Issues in applied linguistics

Michael McCarthy

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Contents

Foreword page iv

Acknowledgements vii

1 Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions 1

2 Language and languages 22

3 Modelling languages: the raw material of applied linguistics 44

4 Language acquisition: methods and metaphors 68

5 Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics 92

6 Applied linguistics as professional discourse 118

References 145

Index 173
Foreword

My partner and I have regular lessons in traditional Irish fiddle playing

from an expert teacher. She has a PhD in musicology, and specialises in
traditional fiddle styles. Each week she teaches us a new tune or set of
tunes. We learn them by ear, with no reference at all to ‘theory’, no writing
down or reading from notes, and they are committed to memory. Occa-
sionally, the teacher steps back from playing and talks about the music, its
distinctiveness and character; sometimes she talks about the instrument
and what it can do. She encourages us to listen a lot to the great exponents
of the tradition. All this teaching is never done in a threatening or
obfuscating way. In between lessons we practise our stock of tunes for
about two hours daily. Sometimes we take them very slowly, to improve
accuracy and intonation, sometimes we blast them out in a carefree way,
which helps with overall rhythm, feel and the general pleasure of ‘per-
forming’.
The parallels with language teaching and learning strike me regularly
and profoundly. In learning the fiddle I am learning a new language, one
that has deep historical roots and which expresses the emotions of a
people to whom I am only related through my grandparents and through
an abiding love of their land and culture. This new language has substance
(musical in this case), form (the various structural patterns of jigs, reels,
etc.) and meaning (it is dance music, it communicates with and ‘lifts’
dancers; it generates emotions; it is Irish, not Spanish or Rumanian). Many
people — not only Irish people - use it, and play together for enjoyment in
pubs, clubs, schools and homes. It is difficult and complex to learn. There
seem to be so many things to remember at once. Progress is slow, but very
rewarding, and depends on my ability to practise a lot, and my motivation
to persevere. Sometimes I wonder if I might have learnt better and faster if
I had taken it up at the age of six or seven, so I could dazzle audiences as
many young children do in present-day Ireland. Other times Iam glad Ican
bring the wisdom of experience, feeling and understanding to this en-
counter with a different culture. And so on.

iv
 Foreword : v

But what has all this to do with applied linguistics? A good deal, Iwould
argue. Applied linguistics is about the relationship between knowledge,
theory and practice in the field of language, and my fiddle teacher seems
to me to be the epitome of an ‘applied language practitioner’, though not
in verbal language. She knows all there is to know about music in general
and the violin in particular. But her task is not to impart that knowledge
and theory to me. What she does is to mediate it and use it to inform a very
practical task: teaching this typical, stumbling but basically willing
learner to play and enjoy the fiddle. Her knowledge and her practice are
interdependent, but are not the same thing. She uses her knowledge to
solve practical problems, like why I make a squeaky sound at times
(perhaps the angle of the bow), why I lack fluency (perhaps my shoulder
and wrist are too tense), and how much new input I can take and process at
any one time, as well as whether I am covering a wide, useful repertoire to
enable me to play with people I’ve never met before but who share my new
language.
In this spirit have I put this book together, as an exploration of what it is
applied linguists in the field of language teaching do, why they do it, and
purely personally, how I think they should be doing it. Iam aware of the
near-impossibility of writing a book that covers applied linguistics ad-
equately in its multifarious branches as we tread gingerly into a new
Christian millennium, and this book does not claim to be a definitive
“survey, or even an introduction. It is an expedition into various ways of
looking at language and how they influence language teaching. It comes
from my own 35 years of involvement in language teaching and teacher
education, both as a teacher of English and Spanish, and as a learner of
French, Spanish, Welsh, Latin, Catalan, Swedish and Malay, and a lifelong
learner of English as a mother tongue, with widely varying degrees of
success, and through a wide range of methods and approaches. It also
comes from my more recent identity as an academic, when I ‘quit the road’
and put down roots in British university life.
In recent years I have immersed myself in the academic study of lan-
guage and language teaching and learning, and have been overawed by
the volume of academic work published in relation to our profession. No
one can read it all. In this book I therefore refer to what I have read (recall,
this is no survey) and what I have found useful, illuminating, sometimes
downright irritating, but mostly thought-provoking, and provoking
thought, above all, is what applied linguists should be doing for their
consumer audiences. This book therefore claims to do no more than this:
vi : Foreword

to raise questions that have nagged at me over the years and questions
which regularly preoccupy the profession in general, and to look at how
the academic- and practice-based study of language can help to provide
answers to practical problems, or at least point us in promising directions.
Much of the ground will be familiar to my peers and betters, though I do
invest a personal degree of commitment to the historical dimension of our
profession, which is not always so much to the forefront. I hope that
younger, and newer, entrants to the community of applied linguists
(graduate students, practising teachers given the opportunity to step back
from the chalkface and engage in study or research, anyone curious to
know what role the study of language plays or can play in language
teaching) will find something in it of merit. There are, to be sure, gaps, and
all] can do is hope that the works of other scholars will fill those. If serious
shortcomings remain in this book after the endless work put into it by
reviewers and editors during its development, the blame for these should
all be laid fairly and squarely at my door.

Cambridge, June 2000

Acknowledgements

This book has taken a long time to write. Although the background
research for it was done mainly in the highly conducive reading rooms of
the Cambridge University Library, no book is ever really the product of the
solitary scholar. Many colleagues, friends, conference presenters, aca-
demic collaborators and professional contacts have influenced me and
what I have written here. They are too many to mention. However, as with
all my academic work, no one has influenced and helped me more in
recent years than Ronald Carter, friend and colleague. Ron is the epitome
of the unselfish intellectual, always ready to give and share ideas, to be
critical without being carping, to see connections and to push me to think
differently. To Ron goes a big thank you for inspiration, support, compan-
ionship and collegiality. Other scholars who have had an immeasurable
influence on my overall thinking include John Sinclair, Henry Widdow-
son, James Lantolf, Doug Biber, Amorey Gethin, Mike Hoey, Malcolm
Coulthard and the never fading memory of David Brazil. To all these I owe
a massive debt. There are also many other colleagues, friends and profes-
sional contacts who have contributed directly or indirectly to what is in
this book, and who have influenced and inspired me in different ways,
amongst whom I would like to extend special thanks to the following: Jens
Allwood, Susan Conrad, Guy Cook, Justine Coupland, Zoltan Dérnyei,
Carmen Gregori Signes, Martin Hewings, Almut Koester, Koen Van
Landeghem, David Nunan, Felicity O’Dell, Anne O’Keeffe, Luke Prod-
romou, Randi Reppen, Mario Rinvolucri, Helen Sandiford, Diane Schmitt,
Norbert Schmitt, Yasuhiro Shirai, Diana Slade, John Swales, Hongyin Tao,
Mary Vaughn and Linda Waugh. At CUP, both Alison Sharpe and Mickey
Bonin have had input into this book, but Mickey gets special thanks for
bearing the irksome burden of guiding me through successive reviewers’
reports, scolding me for slowness and encouraging me because he believed
in the book, adding his own academic comments and editorial expertise,
so that he got his manuscript at long last. And thanks to Cathy Rosario,
whose expertise and efficiency in the final editing process removed

vii
viii - Acknowledgements

inelegant sentences, glitches and bugs so that the book could go to press.
Finally, I thank my partner, Jeanne McCarten, for her support and inspira-
tion over twenty years, without which I might never have finished one
book, let alone this one.
This book is dedicated to the fond memory of my late brother-in-law,
Warwick Partridge, an ‘applied’ man, if ever there was one.
1
Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories,
models, descriptions

1.1 Applied linguistics as problem-solving

In their day-to-day business, professionals whose work involves language

in some way or another often face problems that seem to have no immedi-
ate or obvious solution within the habitual practices which demarcate
their professional expertise. One avenue open to those who find them-
selves in this position is to have recourse to the discipline of linguistics. It
is the belief that linguistics can offer insights and ways forward in the
resolution of problems related to language in a wide variety of contexts
that underlies the very existence of the discipline usually called applied
linguistics. Applied linguists try to offer solutions to ‘real-world problems
in which language is a central issue’ (Brumfit 1991:46), however tentative
or ‘implied’ those solutions may be. What, then, might fall within the
domain of typical applied linguistic problems? A list of such problems will
certainly be wide-ranging and potentially endless, but might include the
following:

1 Aspeech therapist sets out to investigate why a four-year-old child has

failed to develop normal linguistics skills for a child of that age.
2 A teacher of English as a foreign language wonders why groups of
learners sharing the same first language regularly make a particular
grammatical mistake that learners from other language backgrounds
do not.
3 An expert witness in a criminal case tries to solve the problem of who
exactly instigated a crime, working only with statements made to the
police.
4 An advertising copy writer searches for what would be the most effec-
tive use of language to target a particular social group in order to sell a
product.
5 A mother-tongue teacher needs to know what potential employers

1
2 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

consider important in terms of a school-leaver’s ability to write reports

or other business documents.
ina
6 A historian wishes to understand the meanings of placenames
particular geographical area and how they have changed over time.
7 Aperson constructing a language test for non-native speakers for entry
into further education needs to know what the key linguistic or
psycholinguistic indicators are of reading ability in a second or foreign
language.
8 Aliterary scholar suspects that an anonymous work was in fact written
by a very famous writer and looks for methods of investigating the
hypothesis.
9 A dictionary writer ponders over possible alternatives to an alphabeti-
cally organised dictionary.
10 A computer programmer wrestles with the goal of trying to get a
computer to process human speech or to get it to translate from one
language into another.
11 A group of civil servants are tasked with standardising language usage
in their country, or deciding major aspects of language planning policy
that will affect millions of people.
12 A body is set up to produce an international, agreed language for use
by air-traffic controllers and pilots, or by marine pilots and ships’
captains.
13 A zoologist investigates the question whether monkeys have language
similar to or quite distinct from human language and how it works.
14 A medical sociologist sets out to understand better the changes that
occur in people’s use of language as they move into old age.

The list could continue, and with professional diversification of the kind
common in modern societies, is quite likely to grow even bigger over the
years. What all these professional problems have in common is the possi-
bility of turning to the discipline of linguistics to seek insight and poten-
tial solutions. If they were to do this, the professionals directly involved
would become, even if only temporarily, applied linguists. This is different
from saying that there is a community of applied linguists (usually asso-
ciated with university academic departments) whose job it is to mediate
(and teach) linguistics and to suggest applications. That there is such a
community is not questioned here; the existence of academic journals
such as Applied Linguistics and International Review of Applied Linguistics, and
the provenance of the majority of articles published in them, is ample
 1.1 Applied linguistics as problem-solving - 3

evidence (for further argument on this aspect of the mediation of theory

see Block 1996). But in this book I shall advocate that ‘doing applied
linguistics’ should not be only the responsibility of the academic commu-
nity.
Over the last few decades, more and more people working in different
professional areas have sought answers to significant problems by inves-
tigating how language is involved in their branch of human activity. This
has been especially notable in very recent years in areas such as (3), (10)
and (14) in the list of possible problems above (e.g. the growth of forensic
applications of linguistics, see Kniffka et al. 1996; the growth of interest in
language and the elderly, see Coupland et al. 1991). Other areas, such as (1),
(2) and (8), have used linguistic knowledge and insight over a much longer
period. In the future, even more professions will almost certainly turn to
linguists for potential solutions to practical problems: the increasing
sophistication of computers is just one obvious example where a corre-
spondingly complex understanding of human language may be beneficial.
Thus even more professionals will have the opportunity to become applied
linguists.
No one will need to embrace the whole range of the discipline of
linguistics to find a solution to their particular problem. Linguistics itself
is now an extremely broad discipline, and we shall see in this book just
how large a number of interests it encompasses. Furthermore, within this
broad discipline, the various compartments into which the subject falls
are themselves quite vast (e.g. see Malmkjaer’s 1991 encyclopedia of the
discipline), and compartmentalisation creates its own problems for the
application of linguistics (see Brumfit 1980 for a discussion). What this
book will try to do in its limited scope is to exemplify how language
teachers and others involved directly or indirectly in language teaching
and learning (such as materials writers, syllabus designers, dictionary
writers, etc.) may approach their problems via the many and varied aspects
of linguistic study. Wherever relevant, I will also mention work done by
other, non-pedagogical applied linguists in the spirit of learning and
benefiting from their insights and in the fostering of a shared professional
identity, which can only be a good thing. The book cannot and does not
pretend to offer prescriptions for the solving of every problem. You, the
reader, will, it is hoped, see how and where linguistics might rub shoul-
ders with your own professional preoccupations.
4 + Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

1.2 Linguistics and applied linguistics: hierarchy or partnership?

Applied linguistics, I shall maintain throughout this book, is essentially a

problem-driven discipline, rather than a theory-driven one, and the com-
munity of applied linguists has characterised itself in the historiography
of the discipline by variety and catholicism of theoretical orientation. This
is in contrast to linguistics, where association with particular schools of
thought or theories tends to exert considerably greater centripetal force.
Indeed, not least of the questions immanent in a book such as this one are:
Can there be a unitary theory of applied linguistics, or indeed do theories of
applied linguistics exist at all? Is it not a defining quality of applied
linguistics that it draws its theory offthe-peg from linguistics; in other
words, that it should be understood as what Widdowson (1980) calls
linguistics applied? One major difficulty in asserting the latter is the viabil-
ity of the view that linguistics exists as a set of agreed theories and
instruments that can be readily applied to real-world language-related
problems. Such a view oversimplifies the natural and desirable state of
continuous flux of the discipline of linguistics (e.g. see Makkai et al. 1977),
or of any discipline for that matter, and obscures the two-way dialogue
that the academic applied linguistic community has had, and continues to
have, with its own community of non-academic practitioners and with its
peers within linguistics.
Applied linguistics can (and should) not only test the applicability and
replicability of linguistic theory and description, but also question and
challenge them where they are found wanting. In other words, if the
relationship between linguistics and its applications is to be a fruitful
partnership and neither a top-down imposition by theorists on practi-
tioners - admonitions of which are implicit in Wilkins (1982) - nora
bottom-up cynicism levelled by practitioners against theoreticians, then
both sides of the linguistics/applied linguistics relationship ought to be
accountable to and in regular dialogue with each other with regard to
theories as well as practices (see also Edge 1989). Accountability can
discomfit both communities, and abdication of accountability is some-
times the easier line to adopt. I shall attempt wherever possible to refrain
from such abdication in this book, and bi-directional accountability will
be considered an important constraining influence on both the applicabil-
ity of linguistics and the evaluation of applied linguistic solutions. Ac-
countability will centre on a set of responsibilities falling on the shoulders
of linguists and applied linguists in turn. These include:
 1.3 Theory in applied linguistics - 5

1 The responsibility of linguists to build theories of language that are

testable, which connect with perceived realities and which are not
contradicted or immediately refuted when they confront those realities.
2 The responsibility of linguists to offer models, descriptions and explana-
tions of language that satisfy not only intellectual rigour but intuition,
rationality and common sense (but see Widdowson 1980 for comments
on both sides of this particular coin).
3 The responsibility of applied linguists not to misrepresent theories,
descriptions and models.
4 The responsibility of applied linguists not to apply theories, descrip-
tions and models to ill-suited purposes for which they were never
intended.
5 The responsibility of applied linguists not simply to ‘apply linguistics’
but to work towards what Widdowson (1980) calls ‘relevant models’ of
language description (see also Sridhar 1993, who sees applied linguists
as generating their own paradigms for studying language).
6 The responsibility of applied linguists to provide an interface between
linguists and practitioners where appropriate, and to be able to talk on
equal terms to both parties (see James 1986).
7 The responsibility on both sides to adopt a critical position vis-a-vis the
work of their peers, both within and across the two communities.
8 The responsibility of both communities to exchange experience with
front-end practitioners such as language teachers, psychologists or so-
cial workers, who may not have a training in linguistics nor the time or
resources to ‘do applied linguistics’ themselves, but who may be genu-
inely eager to communicate with both groups.

1.3 Theory in applied linguistics

Posing the question whether applied linguists should have theories and
whether the discipline as a whole should seek a unifying and homogenous
set of theoretical constructs is, in my view, a misleading and unproductive
line to pursue, and one which will be discussed further in Chapter 6. It is
difficult enough to establish a set of central tenets that unites the gen-
erally pro-theoretical community of linguists (but see Hudson 1988 for an
interesting list of such tenets; see also Crystal 1981:2, who takes a fairly
optimistic view of the existence of a ‘common core’ within linguistics), let
alone bring under one umbrella the diversity of approach that marks out
6 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

the domains of operation of applied linguistics. Within linguistics, widely

differing theories lay claim to deal with what is important in language: as
we shall see, a sentence grammarian may differ fundamentally from a
discourse analyst over the question of just what is the central object of
study. On the other hand, the sentence grammarian and discourse analyst
may unite in distancing themselves from the more speculative claims of
those trying to map the invisible and largely inaccessible territory of
language and the human mind. However, most linguists would unite in
accepting that they have theories and are ‘theoretical’ in their work (but
see Gethin, 1990 for an opposing view).
Perhaps then, the right question to ask is: should applied linguists be
theoretical? One response is that they can hardly not be, that we all bring to
any problem-solving situation a perspective, a set of beliefs or attitudes
that may inform, but are separate from, the decisions we take to resolve
the problem(s) of the moment. This seems an eminently sensible view of
things, but it has its dangers. It could encourage an ad hoc and unreflective
process that never learns from experience or to induce from varied cir-
cumstances - a philosophy that says ‘my set of beliefs and established
approaches will serve me well in the face of any problem and need not
subject themselves to objective scrutiny nor to constant revision; they are
accountable to no one but myself’. There is also the risk that action,
however manifestly successful, that does not or cannot justify itself ex-
plicitly in some set of theoretical postulates is to be frowned upon: this is
the critic that says ‘that’s all very well in practice, but what about in
theory?’.
This book will take the line that ‘being theoretical’ is a desirable thing,
but that theoretical stance is more useful as a motto than theoretical
allegiance, akin to what Widdowson (1984:30) refers to as having ‘a theor-
etical orientation’. Widdowson’s (1984:21-27) view that applied linguistics
must formulate concepts and theories in the light of the phenomena it is
trying to account for will be valuable as long as it retains its plurality.
Applied linguists must certainly account for, and be accountable to, the
contexts in which they work and the problems with which they engage. An
important component of this is not to shy away from stating the
beliefs,
claims and attitudes that inform their position on any given
applied
linguistic activity, whether it be solving a language-teaching
problem or
proposing a socio-political language-planning solution
that might have
wide humanitarian implications. This is one’s theoretical
stance. The obli-
 1.4 Approaching problems in an applied linguisticway - 7

gation to espouse any particular establishment school of thought or ca-

nonical set of beliefs, claims and postulates consistently over time and
across different situations, may be referred to as theoretical allegiance,
which Widdowson (1980:21) rightly suspects is ‘essentially conformist’.
Thus the question ‘What school of thought do you belong to?’ or ‘What is
your theoretical position?’ will likely be misdirected if put to an applied
linguist. “What is your theoretical stance with regard to this problem or set
of problems?’ is a question we have every right to ask of our applied
linguist peers. Furthermore, there is a very good reason why stance and
accountability go together: we owe it to our membership of a disciplinary
community to be able to contextualise our particular position in relation
to those of others. In short, the theoretical life-blood of applied linguistics
is not allegiance to theories but is more a commitment to a discourse. This
discourse is the communication of varied positions among peers using a
shared language that enables us to find common ground with the posi-
tions taken by others already reported and established, and to recognise
when new ground is being broken (see Crystal 1981:10ff). As Lantolf (1996)
puts it: ‘letting all the flowers bloom’. Thus the rhetoricising of stance, that
is to say rendering it into an organised, communicable and persuasive set
of claims, arguments, illustrations and conclusions is the way in which the
community accounts for itself member to member and to the outside
world. Being theoretical and being accountable are two sides of the same
coin. Encountering problems and adopting a convincing stance towards
them is what defines applied linguistics as a discipline.

