ABSTRACT
In most evaluation traditions, innovation and evaluation are closely related. Although evaluators sometimes address ongoing or established programmes it is more common to focus on some planned change. The ways evaluation and innovation do and do not intersect follow from the different purposes of evaluation and the nature of the field or domain within which innovation and evaluation occurs. Adrian Holliday is an advocate for the 'young academic tradition' of applied linguistics in the face of the 'dominant non-academic culture of English language teaching'. Celia Roberts, like Holliday, emphasises the interconnections of culture and language learning. Her case study of 'intercultural communication' centres around 'language learners as ethnographers' even though she also recognises the limitations of ethnography which were never developed for evaluative purposes. The self-defining of innovation may well be the only valid approach, though it will make those who seek some normative or even comparative basis for evaluation uneasy.
