ETAL SERIES AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS CURRICULA
Corder (1973) was well aware that in limiting the coverage of applied linguistics to language teaching he was open to criticism. To some extent his defense was the mirror image of the Language Learning change of name. There the rationale was that the input was too undefined and therefore it was sensible to remove the label of applied linguistics. Corder argues that it is the output or target that is without shape and therefore it makes sense to limit the area of concern to one main object, that of language teaching.
Spolsky (1978) has proposed a different solution, that is to limit the name of the output to Corder’s area of concern and to call it ‘educational linguistics’, a proposal he has put into action in his Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics (Spolsky 1999 and Spolsky and Hult in press).
There are voices insisting that applied linguistics should fulfil a role wider than language teaching (for example Kaplan 1980a). There is a seductive appeal in such a view, an appeal which slips all too easily into a science of everything position. M. Bloomfield appears to beckon to this:
This volume, then, concentrates on the human problems of language and tries to identify some of them and so indicate what is being done about them. The rise of ethnic consciousness and militancy as well as a general dissatisfaction with the ‘way things are’ have led to a new stress on what may be called applied linguistics and the social dialect problems … Problems of literacy, translation, bilingualism, language teaching, language and nationalism, the role of dialects and so forth have become urgent and some of our best minds have begun to turn towards these matters. (M. Bloomfield 1975: xviii)
What Bloomfield is suggesting is no different from what others (for example Brumfit) have proposed but the magnitude of the responsibility he lays on applied linguistics makes the modest scope proposed by Corder quite appealing.
The extent to which applied linguists see themselves as agents of change is controversial (Pennycook 2001, Davies 2003b, Sealey and Carter 2004). As current concerns with the ethics of the human sciences remind us, there is a tension for social scientists between their role as objective students of society and as agents of change. Such an opposition was noted in the 1960s in the area of cultural anthropology. Commenting on the field, Margaret Mead wrote:
There is some difference at present between (a) those who would regard applied anthropology as a profession for which anthropologists, in addition to a theoretical education in some branch of anthropology, must be specially trained and within which professional standards should prevail; and (b) those who identify applied anthropology with a form of anthropological research which either continuously or at some point becomes part of and affects, the process of change which it studies. It must be stressed that either view involves a search for values, rooted in the discipline of anthropology, which can guide the applied anthropologist in any use of his knowledge at any level of interaction in human affairs. (Mead 1964: 33)
The more involved with human affairs the scholar becomes, the more difficult it is, as Mead argues, to resist the second alternative, which means that scientific objectivity is no longer possible (Skutnabb-Kangas, Phillipson and Bannut 1994, Searle 1995). Like applied cultural anthropology, applied linguistics has also felt the tug of the particular and the urge to identify locally.
A glossary, with all its limitations, is one way of defining the field. Another is to survey the volumes that have followed the first edition of this Introduction to Applied Linguistics in the series Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics. Since 1999, when ETAL 1 was published, eight volumes have appeared. These are, in order of publication:
Teaching Literature in a Second Language (Brian Parkinson and Helen Reid Thomas) 2000
Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching (Ian McGrath) 2002
The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (David Block) 2003
Language Assessment and Program Evaluation (Brian Lynch) 2003
Linguistics and the Language of Translation (Kirsten Malmkjaer) 2005
Pragmatic Stylistics (Elizabeth Black) 2006
Language Planning and Education (Gibson Ferguson) 2006
Language and Politics (John Joseph) 2006
The idea throughout the series has been that an author should explore a problem area of language use in which applied linguistics can take an informed position, informed both by understanding of the context, widely interpreted, and of the language involved. In addition, we attempted to link specialisms as a way of examining our premise that there is a general field of applied linguistics which is not just an agglomeration of unconnected interests. Let us look briefly at the eight volumes.
In the Preface to Teaching Literature in a Second Language, the authors write:
Although the book contains practical ideas, the emphasis is on principles rather than on specific recipes or model lessons, and the aim is to inform teacher choice rather than promote a particular method. (Parkinson and Reid Thomas 2000: ix)
In his Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching, McGrath maintains:
Those with a responsibility for the development and administration of language-learning programs in either educational or workplace settings will need little persuading that materials evaluation and design, along with, for example, syllabus design, learner assessment and the study of classroom processes are centrally important applied-linguistic activities.
(McGrath 2002: 1)
In The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition, Block sets out to:
explore the extent to which Second Language acquisition researchers … might adopt a more interdisciplinary and socially informed approach to their research [taking] a cue from recent debate about the present and future of applied linguistics. (Block 2003: 1)
Lynch’s purpose in Language Assessment and Program Evaluation is to:
present the range of paradigms, perspectives, designs, purposes, methods, analyses and approaches to validity and ethics that commonly define language assessment and program evaluation. (Lynch 2003: vii)
Malmkjaer in Linguistics and the Language of Translation writes that the:
book is for students of translation, languages and linguistics who would like to enhance their understanding of the relationships between translation studies and linguistics – of how linguistics can be applied to the creation, description and constructive criticism of translation.
(Malmkjaer 2005: ix)
Black attempts to show in Pragmatic Stylistics that: Applied Linguistics can make a contribution to the study of literature … The ways in which we interpret ordinary language use are relevant to the ways in which we interpret literary discourse – which is only the language of the time, written by people who are more adept at manipulating its nuances than most of us. But I shall try to show that we follow roughly the same procedures whether we are listening to a friend, reading a newspaper or reading a literary work. (Black 2006: 1)
Ferguson maintains in Language Planning and Education that his book:
is approached from an applied linguistics perspective, meaning that educational concerns and the relationships of language planning to education feature prominently … [L]anguage planning/language policy is an interdisciplinary field with a very wide scope, geographically as well as conceptually. (Ferguson 2006: ix)
In his Language and Politics, Joseph writes that:
in the last decade, applied linguistics has abandoned the structuralist view of language as a self-contained, neutral system, in favor of a conception of language as political from top to bottom. We examine the consequences of that conceptual shift, as it draws together key topics including language choice, linguistic correctness, (self-) censorship and hate speech, the performance of ethnic and national identity in language, gender politics and ‘powerful’ language, rhetoric and propaganda, and changing conceptions of written language, driven in part by technological advances. (Joseph 2006: ix)
The socialization of both the child and the adult is an acculturation process: for the child, the initiating into the language and culture of the group, and for the adult, the introducing into the responsibilities of being an adult within his or her community. Independent actors engage in various domains, one of the most important being that of work. Much of the professionalizing process is made up of acculturation into the shared knowledge and skills of the profession the initiate is entering. This is the case of applied linguistics and a clue to the requirements made of the neophyte can be found in the curricula of institutions offering qualifications in applied linguistics. What these show (the sample surveyed including institutions in Europe, the USA, Australia and Asia) is a degree of similarity. In the core curriculum, all institutions required a course in linguistic analysis, over half in research methods and again in sociolinguistics, and just under half in SLA and in psycholinguistics. The options on offer, of which students were expected to take one, two or three, ranged very widely, from statistics to translation. But in all cases, one core or one option in each institution had the term ‘teaching’ in its title (TESOL, Teacher Education and so on).
