CLINICAL LINGUISTICS
Linguistic analysis
The linguist’s interest in these altered states is precisely in their alteration: what is it that makes them different (what has changed) from the normal state? ‘Before intervention can take place,’ writes Crystal, ‘the specialist needs to have identified exactly what the nature of the disability is. This requires an analysis of those areas of language that are particularly affected – whether structural (in phonetics, phonology, graphology, grammar, lexicon, discourse) or functional (language in use) … Effective intervention presupposes the accurate identification of where the problems lie’ (Crystal 1995: 434).
And in order to carry out the analysis of those areas of language that are particularly affected what the specialist needs is a comprehensive map of ‘normal’ language development and a diagnostic set of tools to employ in pinpointing accurate identification of where the problems lie. (Note that diagnostic instruments for the language impaired are mirror images of the proficiency and achievement tests used to chart normal development in language learning.)
‘The target of intervention,’ Crystal continues, ‘is to bring the deficient language from where it is to where it ought to be. A knowledge of the stages of normal language acquisition … is therefore also a prerequisite of successful intervention.’ And he concludes, ‘The specialist needs to be aware of which teaching techniques and strategies are available and appropriate’ (ibid).
Crystal has here identified three particular kinds of skill for the specialist: linguistic analysis, disability diagnosis and pedagogic know-how. The linguist’s interest is clear in the first of these because of the major involvement of linguists with charting the process of language acquisition, originally in the L1 but increasingly now in the L2 as well. In the second area, diagnosis, we find the linguist’s and the applied linguist’s interests overlapping since for the linguist the development of diagnostic instruments is where they shift into an applied mode (but observe below who are the authors of such instruments) and for the applied linguist the construction of such instruments is central to what they consider to be their normal professional activity. And then in the third area, that of pedagogy and of remedial intervention, we are clearly in the area of the applied linguist and not of the linguist. At least that is the case of my claim that practicing speech therapists are (like language teachers who have gone through courses in applied linguistics) applied linguists.
