Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching
EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Spolsky writes in his editor’s Introduction to the 1999 Pergamon Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics that educational linguistics was:
a term modelled on educational psychology and educational sociology. It describes the commingling of an academic discipline (linguistics) with a practical academic profession (education). While it maintains the higher status for the academic field through using it as the head of the noun clause, it rejects the notion that linguistics is just waiting to be applied, as a hammer is waiting for a nail to drive it in. Rather, the use of the term asserts the need for a careful consideration of the educational side as well, producing a responsible new field. [Its task] is to define the set of knowledge from the many and varied branches of the scientific study of language that may be relevant to formal or informal education … [T]he term also includes those branches of formal or informal education that have direct concern with the language and linguistic proficiency of learners. (Spolsky 1999: 1)
If educational linguistics was modelled on educational psychology and educational sociology, applied linguistics, again according to Spolsky, was modelled on applied mathematics ‘winning out in competition with the equally logical term “Language engineering” to cover a wide range of interests in practical applications of the knowledge that is being developed through the growth of the modern discipline of linguistics’ (ibid).
The distinction Spolsky intends is between a discipline-in-waiting (the hammer, which is his view of applied linguistics) and the development of ‘a responsible new field’, that is educational linguistics. And yet when I examine the nearly 200 articles in his Concise Encyclopedia it is difficult to justify omitting them from an encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Educational linguistics, accordingly, appears to limit both the source (anything linguistic) and the target (various branches of language education).
Definitions of applied mathematics, tend to the theory (pure maths)–practice (applied maths) distinction. It is difficult to understand Spolsky’s view that applied linguistics is a hammer in waiting unless he means that educational linguistics has taken up the earlier definition of applied linguistics, that it is wholly about language teaching, largely in terms of source, entirely in terms of target. This is the position of Wilkins (1999) whose article on applied linguistics in the encyclopedia follows Spolsky on educational linguistics. That way, Wilkins tells us, lies coherence, although he accepts that just as coherence may be achieved by restricting the field to language teaching, a similar coherence could be achieved by examination of any other domain of applied linguistics enquiry (Wilkins 1999: 17). This seems to be the multiple variety view of applied linguistics which does not assume or expect an umbrella coherence. Which suggests that Spolsky and Wilkins are in agreement: educational linguistics is a reduced form of applied linguistics, held together as a discrete discipline ‘by the type of language use that the study is directed to’ (Wilkins 1999: 17).
The term educational linguistics was also used by Stubbs as the title of his 1986 book which, he tells us, ‘has been influenced by Halliday’s work on language in education’ (Stubbs 1986: 2). While this approach has something in common with Spolsky’s, they do not seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Educational linguistics to Stubbs appears to be a way of providing teachers with the education about language that will inform their practice, a very Hallidayan project.