1.4 Approaching problems in an applied linguistic way

It is now appropriate to open up the relationship between the more

theoretical aspects of language study and how they might be applied in
the language teaching context. I shall begin by considering what avenues
within linguistics suggest themselves for approaching two of the problems
relevant to language teaching in the list of 14 above. Let us consider
problem no. 2 in the list: that of the teacher trying to understand why
learners from the same language background are having difficulty with a
particular grammatical structure in English. The teacher’s potential re-
course to linguistics is likely to involve different areas depending on what
questions are asked (see Figure 1).
8 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

What is Known about the learner's first

language or any other language they know
which might be interfering with their
learning of the foreign language?

What do grammarians say about this

structure?
Language teachers’
questions What psychological barriers might be
preventing the learning of the
structure?

Are some structures difficult to learn

if they are tackled too early on? Is there
an order in which structures are best
presented?

Figure 1: Potential linguistic questions for the solution of a grammatical

problem

If we consider another of the problems, that of the dictionary writer

looking for alternatives to the alphabetical dictionary, we might imagine a
different set of questions, as in Figure 2:

What is the internal structure of the vocabulary of

the language(s) | am dealing with?

What do we know about the mental

organisation of vocabulary in human
beings? Perhaps this can be utilised in
Lexicographic dictionary organisation?
(dictionary-making)
questions What problems might a non-native user of the
dictionary have with the organising principle
chosen?

What place should information about

grammar have in such a dictionary?

Is a bilingual dictionary along non-

alphabetical lines possible?

Figure 2: Potential linguistic questions for the solution of a lexicographic

problem

The dictionary writer, like the language teacher, confronts the same basic
questions: Can linguistics offer an approach or a solution to the problem
at hand? If so, which branch(es) of linguistic study, and by what method(s)?
 1.5 Applying linguistics in language teaching: two examples - 9

How reliable is the information offered by linguists? How tenable are their
theories and models of the language? How willing and ready are linguists
to contribute to this kind of practical undertaking? The title of a paper by
McCawley (1986), ‘What linguists might contribute to dictionary making if
they could get their act together’, strikes a slightly pessimistic tone in this
regard. If there is conflicting information to be had from the findings of
linguists, how does one best evaluate which approach is likely to be most
useful? Can the non-linguist take on such a task, or is this a job for highly
trained specialists?
The concern of this book is therefore to raise to the fore a selection of
problem areas in language teaching and learning where knowledge about
language plays or could play a major role, to review what it is that
linguists do, and to consider whether and how their discipline can be
applied, giving as many as possible practical examples of applications. As a
conclusion to the book I shall consider broader ideological issues within
applied linguistics, and how applied linguists have developed and are
developing a sense of a professional community with common interests,
as well as the predictable debates, factions and divisions, uncertainties
and varied positions that characterise any such community, especially one
as loose-knit as that of applied linguists. I shall exemplify across a variety
of languages, even though, inevitably, many examples will centre around
English, because of the historical fact that a large amount of the output of
linguistics and applied linguistics and writing about language teaching
has been based on English, and also because English is the language of this
book. But it is important to offer examples in other languages in order to
underline the universality of the applied linguistic enterprise and the
underlying bond that unites the work of practitioners across the world
working in a variety of language teaching contexts. It is language as a
human phenomenon that we are attempting to understand, in the
hope that we might teach it more effectively in its many manifestations
around the world, and also produce better dictionaries, materials, and
syllabuses, or make improvements in whatever our area of preoccupation
might be.

1.5 Applying linguistics in language teaching: two examples

Before we enter the more detailed chapters on what linguists do, it may be
useful to look more closely at the two examples of linguistics in applica-
tion briefly touched on above (Figures 1 and 2) as a template for the overall
10 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

s
purposes and goals of this book: I shall therefore take the two example
and follow them through to two sets of potentia l applied linguisti c con-
clusions.

1.5.1 Example 1. Grammar: Why do they misuse it?

Many teachers of English as a second or foreign language will be familiar

with errors such as the following in their students’ written work:

1 A teacher has set an essay entitled ‘Traffic in Cities’. An Italian student

writes the title at the top of the page:

Traffic in Cities

And then begins the first paragraph of the essay:

It is a very big problem nowadays and many cities in the world suffer from
Ieee OUC.

The teacher crosses out the first it and puts traffic instead.
2 Another student writes an essay about his specialist university subject -
construction engineering:

This essay will show the increasing development of the insert of Glulam
(glued laminated timber). It will help to find the reasons for the present
boom in Glulam structures. For it*, it is interesting to look at the history,
the properties, the manufacturing process and the types of structures
which are possible.

The teacher puts a red mark against the asterisked it and suggests saying
this essay instead of it.
These two learner errors are typical of many which prompt the teacher
to seek some sort of explanation of the problem, both for their own
professional integrity and satisfaction and in order to be able to hand ona
useful rule or principle to the learner. Let us consider what questions the
teacher might pose and the steps that might be followed:

1 What type of problem is this? Is it:

(a) a grammar problem concerning a particularly tricky English gram-

matical choice?
(b) a problem encountered only by speakers of a particular language or
 1.5 Applying linguistics in language teaching: two examples - 11

group of languages, or one encountered by most learners?

(c) a problem from that fuzzy area of ‘style’, to which there is unlikely to
be a clear, satisfactory answer and which one may therefore just as
well forget?

Question 1(a) is not so simple as it may seem. Many linguists understand

the term grammar to be limited to questions of the internal structure of
sentences, and would consider the it problem as it manifests itself in the
student essays to be outside of the purview of the grammarian and
something to do more with pragmatics, the study of how things acquire
meaning in different contexts (see Evans 1980, for instance). This is one of
the consequences of the pronounced theoretical demarcations we often
find within linguistics. Others might disagree with shunting the problem
out of grammar and into pragmatics, and see this particular problem with
it as belonging to the recently developed sub-disciplinary area of discourse
grammar. This is a sort of hybrid way of studying grammar by looking at
whole texts and taking contexts into account (see section 5.6; see also
Hughes and McCarthy 1998 for examples and applications to teaching; see
Carter et al. 1995 for further discussion). Therefore, one of the first and
most important things for the teacher who would be an applied linguist is
to have a good working knowledge of how linguistics is sub-divided and
how the linguistics community makes its decisions as to what to include
in what. Without this knowledge, it will be even more difficult to answer
question 1(b), which concerns whether the problem is likely to be wide-
spread or limited to learners with a particular first language background.
Question 1(c), whether to consign the problem to the rag-bag category of
‘style’, will also depend to a large extent on whether a satisfactory solution
can be found within studies of sentence grammar, or pragmatics, or
discourse grammar. Then again, the answers to questions 1(a) and 1(b)
need not be mutually exclusive and it may be very beneficial to pursue
both. Finally, we may indeed conclude that the problem is a ‘grammatical’
one (in terms of the most appropriate label to attach to it), and thus
challenge whether grammarians who place it beyond their purview are
being properly accountable to their audience. In other words, we might
begin to re-theorise the paradigms of grammar from an applied linguist’s
point of view.
If the teacher decides initially that the it problem is likely to be one of
grammar, then this decision opens up a further set of possible avenues
towards a solution. One set of choices for investigation might be:
12 + Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

Rules presented in course books and

reference
books designed for teaching English as a
foreign language
(‘pedagogical grammars’).

Rules presented in grammar books that

simply describe the English language
(‘descriptive grammars’).

Rules offered by theoreticians who create

models for understanding particular areas of
It as a grammar grammar (in this case for the pronoun system,
problem for example) and who report their conclusions
in books and learned journals.

An action research project by the teacher in

which he/she sets up a variety of tests and
experiments and observations to see if the
problem is recurrent, if it can be pinned down
and made more specific (e.g. perhaps it only
occurs at the beginning of essays) and
whether such action research can provide an
explanation without further need for
‘theoretical’ investigation.

Figure 3: Paths of investigation in solving a grammar problem

Pursuing the problem in terms of question 1(b) (Is it a problem encoun-

tered only by speakers of a particular language or group of languages, or
one encountered by most learners?) raises yet another set of questions:

Does the learner’s first language have a

grammatical choice similar to but not entirely
overlapping with English /t for contexts such
Questions about the as the two example essays?
learner's first
language Does the learner's first language have
quite a different set of grammar rules
for expressing English it and this?

Figure 4: First-language-related questions

This assumes that the problem is one to do with the learner’s first lan-
guage. Another question might be: Is the learner transferring something
from the first language (which may or may not be viewed as a positive
strategy), is the first language interfering in some way (which would usually
be interpreted in a negative way), or is it possible that it is not a case of
 1.5 Applying linguistics in language teaching: two examples - 13

transfer or interference at all, but perhaps a strategic choice the learner

has made to solve a particular problem (a positive strategy)?
In turn, these questions open up possible paths for exploration:

Studies comparing and contrasting the learner's first

language grammar with English (examples of contrastive
analysis; see sections 2.42.7).

Grammars of the learner's first language, either those

written to describe that language or those written to
teach it (descriptive or pedagogical grammars).
Resources
Studies of typical transfer and cross-linguistic
interference from the learner's language to English, as
reported in learned journals.

Studies of grammatical strategies adopted by learners

(e.g. grammatical simplification) at various levels, as
reported in learned journals.

Figure 5: Cross-linguistic resources for the solution of a grammatical

problem

We can already see that the pathways into ‘doing applied linguistics’ lead
us into complex fields and a multitude of potential resources, and that the
success of the applied enterprise depends on:

1 Identifying and defining problems.

2 Contextualising those problems within linguistic study and developing
a theoretical stance.
3 Harnessing appropriate resources for the exploration of possible sol-
utions.
4 Evaluating the proposed solutions.

We shall also see later in this book that real-world problems are best not
regarded as divorced from the world outside of the classroom, from the
wider socio-cultural and political contexts in which language learning
takes place. As with all problem-solving activities, the solutions may not
come easily or immediately.
Let us now pursue further the problems with it in the student essays and
consider what happens if we conclude that we are dealing with a gram-
matical problem concerning a rather subtle or difficult choice within
14 + Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

be the
English grammar. Our first and most direct resource might
though,
coursebooks and other books in use in the classroom. It is likely,
that we shall find it dealt with under the pronoun s of English, where it is
contrasted with he and she in relation to human or non-hu man entities.
This is also likely to be so in grammar reference books designed for
learners, but the better and more detailed ones may also point to the use
of it in contrast to possible choices such as this and that, as does this extract
from Alexander (1988). Alexander gives us the following rule:

Subject pronouns replacing demonstratives

Demonstratives are replaced by it or they in short responses when

the thing or things referred to have been identified:
Is this/that yours? Yes it is (Not * Yes, this/that is)
Note: An asterisk (*) before a stretch of quoted language indicates
an incorrect or inappropriate form.

This illustration may offer a partial solution to the problem, in that it

seems to suggest the possibility that it cannot be used to refer to things not
already identified, and this principle could perhaps be extrapolated to the
student essays. At this point we are evaluating a linguistic statement,
rather than simply taking it on board wholesale, which is perhaps the
most crucial phase of all in doing any kind of applied linguistics.
However, the evaluation may well be that the concept of ‘things not
already identified’ is not a very useful (or teachable) one. In both the
examples of errors in student essays, the ‘thing being talked about’ cer-
tainly seems to have been identified (‘traffic in the first case and ‘the
present essay’ in the second). We might therefore search further afield
than pedagogical grammars such as Alexander’s to find a more satisfac-
tory solution. One likely area would be the considerable journal literature
on student essay-writing which has grown up around the ‘college composi-
tion’ tradition in the United States. Articles within the college composi-
tion field do indeed treat such apparently puzzling areas as pronoun and
demonstrative usage (e.g. Moskovit 1983; Geisler et al. 1985). When we find
such studies (either by manually searching indexes or doing key-word
computer searches on electronic media such as CD-ROM bibliographies or
on-line bibliographical services), we see how they, in their turn, draw on
wider areas such as the study of writing as communication, text- and
discourse analysis, and the study of reading. In the case of pronouns versus
 1.5 Applying linguistics in language teaching: twoexamples - 15

demonstrative and/or full noun phrase, we find writers such as Hofmann

(1989) and Fox (1987a and b) having recourse to notions such as text
boundaries, segments, topics and focus in the development of the text, rather
than ‘sentences’ or the ‘identification’ of things in the real world (see also
McCarthy 1994a). These terms are not the familiar ones of sentence gram-
mar, then, but belong to the world of discourse grammar and text analysis.
What is crucial, it seems, is not so much whether something can be
identified in the text, but what its status is as a topic in the text from the
viewpoint of the interactants (i.e. writer and reader or speaker and lis-
tener): Is it the current topic? Is it a secondary or marginalised topic? Is
there potential ambiguity or confusion as to what the current topic is?
These are quite different questions from: Is it third person? Is it human or
non-human?
In the first student essay (on traffic) it seems that crossing the gap from
the title to the main text disallows the use of the ‘topic-continuing’
pronoun it, and linguists have indeed argued that the it pronoun may not
be able to refer back to something separated by a textual boundary such as
a paragraph division (e.g. Fox 1987a and b). In the second essay, the use of it
in the phrase for it seems to create confusion as to what we are actually
focussing on at that precise moment: is it glulam or the essay itself? In
other words is this use of it a typical grammar problem of reference or one of
the structuring of information within the textual world shared by writer and
reader(s)? Linguistic descriptions that offer no insight into what seems to
bea crucial distinction may be less than useful for the practitioner seeking
an answer to this particular set of problems.
One or two papers on college composition may not, in themselves, be
enough to offer a convincing and generalisable solution to the pronoun
problem, and the teacher doing applied linguistics may feel the need to
explore further in text- and discourse analysis, or may decide to gather
more data from learners. In addition, even if the teacher feels that a
satisfactory explanation is available, there will still be the problem of how
to fashion it into a point for teaching and learning, i.e. the problem of
methodology, which will largely remain outside of the remit of this book.
However, implicit in what this book describes will always be the belief that
teaching methodologies and descriptions of languages should interact to
produce good teaching (i.e. that accountability should not end between
linguists and academic applied linguists, but should apply between all
groupings within the language teaching profession). Good descriptions
16 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

and practical guidelines should influence methodology and methodologi-

cal developments should influence the quest for better description and
more accessible guidelines for learners.

1.5.2 Example 2. Lexicography: the case of the bilingual thesaurus

Let us turn to another problem mentioned at the outset of this introduc-

tory chapter: that of the lexicographer trying to develop an alternative to
the traditional, alphabetical bilingual dictionary. Alphabetical diction-
aries are useful if the user already knows the word in the target language
or has a word in his/her own language to look up. But what if one only has
a vague idea of what one wants to say, i.e. that one has a meaning floating
round in the mind, but no words whereby to access it, either in the first or
the target language? Among the resources available in such a situation
will be thesauruses and word-finders of various kinds, and dictionaries of
synonyms and antonyms. These types of reference works depart from
purely alphabetical organisation and bring words together on the same
page according to notions of meaning rather than their orthographical
(written-alphabetical) form. The classic model for such organisation is
Roget’s Thesaurus (Roget 1852). Roget brought words together according to
their role in describing a philosophically organised world, a model ‘almost
Aristotelian in character’ (Kjellmer 1990), where the taxonomies of the
natural and human world are reflected in an orderly vocabulary. And yet
we react with mild amusement when we note that Roget included the
word stomach under the category container (along with boxes and baskets);
somehow, Roget’s classification often seems remote from commonsense,
everyday meanings and how words relate to one another.
The lexicographer in search of alternatives for organising the vast
meaning-stock of any language has available a range of semantic and
cognitive models of meaning. If the thesaurus is, in addition, to be bilin-
gual, then a model which permits the mapping of one language’s mean-
ing-stock onto another - with all the problems of lack of one-to-one fit
which that entails - will be a desirable basis from which to work. In other
words, a merely descriptive list of words for each of the two languages in
question will not be enough; it is the model that underlies the description
that is crucial.
The lexicographic problem’s difference from the grammatical one (that
of students misusing it) is only one of degree. Even though a satisfactory
answer may have been forthcoming from pedagogical or descriptive gram-
 1.5 Applying linguistics in language teaching: two examples - 17

mars, they in their turn presuppose some model or underlying theoretical

view of how grammar functions, whether it be that sentence-level syntac-
tic structures lie at the core, or whether a more context-sensitive, discour-
sal model is presupposed. Subsequent chapters of this book will explore
these competing claims. In the case of thesaurus design, the lexicographer
is not unlike the grammarian designing a grammar: the key question is
‘What is the model of language and meaning which will drive the or-
ganisational structure of the thesaurus?’. In other words, what theoretical
stance(s) may be adopted to solve the problem? Though this would seem to
place the lexicographer on a higher plain in the applied linguistics firma-
ment than the teacher looking for a solution to a problem of pronoun
misuse, this book does not take that line. The teacher applying a gram-
matical description is doing applied linguistics just as much as the lexi-
cographer applying a model of word-meaning; they are simply working in
different ways.
The various models of meaning offered by linguists all have some
attraction for the lexicographer. For example, Katz and Fodor’s (1963)
influential notion of decomposing words into their semantic properties,
epitomised in their description of the meaning(s) of bachelor in English (see
Figure 6), would seem to offer a possible basis for mapping words in

[who has the first or lowest academic degree]

(human) [young knight serving under

the standard of another knight]
(male)
bachelor noun [who has never married]
(animal) - (male) [young fur seal when without a
mate during the breeding time]

Figure 6: Katz and Fodor’s description of bachelor

different languages onto one another.

But there is a great deal of semantic overlap and grading in meaning

within families of related words, and Katz and Fodor’s technique turns out
to be severely limited for the lexicographer working with thousands of
headwords in a dictionary or thesaurus. The approach to meaning based
on such a notion of ‘componential analysis’ has been superseded in lin-
guistics by other models of meaning, as we shall see, amongst which
18 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

the lexicographer might gain insight from frame-theoretical approaches.

