ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Professional morality in applied linguistics
Ethics has a clear role in institutional settings where there is concern to declare and to limit individual rights and responsibilities. This applies particularly to professions. House offers this definition: ‘Ethics are the rules or standards of right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession’ (1990: 91).
These rules are often encoded in a Code of Practice or Code of Ethics. The British Association for Applied Linguistics, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1997, issued a document for discussion in 1994 entitled ‘Draft Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics’. Good practice in applied linguistics, the document makes clear, is based on the acknowledgement of responsibilities to a variety of stakeholders, including the subject of applied linguistics itself:
Most of this document is organized around the different work relationships that applied linguists engage in, and within these, it offers a checklist of important issues, cross-referencing to other guidelines where these may be of value. This document isn’t designed as a set of criteria for professional accreditation in applied linguistics, and it doesn’t provide any recipes for professional decision-making. In a changing climate of teaching and research, its suggestions are intended to help applied linguists to maintain high standards and to respond flexibly to new opportunities, acting in the spirit of good equal opportunities practice and showing due respect to all participants, to the values of truth, fairness and open democracy, and to the integrity of applied linguistics as a body of knowledge and a mode of inquiry. (BAAL 1994: 2)
The stakeholders are those with whom applied linguists have work relationships. They include colleagues, students, the public, researchers, informants and sponsors. The recommendations are quite admirable and, in want of anything more enforceable, necessary. But they do have something of the unrealistic about them. Thus:
Contracts with sponsors raise issues that are too numerous and too complex to be treated adequately in the present document. These include: the composition of steering committees; lines of communication; the ownership of data and findings; publication rights; contract termination. Applied linguists need to be careful about the terms on which they accept contracts for investigation, as well as being very clear about the amount of autonomy which they will be able to exercise … Before signing a contract, applied linguists would be well-advised to seek expert advice, and to refer to the detailed suggestions in, for example, CVCP 1992, Sponsored University Research; Recommendations and guidance on contract issues.
(ibid: 13)
The harsh reality is that in these days of contract research, of over-production and resource shrinkage, it is difficult in many cases to turn down a contract for a project on the grounds of principle alone, on the abstraction of ethics which, however admirable, is unenforceable in the profession as a whole. But we should not give up. ‘You must go on. I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ Beckett (1959: 418) wrote. The fact of probable non observance of a code of conduct is not grounds for its abandoning. These are early days for applied linguistics, the professional esprit de corps takes time to build and in the meantime the sense of the ethical milieu slowly develops.
Koehn (1994) considers that what characterizes a profession is that it serves clients rather than makes a customer-type contract. The profession’s moral authority is established by its unconditional concern for the client’s good, by its willingness to act when needed, by its willingness to sustain its service, by its certified competence, by its preparedness to demonstrate its accountability, by its discretion on behalf of its clients and by its self-monitoring. Professions make a public statement that dedicates their agents to a position of public trust, and it is notable that it is the agent (the member of the profession) who is bound not the client. In a contract, on the other hand, the obligation lies equally on both parties. What the professional offers is service or duty, to be professional, to act professionally rather than to be successful, since success cannot be guaranteed.
The relativization of all knowledge(s) within postmodernism inevitably bears heavily on education. Those areas of education in which language is both means and end, whether in the teaching of the first or the second/foreign language, have become notable sites for struggle, since what is seen to be at stake is socialization into a culture as well as the shaping of modes of cognitive development. It is not surprising therefore that in applied linguistics there is both the yearning for an ethics and at the same time a mistrust of what may be regarded as the imposition of a universal ethics.
