imported from other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, psychology
and neuroscience. They range from grammaticality judgments to think aloud
protocols and very detailed conversational analysis techniques, surveys and
various neuro-imaging techniques. Multi-method approaches are becoming
popular, such as neuro-imaging combined with eye movement registration,
or variation analysis and reaction time data. As Merrill Swain indicates,
along with the increased sophistication of the methods comes a growth in
the number and quality of statistical procedures. While in the 1980s knowl-
edge of analysis of variance and correlations was enough, now more
advanced techniques are becoming increasingly popular. Multilevel analysis,
time series analysis, log-linear modeling andMonte Carloiterations can now
be found in many more recent publications. Peter Robinson says:
You look at the early empirical work on language learning and effects of
instruction (say Seliger and Long, 1983), and compare it to today (e.g.,
Gass and Mackey, 2012), and there has just been so much growth and
sophistication in research methods and tools, and interdisciplinary links
to both...That is a major development.6.2.2 The impact of corpus linguistics
One of the major trends has been the development of corpus linguistics. The
enormous growth of corpus linguistics inspired by John Sinclair and his
colleagues has made massive data available. The corpora are based on real
authentic language use and that has led to a claim that all language teaching
materials should be based on such authentic language. But as Henry Widdowson
has argued in various publications, what is relevant and authentic for a native
speaker in a specific situation is not necessarily relevant for a learner who is in
a totally different situation:
The claim of pedagogical relevance was based on the assumption that
the language used in classrooms to induce the learning process had to be
real or authentic use of native speakers as recorded in the corpus...
What came from a corpus, it was claimed, carried the guarantee of real
language and therefore of pedagogical relevance. I objected that one
could not assume that what was real for users was also real for learners
since what made the language real was not its occurrence as text but its
use as discourse and this crucially depended on contextual factors that
the corpus did not record and the classroom could not replicate.
(2009: xxv)The other problem resulting from the growth of corpus linguistics is that
the accessibility of data has led to a substantial growth of language description
at the expense of theorizing. It is all very well to describe the use of language
Main trends I 65