ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
A CAL view: ethics again?
Pedagogical grammar
The practice of providing in a pedagogical grammar ‘tightly controlled practice in writing sentences’ would be derided by CAL as making discourse (or grammar) part of language rather than looking ‘at how meanings are a product of social and cultural relationships and then (turns) to see how these may be realized in language’ (Pennycook 1994b: 116).
Unless, therefore, Mitchell’s (1990) use of the sentences:
1. Mary is as tall as her father.
2. Mary and her father are identical in height.
is deliberately intended to make the familiar unfamiliar by locating ‘the context of language use, the speakers and their intentions in a wider social, cultural, and political context’, then the CAL conclusion would be that pedagogical grammar is simply giving instruction in how sentences can be put together.
Is this fair? Mitchell’s appeal to logical, semantic and pragmatic meanings as well as lexicogrammatical resources suggests that in his view pedagogical grammars are offering explanations as to why things are said, not just how things are said. Whether he is correct or not, there is of course a further somewhat obvious point to make against so strong a CAL position and this is that the sole purpose of pedagogical grammars can be claimed to be to set out the how: the why is quite deliberately left for other areas of language teaching.
