provide clues about his age). In my selection of informants I tried to include
people who have been active in thefield for most of the period of 1980–
2010, so some people have not been invited to participate because they were
too young. Informants who defended their PhD after 2000 were not inclu-
ded, though some exceptions were made for colleagues whom I thought
would have in-depth knowledge of what has happened in the past even
though they may not have“lived”it. Lourdes Ortega and Marianne Gullberg
are obvious examples. The estimated range of ages is between 40 and 75 with
a large proportion in the 55–65 range. The effect of age may be different in
different countries. In the Netherlands, there is mandatory retirement at
age 65. Though some universities will have facilities for emeriti, there is
typically no support for conference attendance or costs for data collection,
which makes active participation in thefield more cumbersome. In other
countries, there is no mandatory retirement, though many universities have
incentives for elderly professors to take part-time retirement. So for this
group of informants there may be differences in level of activity depending
on the retirement conditions.
2.6 Multilingual applied linguists?
One of the questions in the questionnaire was whether the informants read
AL literature in other languages than English. The answer is basically:“No, I
don’t (unfortunately).”There is quite some shame about this, in particular
among the applied linguists from English-speaking countries, who confess
not to have any knowledge of other languages. But apart from a small
number of really international researchers, such as Heidi Byrnes, James
Lantolf and Claire Kramsch, to name just a few, even those informants who
are multilingual and should be able to read literature in other languages
indicate that in fact they do not. There are various reasons for this. One is
that there is already so much literature in English that it is hard to even keep
up with that. The other reason is that the national communities of AL are
also different discourse communities with their own ways of expressing things.
Even for core concepts, like“learning”,“teaching”and“multiculturalism”,
there are marked differences between these discourse communities, which
makes cross-referencing problematic. This does not necessarily mean that a
whole national AL community is disconnected from the mainstream as
shown by the internationally very active AL community in Spain. It is not
clear why the Italian and French communities are so much separated from
the international AL community, while Spain is so active and connected. It
is quite likely that leading researchers such as Rosa Manchón, Carmen
Muñoz, María del Pilar García Mayo and Jasone Cenoz play an important
role in this.
The strong tendency to rely on English only has in some respects negative
effects. Camilla Bardel mentioned that in the foreign language departments in
Sweden the main thesis still has to be written in the foreign language (Italian,
14 The informants