At least two informants, Zoltán Dörnyei and Lourdes Ortega, indicated
that they became applied linguists out of frustration with their teaching
experience. As Dörnyei writes in his 2012 autobiographical chapter:“I was
very much a language teacher at heart, but afrustratedlanguage teacher. I was
aware of the almost unlimited possibilities within language teaching...but I
was far less successful in trying tofigure out why certain things worked
better than others”(2012: 3). Along similar lines Lourdes Ortega mentioned
that she had done all the teacher training courses she couldfind, but felt that
the research on language learning and teaching did not trickle down from
research through teacher trainers to learners.“Researchers do not make
content relevant for teachers. My job is to make research relevant.”
Other informants wanted to enhance their expertise because they were
confronted with specific problems in their teaching. Ruiying Yang remem-
bers:“I became interested in a course on genre analysis because it could help
me solve the problems that Chinese EFL learners had when reading and
writing research papers.”Mary McGroarty reports similar experiences:
Among those I tutored were several native speakers of Spanish; for
some (not all), Spanish transfer issues were evident. I also came to see
that, for some of these students, having a different language background
was not a major issue, but lack of familiarity with academic skills
surrounding literacy expectations at university level was.A similar problem pertaining to motivation played a role in Karlfried
Knapp’s career:
At the time I completed my MA, I became aware of the language pro-
blems of migrant workers in Germany. I began to work as a volunteer in
a community center teaching migrant workers German as a foreign lan-
guage and helping them in their dealings with public authorities. I soon
realized, however, that traditional approaches to foreign language teach-
ing were inadequate for this clientele, and that in addition to insufficient
command of German, the migrants also encountered severe problems
on the level of culture in interactions with Germans, in particular in the
context of official organizations and institutions.There seems to be a tendency for researchers who started out teaching
English abroad without learning a local language to stick to EFL/ESL in their
later research, while researchers like Patricia Duff, but also Diane Larsen-
Freeman and Andrew Cohen, broadened their research to other languages
than English. According to Margaret Thomas, this background and experi-
ence in ESL still defines the research focus:“Given that so many applied
linguists entered thefield through teaching ESL at universities, it is not sur-
prising that the focus is still on the same target group and focused on English.”
This echoes Lourdes Ortega’s observation that most of the research focuses
The informants 19