In frame theory, the sharp distinction between what we know about
language and what we know about the world is broken down (Lehrer
1993), enabling the lexicographer to include socio-cultural information
within the ‘meaning’ of a word (see also Schmid 1993). Such a broader-
based model of meaning may well provide a more practical basis for the
construction of a bilingual thesaurus and the mapping of two linguistic
cultures onto one another in a commonsense and intuitively more satisfy-
ing way.
At this point I permit myself to exemplify the applied linguistic outcome
from one of my own published works. McCarthy (1995), in a bilingual
thematic (thesaurus-type) dictionary for Italian learners of English, at-
tempts to map English words connected with poverty onto Italian words
and expressions in the same frame (see Figure 7). In addition to semantic
equivalences, the learner is given circumstantial information that is cru-
cial to distinguishing use, as well as advice on appropriate collocations.
The particular frame embraces adjectives, nouns, verbs and fixed expres-
sions. The dictionary entry was constructed from a base English list of
‘poverty’ words, and translated into Italian by a team of experts with native
speaker command of both languages. The experts included all the informa-
tion which would, theoretically at least, enable the Italian user to distin-
guish accurately among the possible English candidates for an Italian
‘Meaning’ connected with poverty which the user might wish to word in
English. The extra information beyond the pure semantics includes de-
grees of formality, the contexts in which each word normally occurs (e.g.
bankrupt versus destitute), and the word set includes words such as beggar
and beg, which are roles and actions that have a real-world association with
poverty. In addition to the thematic grouping, any of the words can be
accessed in Italian or English in the alphabetical index, thus enabling the
resource to be used either as an alphabetical bilingual dictionary or via the
overall theme, as a tool when the learner has a meaning in mind but no
clear words as a starting point. The thematic dictionary is as imperfect and
flawed as any other enterprise, and I present it here simply as an example
of a product that began with a problem. The solution involved an applied
linguistic process of starting with the learner (How can hejshe get to an
English word starting only from a vague notion of a desired meaning?),
proceeding to the application of a relevant theoretical model (frame
theory), and producing the goods (the dictionary). Its users will be the only
proper evaluators of its success or failure as a piece of applied linguistics.
 1.6 Conclusion - 19

poor agg (descrive: es. persona, paese] povero a poor rates have bankrupted many small firms. Alti tassi di
area of the city una zona povera della citt3 interesse hanno fatto fallire molte piccole aziende.
poor sp! (sempre + the) i poveri charities which help beggar sn mendicante, accattone The streets are full of
the poor istituzioni benefiche che aiutano i poveri beggars. Le strade sono piene di mendicanti.
poverty snn poverta, miseria to live in poverty vivere in beg vi, -gg- chiedere l’elemosina, mendicare *vedere
poverta a poverty-stricken region una regione colpita anche 384 Ask
dalla miseria
panhandler sn (amer) mendicante, accattone
needy agg [pid formale di poor. Che manca delle
necessita basilari. Descrive: es. persona, famiglia] 270.1 Termini pid informal’
bisognoso
needy s pi (sempre + the) i bisognosi badly-off agg, compar worse-off super! worst-off
penniless agg [che non ha denaro) senza un soldo, al {abbastanza, relativamente povero) in ristrettezze A /ot
verde The failure of his business left him penniless. \\ of old people are quite badly-off. Molti anziani vivono
fallimento della sua azienda lo ha ridotto sul lastrico in ristrettezze. /’l! be worse-off after the tax system
destitute agg (formale. Che non ha né denaro, né beni, changes. Quando cambiera il sistema fiscale le mie
né casa ecc} indigente, privo di mezzi The war left condizioni finanziarie peggioreranno.
many families destitute. La guerra ha lasciato molte hard up agg linformale. Che ha pochissimo denaro,
famiglie nell’indigenza. destitution snn indigenza spesso in via temporanea] a costo di quattrini, in
bankrupt agg [descrive: spec azienda, persona d'affari) bolletta / was always hard up when | was a student.
fallito to go bankrupt fallire, fare bancarotta Quando ero studente ero sempre in bolletta
bankruptcy snn/n fallimento, bancarotta | broke agg (dopo i! v) [informale. Che non ha soldi) al
bankrupt vt far fallire, mandare in rovina High interest verde flat/stony broke (ingh 0 stone broke (amer)
spiantato, povero in canna

Figure 7: Entry for poor in an English-Italian thematic dictionary

(McCarthy 1995)

1.6 Conclusion

One final important area must be addressed before I embark on the rest of
this book, for which we need to return to the question of who, precisely,
applied linguists are. In section 1.1, I spoke of applied linguists in univer-
sity academic departments, but distanced myself from equating only
those people with the title ‘applied linguist’ or with the notion of ‘doing
applied linguistics’. This is important, for the temptation to ring-fence
applied linguistics within the academic community leads inexorably to a
gulf of suspicion between academics (whether linguists or applied lin-
guists) and practising language teachers ‘out there’ at the chalkface. Kirby
(1991) speaks of a ‘growing chasm which separates theoreticians from
practitioners’ and an ‘end of the honeymoon’ (a reference to a paper on the
subject by Lennon 1988). One of the central problems Kirby identifies is the
feeling that applied linguistic research does not address the practical
needs of teachers, and much of what he says cannot be denied. But the
solution that applied linguists (in the academic sense) and theoreticians
must become more sensitive to the needs of language teachers is only half
a solution: the position this book takes is that non-academic teachers
should become applied linguists, not just look to them for guidance. Only
when the community of applied linguists itself becomes a broader church
20 - Applying linguistics: disciplines, theories, models, descriptions

will the problems of the current uneasy relationship be able to be properly

addressed and moved towards solutions satisfactory to all parties. That is
why this book is aimed at language teachers and other language practi-
tioners, not just applied linguists in the academic sense of the term. If it
can only speak to this last group, then it has failed.
What I have tried to do in this introduction in considering two quite
different language-teaching problems and how they may be solved by
having recourse to aspects of linguistics, is to emphasise the multi-faceted
nature of applied linguistics, even in just one of its professional branches,
that of language teaching and learning, and to begin to explore the
various levels on which problems may be tackled. In the first case (the
grammatical problem) I stressed the potential of linguistic description, that
is the sets of observable facts about languages that linguists can offer. In
the second case (the lexicographic problem), I stressed the modelling of
language, that is theoretical constructs that help us to understand how
languages (might) work. Behind models lie theories - the mental explora-
tions, speculation and argumentation that go to build a set ofideas, beliefs
or principles about language. Linguists are in some sense inevitably in-
volved in all three of these activities, though some eschew description of
actual language use, for example early exponents of transformational-
generative grammar (see section 3.3.2), while others would argue that
only looking at real language in use is the proper starting point on the
long journey to a theory of language (e.g. Sinclair 1991; see also Chapter 5).
Most prefer to move in both directions: the good applied linguist not only
starts from day-to-day practical problems and looks for solutions in de-
scriptions, models and theories of language, but also develops his or her
own models and theoretical stances. Behind these there usually develops a
guiding set of beliefs about language, however rooted in practical con-
cerns and however scornful non-academic applied linguists may occa-
sionally be of those for whom language seems to be an abstract, rather
than a concrete, object. The examples we have looked at and the typical
procedures followed to get to the roots of the problems have been peda-
gogical ones, but essentially the same questioning must take place in the
mind of any applied linguist who tries to locate his or her particular set of
problems within the vast array of linguistic theories and descriptions.
We thus travel in this book across a landscape strewn with different
theories, models and descriptions and attempt to build up the complex
picture that is present-day applied linguistics with reference to language
teaching and learning. The book will consider the description of sounds,
 Notes -: 21

words, and grammars, the modelling of how we communicate and create

texts, how the mind processes language, and theories of what language is
and how those theories shape our day-to-day perceptions and actions as
language practitioners. It will also be concerned with how applied lin-
guists engage in discourse with one another and construct their common
language and professional identity. No one level of activity will be con-
sidered privileged, and the interrelationships between levels of applied
linguistic activity will inform the argument throughout.
The lack of a monolithic definition of applied linguistics, the lack of
unitary theory and of clear disciplinary boundaries will be regarded as a
positive characteristic of the discipline, its very openness to outside in-
fluences being its strongest and most enduring quality, and one that has
served it well over the decades that the term applied linguistics has had
currency.! All this will take place against the background of a belief that
applied linguists and linguists alike owe accountability to one another,
principally through the fruits of their work, and that the cornerstone of
such accountability is fluent and non-obfuscating communication be-
tween the partners in the task of making social sense of phenomena
connected with individual languages and language as a whole.

Notes

1 Exactly when the term ‘applied linguistics’ came to be established is not clear.
The term ‘linguistics’ goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century, al-
though the beginnings of ‘scientific’ linguistics properly go back further (see
Lepschy 1982). The use of ‘applied’ in the sense of practical applications of
sciences can be dated back to at least the middle of the seventeenth century.
Howatt (1984) looks back to Henry Sweet (1845-1912) as applying ‘living philol-
ogy’, though Howatt dates the first ‘public’ use of the term applied linguistics to
1948.
2
Language and languages

2.1 Introduction

The title of this chapter suggests a division between a general, abstract

view of human language and the study of the different, specific languages
spoken by human societies, and perhaps that such a division is related to
how applied linguistics operates or should operate. In this chapter I will
argue that separating the two preoccupations overmuch is misleading,
and that the one should always inform the other as a basis for applied
linguistics. This is particularly crucial when we come to pose the question
of the relevance to language teaching of the study of similarities and
differences between languages, and whether we believe in a ‘universal
grammar’ as a principal driving force in language acquisition, or whether
we choose to focus on linguistic and cultural differences that might
influence learners. In short, how we address the two concerns affects
greatly how we engage in the enterprise of applied linguistics and how we
position ourselves professionally in terms of the domains in which we
operate.
A historical perspective on the study of language and languages is
helpful in understanding how the applied linguistic profession has shaped
itself into its present form, with its mix of social concerns, interest in
individual languages and a preoccupation with language as a global
phenomenon. Nowadays, it is rather unfashionable to see linguistics (or
applied linguistics) as a historical discipline, and the emphasis in univer-
sity studies is generally on the synchronic (the study of language at a
particular, usually the present, moment of time). There are dangers in this
however, not least an arrogance that only more recent research and
insight is relevant, something often reflected in the absence of bibli-
ographical references to anything older than about 20 years in research
papers. Another danger is simply that of ‘reinventing the wheel’, brought
about by ignorance of relevant work that may have been carried out
decades or even centuries ago. This book, therefore, makes no apology for

22
 2.2 Some relevant history - 23

taking the discussion back over several centuries and paying tribute to our
earliest applied linguist ancestors.

2.2 Some relevant history

The degree to which the study of language in general and the study of
individual tongues have complemented each other historically has varied
over the centuries and has largely been a question of prevailing social
forces. The foundations of modern western linguistics laid by the Ancient
Greeks and Romans and their interest in language were grounded in
philosophical developments of a much more global nature. Robins
(1951:18) points out that the initial divisions of language into parts of
speech by the Ancient Greeks was made on logical rather than formal
grounds, a fact whose influence has continued down the centuries. Thus
deep do the roots of some approaches in modern linguistics (and applied
linguistics) run. In India, the ancient Hindu grammarians’ interest in
language was based on religious concerns (Itkonen 1991:6). When the old
Roman Empire gave way to the Byzantine period, very practical moti-
vations connected with teaching and teachers guided the Byzantine gram-
marians, who none the less contributed to the general development of
grammatical theory (Robins 1993:25).
In Britain, around the end of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon
scholar Aelfric took over Roman models for his pedagogical Latin Gram-
mar, and this was a precursor of many centuries of Latin-dominance in
English grammar (Robins 1990:80). In the Middle Ages in Europe, Latin
grammarians both referred to local vernaculars in their studies and
opened up the question of whether there was a universal grammar for all
languages which might possibly diversify into ‘species’, or grammars of
individual languages (Fredborg 1980). In Britain, alongside such theoreti-
cal concerns, a group who today might be called pedagogical applied
linguists, the Oxford Grammar Masters, were led on by very practical
matters of teaching Latin in their grammar schools. Among their number
was John of Cornwall, who more or less took his theory, ready-made, from
the earlier Roman grammarians (Hunt 1980) - an approach in which he
was not alone.
Later, during the European Renaissance era, at a time when new areas of
the world were opening to trade and cultural contact, the discovery of new
individual languages spurred on further the study of universals in the
grammar of languages, as well as a search for universals based on
24 - Language and languages

European vernaculars, as epitomised in the work of the Port Royal gram-

marians (Robins 1990:139; Hughes 1986). In the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries, major efforts were made to classify the apparently huge
variety of world languages according to their resemblances, once again
combining the study of individuality with that of language as a global
phenomenon and seeking universal qualities (e.g. Stackhous 1731; Harris
1751).
Latin continued to hold sway for a very long time, and the history of the
notion of ‘Standard English’ is inseparably linked with the view of Latin as
a yardstick against which to describe other languages (e.g. see Watts 1999).
But although it is true in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that
Latin as an ideal often dominated and perhaps obscured the attempt to
model language on a wider scale (Latin forming the usual basis for analogy
in the description of English and other languages, see for example Hewes
1624), much interesting comparative work did spread its net wider than
just comparing an individual tongue with Latin. Indeed, the decline of
Latin and the need for better international communication (Hayashi
1978:2) resulted, from the latter part of the sixteenth century onwards, in
scholars bringing groups of languages together for practical applied lin-
guistic purposes in the form of polyglot dictionaries, such as Baret’s triple
dictionary of English, Latin and French (1573), and his quadruple diction-
ary of English, Latin, Greek and French (1580). This tradition was con-
tinued, but without including Latin or Greek, in Howell’s quadruple
English-French-Italian-Spanish dictionary (1660). These were applied lin-
guists responding to social change and to very practical needs, not essen-
tially different from those in the twentieth century who blazed new trails
in the development of learners’ dictionaries.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further distinguished them-
selves in terms of practical solutions with two-way, or ‘double’ grammars,
such as Offelen’s (1686) grammar designed ‘for Germans to learn English;
and for English-men to learn the German tongue’. Similar double gram-
mars existed for English and French (Mauger and Festau 1690), English and
Italian (Altieri 1725), English and Portuguese (Castro 1751) and even a
triple/quadruple grammar ‘whereby the French and Italian, the Spaniard
and Portuguese, may learn to speak English well; with rules for the
learning of French, Italian and Spanish’ (Colsoni 1695). Thus from the
eighteenth century onwards, a solid foundation existed for comparative
contrastive studies of languages both at the level of pairs of languages,
such as Elphinston (1756) on French and English, and wider groupings,
 2.2 Some relevant history - 25

such as English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew by Baily (1758), and Hungarian,
Finnish, Lapp and Estonian by Gyarmathi in 1799 (see Itkonen
1991:279-80), as well as a range of practical products which responded to
consumers’ needs.
Rasmus Rask (1787-1832), continuing the search for a universal gram-
mar, based his quest on cross-linguistic study rather than philosophical
speculation (Itkonen, ibid.), until in the middle of the nineteenth century
we find comparative studies of the languages of Europe on philological
principles (e.g. De Vere 1853) and even one claiming to be based on a
comparison of over 60 languages (Barnes 1854). Also in the nineteenth
century, the revelation of Sanskrit’s ancestral role in the history of
European languages produced a new impetus for global studies of lan-
guage along historical lines (Robins 1990:148ff). Nineteenth-century lin-
guists worked in an environment of social and scientific theories that
increasingly questioned the status of human beings in the natural order
(e.g. Darwin’s theory of evolution). These new ways of looking at human
development informed the study of individual languages with a view to
classifying them into larger families (e.g. Farrar 1870). Once again, the
preoccupation was as much language in general as languages in particu-
lar. Then, as the might of the British Empire grew and the world it
encompassed seemed to shrink, serious questions were raised as to the
possibility of a universal, ‘world language’ that might serve international
trade and communication (Eclectikwn 1846), and, once more, we find
linguists asking questions about individual languages with global preoc-
cupations concerning ‘language’ informing the debates. For instance, in
_ the early part of the present century it was debated whether English or
Esperanto was better as a world language (see Long 1919).
In more recent times, Chomsky, although he stated his case and exemp-
lified it in English, had as his concern a universally valid theory of human
language, a defining characteristic that marked off humans (Chomsky
1957) — his work having grown out of a society where behaviourism was a
dominant scientific paradigm. Also in this century, the continuing growth
of contrastive linguistics (James 1980) has led to a huge amount of re-
search comparing individual languages in great detail, and, while such
studies may not have the modelling of human language as a whole as their
goal, most of them clearly operate within frameworks that take certain
facts about human language for granted.
For our purpose, which is the creation of relevant models of language
accountable to the needs of language professionals, maintaining the
26 - Language and languages

balance between a preoccupation with individual languages and with

language as a general human phenomenon is crucial, for without it false
trails lie waiting for the applied linguist pursuing solutions to cross-
linguistic problems. We shall see that the study of individual languages
can be done on many levels, with different applied linguistic implications,
and understanding these can be greatly assisted by never forgetting that it
is language, and not just languages, which is our concern. Equally, ignor-
ance of individual languages can lead linguists into the trap of over-
generalisation, and claims about the existence of ‘universals’ which are
patently not universal; for example, see Gethin’s (1999:10) evidence from a
number of languages that seriously undermine universalist claims made
by Pinker.
The historical perspective on applied linguistics espoused in this book
reminds us that scholars of languages and language over the centuries
have combined the study of individual languages with comparisons across
languages and with debates about language as a whole. The historical
perspective also demonstrates how sensitive much of what would today
come under the umbrella of applied linguistics has always been to histori-
cal and cultural forces that allow the flourishing of theoretical debate, but
which also periodically anchor linguistic activity in practical concerns
generated by cultural and socio-economic forces of the time. An example
of this is how interest in spoken language has waxed and waned over the
centuries. It was brought to the fore in Tudor times in Britain, when the
need for educated Europeans to communicate with one another in a
Europe where Latin had dissolved into a series of vernaculars led to the
production of speaking manuals (e.g. Boyer 1694 for the learning of
spoken French) and to the use in the English grammar schools of the
Vulgaria, which were Latin textbooks with an emphasis on speaking Latin
(see White 1932; see also McCarthy 1998:16 for further examples). Then in
the nineteenth century, renewed interest in spoken language was aroused
by European traders’ encounters with languages that were very exotic to
them such as Japanese (Mutsu 1894; Coningham 1894). It would be wrong
to think that our present-day applied linguistics is in any way fundamen-
tally different, and an understanding of the socio-economic and cultural
forces that gave birth to and which have impelled our profession, as well as
those which are pushing it forward now, is vital to its health, not least in
urging a degree of modesty upon us. It is only too easy to think we are the
first to tread the ground we walk upon.
 2.3 Knowledge of language and knowledge of languages - 27

2.3 Knowledge of language and knowledge of languages

It is possible to know different languages while knowing little about

language as an overall phenomenon. What we can know about human
language is vast; what it is relevant to know in an applied linguistic
context is very much in the hands of applied linguists themselves. While
every new direction in linguistics is eagerly seized upon by applied lin-
guists in search of something new to apply, the professional community as
a whole would probably agree on a number of key points concerning the
nature of human language in general (see Hudson 1988). These may be
seen as a core set of tenets to inform what professionals such as language
teachers do. They can be condensed into the following?

1 All normal humans acquire a first language with little or no formal

tuition.
2 Humans can, with varying degrees of proficiency, learn one another’s
languages.
3 All human languages have forms and meanings. Forms are reflected in
syntax, vocabulary and phonology.
4 All languages are realised in substance, whether sound alone or sound
and writing. Languages without their own, indigenous writing systems
(the majority) may borrow ways of writing from those that have develop-
ed them.
5 All human languages function adequately in their social settings; no
languages are more ‘primitive’ than others, and where languages need
new ways of expression, they easily borrow from other languages where
the necessary expressions exist (e.g. the way English has plundered
other languages over the centuries, and how it, in turn, lends ways of
saying nowadays to other languages).
6 All languages function within social contexts. Social actions such as
conversations, story-telling, transacting business, forming and con-
solidating relationships through language, are universal, as is creativ-
ity. No language is inherently ‘better’ at these things than any other.
7 All languages reflect and are integrally bound up with some sort of
psychological, social and cultural reality for their speakers. As these
realities change so do the languages that encode them and help to
decode them.

These points may seem obvious, almost nugatory, and they form the
implicit bedrock for most, but certainly not all, modern applied linguis-
28 + Language and languages

tics. However, it is often possible to lose sight of the woods when tangled
up in the trees of comparisons between individual languages and the
historical baggage of linguistic imperialism that some of the major
European languages carry with them. In the past, Latin and Ancient Greek
were dominant, and, today, none exerts greater hegemony than English
(see Phillipson 1992). Not losing sight of the woods enables us better to
understand the types of language study where individual languages are
compared or contrasted, and properly to evaluate their relevance to the
applied linguistic community. Applied linguistics must embrace knowl-
edge about language as a general human phenomenon, for without it the
construction of relevant linguistic models becomes extremely difficult,
and comparisons may run the risk of being skewed by prejudice based on a
particular language. Knowledge about language and knowledge about
languages will be equal prerequisites to the relevant modelling of lan-
guages for pedagogical purposes, and the historical lesson of the signifi-
cance of such a balance in our overall understanding must not be lost.

