In this section informants listed both journal articles and book chapters.
There are 77 book chapters, so the majority of the publications are journal
articles. The oldest publication was Mitchell, T.F. (1954)“The language of
buying and selling in Cyrenaica”,Hespéris, vol. 44: 31–71, mentioned by
Richard Young. The most recent is Aronin, L. (2014)“The concept of
affordances in applied linguistics and multilingualism”in: M. Pawlak and
L. Aronin (eds),Essential Topics in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism,
Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 157–73, mentioned by David Singleton. In fact, for
more recent publications it is difficult to say whether they will become one
of the most important ones, as for these publications the impact and
importance still has to materialize.
There is no clear pattern in the topics the articles deal with, apart from the
psycholinguistically oriented articles in the early 1980s and thefirst attempts
to broaden the scope later on. It would be interesting to analyze the citation
history of some of these key publications. The program HistCite (www.gar
field.library.upenn.edu/histcomp/) would be suitable for this, but it turns out
that this program is based on the information in Web of Science, an online
platform that is strongly biased toward the hard sciences and medicine and
does not sufficiently cover the humanities to get a good picture (see also
Chapter 9 on this issue).
If we look at the journals in which the articles have been published, we see
that there is a core of journals that are preferred. Table 5.1 lists the journals
with the number of listings.
Although the list of the top journals is in line with the journals that are
read regularly by the informants there is a remarkable gap here betweenAL
and the other journals. This can be partly explained by the high frequency of
the Canale and Swain article from 1980, although other journals also have
Table 5.1AL journals with the number of listings (>2)
Applied Linguistics 57
Studies in Second Language Acquisition 31
Language Learning 29
TESOL Quarterly 26
The Modern Language Journal 17
Second Language Research 17
IRAL 14
Journal of Social Issues 4
English Language Teaching Journal 4
Language 4
Review of Educational Research 4
International Journal of Applied Linguistics 3
Journal of Child Language 3
Psychological Review 3
Reading Research Quarterly 3
Applied Psycholinguistics 3
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3
52 Most important articles and books in AL