Applied linguistics: no ‘bookish theoric’
THE NEW CRITIQUE OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
A theorizing approach
Modernist approaches (such as CDA) and postmodernist critiques (such as CAL) of applied linguistics are, as we have seen, seductive. They provide a useful debate on the nature of the discipline, they need to be taken into account. But they must not be allowed to take over, cuckoo-like. Because their interest at the end of the day is not primarily in what Brumfit calls ‘real-world problems in which language is a central issue’. And since this is what applied linguistics is about, it is difficult to consider critical approaches as other than marginal to the applied-linguistics enterprise.
In his critique of critical discourse analysis, Widdowson makes the following comment: ‘It would appear that what the theory presented here really amounts to is the reaffirmation of the familiar Whorfian notion of linguistic determinism, but applied not only to cognition in respect of the language code, but in respect to its use in communication as well’ (Widdowson 1998: 139).
Whorfianizm, the notion of linguistic determinism (or linguistic relativity), asserts that thinking and language are so closely connected that our view of the world is determined by the structure of our first language or mother tongue.
Is Widdowson correct about the influence of Whorfianizm in CDA? Surely the proponents of critical discourse analysis and of the Foucauldian approach of critical applied linguistics cannot be quite so naive as to fall for the functional fallacy? And yet, perhaps that is the case. Certainly there is a trace of strong Whorfianizm running through the certainties of both CDA and CAL which seems to take for granted that language is a direct reflection of meaning. Such a restricted view reflects a meagre view of the resources available to language.
But perhaps at bottom this is a philosophical disagreement between those traditional views of reality, realism and nominalism, realism meaning that universals exist in reality independently of our consciousness and nominalism the opposite.
For the nominalist there is no one-to-one relationship between language and concept: language is a code for referring to meaning but is not of itself that meaning. That must mean that only the very weakest Whorfian position is tenable; it must also mean that the critical approach to discourse analysis or to applied linguistics is vitiated by its own attachment to a realist (and Whorfian) view of language, cognition and meaning. Postmodernist approaches simply take the realist position to its extreme: there is indeed no truth (reason) to be discovered, only truths (reasons). But there is still the fixation on truth. The nominalist, the empiricist and the applied linguist are not concerned with truth but with a theorizing explanation. They place themselves in a compromise position between the grand theory of the modernist and the relativity of the postmodernist. Theory, yes but not grand theory. Explanation for the time being – not truth for all time. The search for a theory of applied linguistics is surely misconceived, rather like the hunting of the snark in Lewis Carroll’s poem. Applied linguistics does not need a unitary theory; what it requires is an openness to influences and theories from elsewhere, so that professional applied linguists can adopt a theorizing approach to language problems.
