argues that having a high profile president may enhance the status of the
field even when that person is not the typical applied linguist or a regular
AAAL conference-goer. In his view, having someone like Michael Tomasello
as president would be good for the profile of thefield while such a person
clearly would not define himself as an applied linguist.
4.2 The list of leaders
Not surprisingly, most of the informants who were interviewed only had a
quick look at the questionnaire before the interview, but Alan Juffs was a
laudable exception; he mailed his responses even before the interview. The
impromptu listing of names is not ideal. As Lourdes Ortega remarked, it is a
bit like a verbalfluency task in which the participant has to name as many
birds or words beginning with an“s”in one or two minutes. As with the
verbalfluency task, participants had different strategies to come up with
names. Some listed people on the basis of geography, others of topics or
publications. I started out asking people to list names and give reasons for
their choices, but I would also suggest names to which they were free to say
yes or no. This may have led to a bias in favor of the best known people,
though the names suggested were sometimes also focusing on specific lines
of research.
This question clearly left quite some room for listing many different
people, also because“thefield”was not uniformly defined. Even adding my
own definition (the development and use of multiple languages) didn’t lead
to a restriction of people who were active in the area at all. Many informants
listed researchers who would not be typically called applied linguists, such as
Bourdieu, Goffman or Perfetti. I decided that all names mentioned in the
interviews would simply be listed. The scattering of names is of course a sign
of the links to many other differentfields of research that applied linguists
make use of, but may also be a sign of a lack of focus. As mentioned in the
previous chapter, interdisciplinarity is clearly a main characteristic of our
field.
All the names were put in an Excelfile that generated a frequency count of
the people mentioned. The total set of names mentioned consists of 228
individuals. This set has been reduced by removing the names that were
mentioned three times or less. Table 4.1 shows the frequency of listing of
the names mentioned at least four times.
The list in Table 4.1 allows us to define the leaders in ourfield. There are
58 names mentioned at least four times. The frequency distribution shows a
clear top group consisting of:
Claire Kramsch
Merrill Swain
James Lantolf
Diane Larsen-Freeman.
38 The leaders