2.4 Comparing languages: typological aspects

Let us first consider one of the levels that languages are often compared
on: the morphological. Morphology has a long history as an important
component of linguistic analysis, going right back to the ancient Indian
linguists (Robins 1980:155). It has also been important in cross-linguistic
comparisons and the study of language typology (e.g. Bloomfield
1933:207), resulting in major works on the classification of the world’s
languages (e.g. Voegelin and Voegelin 1977). Although it is true that some
earlier versions of transformational-generative linguistics in the 1960s
denied the status of morphology, it re-surfaced in Chomsky’s work in the
1970s and is now widely recognised again as central to language study.
In the study of morphology in the world’s languages, it is apparent that,
although all languages divide lexical and grammatical forms into units
that represent meanings, the notion of a ‘word’ as it is understood in a
language like English may be more elusive for languages displaying ‘isolat-
ing’ morphologies. In such languages, one unit of meaning may be repre-
sented by one sound or character, for example Chinese languages, or
Vietnamese (Comrie 1981:39). The structuralists in fact rejected the word
as an entity and gave central place to the morpheme (see Harris 1946), as
did early transformational-generative grammar. Molino (1985) illustrates
how different morphological processes such as inflexion (the addition of
 2.4 Comparing languages: typological aspects - 29
6sSsSs—SSasSsS$SS0S8@@@j
TegwFw? TS’_CO
wooooOonooeeeeeeeoeaeaeaeee

inflexion derivation compounding

aE a Ee ee es ee oe eT res eee ee ee ee eT
Arabic v partial very weak
Chinese very weak very weak "A
English weak Jv v

/ = typical feature of the language

Figure 8: After Molino (1985)

endings denoting grammatical features such as tense, case, number, etc.),

derivation (the creation of new words using prefixes and suffixes) and
compounding (the creation of new vocabulary items by combining more
than one existing word) are differentially represented in individual lan-
guages. English, Arabic and Chinese, for instance, give different weight to
each process, as represented in Figure 8.
What do such insights mean for language teachers? Are they relevant
facts? If there were evidence that the difference in fundamental mor-
phological characteristics caused difficulties in language learning, such
facts would clearly be relevant and may be essential in modelling lan-
guages pedagogically. If not, the facts may be none the less fascinating as
facts about human language and may contribute to a new understanding
at the level of our general knowledge about language (e.g. that although
our morphologies may be different, we have sufficient universal
commonality to make foreign language learning unproblematic at the
morphological level). In reality, there is some (although limited) tantalis-
ing evidence that Chinese learners of English experience particular diffi-
culty with polysyllabic English words, which are likely to be polymor-
phemic too (Meara 1984:234). This may be because of fundamental
morphological differences between Chinese languages and English. On
the other hand it may be a problem related to reading habits which, in
turn, may be conditioned only partly by the morphological characteristics
of the mother tongue. This latter hypothesis would introduce a psycholin-
guistic and cultural dimension to the modelling of the problem. Either
way, if the research evidence can be shown to be more conclusive in terms
of regular difficulty, a morphological modelling of L1 (first language) and
TL (target language) may be relevant and useful, and can be conducted ina
way that is fully accountable to language teachers’ needs.
Language teaching, though, does not and should not only proceed by
means of trouble-shooting, and applied linguistics as a problem-solving
30 - Language and languages

discipline should not be equated with being error- and difficulty-driven in

its services to language teaching. ‘Problems’ may also be questions that
need evaluating in terms of their relevance, or simply new areas of investi-
gation that open up. For example, we might wish to explore whether
language learners’ use of the word-formation resources in L2 are in-
fluenced by the morphological characteristics of their L1, whether such
influence is generally positive or negative, and how persistent such influ-
ence might be over various stages of language learning. Broeder et all.
(1993) report just such an investigation based on subjects from several
typologically different source languages (e.g. Finnish, Arabic, Italian, Pun-
jabi), and Germanic target languages. They report that language typology
is relevant in learners’ ability to construct nominal compounds in the
target languages, and that learners use both source-language- and target-
language-related information in constructing in L2.
Another, related question that morphology may have some bearing on
is whether languages displaying similar morphology are necessarily easier
to learn than those displaying basic differences. Geographically neigh-
bouring languages often display common morphological tendencies and
morphological modelling across groups of such languages may be relevant
to the naturally arising question: Are neighbouring languages easier to
learn (see DuSkova 1984; Hedard 1989)?
Morphology is not mentioned idly in this book: fashions change, and the
‘unfashionability’ of morphology as a branch of applied linguistic study in
the post-Chomskian era is keenly evidenced in its absence from language
teaching syllabuses and materials, at least for the teaching of English,
apart from lip-service to the commonest features of derivation. It is also
relatively absent from the pages of the most widely read applied linguis-
tics journals. Is it time for morphology to make a comeback? Should
applied linguists be concerned with theories of ‘universal’ morphology
(see Dressler 1986), or should we merely be aware that morphological
differences between particular Lis and L2s may cause the occasional
hiccup in language learning?
Where languages display ‘uniform verbal morphology’ (e.g. the uniform
complexity of verb-inflexions in a language like Spanish), what problems
might be encountered in learning a non-uniform language like English
(see Hilles 1991)? How should we (or should we at all) account in any
pedagogical model of spoken language for the morphological creativity
observed in everyday talk, for which Carter and McCarthy (1995b) offer
 2.5 Grammatical issues in cross-linguistic comparison - 31

corpus-based evidence from English conversation? What kinds of difficul-

ties might the problem of the application of the concept of a ‘word’ to
Chinese languages, mentioned above, throw up for Chinese learners of a
language like English? Should we heed Sampson’s (1979) exhortation that
decomposing words (including derived forms) may fly in the face of his
claim for English that ‘the semantic atoms of our language are the same as
the items listed in an ordinary dictionary’, i.e. whole words (see also the
discussion in Chapter 3.4)? This last point is related to the interesting
research question of whether learners proceed from decoding whole
words to breaking down words into their roots and derivations, etc., for
which Aiking-Brandenburg et al. (1990) find no conclusive evidence, al-
though they do advocate the teaching of derivational morphology as an
aid to comprehension and spelling.
The question of the relevance of morphological theory and description
is a complex one. It shares many of the features that other fundamental
questions in applied linguistics manifest, that is to say, the existence of a
body of scholarship with a long tradition within linguistics offering the
potential for applicability, the need to evaluate local and global
modelling, the often tenuous and difficult-to-prove relationship between
such theories and available evidence of problems in language learning,
and the accountability of existing theory and description to the practical
needs of language professionals.

2.5 Grammatical issues in cross-linguistic comparison

In the historical discussion in section 2.2, the hegemony of Latin as a

model for the description of other languages was mentioned, with a
cautionary note as to its influence on the way languages are described.
This seems particularly to affect how the grammar of languages is pres-
ented pedagogically. The influence of Latin models may be on the wane in
current pedagogical presentations of English and other modern lan-
guages, but within the last one hundred years, pedagogical modelling of
languages exotic to English have frequently been poured into the medi-
ating mould of Latin categories. This has resulted in a set of labels in
English that at best obscure the categories of the target language and at
worse probably create the kind of learning difficulties many Europeans
and others will recall from their schooldays. I personally recall very pain-
fully trying to struggle with the alien categories that Latin threw up, such
 32 Language and languages

as the ‘ablative absolute’. Figure 9, from a pedagogical Assyrian Grammar,

illustrates the kinds of problems exacerbated by ‘mediated’ cross-linguis-
tic comparisons of this kind.

THE PRONOUNS.

THE PeRSONAL PRONOUNS :—

I. Seng. hE Le anacu...

ie Ye =I Vaio 3. SF

yatima ...
Ey} se Ey
Plural ... a-[nakh ? ]-ni

2. Sing. Mase.... atta ... » = thou

jo eM isle atti 2 == hon

CAE han) awe

Com. Gend.... thou
(1>:ae oe ee

Plural, Mase.... attunu a ye

Pe oo hae [at-tina] +. = you

3. Sing. Mase. ... si eng (== he, at, him

PURE GS SI Il she, it, her

sinu ...

sun

Plural, Mase... sunitu «+. (= they, them

suniti

suntit...

SIRAY ag

sin they, them

sinati ...

Figure 9: Assyrian pronouns (from Sayce (s.d.):57)

 2.5 Grammatical issues in cross-linguistic comparison - 33

What is confusing here is that three different surface forms (anacu, yati and
yatima) all seem to be ‘first person singular personal pronouns’, while catu
and cata both seem to be a second ‘person singular common gender
pronoun, not to mention numerous formal variations in the third person
pronoun paradigm. The paradigm does not fit modern English either, with
the grammar having to introduce archaisms such as thou to account for
distinctions of number in the second person. One suspects that without
the influence of these familiar Latin categories, a truly bilateral compari-
son between English and Assyrian might have been more illuminating of
what is obviously a rich system in the latter language. What I advocate in
this book is an applied linguistics which (a) understands and pays tribute
to its historical roots in classical linguistic study, but (b) respects the
equality of all languages in terms of their amenability to description and
modelling for pedagogical purposes. These two principles can be followed
without having to be subservient to notions of ‘ideal’ languages and
models extracted therefrom, whether classical ones such as Latin or Greek,
or currently dominant ones such as English.
The question of neighbouring languages referred to in section 2.4 is a
good place to consider another aspect of the role of grammatical
modelling in cross-linguistic comparison. Let us take the example of ways
of talking about the future in European languages. Several languages
apart from English have a way of talking about future events that employ
the equivalent of the English verb to go. These languages include French,
Dutch and Spanish (but not German, Swedish or Italian, for example).
Learners of the languages that do have a be going to future are often given
advice about the usage of the be going to-equivalent form that suggests that
L2 has something special or different about its usage. King and Lansdell’s
(1979:33) adult French language course gives the meaning of the go-
equivalent, aller + infinitive, as ‘to say what someone is intending to do’. In
a later expansion in the same book, the notion of ‘probability’ is added to
the meaning of the form and the learner’s attention is drawn to the fact
that the examples are all of the spoken language (ibid.: 70). Bougard and
Bourdais (1994:152) French course assigns to the aller construction refer-
ence to ‘something that is already planned and very likely to happen’.
Learners of English are told in Soars and Soars (1987:64) that the be going to
future expresses ‘intention or evidence’. English-speaking learners of
Spanish will learn in Halm and Ortiz Blanco’s (1988:219) coursebook that
the Spanish be going to equivalent (the verb ir + a) embraces ‘the immedi-
ate future’. Shettor’s (1994:125) Dutch pedagogical grammar says gaan (the
34 - Language and languages

Dutch be going to equivalent) expresses ‘intention’. The Dutch learners’

course Levend Nederlands (1984:79) assigns to gaan the meaning of ‘een
intentie of een plan’. However, descriptive linguistic studies, both of indi-
vidual languages and contrastive ones, seem to suggest that French aller,
Dutch gaan, English go and Spanish ir are actually very similar, having
perhaps more in common than that which separates them, in that they all
relate to the future based in a present state of affairs (on French see Wales
1983; on English, French and Dutch compared, Haegeman 1983; on Eng-
lish Aijmer 1984, Haegeman 1989; on Spanish, Bauhr 1992). The future-in-
present meaning offers a unitary explanation, for example, for apparently
different English sentences such as ‘I’m going to take up golfin the spring’
(present state of intention/decision), ‘It’s going to rain’ (based on present
evidence), ‘I’m going to be fifty next birthday’ (based on present age) and
‘I’m going to have to replace that door’ (based on its present state). If there
is evidence that, at least for the four languages mentioned (and probably
others), the be going to future is very similar across languages, we may
actually be confusing learners by suggesting it has a special status with
regard to particular features such as ‘intention’ or ‘immediacy’ in particu-
lar languages, and if difficulties do arise, they may turn out to be pedagogi-
cally induced ones.
The real value of the cross-linguistic comparison in the case of going to
may be in pointing up the potential familiarity with the structure that
particular groups of learners may bring from their L1. Once again, the
main point is that cross-linguistic comparison should not be seen as
merely error- or difficulty-driven, but problem-driven in the true sense
that we hope to project applied linguistics in this book, where ‘problem’
includes curiosity, enquiry, comparison, evaluation and questioning, as
well as trouble-shooting errors, obstacles and difficulties, and sorting out
failure.

2.6 Lexis and the question of available paradigms for comparison

Contrastive analysis of languages proceeds within the current paradigms

of linguistics and so, often, the language teacher has to take what is on
offer, and ‘linguistics applied’ (see section 1.2) determines the scope of
comparability the teacher can utilise in building knowledge about lan-
guages. The cross-comparison of lexical systems is a good example of this.
For a long time, the study of lexis was dominated by the science of
semantics and, for many applied linguists, lexical meaning was synony-
2.6 Lexis and the question of available paradigms for comparison - 35

mous with semantic meaning as semanticists described it. This was not
necessarily a bad state of affairs, and vocabulary teaching undoubtedly
benefited indirectly from developments in the study of semantic fields, as I
have argued elsewhere (Carter and McCarthy 1988; McCarthy 1990). Good,
contrastive work on semantic fields has been and continues to be done
(Lehrer 1969, 1974, 1978, 1985; Miller 1978), and the study of the way
languages divide up the available semantic space, how they ‘word the
world’, has been crucial in understanding the difference in general struc-
ture of the vocabularies of different languages (see Lyons 1977:253 on the
work of Trier).
It was only in the late 1960s that the paradigm of lexical studies began to
shift in Western Europe, and more and more energy began to be devoted to
collocational meaning in vocabulary, especially among the neo-Firthians
(e.g. Halliday 1966; Sinclair 1966), and the study of how words combine
(often quite arbitrarily) began to be seen to be as significant as the study of
what they meant in denotational or connotational terms. Collocational
studies have given us an explosion of applied linguistic activity (not least
in lexicography, with pioneers such as Sinclair driving hard from the
practical end; see Sinclair 1991) that has a very direct and stimulating
relevance to language teaching (see also section 3.4). In this case, probably
because of its intuitively immediate relevance, it is often applied linguists
‘doing applied linguistics’ in the sense I have advocated who have provided
hard evidence for the facts of collocation in individual languages, rather
than those who have just been involved in ‘linguistics applied’ (i.e. taking
already existing descriptions). Kennedy’s (1987a) study of expressions of
temporal frequency in English is a good example of this, arising out of a
practically motivated analysis of academic English texts. Kennedy con-
siders the arbitrary combinations such as fairly commonly, very rarely, pretty
regularly and virtually always (compare the non-occurring “virtually rarely, or
*pretty always) and gives a very useful list of appropriate collocations that a
language teacher could use directly (see also Kennedy’s (1987b) work on
quantification, which has a similar practical motivation). In my own work
with O’Dell (McCarthy and O’Dell 1999), we have used collocation as a
means of presenting differences in synonymous pairs or amongst sets of
related words, based on corpus evidence. For example, in considering the
closely related adjectives terrible and horrible, information on their likely
co-occurrence with human or non-human nouns was crucial in our deci-
sion as to how they should be presented and practised. Table 1 shows how
often the two adjectives co-occur with person-related nouns per one thou-
36 - Language and languages

sand words of spoken text, revealing a markedly greater preference for

horrible to occur with person-related nouns, although both adjectives may
occur with such nouns.

Table 1: Collocations of terrible and horrible with person-nouns (per

one thousand words).

+ pers n. per 1k

terrible 19
horrible 43

Studies of collocation in other languages also exist (notably Russian; see

Kunin 1970; Benson and Benson 1993), but cross-linguistic comparisons
are relatively scarce:* the paradigm has not shifted sufficiently yet. And yet
we are at a good point where applied linguistics as a profession seems to be
expressing a shared urge for more knowledge, insight and useful descrip-
tion of collocation (whether for lexicographers, materials designers, sylla-
bus compilers or vocabulary teachers), rather than relying on ready-made
products and ‘linguistics applied’, or waiting for semantics to come of age.

2.7 Discourse analysis: new paradigms in cross-linguistic

comparison

Where paradigm shifts occur in one area they sometimes influence para-
digms in other areas of language study, and the development of discourse
analysis, the study of the relationship between language and its contexts
of use, is a case in point (see Coulthard 1985; Cook 1989; McCarthy 1991a;
McCarthy and Carter 1994). As we shall see below and in Chapter 5,
discourse analysis has had a profound effect on how languages are com-
pared, but it has not only offered new frameworks for analysing longer
stretches of naturally occurring language, it has also caused traditional
areas such as grammar to be re-assessed (e.g. Giv6n 1979; Monaghan 1987;
McCarthy and Carter 1994: ch 3; Hughes and McCarthy 1998). Influences
have been felt in phonology, too. Many languages are well-catalogued in
terms of their basic pronunciation features, and inventories of phonemes
exist which make cross-comparisons of similarities and differences be-
tween languages relatively unproblematic (e.g. the phoneme inventories
in Campbell 1991). However, in the study of intonation across languages,
things are not so straightforward.5 Traditional models of intonation stress
2.7 Discourse analysis: new paradigms in cross-linguisticcomparison - 37

either semantic, ‘emotional’ and/or ‘attitudinal’ correlates of tone con-

tours such as rises and falls (e.g. O'Connor and Arnold 1961; Crystal 1969;
Lindstrom 1978), which have been very influential in English language
teaching,° or grammar-related features of intonation (e.g. Halliday 1967;
Kullova 1987). This has often made it difficult to have satisfactory cross-
linguistic comparisons because of the elusiveness of notions such as ‘emo-
tion/attitude’ and the need to cross-compare two levels of language encod-
ing simultaneously in grammar-related descriptions.’
Discourse-oriented views of intonation (i.e. those which take into ac-
count features of the discourse such as participant relationships, state of
shared knowledge, etc.) offer the potential of a more universal model of
intonation and of more accurate and relevant descriptions for individual
languages. For example, Brazil’s (1985; 1997) discourse model of English
intonation stresses assumptions made by participants in talk about the
state of shared knowledge, and whether information is being ‘referred to’
(i.e. assumed as shared) or ‘proclaimed’ (assumed to be newsworthy). These
categories are likely to be universals across all languages, even if their
realisations in terms of precise tone contours may vary. The potential
contribution such a theory could make to models for pedagogy is im-
mense, both for individual languages and for cross-linguistic comparisons.
As yet, though, little in the way of ready-made comparisons exist using this
approach.’ This, however, is not necessarily a negative feature for our
conception of applied linguistics, since we have argued that it is as much
the task of applied linguists themselves as it is that of linguists, to create
relevant models within their own needs and contexts.?
Comparing intonation across languages brings us back to the problem
of linguistic hegemony discussed in connection with Latin and English. If
we are to compare two languages, especially where one is perhaps already
better described than another (as is often the case with intonation), do we
just overlay the system devised for one language on to another, or do we
simply let the data speak and start from scratch (see Keijsper 1983)? Much
depends on whether one follows an instrumental tradition (i.e. of scien-
tific measurement) or a functional one (attempting to assign meanings/
attitudes to forms). If the latter, then attempts at cross-linguistic compari-
son are likely to proceed on the basis of preconceived models of functional
categories and may cause great problems. On the other hand, purely
scientific or distributional studies of intonation across languages may
provide a mass of data with little gain in interpretation (e.g. Scuffil’s 1982
study of German and English”), although it may potentially form the basis
38 - Language and languages

for language-independent universal models of intonation (Collier 1991).

