same conferences, that they have academic status and a good publication
record, that they have changed positions both geographically and content-
wise, that they are active in professional organizations and act as editors of
books and journals and that they are well connected. They do not neces-
sarily work in the same area and on the same topics, but they have their
favorite topics: James Lantolf and Merrill Swain for Social Cultural Theory
(SCT), Diane Larsen-Freeman for complexity theory, Henry Widdowson for
discourse, and Claire Kramsch for cultural and ecological approaches to
foreign language learning. Though there are clearly differences in view and
theoretical orientation, in general they respect each other’s work. It seems
that the leaders, probably combined with the publishers, are what binds the
field, more than research topics, definitions of thefield, impact on language
teaching or views on what constitutes the core of the AL literature. A
majority of the leaders do work that relates to language teaching, though
the distance from what really goes on in classrooms is fairly large for most
of them.
The third source is the information given about articles and books. As
pointed out earlier, the list of articles and books mentioned is very long and
there are just a handful of publications that are generally seen as core for the
field. There are many publications from outside thefield, which supports
the view that AL is conceptually interdisciplinary in the sense that ideas,
theories and research methods from other disciplines are imported. The
multitude of publications mentioned is, on the one hand, a sign that there is
basically no content that is shared by all applied linguists; on the other hand,
it shows the ability of thefield to react creatively to developments in other
areas and apply them in its research.
There does not seem to be a common core of publications that define the
field. Whether this is a specific problem for AL, I do not know. A similar
survey to the one reported on here among psychologists or cultural anthro-
pologists is likely to show an equally disparate pattern. It may be a natural
tendency of disciplines to fractionize and reassemble parts of the old dis-
cipline into new coalitions. This may not be a reason to despair about the
future of AL and, indeed, we have seen the emergence of sub-communities,
working on testing, SLA, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), SCT and so on.
There seems to be little ground for any of these subdisciplines to claim that
they are the“real”AL, even for those that in the early days of thefield were
defined as the core constituents.
The fourth question concerned the trends the informants have witnessed
over the last decades. There is a wide range of topics the informants refer to.
Thefield has moved in many ways and directions, but there are probably
two main issues to be noted. Thefirst is the decline of the impact of formal
linguistics as a major theoretical basis for AL. The other major trend is the
move away from an emphasis on psycholinguistic mechanisms in individual
language users and learners to cognition as socially embedded. The“social
turn”was, or maybe still is, a reaction to the impact of psycholinguistics and
134 Concluding remarks