upbringing. But I always felt that I was a real applied linguist. I had a vague
notion that there were other people that held other views, and that the con-
ception of AL was not as straightforward as I felt it to be, but I never worried
about it.
The work with bilingual schools in the Netherlands clearly was AL, in the
sense that it contributed to solving real world problems. It brought me into
real classes where pupils became individuals rather than types of informants.
It was also a good example of the right kind of problemfinding and solving:
it was not me who wanted to develop a quality control system for bilingual
schools, but the schools themselves.
Our work on language attrition might also be seen as another“real”AL
activity, but here the problem to be solved did come from the research and
language policy community and not so much from those exhibiting or suf-
fering from language attrition. The same is true for the work on relearning of
forgotten languages. Though I would still claim that this contributes to solving
real world problems, the initiative to work on this came from inside the ivory
tower.
But I ask myself, why was I not interested in discourse analysis and con-
versational analysis at the time? From time to time I would attend presenta-
tions in whichfive seconds of speech were analyzed exhaustively, preferably
without taking into account the conversational context, with unfounded
assumptions about the speaker’s intentions and the significance of minor
details. The research community I was part of at the time was the Inter-
faculty Unit for Language and Speech, which connected research at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Faculty of Arts of the Uni-
versity of Nijmegen. The researchers at the MPI, both residents and those
visiting, were a constant source of inspiration, and of course they all held on
to the experimental empirical approach. Introspection, and more generally
qualitative data, were looked at with suspicion and doubts about the eco-
logical validity of single word recognition tasks were seen as irrelevant. A
typical reaction to the more qualitative approach that began to start in the
1980s was Wolfgang Klein’s review of the Faerch and Kaspar book on
introspection in SLA from 1989. The title of his review was“Introspection
into what?”and that summarized the MPI perspective neatly.
For a while I became interested in SCT, in part because I liked the people
who were working on it. Though it has brilliant thinking behind it, in the
end it became too nebulous for me and required too much adherence to the
scriptures. Also the emphasis on instruction ran counter to my own intui-
tions based on my experiences and research on bilingual schools and CLIL.
My observations, underpinned by substantial evaluative research, were that
pupils in CLIL classrooms acquired high levels of proficiency in English
both in perception and in production, mainly through using it rather than
learning the rules. The pupils’interest in rules followed their acquisition of
implicit knowledge, and they wanted the rules to back up their intuitions,
more or less along the lines of Krashen’s monitor theory.
Concluding remarks 137