Most studies of intonation across languages in fact tend to be a mix of
semantic/grammatical/attitudinal approaches, suggesting a dominance of
the approaches used for ‘base’ languages such as English (e.g. Chitoran
1981; El-Hassan 1988). Just as we have argued that grammars of languages
should be seen on their own terms (both to the benefit of individual
description and to the search for universals), studies of intonation should,
ideally, do the same. The point in dwelling so long on intonation is that it
not only represents many of the age-old problems of linguistic description
and how applied linguists should evaluate cross-linguistic study, but also
offers new directions resulting from the paradigm shift that discourse
analysis represents, and an opportunity to tackle the long-standing prob-
lem of looking at intonation in its own right, disentangled from lexico-
syntactic and semantic frameworks. However, new paradigms in linguistic
study and their applications will not necessarily simplify the very complex
interactions that undoubtedly take place between a learner’s L1 inton-
ation and the target intonation."
The most significant influence that discourse analysis has had on how
we compare languages is in providing a new set of parameters within
which to carry out comparisons, which are independent of the traditional
levels of analysis such as sentence grammar and semantics (see Marma-
ridou 1988). Discourse and conversation analysts have focussed on struc-
tures and patterns beyond the clause and sentence. They have brought to
the study of language notions such as coherence and cohesion over clause
and sentence boundaries (Halliday and Hasan 1976), the concept of ex-
change (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975), turn-taking in talk (Sacks et al. 1974),
speech acts (themselves borrowing from developments in the philosophy
of language), face and politeness phenomena (Brown and Levinson 1987),
discourse-marking (Schiffrin 1987; Fraser 1990), and so on. Originally
based on the description of individual languages (very many on English),
such categories have naturally and rightly been brought into service in the
comparison of languages too, and universals of interaction have been
observed (House 1985). It is here that fundamental questions and problems
arise, questions directly relevant to pedagogical applied linguistics.
Discourse-level studies across languages may be divided into two major
types: those which deal with lexico-grammatical phenomena re-inter-
preted from a discoursal point of view, and those which look not at
language forms but at the socio-cultural aspects of linguistic behaviour.
These two different modes have fundamentally different implications for
2.7 Discourse analysis: new paradigms in cross-linguisticcomparison - 39

language pedagogy, and need careful evaluation as to their relevance in

the modelling of languages for pedagogical purposes. The first approach,
that based on lexico-grammar, is in many ways more straightforward, in
that it extends the understanding of forms that were traditionally prob-
lematic or neglected, by looking at their occurrence in real data. Examples
here would include word-order phenomena: whereas the typological tradi-
tion of conventional linguistics stresses the canonical sentence (usually
the neutral, declarative form’) and the various possible combinations of
subject-verb-object that characterise different languages (e.g. Givén 1984),
discourse-based investigations are concerned with non-canonical word-
orders, such as fronting of objects and other elements in subject-verb-
object languages, and how this relates to topicalisation in different lan-
guages (e.g. Kallgren and Prince’s 1989 study of Swedish and Yiddish). Such
studies may reveal interesting formal differences that could merit inclu-
sion in a ‘discourse-grammar’ of particular languages.
On the other hand, where languages are typologically similar, features
of discourse such as disturbances of canonical word-order for topicalisa-
tion purposes may be formally identical or very similar across languages
and thus raise different questions about their transferability in language
learning, ones which are likely to have complex answers (e.g. Trevise 1986
on French and English). Other areas of language form that have come
under a more discourse-based approach include ellipsis (e.g. Kuno 1982),
questions of various kinds (Anzilotti 1982; Takashima 1989), and clause-
types (Dunbar 1982). These studies necessarily involve some kind of prag-
matic framework with which to approach grammatical functioning across
languages, but often suffer from the lack of a unitary framework for
pragmatics.
Turning to the non-formal aspects of language comparison at the dis-
course level,!? considerable interest has been shown in how management
features of conversation, such as discourse-marking, operate in different
languages (see Abraham 1991; Ozbek 1995), both in formal terms (i.e. the
occurrence and distribution of markers) and in sociolinguistic terms (how
they reflect social norms of interaction). Marking seems to be a universal
feature, and the potential for modelling individual languages as well as
assessing the degree of universality in marking is great. Both viewpoints,
as before, raise different questions for language teaching in relation to
transfer of forms and transfer of behavioural features.
Even more intriguing are the comparisons made across languages in the
performance of specified speech-acts such as apologising, complimenting,
40 - Language and languages

requesting, and so on (see Trosborg 1995 for the most complete study), for
not only do such studies often reveal different ways of realising such
speech acts (in terms of sequencing, frequency, etc.) but they also under-
pin the cross-linguistic study of interactional styles, and how these may be
related to cross-cultural mis-communication and the creation of negative
stereotypes. Garcia’s (1992) study of responses to requests by Venezuelans
and English-speaking Americans, for instance, dwells on an apparent
difference between a ‘deference’-oriented approach by the Americans and
a ‘camaraderie’-oriented approach by the Venezuelans, which Garcia at-
tributes to different, culture-bound ‘frames’ of conversational participa-
tion. Similar studies have found speakers of French who come over as
‘blunt’ compared to speakers of English who come over as ‘beating about
the bush’ (Béal 1994).
How does the applied linguist evaluate the relevance of such non-formal
cross-linguistic studies? Is the metalanguage of speech acts sufficiently
universal to validate such studies (see Wierzbicka 1985)? Are cross-cultural
speech-act problems in fact formal ones in disguise? Form-related prob-
lems may well lurk behind cross-cultural studies where subjects are re-
quired to perform in L2 rather than their L1; for example, Scarcella and
Brunak (1981) suggest that language learners may learn formulaic ut-
terances for such features as politeness in an L2 before they are fully aware
of their distributional appropriacy. So, although a difference in behaviour
may not necessarily correspond to a deep cultural difference, we may yet
evaluate such studies as being very relevant in the arguments in favour of
cross-cultural awareness as a necessary component over and above the
learning of speech-act forms in the L2.* Underlying this kind of discoursal
comparison is the global question of what is relevant in language descrip-
tion in general, for unless we take a stand on that, then we cannot
evaluate whether clear differences between behaviours across cultures
manifested in language performance are in fact matters of ‘language’ at
all. If we follow Harris (1990) in seeing the integration of the linguistic and
non-linguistic features of communication as vital to an adequate theory of
language (see also Fleming 1995), then non-formal features of discoursal
difference across languages are necessarily part of a proper contrastive
theory which would lay considerable claim to relevance and accountabil-
ity to the needs of second language pedagogy. Nor would we wish to stop
there, for from beneath the welter of discourse-based studies of individual
languages and groups of languages there steadily emerges a feeling that
form as such (especially grammatical form) is, as Hopper and Thompson
 2.8 Conclusion -: 41

(1993:357) claim, ‘shaped by the entire range of cognitive, social, and

interactional factors involved in the actual use of language’, and that
grammatical regularities, rather than representing ‘frozen semantics’,
come to us as a result of ‘sedimented conversational practices’ (ibid.).
The advent of discourse analysis has not solved the fundamental prob-
lems of contrastive analysis, in that it proceeds in different ways for the
different levels of analysis, whether syntactic, lexical, phonological or
discoursal (Fisiak 1983). However, discourse analysis (and the cross-
cultural rhetoric studies that concentrate more on written text structures
across languages; e.g. Kaplan 1966, 1983; Bar-Lev 1986) help satisfy the
desire in language teachers to include the learner and his or her cultural
starting point in any relevant modelling of language for pedagogical
purposes. A contrastive analysis that does not situate languages in their
socio-cultural contexts of use is less likely to yield the kinds of relevance
and accountability we need, and is less likely, ultimately, to provide an
adequate view of communication through language as a universal phe-
nomenon.

2.8 Conclusion

We have dwelt long on problems and levels of comparability in this

chapter, because comparing languages is never far from the applied lin-
guist’s mind, especially in second-language pedagogy. We have also ar-
gued that a view of language as a whole is a pre-requisite to good applied
linguistics, as it has been recurrently throughout history. While we have
hovered back and forth between theoretical and practical aspects of con-
trastive analysis, we would not wish to make too much of a distinction
between ‘theoretical’ contrastive analysis and ‘applied’ contrastive analy-
sis (Fisiak 1983), for central to this chapter and this book is the notion of
taking a theoretical stance. Our argument here is that applied linguists
need to adopt a stance both on the differences between languages and the
relevance of such differences to their professional area, whether it be
pedagogy, lexicography, language planning or whatever, and how lan-
guage as a whole should be studied and understood. Recently, for
example, Malmkjaer (1997) has taken the rather unfashionable line of
arguing for an enhanced role for translation in foreign language learning,
integrating it with the other language skills, and seeing it as a way of
focussing learners’ attentions upon both L2 and L1. She admits, though,
that competence in translation and general linguistic competence do not
42 + Language and languages

necessarily go in tandem, and that translation may cause cross-linguistic

interference. Malmkjaer has taken a stance, and argued persuasively for it;
based on historical, linguistic and pedagogical evidence, in other words,
good applied linguistics.
In this chapter we have considered some broad questions arising from
the relationship between different languages and language as a global
phenomenon. We have seen how, historically, the two notions have been
in dialectal relationship, against different socio-economic backdrops. But
another central dialectic has underlain the development of applied lin-
guistics, and that is the perspective from which language and languages
are viewed. In Chapter 3, we look at two extremes along the spectrum of
models of language: that which views language as an abstract system, and
that which views it as inseparable from its contexts of use.

Notes

1 The dominance of Latin as the framework for the analysis of other languages
goes back much further. Fredborg (1980), for instance, sees it as operating to the
detriment of the study of the European vernaculars in the 12th century. Latin
models are certainly never far from the surface in the attempts to categorise
English parts of speech down to the eighteenth century, for example Gill (1619),
Jonson (1640), Cooper (1685), Priestley (1761) and Lowth (1762).
2 The points listed here are a convenient shorthand for the purposes of this
chapter, and I would not wish to suggest that there is not great disagreement
among linguists as to what the basic tenets are and what is significant or
relevant to a linguistic theory (e.g. see Gethin 1990 and 1999 for a radically
different view from the mainstream of what is central in linguistic argument).
Ww The belief in Latin as an ideal model language, however, is very resilient. In the
last stages of revision of this book, a campaigner for the promotion of teaching
Latin in British primary schools stated in a BBC radio interview that one of the
desired aims was the teaching of English grammar through Latin. The inter-
viewee remained unchallenged as to why this should be preferable or necessary
rather than teaching English grammar through English (BBC Radio 4, Today, 23
May 2000).
4 One early exception is Mitchell (1975:10), and a recent excellent example is
Newman (1988) on Hebrew and English collocations. A brief selection of
Swedish collocations may be found in Gellerstam (1992). Also in recent years,
work has commenced on various computer-based projects across languages,
using sophisticated databases (e.g. Heid and Freibott 1991; Thomas 1993; Fon-
tenelle 1994), and such projects may be assumed to increase in scope and
importance in the near future.
 Notes -: 43

5 There have been attempts at ‘intonational typology’ for the world’s languages,
for example Romportl’s (1973) grouping into four major types, though these are
not isomorphic with typologies based on morphological traits.
Cook (1979) has a focus that includes more functionally oriented categories
such as asking for and checking information, degrees of positiveness, etc., but
the attitudinal approach has generally been very influential in English lan-
guage teaching (e.g. Roberts 1983).
Chitoran (1981) takes up some of the issues involved in cross-linguistic syntactic
and semantic comparisons in the study of intonation.
But see Mansfield (1983) for its application to Italian.
Brazil’s is not the only discourse-sensitive account of intonation. Schaffer (1983,
1984), for instance, matches intonational choices with discourse features such
as turn-taking and topic management, while Selting (1992) looks at the role of
intonation in oral narrative.
10 This may be compared with Trim’s (1988) study of German and English which
relates the distribution of tones to sociolinguistic aspects such as the creation
of negative stereotypes.
11 The complex nature of intonational traces of L1 in L2 is discussed in Lepetit’s
(1989) study of Japanese and English learners of French.
12 See Keenan (1976).
13 These non-formal levels of language behaviour are parallelled in what Lehtonen
and Sajavaara (1983) call the ‘interpersonal’ level of comparison, though they
would seem to include psychological factors too.
14 There is certainly no shortage of cross-linguistic studies of features such as
politeness, e.g. for Thai see Khanittanan (1988); on Spanish and English: Haver-
kate (1988); English and Arabic: El Sayed (1990); English, French, Hebrew and
Spanish: Blum-Kulka (1989).
3
Modelling languages: the raw material of
applied linguistics

3.1 Introduction

In Chapter 2, I dwelt in some detail on the relationship between a general

view of language and the study of individual languages in relation to one
another. This enabled us to gain a historical perspective on the develop-
ment of applied linguistics as a professional discipline, and to remind
ourselves of the inherent socio-economic and cultural boundedness of our
discipline. But it should also serve to remind us that, whenever we are
studying a particular language, either as the starting-point for language
learning (the L1) or as the target language (the L2 or L3, etc.), our view
of that particular language is likely to be highly conditioned by our view of
language as a whole. In this chapter I shall investigate further how views
of what constitute language data, and of what constitutes relevant data
with regard to teaching-learning processes, influence the way applied
linguists ‘do’ their professional activities. I shall take a look at the core
linguistic levels of grammar, morphology, lexis and phonology and see
how different attitudes towards language as a whole have affected the way
their role in language learning and teaching have been perceived. In
Chapter 4 I shall look closer at how such views have affected research
paradigms in the study of language acquisition, and especially at the
nature of input in second language acquisition research.

3.2 Language as abstract system, language as social phenomenon

One position that has remained strong in the discipline of linguistics over
a long period is that language as an object of investigation can best be
modelled by viewing it as an abstract system, existing independently of its
contexts of use, or, in Di Pietro’s (1977: 4) words, as associated with ‘mental
constructs’ rather than ‘sociological factors’. In general, linguists who
take this view would argue that such features as social and cultural

44
 3.2 Language as abstract system, language as social phenomenon - 45

influences, individual variation in language use, the effects of immediate

context, and so on, are best excluded from the study of language, and that,
what matters are the universal, underlying phenomena, which may be
summarised as follows:

* That all normal human beings acquire human language of some sort,
while other animal species do not. Linguistics must therefore address
this innate capacity.
* That beneath the externally different forms of different languages,
there lie universal features. Relating these universal features to the
individual characteristics of languages is a central task of linguistics.
* That adult native speakers can say of their own language(s) what is
grammatical and well-formed and what is not, by recourse to intuition
and introspection.
¢ That externally observable language behaviour (often referred to as
performance) is only an imperfect guide to the internal knowledge of a
language that any individual possesses. This internal knowledge (often
called competence) is amenable to scientific investigation.

Such an idealised view of language is most readily associated with the

classic Chomskian paradigm as displayed in Noam Chomsky’s earlier
writings (e.g. Chomsky 1957; 1965), but many linguists who are not necess-
arily loyal disciples of Chomsky would also find themselves at ease with
most of these general principles. For example, the discipline of semantics
has certainly proceeded upon the assumption that words and their mean-
ings can be discussed by recourse to linguists’ intuitions, and that differ-
ent systems of meaning and the different lexicons of languages none the
less operate in universally consistent ways which can be explicated and
displayed without reference to the social contexts of use (see Nida 1975;
Lyons 1977). When semantics began to move more towards centre-stage in
Chomskian linguistics, it was at that time mainly concerned with the
componential structure of words and the compositional meaning of syn-
tactic forms in combination in sentences (Katz 1977: 2). Contemporaneous-
ly with the development of Chomsky’s linguistics, case grammar, while
committed to a more functionally oriented account, in contrast to the
belief in the autonomy of syntax espoused by early versions of Chomsky’s
linguistics, still eschewed reference to real contexts of use (Fillmore 1968).
Similarly, psycholinguists have long believed that the meanings of words
are acquired by young children in an internalised, systematic way, that
children’s performance can offer a window on the internal development
46 - Modelling languages

of their semantic competence, and that such phenomena as the acqui-

sition of the phonology of languages are subject to universally valid
principles (Jakobson 1968; Hawkins 1991; Aitchison 1994: Chapter 15).
Underlying the whole approach to language as an abstract code or system
is acommitment to rationalism, often referred to via its historic links with
the philosophy of Descartes as ‘Cartesian’ linguistics (Chomsky 1966).
Beaugrande (1997) draws attention to the methodological consequences
of such a position: the linguist becomes a ‘homework’ linguist, as opposed
to a ‘fieldwork’ linguist (p. 280). Similarly, Di Pietro (1977) reminds us that
the linguist working within this general paradigm only needs to refer to
his or her own language, and not that of any other user, inevitably leading
to insoluble disputes over what is grammatical and what is not. Perhaps
the most striking consequence, observable in much work in second-
language acquisition, is that human subjects may come to be treated as
laboratory subjects, as readily when it is a question of investigating lan-
guage as when investigating the common cold, or the memorisability of
complex digits, or the ability of rats to find bits of cheese in a maze. But
more subtle effects may be seen in how language learning materials are
designed and in advice and prescriptions offered to teachers resulting
from such laboratory-style ‘treatments’.
It would be a gross over-simplification to lay the responsibility of view-
ing language as an abstract system solely at the door of Chomsky and his
followers. Robins (1979:205) notes that:

In the European linguistic tradition, the conception of syntax as

a theory of sentence structure embodying its own specific
elements and relations can be regarded as part of the legacy of
the Middle Ages.

Furthermore, the classical tradition of the study of dead languages such as

Latin and Ancient Greek, because of the general inaccessibility of real
speakers and contexts of use, has contributed greatly over the centuries to
the view that languages can be systematised, displayed and taught in all
their glory without reference to individuals and to real occasions of use.
This heritage was not always confined to dead or inaccessible languages: in
Great Britain, until the 1960s, the teaching and learning of the Welsh
language in Wales itself often followed the same pattern as the teaching of
Latin, and, in the English-speaking urban areas of Wales, only a privileged
few high achievers were given access to real speakers and real contexts for
3.2 Language as abstract system, language as social phenomenon - 47

use, even though such contexts were living and available nearby. I need no
points of reference beyond my own, personal experience as a schoolboy in
Wales in the late 1950s and early 1960s to vouch for these claims.
More directly relevant to recent philosophical influences in second
language pedagogy is the development of speech-act theory (Austin 1962;
Searle 1969). Although the study of speech-acts would seem on the face of
it to be definitely concerned with language in use (to use Austin’s own
title, with How to do things with words), most of the initial theory and
discussion of speech acts proceeded with intuitive data, invented phrases
and sentences corresponding to what linguists’ intuitions accepted as
prototypical ways of making requests, apologies, etc.1 It is true that more
recently, speech-act studies have come to be based on real language use
(e.g. the study of complimenting, see Manes and Wolfson 1981, and the
study of the performance of speech-acts such as apologies and requests by
language learners, see Trosborg 1995), but it is also true that much speech-
act research, and a good deal of what in general passes for ‘pragmatics’ (i.e.
the study of how meaning is achieved in use), has based its statements on
highly abstracted data (e.g. Grice 1975; Leech 1983). As a balance to this,
Oller (1977: 50) sees pragmatics as ‘the dynamic interaction between the
speaker’s knowledge of the world (including immediately perceived infor-
mation, relationships between speakers, and the like) and the syntactic-
semantic dimensions’, and further adds that the dimensions ‘are by no
means independent’ (ibid.). Thomas (1995: xiii) promises that her book
‘accords a central place to the roles of both speaker and hearer in the
construction of meaning and takes account of both social and psychologi-
cal factors ...’. Speech-act theory had a direct affect on language teaching
in the early days of the communicative movement, with proposals for
syllabus design by applied linguists such as Wilkins (1976) being firmly
rooted in inventories of abstracted data, and teaching materials offering
learners intuitively grounded formulae for the achievement of speech-acts
such as apologies, interruptions, complaints, etc. (e.g. Abbs and Freebairn
1980: 53; Jones 1984:36ff; Soars and Soars 1987: 54-5).
The other side of the coin is the view that language cannot properly be
studied as an abstract phenomenon. Again, no single school or linguist
can be said to be the origin of this perspective, though sociolinguists such
as Dell Hymes (Hymes 1967) have had a great influence on many branches
of applied linguistics, including language teaching. The view of language
as a social phenomenon is, broadly speaking, based on the view that
language only exists for social purposes, and that, logically, its study must
48 - Modelling languages

address and encompass those social purposes. Its tenets may be sum-
marised as follows:

¢ The forms and meanings of languages have evolved in social contexts,

and are constantly changing and evolving in response to social and
cultural developments.
° Language itself contributes to construct social and cultural realities,
and is not neutral in the part it plays in our perceptions and articula-
tions of our social experience.
¢ Language is acquired in social contexts; language acquisition is one
feature of socialisation and acculturation.
¢ ‘Performance’ constitutes the most important evidence for how lan-
guage works and what it is; it is not simply a veil obscuring underlying
‘competence’.
¢ Performance is best observed in real language phenomena such as
written texts and conversations; it cannot properly be studied under
laboratory conditions.
¢ Linguistic evidence is external. The linguist’s intuition is no longer the
primary evidence. External evidence means that issues such as correct-
ness and standards will no longer be absolutes. For a global language
like English, since many of its highly competent users will not be
native-speakers, the native-speaker as the sole source of evidence for use
also becomes displaced. I shall return to the issue of the primacy of the
native-speaker in Chapter 6.
‘Meaning’ is only an abstraction from the actual communicative
achievements of participants in written and spoken interaction. Mean-
ing is emergent in language forms, rather than immanent.

