It seems to me that the term SLA has basically come to mean a fairly narrow approach to doing research on learning an L2such as the experiments reported by Ellis That is a shame because this sort of experimentation is so fruitless But its an undertaking that a number of university based academics gets paid to pursue so it has taken on an undeserved legitimacy It s now quite distinct from applied linguistics AL since so little of linguistics informs the concepts and interpretations of current SLA research 133 7 7 240