, self-interest and too
quick jumps into applications have often caused difficulties for language
education, pulling it in different directions. It is not clear that SLA theory or
approaches to methodology have helped language education.” Barbara
Seidlhofer even goes one step further by claiming that:“What we do is
based on the assumption that we contribute to the effectiveness of teaching
and learning, but basically we are doing things for ourselves.”
Annick De Houwer:
From my European perspective I haven’t seen much improvement in
language teaching. I have been training future EFL teachers, and it is still
an uphill battle to counter the grammar-translation method and to do
away with vocabulary list learning. Insights from AL are apparently not
easily applicable! Also, rigid monolingual, standard norms continue to124 The impact of AL research