The two broad views of language are unquestionably a simplification of a

quite complex cline of beliefs and approaches in current applied linguis-
tics, and I shall try to do some credit to that complexity in this book. None
the less, underlying the eclecticism that is generally accepted as healthy to
the applied linguistic profession, the two views can be observed operating
dialectically, creating a tension that occasionally surfaces in debates be-
tween strong advocates of one line or the other. It is, as such, a powerful
thread in the fabric of the discourse of applied linguistics (see Chapter 6
for applied linguistics as a professional discourse).
The view of language as social phenomenon undoubtedly has much to
commend it to language teachers in comparison to the notion of language
as abstract system: it seems more real, visible, amenable to verification or
3.2 Language as abstract system, language as social phenomenon - 49

falsification, and seems to chime in more with learners’ needs to use

second and foreign languages rather than just to know them or know about
them. However, it too has its problems. Just what does ‘social context’
mean? How does one systematise context? What features of language use,
over and above the phonological and lexico-grammatical variations that
reflect socio-cultural features such as formality and informality should be
included in our modelling of a language? If language really is individuals
interacting with other individuals in unique contexts, how can we ever
build enough information into our model of a target language to capture
such variability, and is not at least some degree of abstraction desirable,
and inevitable (Larsen-Freeman 1997)? How much abstraction? Why not go
the whole hog and take language right out of the messiness of real
contexts and simply present it as a system to be learnt in the abstract and
only later applied to situations of real communication?
The degree to which these questions are real ones for applied linguists is
reflected in the different schools of thought that have contributed to the
broad field of ‘discourse analysis’, generally seen as a sub-discipline firmly
on the social end of the cline of language study, and currently enjoying a
surge of interest within second-language pedagogy (see Cook 1989; Mc-
Carthy 1991a; McCarthy and Carter 1994). In the British discourse analysis
school as exemplified by the work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), their
observations of the language used between teachers and pupils led to a
model of spoken discourse at quite an abstract level of generalisation (see
section 5.4). On the other hand, in the strongest versions of American
conversation analysis (which has also contributed to defining the general
field of ‘discourse analysis’), fine-grain investigations of individual conver-
sations often content themselves with illustrating how unique individuals
achieve unique goals on unique occasions. In this view, there is little
generalisation about language forms, since their force and meaning are
argued to be contingent upon their particular placement in that particu-
lar discourse, how participants respond to them, etc. (see Heritage and
Watson 1979; Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Bilmes 1988; Pomerantz and
Fehr 1997). It is difficult to see how the kind of conversation analysis
completely embedded in individual pieces of data without any generalisa-
bility could be ‘applied’ in pedagogy, although there have been calls for
the ‘sensible’ incorporation of findings from conversation analysis into
communicative language teaching (Celce-Murcia et al. 1997: 144). Similar-
ly, van Lier (1989) sees conversation analysis as having a positive role in
assisting our understanding of what interviews are, in the context of oral
50 -: Modelling languages

proficiency interview tests. It must also be acknowledged, though, that in

the practice of language teaching there have been negative consequences
flowing from the strong view of language as a social phenomenon, with
teachers in the early, heady days of the communicative movement often
made to feel guilty if their learners were not constantly using and ‘output-
ting’ language in contexts and activities designed to ape as well as could be
done the ‘real world’.
Thus the picture is complex, with neither end of the cline between
language as abstract system and language as social phenomenon offering
a trouble-free route for application in language pedagogy. However,
understanding how these views have influenced the construction of gram-
mars and the descriptions of lexis, morphology and phonology that under-
lie teaching materials and classroom activity, and that have formed the
input for language acquisition studies is crucial, whichever end of the
spectrum our sympathies ultimately incline towards. I shall now consider
some examples of language description in terms of how they reflect a view
of the nature of language study.

3.3 Grammar and grammars

3.3.1 The sentence: friend or foe?

If you studied any grammar at all at school or as an adult, whether of your

first language or that of a second language, it is highly likely that the
grammar you learnt was modelled on classical languages such as Latin and
Ancient Greek, for in most parts of the world such models still dominate,
though their influence may not always be obvious on the surface. If you
studied at a university, it is possible you were introduced to academic
models of grammar which may or may not have ever been applied in
language pedagogy. For example, you may have encountered the trans-
formational-generative grammar of Chomsky and his followers (see sec-
tion 3.3.2), the case grammar promoted by Fillmore (1968) and Anderson
(1971), or the systemic grammar of Halliday and his followers (Halliday
1985; Downing and Locke 1992). What the traditional classical model and
most of the others in circulation will have in common is some notion of a
core unit, usually the sentence (though Halliday’s grammar tends to see
the clause as more core-like; see section 3.3.2). It is worth dwelling a little
on the nature of the sentence, for it is not simply an artefact used by
grammarians. As we shall see in Chapter 4, a good deal of second language
 3.3 Grammar and grammars - 51

acquisition experimentation uses sentences as the input, and very few

language teachers would ever claim to do their job without recourse at
some time or other to the sentence as a vehicle of illustration, whether for
grammar or vocabulary or some other feature such as intonation.
Behind the use of the sentence as a theoretical and descriptive unit lie a
number of basic assumptions, not necessarily all shared by all grammar-
ians, but recurring across many different models and in descriptions of
many different languages:

¢ That sentences have meaning; they are often traditionally defined as

‘completed thoughts’ or units of meaning. This meaning can be appre-
hended from the sentence alone, without recourse to further informa-
tion about context, who said it or wrote it, etc.
¢ That sentences express fundamental meanings found in all languages
(e.g. subjects doing things to objects, people and things acting in time
and space, events and ideas logically relating to one another). In other
words, the sentence is a universal of human language. Thrushes, dol-
phins and dogs may have vocal signals that carry meanings, but they do
not have sentences.
¢ That sentences are formed in individual languages according to rules.
Native speakers acquire and know these rules, and can tell when a piece
of language corresponds to or violates the rules.
¢ That sentences are formed from other, lower-level grammatical units
such as phrases and clauses; they are the highest level of grammatical
structure —- beyond them lie texts and contexts.
¢ That sentences exist in both spoken and written language, however
imperfectly they may be realised in the real-time performance of spoken
language.

Most language teaching accepts these assumptions. It is assumed that

sentences can be used as vehicles to illustrate how any language expresses
meanings, that their construction is systematic, and that learners will be
familiar with them as units of meaning and as objects of study, and will
expect them to be used in class and in materials. It is also generally
assumed that what has been written and practised as a sentence will
transfer unproblematically to speech, given the right amount and type of
practice. The fundamental beauty of the sentence in pedagogy is its ability
to act as a vehicle for the illustration of language, rather than as a vehicle of
communication. The sentence as a unit in fact fits very well with a view of
language as an abstract system, since sentences are simply slabs of
52 - Modelling languages

language, fenced off from the messiness of context and individual users;
they are ideal containers for illustrating rules, patterns and meanings in a
clear, non-distracting way. They can be brought together according to
their similarities in structure (e.g. ten sentences all containing past tense
verbs), regardless of whether their meanings and contexts are coherently
related to one another. What is more, in using sentences as a way of
investigating acquisition, we can approximate better the language user’s
underlying competence in any language, since their response in experi-
ments is likely to be oriented to the abstract features of the form and
meaning of the sentence rather than to the distractions of any unique
occasion of actual use. In laboratory ‘treatments’ of subjects, sentences
can be controlled, and offer the possibility of stable, replicable input for
the experimenter, free from the vagaries and caprices of real, unpredict-
able language. Finally, the sentence can be seen as the crowning achieve-
ment of the manipulation of morphemes, words, phrases and clauses in
the L2, which the learner can progress to, stepwise, through exposure,
practice and production, and feel the satisfaction of that achievement (see
Hughes and McCarthy 1998 for a further discussion of the pedagogical
value of the sentence).
The sentence, though, clearly does not sit so easily alongside a view of
language as a social phenomenon. The problems of situating a description
around the unit of the sentence in such an approach could be summarised
as follows:

* Meaning is not independent of context. When people process sentences,

what they are really doing is imagining a context for them, however
minimal.
* Rules about well-formedness are not absolute; something may be unac-
ceptable to a native speaker in one context but pass unnoticed and be
perfectly acceptable in another. Individual judgements will vary greatly.
° Judgements of grammaticality are likely to display fuzzy boundaries;
any set of sentences will rarely produce a unanimous yes or no response
from native-speaker informants.
* Issues of well-formedness and acceptability are socio-culturally and
politically influenced and are not innate. Schooling and social identities
condition people’s perceptions of well-formedness as much as natural
acquisition processes do, and such conditioning will vary historically
and be subject to fashion and the persuasiveness of dominant rhetorics.
Much everyday speech (by far the bulk of language output in any society)
seems to function perfectly adequately without a predominance of
 3.3 Grammarand grammars - 53

well-formed, complete sentences. A lot of spoken language is character-

ised by single-word or short, phrasal utterances, false starts, wandering
structures, strings of clauses and phrases often without any obvious
starting or finishing point.
* In conversation, units that look like sentences (e.g. a main clause and
an associated subordinate clause) may often be produced jointly
by speakers rather than as a construction by one voice (see Tao and
McCarthy in press for some examples).
Well-formedness is clearly less important to interlocutors than com-
municative appropriacy and efficiency: notions of typicality and lack
of problematicness are more useful than an abstract notion of well-
formedness.
Some sentences in written and spoken texts are complete units of
thought or meaning; others depend on preceding or subsequent senten-
ces to make any sense at all.
Children do not necessarily acquire sentences as the most primitive
units of communication; in early stages of acquisition, children com-
municate effectively with single words, or phrases, or fixed, unanalysed
clausal units (Jespersen 1964: 113; Peters 1983).

In language pedagogy, the sentence may be less than useful, even irrel-
evant, in performing mundane speech acts such as greetings, suggestions,
thanks and apologies, not to mention in the extended performance of
spoken collaborative tasks. In the very earliest stages of communicatively
oriented language courses, beginner-level learners may well achieve more,
faster, if the sentence as a unit does not surface at all, and many successful
courses focus in the early stages on the acquisition of useful formulae,
with only implicit attention being paid to putting together entities such as
subjects, objects and clauses (e.g. Richards 1994).

3.3.2 Models of grammar and their applicability

When it comes to applying grammar models in second language teaching
(or indeed in other applications, such as the automatic grammatical
tagging of computerised text), the traditional, classical-based model has
its attractions, and it is no mere act of historical chance that its influence
has been so tenacious and resilient. The traditional model proceeds on the
basis of the study of syntax and morphology, syntax being principally
concerned with the rules which allow the arrangement of words into
well-formed structural configurations, and morphology being concerned
54 - Modelling languages

with ‘items and paradigms’ (see McCarthy 1991b), that is the way individ-
ual words (e.g. nouns, verbs), inflect or combine to create the paradigms of
tenses, number, person, etc. An example of a paradigm was given in
section 2.5, for Assyrian pronouns, where it was argued that at least one of
the problems of the classical-based approach is the imposition of the
paradigms of Latin on to languages that operate in quite different ways.
That is not to say that one should never create paradigms, or that they are
not useful, but simply that they should be formulated on their own terms,
with attention to the relevance for the learner, whose task it will be to map
L1 paradigms and L2 paradigms onto one another. Paradigms need not be
seen as entirely abstract artefacts, and much can be learnt about social
and cultural structures from them. For example, if we just take three
European languages, and build paradigms for their human-subject-pro-
nouns in relation to one another (Figure 10), we see important socio-
cultural differences in the ways that familiar and distant relationships are
(or are not) discriminated. For a Spanish-speaking learner of English, the
Spanish paradigm can be greatly reduced and simplified, especially in
terms of distant versus familiar relations in the second person (shaded
English boxes) and in terms of gender. For the English-speaking learner of
Swedish, you has to be discriminated into du and ni, not only on the basis of
number, but also on the basis of familiarity and distance (shaded Swedish
boxes). For both the Swedish-speaking and English-speaking learner of
Spanish, the system in both L1s has to be discriminated to accommodate
masculine and feminine plurals (shaded Spanish boxes), though Swedish
does at least discriminate familiar and distant second person.

Meaning Spanish English Swedish

1%t singular yo jag

2" singular familiar tli du
2"4 singular distant usted ne
3 singular masculine él han
3 singular feminine ella hon
1s plural masculine L ie vi
1* plural feminine no
2” plural masculine familiar -vosotros —
2°¢ plural feminine familiar -vosotras —
2"4 plural distant
3 plural masculine
3° plural feminine

Figure 10: Human-subject-pronouns in Spanish, English and Swedish

 3.3 Grammarand grammars - 55

The item and paradigm approach thus has a good deal of usefulness in
modelling languages in relation to one another, as long as one is careful
not simply to try to fit everything into a Latin strait-jacket. It also sys-
tematises visually for the learner an array of forms which might otherwise
be confusing, and may serve as a useful mnemonic, especially for those
learners with strong visual or diagrammatic orientations in their learning
styles. A pronoun paradigm such as Figure 10, if constructed and dealt
with in a humanistic way, can remind us, in Di Pietro’s words, that ‘The
pronouns of a language are more than grammatical forms which some-
how replace nouns. They mark the many relationships between speaker,
hearer and referent which grow from the social status of the parties
involved, the setting of the speech act, and even the visual orientation of
the speaker’ (Di Pietro 1977: 8). It is not, therefore, the paradigm itself but
the linguistic assumptions that underlie it and the use to which it is put
that matters.
The weakness of the item and paradigm approach is that it does not
always bring together into formal paradigms items that learners may have
to make genuine choices from when constructing real texts. McCarthy
(1994a) and Hughes and McCarthy (1998) have argued, for instance, that
the pronoun it occurs in regular opposition in texts to the demonstratives
this and that, such that in the following two (concocted sentences), the
anaphoric (backward) reference to the first sentence presents a genuine
grammatical choice to do with topical focus (see also section 1.5.1):

Freda told me about Sally’s problem. It?/this?/that? grabbed my

attention immediately.

It, this and that would be unlikely to be brought together in most tradi-
tional grammatical paradigms, where it would probably be found in a
pronoun paradigm such as in Figure 10, indicating a non-human or
impersonal pronoun, in contrast to the human ones, while this and that
would be locked into their own demonstrative paradigm with these and
those, to the exclusion of other items. The implications of such choices for
a view of language as a social phenomenon are that considerable re-
thinking of what the relevant paradigms are may be necessary, based on
the evidence of real contexts rather than using offthe-peg paradigm
frameworks largely inherited from the classical languages, or based solely
on formal grounds. Here we see that the relationship between one’s view
of language and how one models it for pedagogy influences the very basics
of the linguistic raw material with which the learner will be presented or
56 - Modelling languages

which the researcher may adopt as experimental input. Grammar does not
exist in a vacuum, with its categories pre-ordained, independently of the
use to which it is put by applied linguists, who shape it according to their
underlying perspectives and who interpret its effects in practice.
Much the same can be said of traditional views of syntax. If the abstrac-
ted sentence is the unit of description, then an English sentence such as:

Thought it was Jim, but couldn’t be sure.

would not only be ambiguous, but would fall down on the requirement
that English clauses must have a subject, or that the subject must at least
be retrievable (as in imperative clauses). Who ‘thought it was Jim’, and who
‘couldn’t be sure’? Our example sentence can only be considered unam-
biguous and well-formed if we create a context for it; in other words, if we
transform it from a sentence into an utterance, and imagine a situation,
with a subject such as J or some other person, in a context where ellipsis of
the subject is normal and unproblematic. For this reason, such ellipsis is
often referred to as situational ellipsis (Quirk et al. 1985:895); we need a
situation, or have to create one, in which the identity of the subject is
obvious (e.g. a speaker telling a first-person narrative). How this affects
grammatical description is that in a sentence-based view, there is some-
thing missing, and ellipsis is seen as a special set of cases where grammati-
cally obligatory items may be ‘missed out’, since the sentence cannot be
processed unless certain items can be ‘retrieved’ or ‘restored’. In a socially
embedded view of language, where utterances are always studied in con-
texts, nothing is ‘missing’ from the utterance, and there is no reason to
believe that the notion of ‘restoring’ or ‘retrieving’ the subject has any
psychological reality for speakers and listeners. Nothing is missing since
the subject is there in front of the listener or is simply obvious and/or
current/salient in the context. We might therefore wish to re-cast our
account of ellipsis in a grammar embedded in social contexts so that items
such as subjects are considered to be ‘added’ when they need to be stated
explicitly for the benefits of participants. A parallel can be seen in lexis,
which is often highly implicit in face-to-face spoken language (see Cheng
and Warren 1999), but explicit when required (Cruse 1977).
In sum, sentences place requirements on grammatical forms that con-
textually embedded utterances may never need to make. In language
acquisition experiments where sentences are the raw input for gram-
maticality judgements, we may simply end up testing those requirements
 3.3 Grammarand grammars -: 57

rather than knowledge of or competence in the processes of ordinary

communication.
Transformational-generative (TG) approaches to grammar locate them-
selves firmly within sentence-based schools of thought, though they repre-
sent a departure from the item and paradigm approach of classical-based
grammars. The interests of TG grammarians include not only the pro-
cesses whereby structures are as they are in particular languages, but also
the ways in which grammars correspond to universal linguistic features
and to the innate competence of native speakers. The main purpose of a
transformational-generative grammar is, as its name suggests, to describe
the basic transformations necessary to generate the permissible sentences
in any given language. So, for example, in early TG descriptions of English,
explaining how passive voices in the surface structure of sentences (i.e. the
final product as written or spoken) are arrived at by ‘transforming’ basic
active-voice structures with a prior existence at a deep level, or how
embedded relative clauses derive from combining underlying matrix
clauses in the deep structure according to specified rules, is considered to
be a central aim of the grammatical description (Chomsky 1957). What is
more, the purposes of the description must extend not only to saying how
an infinite number of correct grammatical structures may be generated,
but also to the formulation of rules that will automatically forbid the
generation of incorrect, ungrammatical sentences. Thus a sentence such
as The woman (who[m]) I met was Irish would be deemed to be well-formed in
terms of the transformations it has undergone from the two matrix or
‘kernel’ sentences The woman was Irish and I met the woman, through dele-
tion of the woman in the embedded clause, movement of that clause to a
position after the head of the subject noun-phrase, and the (optional)
addition of who(m). This is necessarily a brief and superficial account of the
complex evolution of TG theories (see Matthews 1979 for some of the key
theoretical changes that evolved among TG adherents in the 1960s and
the under-
1970s), but it does exemplify TG’s faithfulness to the pursuit of
lying rules of syntax that are believed by its apologists to drive the
construction of sentences and which are the goals of acquisition. The
earliest versions of TG were not even concerned with meaning, although
later versions saw semantics as an essential part of the grammar of a
language, while still excluding anything about use in the real world, as
Oller (1977) reminds us.
Chomsky never saw TG (or linguistic theory in general) as having any
58 - Modelling languages

on
relevance for language pedagogy. In fact the whole of the debate
language acquisition in his Cartesian Linguistics emphasises that grammar
is a question of explaining the universal inborn human capacity for
language acquisition as a prerequisite to the acquisition process, and he
rejects notions of ‘training’ and ‘institution’ (Chomsky 1966:63). None the
less, such a systematic view of sentence construction is appealing, and was
not without its adherents in second language teaching materials design-
ers in the 1970s, as those of us who taught with highly successful courses
such as O’Neill’s Kernel Lessons Plus will recall. O’Neill’s title itself was a
tribute to TG, and its exercises in the creation of features such as relative
clauses instructed the learner to ‘transform’ simple sentences into more
complex ones. The cognitive aspects of learning are foregrounded. In the
rationale for the teacher, O’Neill and Kingsbury (1974:iii) state:

Contextualisation, by itself, is often not enough. An additional

and more formal approach has been found desirable for adult
students. However, this ‘approach’ keeps the use of formal
terminology to a minimum. The aim is not to make students
name parts of speech or to parse. The aim is to give students a
cognitive grasp of the patterns and an insight into their
transformations and the part they play within the whole system
of English (this is the function of the exposition) and also to
provide the sort of exercises that promote real fluency in the use
of these patterns (this is the aim of the exercises).

