ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
A CAL view: ethics again?
Second-language literacy study
To an extent CAL takes an individualist approach to the solution of language problems. With regard to the bilingual literacy project CAL would therefore maintain that judgements based on group performance are uninteresting and that there can be no exception to the principles of individual rights and individual access. As such, there would be strong support for the provision of first-language literacy as a means of ensuring cognitive growth and as a bridge to the acquisition of literacy in the second language. The doubts expressed by the project’s applied linguists would therefore be dismissed as once again hegemonic, reflecting a patronizing view as to the role and superior efficacy of a language such as English.
As can be seen, in the cases of the examples of the language-program evaluation and the second-language literacy study, CAL would offer what might be regarded as an idealistic ethical view, taking no account either of the availability of resources or of the social facts of for example the position in the world (in India, or in Australia) of English. And so, in spite of its claims to be socially concerned, CAL appears to be individually oriented. This puts a question mark against its role within applied linguistics as it has been practiced, since that practice has always been socially aware, context sensitive, attempting to bring together what is known about language and local realities. CAL looks much more like the abstraction we expect in theoretical linguistics. But of course, the bottom line of CAL is that it does raise the fundamental question within applied linguistics, which is whether its traditional practice has in fact been misguided.
