Marjolijn Verspoor and I started working on the application of Dynamic
Systems Theory (DST) to second language development (SLD). This led to
our Routledge publication,Second Language Acquisition: An Advanced Resource
Book, in 2005. The interest in complex adaptive systems has given direction to
both our teaching and our research over the last ten years.
Over the last 25 years I have been actively involved in the development of
bilingual education and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in
primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. As part of the certifi-
cation team, I contributed to the development of a quality control system
for bilingual schools and I have reviewed programs in many schools over all
those years. Part of the review process was observing lessons, which has
been a source of inspiration with respect to language learning in instructional
settings.
So, over the years, I have moved from topic to topic and back. The larger
part of my work was concerned with bilingual processing based on reaction
time data. Moving to DST as a new perspective also meant a sometimes
dramatic break with my earlier work. My“social turn” came gradually,
through contacts with people working on sociocultural theory like Lantolf,
Thorne and Swain, and through the increasing awareness that in a DST
perspective the social and the cognitive are closely connected and essentially
inseparable.
The second issue to be clarified here is the choice of the period studied,
1980 until 2010. The motivation for this is simply: this is the period I was
involved in thefield. Though this continues to be the case, I decided that
2010 is far enough in the past to reflect on it. The choice of the period of
1980 – 2010 is not inspired by important theoretical or paradigmatic shifts or
the publication of pivotal books or articles, though, incidentally, it is the
year in which one of the most important articles in ourfield, Canale and
Swain’s article on communicative competence, was published inApplied
Linguistics. As the data presented in this book will show, the informants
did not limit themselves to thinking about that period only. Many of the
publications mentioned preceded this time window or were published after
that. Still, 1980 was marked for other researchers as well. Dörnyei’s auto-
biographical chapter:“From English language teaching to psycholinguistics:
A story of three decades”(2012) also mentions the early 1980s as the beginning
of his career in AL. For some it was the end of a phase: Spolsky mentioned:
“1980 was a good year: that was, as you will see from my publications about
the date, when I gave up on applied linguistics and argued it wasn’t a useful
field”. Apparently he still saw some use for the label, since that same year, he,
Merrill Swain and Henry Widdowson started the journalApplied Linguistics,
which was maybe the most important event for thefield in that year. The
journal was to become one of the leading journals in AL.
So far I have not found anything substantial that supports my choice for
2010 as the end date. The publication of Kaplan’s monumentalThe Oxford
Handbook of Applied Linguisticsin that year was certainly an important event.
Introduction 3