In fairness to such an excellent textbook author as O’Neill, his courses

went far beyond the mere manipulation or ‘transformation’ of sentences,
but his work remains as an example of at least the partial influence of TG,
and the power of the independent sentence as raw material in language
pedagogy, even in a course where other elements such as extended narra-
tives and notional-functional components were also present.
Also in the immediate aftermath of Chomsky’s impact on linguistics, we
see attempts to apply the transformational model to cross-linguistic com-
parisons of the type discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, and there was one
attempt to apply a three-way contrastive analysis on transformational
principles between relative clauses in Hindi, Arabic and English to the
prediction of error and difficulty for learners of English from the first two
L1s (Fox 1970). As we shall see in Chapter 4, such straight comparisons and
predictions were destined to founder on the evidence of real language
learners’ performance, but for as long as contrasts between languages
 3.3 Grammarand grammars - 59-

rested on comparisons of isolated sentences, the transformational-gener-

ative model probably served as well as any.
Grammars with a social orientation include functional grammars such
as Halliday’s systemic grammar (Halliday 1961; 1978; 1985) and discourse
grammars (e.g. Givén 1979). For Halliday (1977:16) functional theories of
language are ‘not concerned with language as object but with language in
the explanation of other phenomena’. Halliday’s grammar is highly elab-
orated, and deserves more attention than it has received in second lan-
guage pedagogy (a notable exception to this neglect being Downing and
Locke 1992). In Halliday’s model, the clause, rather than the sentence, is
seen as the crucial hub around which language turns. Rather than explain-
ing functions of the clause in purely morpho-syntactic terms (positions of
subject and object, lists of tense inflections, etc.), the clause is seen as the
nexus of basic choices (or systems) which represent the meaning potential of
any given language. The choices speakers and writers make from these
systems are socially motivated.? The choice of including or not including a
modal verb in the verb phrase, for example, is seen as a matter of the
interpersonal relationship projected between participants in the act of
communication; the choice of a transitive verb rather than an intransitive
one, or vice versa, is seen as a choice among potential representations of
the relationship between the participants and processes encoded in the
clause itself (Berry 1975). Thus a clause such as The letter might have got lost
wouid be seen as arising from choices within the systems of tense, aspect
and voice motivated by social concerns such as presenting one’s statement
as tentative, choosing not to name or blame an agent for the loss of the
letter, distancing onself from the event (c.f. the immediacy of The letter may
be lost), and using get as a characteristic passive marker of emphasis on
(often unfortunate) end-results rather than agent or process (Carter and
McCarthy 1999). The Hallidayan grammar does consider combinations of
clauses (to all intents and purposes ‘sentences’), but notably prefers to call
them ‘clause complexes’ (Halliday 1985:215-6), and the clause remains as
the central object of interest. Even orthographic sentences in extended
texts are not treated as independent units, but must be related to one
another in the grammar by the processes of above-sentence cohesion (Halli-
day and Hasan 1976), involving such features as pronoun reference across
sentence boundaries, textual ellipsis and conjunction.
Halliday has proved that it is possible to elaborate a grammar in which
the sentence is not paramount, and in which social concerns can be
addressed. Another, by no means insignificant consequence of Halliday’s
-60 - Modelling languages

view of the clause as socially grounded is that the distinctions between

deep structures and surface structures, and between competence and
performance, are no longer requirements of the model. Also central to
Halliday’s view is that social-semiotic structure (i.e. how societies organise
their systems of meaning into symbolic representations) and language
structure reflect and condition one another. Put simply, this means that
an artefact in language (e.g. a text) can tell us much about the social
relations that brought it into being, and a context of situation (i.e. the
specification of conditions such as relationships between interlocutors,
purpose of communication, mode of communications, etc.) can tell us
much about what language is likely to occur. The relationship between
language and social semiotics is bi-directional. It is difficult to see, there-
fore, how one might use a Hallidayan grammar in a laboratory-style
investigation of language acquisition, since for Halliday, acquisition as
well as use is not independent of social contexts and motivations (Halliday
1974; 1977).
The present account of grammars and their applicability is necessarily
sketchy and brief, but is meant to illustrate the ways in which views of
language from opposite ends of the theoretical spectrum can shape the
modelling of grammar, and how grammarians’ attitudes to the relation-
ship between their data and social concerns (whether they exclude them
or embrace them) can result in quite different priorities in the description
of languages. The end product, what the applied linguist has for potential
application, will either fit or misfit the applied purpose, and for that
reason, awareness of where grammatical models start from is crucial to
doing applied linguistics successfully. The same is true for models of the
lexicon.

3.4 The place of lexis in different views of language

It may not be so immediately obvious that models of vocabulary are just as

sensitive as are models of grammar to the decision to view language as an
abstract system or as a socially embedded phenomenon. The issue is not to
be confused with the long-established tradition of the historical study of
vocabulary change (e.g. for English, see Hughes 1988), which is usually
based on socio-historical evidence. The debate we must address for the
present chapter is whether more is gained or lost by bringing to centre-
stage the users of language, and how words ‘mean’ in real contexts, than
by looking at words in their citation forms, out of context, as most
 3.4 The place of lexis in different views of language - 61

dictionaries and a good many vocabulary learning manuals do. In this

regard, a few general points may be made at the outset:

* Even in linguistic sub-disciplines with a strong social emphasis such as

discourse and conversation analysis, lexis has been the poor relation of
features such as turn-taking, exchange structure, discourse-marking
etc., to which much effort has been devoted, and even of discourse
grammar, which is a rapidly growing area of interest.
* Lexis has had something of a struggle to establish itself as an indepen-
dent, yet systematic level of linguistic encoding. Often it has been
viewed as subsumed within semantics, or even relegated to the level of a
disparate set of ‘irregularities’. Chomsky (1965:84) speaks of the lexicon
as ‘an unordered list of all lexical formatives’, in contrast to the well-
behaved and generative world of syntax, and it is the ‘idiosyncratic’
properties of words that relegate them to the lexicon (ibid. 87).
¢ Under both structuralist and notional-functional approaches to second
language pedagogy, vocabulary was usually seen to be a lower priority
than, respectively, the learning of structure, and the practising of speech-
acts. Structural approaches focussed on grammatical forms, while
notional-functional approaches emphasised the holistic meaning of
speech-acts, rather than the individual words that composed them. This
accounted for the Cinderella status vocabulary was perceived to occupy
by applied linguists who refused to leave it alone in the 1980s (e.g. Meara
1980; McCarthy 1984; Carter 1987; Carter and McCarthy 1988; Nation
1990).
Semantics has provided applied linguists with useful frameworks for
systematising meaning and relations among words (Nida 1975; Lyons
1977). For example, notions such as synonymy, antonymy, connotation, denota-
tion, etc., have been widely used alike in the teaching of vocabulary and in
lexicography (recall the discussion of thesaurus-design in Chapter 1.5.2).
Applied linguistic research on vocabulary teaching (e.g. Channell 1981)
and acquisition (Schmitt and Meara 1997) has often based itself wholly or
partly on semantic principles. Even the somewhat abstract realm of com-
ponential analysis (analysing words into semantic ‘components’ such as
+ human, + male, + young for boy in English; for examples, see Leech
1984) has prompted direct applications in vocabulary-teaching materials
(Rudzka et al. 1981). However, keeping the study of lexis penned within the
world of semantics makes any proposal to develop a lexical model in
harmony with a socially embedded view of language difficult.
62 - Modelling languages

Several relatively recent directions oriented towards context in the

study of lexis have led to significant new applications within lexicography
and language teaching (as well as stylistics and the teaching of literature)
and shifts of emphasis in applied linguistic research, offering the possibil-
ity of a socially sensitive theory of lexis:

The Neo-Firthian approach to word meaning, which stresses meaning in

context. Firth (1935) argued against the notion of meaning ‘chiefly as a
mental relation or historical process’, that is to say meaning as represen-
ted either in pure semantics or in the philological tradition. He pro-
posed that the meaning of a word was as much a matter of how the word
combined textually with other words (i.e. its collocations) as any in-
herent properties of meaning it possessed of itself: dark was part of the
meaning of night, and vice-versa, through their collocation with each
other (Firth 1951/1957). Collocations are clearly not absolute or deter-
ministic, but the outcome of repeated combinations created and
experienced in text by language users. We talk of a happy marriage in
preference to (but not absolute exclusion or prohibition of) a content
marriage; meanwhile a gay marriage has acquired its specialised socio-
cultural meaning (and thus its pragmatically specialised collocability)
only recently.
Key discussions of the implications of a theory of collocation may be
found in Halliday (1966), Sinclair (1966), and in Halliday and Hasan
(1976), where collocation is seen as part of the process of the creation of
cohesion in extended texts. Both Halliday and Sinclair in their early
papers on collocation foresaw and spearheaded the development of the
large-scale analysis of lexis using massive amounts of text.
The Neo-Firthians are not the only ones to be interested in lexis as an
independent area of study; the general field of phraseology and the
study of idiomaticity (e.g. Makkai 1972), both in the West and (in parallel
and often unknown to Western linguists) in the former Soviet Union
(see Kunin 1970; Benson and Benson 1993), has long worked within a
framework not dominated by syntax.
The growth of corpus linguistics (see Chapter 6; see McCarthy 1998:
Chapter 1 for a historical sketch). Computer technology has enabled the
vast stock of ‘irregularities’, that vocabularies of languages were often
perceived as, to emerge as anything but ‘irregular’ (e.g. the lexico-
grammatical regularities in verb behaviour evidenced by Hunston and
Francis 1998). What is more, studies of large corpora by linguists such as
 3.4 The place of lexis in different views of language - 63

Sinclair and his associates (Sinclair 1991) have shown lexis to be a far
more powerful influence in the basic structuring of language than was
ever previously advocated. Corpora are essentially social artefacts; they
are snapshots (some bigger and covering a wider landscape than others;
some more fine-grained and carefully composed than others) of the
output of chosen groups of language users. What they can show us are
the regular, patterned preferences for modes of expression of language
users in given contexts, and how large numbers of users separated in
time and space repeatedly orient towards the same language patterns
when involved in comparable types of social activities (or genres; see
McCarthy 1998: Chapter 2 for an extended discussion of corpora as a way
of investigating language genres). What corpora can show us with re-
gard to lexis, amongst other things, is that much lexical output consists
of multi-word units; language occurs in ready-made chunks (especially
in speech) to a far greater extent than could ever be accommodated by a
theory of language wedded to the primacy of syntax (see below; see also
Moon 1997, 1998). These developments have occurred in tandem with
non-corpus-based studies of lexis in context.
° The study of lexical units in text and interaction. This trend, not necess-
arily dependent on large corpora, focuses on two main areas: (a) the
incidence of multi-word units (e.g. Bolinger 1976; Cowie 1988; Nattinger
and deCarrico 1992; Lewis 1993; Howarth 1998) and how they have
developed pragmatic specialism in regular contexts of use, and (b) the
study of how lexical meaning is emergent in interaction (McCarthy
1988, 1998: Chapters 6 and 7) and how lexical items construct the
discourse process (e.g. Hoey 1991a; Nyyss6nen 1992; Drew and Holt 1988;
1995).

In terms of a framework for applied linguistics, recent lexical findings

within the headings above have far-reaching implications. If lexis is indeed
an important agent in the organisation of language, then an over-
emphasis in acquisition studies on syntax may be misguided, just as an
over-emphasis in teaching and in materials on single words out of context
may leave second language learners ill-prepared both in terms of compre-
hension of heavily chunked output such as casual conversation as well as
in terms of fluency. Indeed, fluency can hardly be operationalised at all as
a useful concept within applied linguistics without recognition of the part
which knowledge and retrievability of ready-made lexical chunks must
necessarily play within it.
64 - Modelling languages

There are direct implications here, too, for that aspect of morphology
that deals with word-formation (principally, derivation and compound-
ing)? Rather than seek a set of underlying rules whereby derived and
compound words are generated, the mental lexicon can be seen as a
complex site of multiple connections. These embrace both open, creative
possibilities for using and decoding the word-formation resources stra-
tegically in real discourse, and already-lexicalised exceptions to general
rules, as well as a large number of off-the-peg, immediately retrievable,
derived items and compounded chunks (see Aitchison 1994: Chapter 11,
also 165-6).4 Teaching word-formation rules has not had a high priority in
recent approaches to vocabulary pedagogy, though McCarthy and O’Dell
(1994; 1999) have included limited practice in the use of prefixes and
suffixes. With regard to the investigation of the creative use of word-
formation resources by native-speakers in real spoken and written data,
Carter and McCarthy (1995b) provide corpus evidence for its everyday
occurrence and advocate the exposure of learners to such data. Lewis
(1997) has also attempted to take the implications of a lexical view of
language into practical applications.
The work done on lexis in interaction has suggested that the abstract
relations of meaning delineated by semanticists undergo considerable
local adaptation or ‘instantiation’ in interaction (McCarthy 1988). Lexical
meaning seems far less absolute and fixed, especially in face-to-face con-
versation. Work in this area points to some general findings:

* Categories of meaning such as synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy, etc. are

local achievements, projected by speakers and subject to negotiation
and joint construction with interlocutors (Cruse 1977; Jones 1999).
¢ Lexical categories display a good deal of fuzziness. Speakers use vague
category markers such as and things like that, or something and hedges
such as a bit and like to reinforce the indeterminacy of categories (Chan-
nell 1994; McCarthy 1998: Chapter 6).
Delexical words such as get, do, thing, stuff, which combine with content
lexical words to create collocations such as ‘get up’, ‘do a painting’, are
extremely frequent in spoken language and express meanings difficult
to capture in conventional semantic terms yet which function efficient-
ly and unproblematically in real communication.
¢ Chunking is ubiquitous, and chunks are not only opaque idioms.
Chunks may be quite extensive in the number of words they contain,
often up to, but rarely exceeding, six or seven words. On the ‘magic’
 3.5 Phonetics and phonology - 65

number of seven as a psychological limit, see Miller (1956).

¢ Lexical chunks may not necessarily be coterminous with grammatical
units: I can’t get over how ... is a frequently occurring chunk in British
English, but it extends over a clause-boundary (patterning runs out after
how, with numerous ‘open’ possibilities thereafter, such as ... how kind
they were, ... how quickly it all happened, etc.).

As with grammar, a socially embedded view of lexis changes the land-

Scape in terms of how and what one might apply in any practical domain.
It certainly suggests that assumptions learners bring with them to vocabu-
lary learning that words will have precise meanings (and that teachers will
know them!) need to be carefully de-nurtured and a new kind of awareness
raised. This equally applies to the usual assumption learners bring to the
task that the vocabulary of a language is a list of single words. Lexical
strategies in communication become as important as cramming words in
a vocabulary pedagogy with a social orientation, and not only in spoken
contexts. Studies of lexical cohesion in written texts (Halliday and Hasan
1976) suggest that considerable lexical manipulation is involved in the
creation of text in terms of the interplay between lexical repetition and
variation (see also McCarthy 1984). Once again, the lessons learnt from a
socially embedded research agenda in lexis should not be ignored in the
consideration of input and output in first and second language acquisition
investigations.

3.5 Phonetics and phonology

Most language teachers at some time or another engage with the problems
of teaching pronunciation and intonation, but in practical manuals and
coursebooks, there is perhaps less direct influence from developments in
linguistics than in other areas such as grammar and lexis. Pronunciation
and intonation teaching is generally rather conservative in its approaches
and methods. For most of us, the reliable inventories of phonemes for the
L2s we teach, the sets of minimal pairs of words that enable learners to
practise the discrimination of meaning-carrying sounds, and a knowledge
of the basics of place and manner of articulation of L2 phonemes is
sufficient raw material to equip us well for the kinds of tasks learners will
be engaged in and the difficulties they are likely to encounter. If we are
lucky enough to teach an L2 where the description of intonation has been
codified, we may additionally have recourse to such information if and
66 - Modelling languages

when we attempt to refine learners’ L2 intonation. For a language like

English, given what we know are likely to be the difficult sounds and
sound-sequences for many learners (e.g. see the useful tips for different
languages in Swan and Smith 1987), efficient training, whether of mini-
mal-pair discrimination (e.g. Baker and Goldstein 1990) or in more com-
municative contexts (e.g. Hewings and Goldstein 1998) has always seemed
to be best practice. And yet problems remain. Stubborn difficulties persist
despite our best efforts to get students to co-ordinate the lips, tongue and
teeth in complex harmony with the release of the air stream. We still get
zis and dis when we want to get this, and some sounds just seem to refuse to
be learnt properly until the learner is ready for them.
Phonetics and phonology have not stood still as areas of linguistic study.
Nadasdy (1995) very clearly illustrates how a quiet revolution has taken
place both in phonetics (the study of sounds) and in phonology (the study
of the sound systems of languages). These shifts of focus reveal contact
points with views of language as a social phenomenon inseparable from its
use, many of them being moves away from the description of phonological
systems per se towards questions of production and comprehension
between speakers and listeners and the non-linear, real-time parallel
processes of articulation of segments (or ‘autosegmental’ theories of pho-
nology). A good many questions remain unanswered vis-a-vis the practical
consequences for language teaching, but it is true that an applied linguis-
tic theory wishing to ground itself in a social view of language learning
should certainly not relegate phonetics and phonology to mechanistic
aspects of language. Similarly, in the study of intonation, things have
moved on from both the out-of-context, introspective accounts of inton-
ation and emotion or ‘attitude’ (for a critique see McCarthy 1991a: Chapter
4) and from modelling intonation within mainly grammatical parameters.
Recent discourse-based studies have looked at intonation choices as re-
flecting interactive concerns of speakers and listeners, such as projected
states of shared knowledge, marking of extended discourse segments, etc.,
and tried to apply them in practical contexts (see especially the work
inspired by David Brazil: Bradford 1988; Hewings and Goldstein 1998).

3.6 Conclusion

This chapter has focussed on the way opposing views of language, on

extreme ends of a spectrum whose limits represent the presence or ab-
sence of a social orientation, have direct implications for applied linguis-
 Notes -: 67

tics and how linguistic insight is characteristically applied in language

pedagogy. The chapter has focussed on the core practices of linguists in the
theorising and modelling of grammar, morphology, lexis and phonology,
but the philosophies that underpin abstract versus socially embedded
views of language have implications for the way we approach our learners
in the pedagogical enterprise. The view of language that I have character-
ised as ‘abstract’ is also essentially rationalist, even positivist. The socially
grounded view I have opposed to it is essentially relativist and humanist.
For this reason, applied linguists often identify with either a ‘hard-science’
approach to their subject or a ‘social-science’ approach. Nowhere is this
more apparent than in the study of second language acquisition, to which
we turn in the next chapter.

