its focus on controlled, experimental, statistically based research in thefield.
For the credibility of the field the “hard science” approach in psycho-
linguistics is seen as important, but many informants feel that it is no longer
needed, since AL has a well-established position in many universities all over
the world.
Thefifth question was how informants see the relationship between
research and teaching. Again, there was a range of views. For some informants
even having this item in the questionnaire was too much of a sign that AL is
basically, or only, on learning and using additional languages. But the
majority agrees that many of the“real world problems”AL can contribute
to are related to language learning and instruction. Views are divided over
the contribution of research to the improvement of language teaching.
Some informants see a negative impact, others see no impact at all, but for
the majority the impact has been substantial. What it contributed is a move
from behaviorist approaches to language learning to more communicatively
oriented approaches. Part of that is related to language policy and political
and social developments outside thefield. The impact on better teaching
methods has been limited, but the now generally accepted notion that there
is no optimal, one-size-fits-all approach to language learning is an important
contribution. Individuals differ in many respects and so does their learning.
Do these sources of information converge? The global picture that emerges is
one of what might be labeled as a“community of practice”. There is a feel-
ing of shared interests and goals and the intention to improve these through
learning from others. But maybe the seventeenth-century term“invisible
college”is more appropriate here. Robert Merton, the founding father of
the sociology of science, presents the following definition:
Invisible colleges can be construed sociologically as clusters of geo-
graphically dispersed scientists who engage in more frequent cognitive
interaction with one another than they do with others in the larger
community of science. At the outset, the members of an emerging invisible
college regard themselves as major reference individuals and regard
themselves collectively as a reference group, whose opinions of their
work matter deeply and whose standards of cognitive performance are
taken as binding.
(1977: 6)Of course, geographical dispersion has become less of an issue in the
twenty-first century than it was in the seventeenth century, but the picture of
more interaction within the group than outside the group without closing off
such external contacts is typical of AL. In that sense, a discipline is defined
more by what a group of people do than by the verbal labels they use to
describe it.
It may be enough to feel that we belong to that community more than any
other community in the academic world. Within that community there may
Concluding remarks 135