argued that we cannot generalize from case studies to groups, and now
we know we cannot generalize from groups to individuals.6.3 Conclusion
Thisfirst list of trends shows that, in terms of theories and research me-
thodology, thefield has been and is moving. Some theories wane, others
grow. There is a clear trend away from formal theoretical linguistics, in par-
ticular UG, to more socially oriented and usage based approaches. There is
also a tendency to make the gap between psycholinguistic approaches and
sociolinguistic approaches smaller. This is one of the results of the application
of CDST, though that model still has to prove its worth.
The most important, but therefore not necessarily positively evaluated,
developments are the decline of formal linguistics in AL, the growth of SCT
and other theories that try to connect the psycho and the socio, the devel-
opment of technology that made large scale corpus construction and analysis
possible and the application of more advanced research techniques and sta-
tistics. In the last few decades we can also witness the growth of the range of
research paradigms and techniques, ranging from conversational analysis to
neurobiological methods. Again, this fanning out suggests that AL as a dis-
cipline is open to new developments in adjacentfields, both in terms of
theories and in terms of research methods. More advanced statistical tools
are being used, but at the same time the traditional views on generalizability
based on sampling from a population are challenged. This adds to the com-
plexity of the debate on qualitative and quantitative methods, since the
boundaries between the two are blurring. Conversational analytic methods
may be used to study dense data on language development using time series
analysis. This is clearly a very recent development that is likely to have an
impact in the future.
Several informants point out that the scientific rigor of AL research has
improved dramatically, though standards for qualitative research that have been
developed and tested are not always applied adequately. There is some concern
about the fact that old ideas are presented without mentioning the original
thoughts behind them, and therefore there is the risk of re-inventing the
wheel, but that may also reflect the mean age of the group of informants in
this study.
References
Baker, K. and De Kanter, A. (1983)Bilingual Education, Lexington: Lexington Books.
Bhatia, T.K. and Ritchie, W.C. (eds) (2006)The Handbook of Bilingualism, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Davies, A. and Elder, C. (2004)The Handbook of Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell.
Doughty, C. and Long, M. (eds) (2003)The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition,
London: Blackwell.
Main trends I 71