Policy recommendations for language learning: Linguists’ contributions between scholarly debates and pseudoscience

Some language-acquisition researchers not only pursue their scholarly agenda but also act outside academia as experts in language policy-making. However, the relationship between scholarly quality and political impact is complicated, and oftentimes policy is not based on robust scholarly evidence. In this contribution, I focus on research findings in language learning that have been taken up in language planning and policy (e.g., the notion of linguistic interdependence). Drawing on concrete cases, I discuss problems of individual expertise and quality of research. Where there are methodological inadequacies and/or lack of expertise, problematic or even utterly false conclusions can be drawn from research. A critical review of influential claims in the field of applied linguistics with respect to robustness of the evidence and its fit to the actual policy problem should allow us to determine which theories and research strands may be useful for language-policy recommendations and which are probably not. A critical review of linguists’ involvement in policy-making suggests that often a more appropriate appellation for so-called evidence-based policy would be policy-based evidence. In my discussion, I address two delimitation problems: defining the boundary between pseudoscience and real science (in the wide sense of the term, including social sciences and humanities) and defining the boundary between scholarly rigor and political advocacy by academics.