THE PROFESSION OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Defining a profession
The definition of a profession appears to be straightforward. In Webster’s Third Dictionary (1994), the definition of profession is:
a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive preparation, including instruction in skills and methods as well as in the scientific, historical and scholarly principles underlying such skills and methods, maintaining by force of organization or concerted opinion high standards of achievement and conduct, and committing its members to continued study and to a kind of work which has for its prime purpose the rendering of a public service.
What has happened this century is a flight into professionalism, a result of the rising proportion of occupations that have required a high standard of education. Many of these occupations have aspired to professional status. In the first half of the last century the number of males in professional employment in the UK increased five-fold (from 1 to 5 per cent). The criteria for professional status can be short-listed (by Wilensky 1964, for example) or long-listed (Musgrave 1965). On the basis of the short-list (full-time, a training system, a professional association, a code of ethics), applied linguistics makes the cut. The issue is less clear on the long-list: knowledge base, conditions of service, public recognition, all yes; control of entry, controlling professional association, code of professional conduct, all are queries.
