ETHICS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
A CAL view: ethics again?
Workplace communication
The CAL requirement 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’ would at first blush suggest that the work described under workplace communication meets the CAL criteria. Gumperz et al. is based on an analysis of ‘recordings of genuine examples of … conversations and meetings … to find out how each side interprets what has happened in the conversation’ (1979: 9).
This does seem to meet the CAL requirement. The film and its accompanying material are intended to facilitate advice and teaching in workplace communication skills. They are based on real conversations and interviews, such as the college librarian interview, and take account of feedback from both sides of their interpretations and of what they thought went wrong in terms of inferencing.
It appears that this approach may meet the kind of awareness that Pennycook is looking for. Indeed, perhaps because workplace communication has always been heavily influenced by critical discourse analysis, of all four examples discussed this one is the nearest as it stands to the aims of CAL.
Can we ignore the assumed stipulation that the interview quoted must be held in English, on the grounds that the candidate is likely to be fully fluent in his variety of English? But this is precisely the point: his variety of English! What is lacking – and what CAL might point to – is that in terms of the wider social, cultural and political context, not only are such Asian migrants disadvantaged, but no account is taken of differential communicative competences. What is needed surely is that the Interview Board contain at least one member who is a speaker of the Asian English spoken by the candidate.
And yet, even here, on its own home ground, doesn’t CAL go a little far? As we saw with the second-language literacy study, CAL appears to make claims on the basis of individual requirements. How possible is flexibility for an interview panel which needs consistency across candidates, not all of whom are likely to speak the candidate’s variety of English? Furthermore, the post under interview presumably needs someone who can fully control the varieties of English in use in the college library. It is unlikely that in the context of a London borough, the composition of the student body would contain only speakers of the candidate’s variety of Asian English. It therefore seems not unfair that the interview panel should, even in directly, make judgements about the candidate’s control over their variety of English which they, not unreasonably, take for granted?
