Applied linguistics: no ‘bookish theoric’
CHANGE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS PRACTICE
Applied linguistics as practiced in the 1960s is recorded in the widely praised volume by S. P. Corder (Introducing Applied Linguistics, 1973). We can consider the view of applied linguistics set out in that volume as essentially modernist (or structuralist). Changes have inevitably taken place since the Corder book appeared and therefore the question we address is whether those changes can in any sense be regarded as post-structuralist or postmodernist. We might speculate that it would be surprising if that were not the case, since the involvement of applied linguistics in both the humanities and the social sciences has exposed it to the zeitgeist.
Corder divides his book into three parts:
1. Language and Language Learning
2. Linguistics and Language Teaching
3. The Techniques of Applied Linguistics
As we have seen, he writes: ‘I am enough of a purist to believe that “applied linguistics” presupposes “linguistics”; that one cannot apply what one does not possess’ (Corder 1973: 7).
Corder’s orientation in applied linguistics is, that of a linguist interested in application. It is not surprising therefore that half the book (Parts 1 and 2) deals with language from a linguistic point of view. The subsections here are:
Part 1
Views of language
Functions of language
The variability of language
Language as a symbolic system
Part 2
Linguistics and language teaching
Psycholinguistics and language teaching
Applied linguistics and language teaching
The description of languages: a primary application of linguistic theory
While Part 1 provides a linguistic view of language, Part 2 offers a linguistic approach to language teaching. Part 3 then examines the practice of applied linguistics, now that the linguistic scene has been set, making it possible to apply what one knows rather than what one does not.
In comparing Corder’s view of applied linguistics with what has happened since his book appeared, it is on his Part 3, where he is concerned with the practice of applied linguistics, that our comparison should focus. While leaving a discussion of the theorizing (in particular the approach of so-called critical applied linguistics) to the last part, we recognize that such a distinction between theory and practice is difficult to support. For those who profess a critical applied linguistics approach to the subject, what they do is as much practice as it is theory. Nevertheless, to facilitate discussion, we will maintain the fiction that practice and theory are separate.
Corder’s Part 3: ‘The Techniques of Applied Linguistics’ contains the following subsections:
Comparison of varieties
Contrastive linguistic studies
The study of learners’ language: error analysis
The structure of the syllabus
Pedagogic grammars
Evaluation, validation and tests
The first three of these he tells us concern selection; it would appear that the next two deal with grading or sequencing and the last one is a free-standing discussion of monitoring the outcomes. To an extent, therefore, this division by Corder represents an older model, that of language-teaching methodology (Mackey 1965) or methodics, the division of language-teaching studies into three parts: selection, gradation and presentation. Here we miss out on the last part which Corder presumably regards as not properly part of applied linguistics, more the concern of language-teacher education.
Varieties, contrastive analysis, error analysis, syllabus development, pedagogical grammars and testing: that was the practice of applied linguistics in the 1960s. When we compare the 1960s and the 2000s there are two differences. The first is the expected one that these areas have developed over time: the comparison of varieties has branched into world Englishes, stylistics, discourse analysis, gendered language and so on. Contrastive linguistic studies and the study of learners’ language (error analysis) have moved on apace, at first contrastive studies being revitalized by the study of learners’ language to become the current study of second-language acquisition, itself also heavily influenced by developments in linguistic grammars. Syllabus studies have become curriculum studies, widening their brief and thereby taking far more of the context in which language teaching takes place into account. Pedagogical grammars might well now be called a pedagogical approach to grammar, while evaluation, validation and tests may well be termed assessment or even perhaps classroom-based assessment.
The second difference concerns what was glaringly missing in the Corder book. It contained no single chapter with sociolinguistics in its title. This omission seems grave in view of the take-over of applied linguistics by the social turn since 1975. The same is not true of linguistics in its Chomskyan canon, where the quest is still very much in the realist tradition for the truth of language in itself or in the head, with no appeal to context. There are many linguists who do not share this view of linguistics and who consider that a linguistics without the social dimension is a contradiction. But in applied linguistics the social aspect dominates, and it does do for two reasons. The first reason is that it has been accepted that the social is essential to all understanding of language in use, that in the specific case of language teaching all formal language learning must take account of the context in which that learning takes place and furthermore that the context determines and affects that learning, hence the imposing on to linguistic competence of the superseding communicative competence.
The second reason (and this is not wholly unrelated to the influence of the social) is that there is noticeable now a loss of confidence in the techniques offered by Corder and widely used in the 1960s and 1970s (and indeed 1980s) as general statements of how to proceed. Discourse studies is a good example of that loss of confidence since what it does with exemplary success is to discuss how to analyze and read a text rather than how to analyze and read texts. Where have we heard this before? Isn’t it reminiscent of Lyotard: there is no one unique reason, there are only reasons?
What this suggests is that Corder, and that era of applied linguistics, were indeed ‘modern’ and ‘structuralist’, and that in its subsequent practice applied linguistics has become less concerned with over-all solutions. As with the development of communicative competence in part, this has been influenced by the lack of success in using applied linguistics to improve language teaching in any direct way. What it also shows is that applied linguistics is really concerned with approaches and questions and not with solutions. As it actually has always been. What has changed is that this has perhaps become more explicitly marked in the practice.
‘The context determines and affects the learning’ – that comment helps explain the phenomenon World English(es). This expression, Bolton writes, ‘is capable of a range of meanings and interpretations’ (Bolton 2004: 367). More widely, it refers to the global use of English, and is sometimes referred to as international English(es). More narrowly, ‘the term is used to specifically refer to the “New Englishes” found in the Caribbean and in West Africa and East Africa, societies such as Nigeria and Kenya, and to such Asian Englishes as Hong Kong English, Indian English, Malaysian English, Singaporean English and Philippine English’ (ibid).
There is a third sense of the term, associated particularly with the scholar Braj Kachru and the journal World Englishes with which he has been closely associated for over twenty years, and is informed by an explicit political concern, well stated by Kachru and Smith in their 1985 editorial: ‘The language now belongs to those who use it as their first language, and to those who use it as an additional language, whether in its standardized form or in its localized form’ (Kachru and Smith 1985: 210).
For the applied linguist, such a claim raises the issue of what it means to be a native speaker and how far ‘localized forms’ which are, presumably, not standardized, can be owned by those who use them. In other words, if Indian English, Kenyan English and so on are not standardized (as are Australian English, Canadian English etc.) then what distinguishes them from a combination of British standard English and some vocabulary differences? These are central applied linguistic issues because they reach into syllabus, textbook, proficiency test and teacher education (which model is expected?) as well as issues of identity and discrimination. What distinguishes the growth of World Englishes from earlier spread of English is that this expansion is of English as a second language. The question for applied linguistics is what norms World Englishes speakers observe and, by implication, how far language spread requires native speakers.
