DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Language-teaching curriculum
Research
Research in curriculum tends to be within one specific area, such as assessment, pedagogic grammar, background knowledge or genre comparison, rather than overall method or content or teaching. What has influenced curriculum have been speculative ideas, given the status of theoretical models and therefore at least potentially researchable. I think here of communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980), notions and functions (Wilkins 1994), the graded levels of achievement movement and its associated unit credit scheme (Clark 1987). In all cases what is interesting is that they have each drawn on the fundamental idea of the centrality of interpersonal communication in language learning (and therefore teaching).
As a source for curriculum innovation as well as for research, communicative competence has been unparalleled since 1975. Its first in-depth discussion by Dell Hymes took place, it is well to remember, at a Research Planning Conference on Language Development among Disadvantaged Children and was a deliberate counterblast to what Hymes regards as the over-narrow emphasis given by Chomsky to linguistic competence:
The limitations of the perspective appear when the image of the unfolding, mastering, fluent child is set beside the real children in our schools. The theory must seem, if not irrelevant, then at best a doctrine of poignancy: poignant because of the difference between what one imagines and what one sees; poignant too because the theory, so powerful in its own realm, cannot on its terms cope with the difference. To cope with the realities of children as communicating beings requires a theory within which sociocultural factors have an explicit and constitutive role; and neither is the case. (Hymes 1971)
Communicative competence is based on the notion of appropriacy, an attempt to build a model for ‘the rules of language use without which grammar would be useless’ (Pride and Holmes 1972: 278). Hymes’s powerful insight combined with the trenchancy of his portrayal made possible major development and research in applied linguistics, akin to the Restricted and Elaborated Codes proposed by Basil Bernstein (1971) and the interlanguage hypothesis by Corder in the 1980s (Corder 1981). In sociolinguistics, in second-language acquisition, in curriculum design, in language assessment, the construct of communicative competence has been of major importance. Whether it has enabled us to do better (teach more effectively, for example) is another matter. But as an explanatory device, illuminating what is done and at the same time examining what it means, communicative competence is a good example of applied linguistics as explanation and as inspiration.