Notes

ra Katz (1977: xi), in an attempt to weld a transformational framework to speech-act

theory, comments that Chomsky and his followers ‘paid as little attention to
speech acts as the Austinians paid to transformations’, reminding us of the
independent schools of linguistics which separately and contemporaneously
pursued sentence-based concerns.
2 Halliday is one of the Neo-Firthians, or disciples of J R Firth. Firth, as long ago as
the 1930s, was advocating a ‘sociological linguistics’ (Firth 1935). On Firth’s work
and influence in general, see Mitchell (1975).
3 Fora full account of English word-formation processes, see Bauer (1983). What is
claimed here for derived words and compounds could equally hold true for other
word-formation phenomena such as acronyms, initials, clippings (e.g. phone
instead of telephone), etc.
4 Halle (1977) argues convincingly from a generative viewpoint for the indepen-
dence of morphology from either syntax or phonology, and, although abstractly
based in general terms, none the less adds support to the arguments here for a
lexically driven model of fluency.
4
Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

4.1 Introduction

The use of linguistic frameworks in the modelling of first language acqui-

sition has a long pedigree, and has influenced the kinds of frameworks
applied to the study of second language acquisition (see Stern 1970:57ff;
Brown 1980:58-61). Many of the issues prominent in the study of one kind
of acquisition continue to overlap with those in the other. But whatever
the initial influence first language acquisition studies may have had, or
continue to have, on second language studies, there is no doubt that
second language acquisition (SLA) has developed in its own right as a
branch of applied linguistics. In many respects, SLA may claim to be a
classic example of applied linguistics, in that its proponents have fought
hard battles to establish its independence both from a one-way depend-
ence on linguistics (Widdowson’s ‘linguistics applied’; see section 1.2), and
from being seen merely as a branch of educational psychology. Some of its
most faithful adherents see it as a rationalist, scientific enterprise, with its
own theoretical base and its own avenues of enquiry, in which methods
associated with the natural sciences play a major role, for example, labora-
tory-condition experiments (see the special issue of Studies in Second Lan-
guage Acquisition, 1997, 19 (2), and section 4.2). But also, of late, debates
have raged over the status of SLA investigations. By no means everyone
agrees that SLA should model itself on the hard sciences, and many see
SLA’s future as bound up with more humanistic and holistic approaches.
Some question whether SLA has contributed anything at all in a real,
practical sense to second language pedagogy.! In this chapter we shall
examine the broad evolution of SLA as a sub-field within applied linguis-
tics and try to relate the debates that fuel its progress to the fundamental
issues raised in the previous chapters. This introductory chapter cannot do
full credit to what is a very large, complex undertaking; a fully compre-
hensive survey of the field of SLA can be found in R. Ellis (1994).

68
 4.2 The emergence of SLA : 69

4.2 The emergence of SLA

The notion of ‘acquiring’ a second language through the mediation of an

efficiently ordered methodology is not new. For centuries, language peda-
gogues have claimed to offer the most effective methods for acquiring
foreign tongues. In the seventeenth century, Jeremy Taylor’s (1647) Latin
primer promised:
A new and easie [sic] institution of grammar: in which the labour
of many yeares [sic] usually spent in learning the Latine [sic]
tongue is shortned [sic] and made easie [sic].
Likewise, Mauger (1679) published a French grammar for English-speakers:

...enriched with new words, and a new method, and all the
improvements of that famous language as it is now flourishing
at the court of France: where is to be seen an extraordinary and
methodical order for the acquisition of that tongue, viz. a most
modish prononciation [sic], the conjugation of irregular verbs,
short and substantial rules...
The tradition continued in the eighteenth century, with Bridel’s (1797) An
Introduction to English Grammar, which was:
... intended also to assist young persons in the study of other
languages, and to remove many of the difficulties which impede
their progress in learning.
These endeavours were usually aimed at an orderly presentation of rules
of syntax and pronunciation, along with a vocabulary list and, sometimes,
model dialogues. McCarthy (1998: Chapter 1.7) traces the development of
interest in the acquisition of spoken language from the sixteenth-century
Vulgaria Latin textbooks, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuals of
rhetoric and pronunciation, through the nineteenth-century interest in
newly encountered (for Westerners) ‘exotic’ tongues such as Japanese, to
the twentieth-century influences of new media and expanded communi-
cative needs. All along, pedagogues have had notions such as removing
difficulties, streamlining and speeding up learning, efficient acquisition
of rules and items, etc. at the forefront of their efforts.”
In more recent times, studies of the effectiveness of different methodo-
logies in language teaching have raised wider issues that have become
central concerns in the quest for rigour in SLA studies, such as the control
and influence of extraneous variables, the reliability of sample popula-
tions, the time-span studied, the relationship between explicit and
70 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

indirect forms of instruction, the effects of corrective feedback, the type of

input, etc. Parallel with these methodological debates, higher-level theor-
etical concerns have emerged, such as the differences between first and
second language acquisition, whether conscious ‘learning’ is the same as
‘acquisition’, the theoretical modelling of linguistic input and output and
the universality or otherwise of SLA findings.
One early debate in the study of contemporary SLA was whether tradi-
tional grammar methods were less, more, or as efficient as audio-lingual
approaches. Audio-lingual language learning arose out of behaviourist
psychology, which held that learning took place in a stimulus-
response-feedback pattern, and that repetition and habit-forming were
crucial to acquisition. Learning speech habits was supposed to be an
effective spur to acquiring good general competence in a second language.
In practical terms this meant much listening, drilling and repeating, often
in language laboratories, with little attention to meaning or any cognitive
effort in the apprehension of rules. It was a well-established methodology
when I entered the ELT profession in 1966 as a Berlitz-method teacher,
using the ‘blue-book’ Berlitz manual familiar to anyone who taught with-
in the Berlitz organization at that time. Learners listened and repeated,
and produced structural patterns based on platitudinous sentences (This is
a pen; It is red, etc.). The method was not without many stunning successes —
mind-numbing though it was for the teacher or for more curious learners.
The behaviourist philosophy had many critics, foremost among them
Chomsky, with his famous critique of B F Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour (Skin-
ner 1957; see Chomsky 1959). Applied linguists thus set out to debate and
test the rival claims of audio-lingual approaches and opposing, traditional
‘cognitive’ approaches, in which the acquisition of rules was considered
paramount (Smith 1970). Conflicting evidence emerged. Agard and Dunkel
(1948) reported a school survey in the USA, where students had been
exposed either to traditional methods or to audio-lingual methods. The
students studying with audio-lingual methods certainly seemed to be able
to reproduce learnt dialogues and patterns with ease, but were poor at
speaking on unrehearsed topics. However, their overall proficiency in
speaking and pronunciation remained robust (pp. 287-8). Students taught
with traditional methods were better at reading. Such findings raised as
many questions as they were intended to answer. How reliable are findings
that only look at relatively short-term exposures to different methods?
How reliable are the methods of post-testing applied in such studies? Do
they really test the success of the method, or something else (e.g. ability to
 4.3 Basic questions andissues - 71

do tests, or short-term memory)? What controls were exercised during the

experimental period? Were the sample populations (a) representative, and
(b) comparable? A more controlled attempt at comparing audiolingualism
and traditional methods, with better screening of populations, more rigor-
ously controlled input, more sophisticated testing, etc., was carried out by
Scherer and Wertheimer (1964). The results were again mixed, with some
fairly predictable gains for audio-lingual students in speaking and listen-
ing, but less promising progress in the written aspects of language use.
Overall, the audio-lingual studies were inconclusive but were sugges-
tive, and they did influence practice, in the sense that early optimism
towards the technology of such media as language laboratories and the
then ubiquitous strip-film projectors faded in the face of poor results and
lack of strong supporting research evidence to encourage professionals to
persevere with them. Most of all, the audio-lingual studies set off a tradi-
tion of concern with experimental studies involving large populations,
controlled input and statistical analysis, as well as longitudinal evidence.
Also, in relation to our concerns in Chapter 3, the audio-lingual studies
represented a clash of cultures in language pedagogy; more than tech-
niques were involved, and beliefs about the nature of language and lan-
guage learning informed the debates, no less than they have continued to
do since then.?
The audio-lingual studies were also unfolding against a backdrop of
lengthier, broader debates over the possibility of a scientific basis for the
study of language and language pedagogy that had been ongoing since the
beginning of the twentieth century (e.g. Sweet 1899; de Saussure 1916/
1964; Palmer 1924). This, along with the appearance of the new journal
Language Learning in 19484 was all part of the general emergence of a
sub-discipline that eventually received the name Second Language Acqui-
sition. As with so many other sub-disciplines in applied linguistics, its
adherents came to it from different starting points and endowed it with its
persistently eclectic character. By the mid-1970s, the field of SLA had
certainly sufficiently come of age for a critique to be published of its
methods and their relevance to language teaching (Tarone et al. 1976).

4.3 Basic questions and issues

Among the central questions SLA researchers attempt to find answers to

are:

° Is second language acquisition like or different from first language

72 + Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

acquisition? In some respects the task would seem to be similar, regard-

less of which language one was acquiring. On the other hand, second
language learners have the advantage of previous linguistic experience,
and the potential disadvantage of interference from an established first
language (see Brown 1980: Chapter 3 for a good discussion). Equally
interesting is the question of the acquisition of third or further lan-
guages (e.g. see Ringbom 1985).
Is conscious ‘learning’ the same as ‘acquisition’? Can the first lead to the
second? Much debate has been generated over this question, arising
from claims made by researchers such as Krashen (1981), and Gregg
(1984). For many chalkface, practising teachers it is a non-issue, and yet
there are related questions that refuse to go away, such as why well-
practised and rehearsed language features still seem not to ‘stick’,
despite best efforts.
¢ Are there universal features of second language acquisition, regardless
of which L2 is being learned? Are there ‘natural’ orders or sequences in
which things will be acquired, regardless of the sequence in which they
are taught (Krashen 1981)? First language acquisition points to the
existence of regularities in the order of the acquisition of sounds and
syntax, independent of the individual or the learning setting.
¢ What role do the first or other languages play in the ease or difficulty
encountered when learning a second language? Are languages from the
same families easier or more difficult to acquire successfully (Hedard
1989)? What part do learners’ subjective or culturally conditioned
perceptions play in cross-linguistic difficulties, aside from objective
differences that might exist between languages (see Kellerman 1986)?
¢ What non-linguistic factors affect SLA, for example, age, gender, moti-
vation, previous learning experience, individual aptitude, etc. (see
Skehan 1989)? Can one ever generalise, when, in the final analysis,
learners are always individuals?
* What is the difference between SLA in a naturalistic setting (e.g. living
and working in the L2 community) compared with a formal setting (e.g.
a classroom)? Is the classroom, the street or the laboratory the appropri-
ate site for the investigation of SLA processes?
* Can learners’ language be described systematically at various stages of
development, or is learner language erratic and unsystematic? What
kinds of learner data are relevant, and how should one interpret such
data?
* Can aspects of acquisition be studied discretely or atomistically, or
 4.3 Basic questions and issues - 73

should the whole person always be the focus of attention, i.e. a holistic
approach to SLA?
* Should acquisition of a second language be measured against monolin-
gual standards, or should second language learners be viewed as lan-
guage users who can use more than one language, and not as ‘failed
monolinguals’ (Cook 1997: 46)?
* Is there a different outcome from explicit instruction as opposed to
more indirect ways of teaching language features? Does corrective feed-
back help or hinder acquisition? How long do the effects of different
types of instruction last?
° Are there significant differences in the way grammar is acquired as
compared with vocabulary or pronunciation? Is language acquisition
knowledge of ‘universal grammar and a language-specific lexicon ...
in essence a matter of determining lexical idiosyncrasies?’ (Larsen-
Freeman 1997:88). In other words, is the study of the acquisition of
grammar rules in some way more fundamental than the study of
vocabulary acquisition, or is this simply a blinkered and misguided
perspective on the nature of language and the learning enterprise?
Should SLA consider the acquisition of social and cultural competencies
as well as purely linguistic ones? Since learning normally takes place in
social settings, and not in glorious isolation within the learner’s head,
what value is an approach to SLA that ignores the social and cultural
context?
Are language skills such as listening and reading transferred from the
L1, or do they have to be learnt afresh in the L2? Are they ‘linguistic’
skills as such, or are they best viewed within a framework of cognitive
psychology? What social and cultural factors affect acquisition of a skill
such as reading?
e Are discrete aspects of acquisition testable as measures of general com-
petence or proficiency, e.g. the relationship between possessing a large
vocabulary and success in other aspects of language proficiency; see for
example Schmitt and Meara (1997)? How reliable are tests when it comes
to interpreting what has been achieved in an SLA experimental setting?

It should not surprise us that responses to the questions posed above are
usually mediated through different perspectives on the nature of lan-
guage and the relationship between language as a whole and individual
languages, such as we have discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, and by differing
views on the accountability of SLA to its consumers, as foregrounded in
74 + Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

Chapter 1. Views are certainly divided on the answers to the questions

listed above: even whether it matters that pluralism and different para-
digms reign in SLA is a matter of ornery and splenetic debate (Block 1996;
Gregg et al. 1997). Here we shall consider how far and in what ways SLA has
attempted to address some of the more central questions, and how such
investigations have influenced the general field of applied linguistics and
language teaching.

44 Cross-linguistic influences and ‘interlanguage’

Perhaps the most stubborn issue that refuses to go away in SLA is the
influence of the first or some other language on the acquisition of a new
language. Gass and Selinker (1993) note that in the late 1960s, the notion
of cross-linguistic transfer was marginalised but that, at the time of
editing their book, transfer was firmly back on the agenda, with the need
for a reconciliation of differing perspectives. They conclude that transfer
‘is indeed a real and central phenomenon that must be considered in any
full account of the second language acquisition process’ (p. 7). While there
is no doubt that a simple cross-linguistic comparison of two languages is
insufficient to explain and predict performance in a second language,
accounting for features of second language performance is by no means
easy. One possibility is that there are universal orders of acquisition that
cannot be overridden by pedagogical intervention: the learner will not
acquire something until he or she is ready to, regardless of teaching, and
not until certain other conditions have been met. For example, evidence
suggests that there are regularly occurring orders of acquisition among
learners of English negative constructions with auxiliary verbs, such that
progression from the affirmative form can will likely include intermediate
forms such as *I no can and “I don’t can before the target-form can’t emerges
(Cancino et al. 1978).° Recurring evidence of this kind has led some to the
view that learner language is systematic (Corder 1967), and that it is
possible to talk of a learner’s interlanguage (Selinker 1972; 1992), i.e. a
systematised approximation to the target language, a series of organised
way-stages, based on hypotheses, on the road to mastery of the TL. Such
systematicity does not presuppose that all the rules in a learner’s interlan-
guage correspond to TL rules. The interlanguage view removes the respon-
sibility for performance features away from the leaden and mechanistic
influence of L1, and places the focus more on the actual learner and his or
 4.4 Cross-linguistic influences and ‘interlanguage’ - 75

her cognitive processes. This view has some attraction, since it can offer an
explanation for features of performance which seem to be independent of
the L1 (see Tarone 1988). However, if interlanguage exists, then it is
unlikely to be in the form of lock-step stages that can be frozen in time and
observed in any meaningful way by researchers, and is more likely to be in
continuous flux, with hypotheses being constantly under revision, some-
times dissolving, sometimes consolidating, re-cast, thrown out, revived,
put on ice, different depending on who the learner is interacting with,
when and where, and so on. If this is true, then interlanguage may be an
interesting, but largely useless, theoretical construct.
Recent debates over the status of variation in learner performance are
relevant to the question of interlanguage. Is variation in learner perform-
ance free, or is it systematic, or are both kinds present (R. Ellis 1999)? In
other words, if a learner uses a feature (say, for example, the English
definite article, or the French subjunctive mood) unpredictably in similar
linguistic environments, what does this mean? R. Ellis (ibid.) sees free
variation as evidence of learners using items that have been acquired but
not yet organised into systems (tying in with associative views of acquisi-
tion; see section 4.7.1). Ellis accepts that some facts of learner performance
that appear erratic and unstructured can often be shown to be systematic,
at least in terms of probability of co-occurrence with particular linguistic
environments. He quotes a study of his own (R. Ellis 1988), where learners
were more prone to omitting the copula when preceded by a full noun
subject than when the subject was a pronoun. The learners were thus
working with some kind of systematic set of associations rather than
randomly floundering among various possibilities.
Where there is variation that does not correlate systematically with any
environmental factors, one can either dismiss it as just that - random, and
irrelevant to a theory of interlanguage (e.g. Schachter 1986) - or one can
build a model of interlanguage that has free variation as a component.
This R. Ellis does, examining evidence of cases where two forms occur in
the same linguistic and discoursal contexts and carry the same illocution-
ary meaning; in other words, all other things being equal, cases where
there seems to be no apparent reason why two different forms should
occur. Ellis brings into play the notion of ‘expressive need’ (ibid.), which
corresponds to human urges towards variety, curiosity and free choice. In
this view, free variation may be short-lived, rapidly giving way to system-
atic variation as a result of sociolinguistic needs and pressures. In settings
76 + Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

where such sociolinguistic constraints are reduced or absent (and Ellis

suggests classrooms may be just such settings), free variation may persist
and only become systematised in the longer term.
Ellis’s view is attractive, and introduces a humanistic and sociolinguis-
tic component to modelling interlanguage that enables apparently ran-
dom facts to assume the status of relevant data. There are, none the less,
problems with such a view. Firstly, there is by no means universal agree-
ment, as we have argued throughout this book, as to what sort of evidence
would constitute sufficient context in which to adjudge something as
‘free’ of all constraints except individual creativity and curiosity. Is a
cursory description of the situation in which an utterance occurs enough?
Or does one need the strongest possible version of a micro-level conversa-
tion analysis, in which every possible feature of context is recorded and
transcribed? What status do learners’ own accounts of their usage have in
such analyses? Equally, if ‘expressive need’ exists, could it not also be seen
as a personal, affective, but externally targeted sociocultural act connec-
ted with the learner’s desire to create an identity for him or herself in
interaction, or to engage in meaning creation, rather than just curiosity?
If this last conceptualisation is viable, then, mapped on to a socially
oriented view of language, variation is not ‘free’, and does not need to be
explained as such, since learners’ voluntary actions are seen as constitut-
ive of the acquisition process. Learners are never conceptualised as mere
passive receptors of ‘acquisition’ in such a view. One thing is clear: good,
contextualised corpora of learners in interaction (as natural as possible,
given Ellis’s caveat about classrooms) would seem to be the way forward.
The more sensitive a theory of interlanguage is to the conditions in which
we observe it, the more likely it is to generate a true image of the processes
underlying the progress from L1 towards proficiency in L2.
One of the reasons why applied linguists felt unhappy with simplistic
comparisons of different languages as a way of explaining and predicting
learner performance is that blaming the L1 for difficulties and problems in
learning an L2 reflected a rather negative and passive view of the learning
process. Just as the L1 might interfere with the acquisition of L2, might it
not also have a positive influence on L2 acquisition? The metaphors for
talking about cross-linguistic phenomena thus shifted from negative
terms such as interference and L1-induced errors to more positively oriented
metaphors such as cross-linguistic transfer and interlanguage strategies (Odlin
1989; Kellerman 1995). This is a good example of the discourse of applied
linguistics and its role in defining our professional profile - a theme to
 4.5 Inside the laboratory - 77

which we return in Chapter 6. The newer metalanguage takes into account

the fact that simple comparisons between two languages cannot explain
why a structural possibility might be wrongly over-generalised from one
language to another. For instance, for an English-speaker learning Span-
ish, indirect object structures in English, such as I gave her/Sally the message
may be over-generalised, based on the evidence of similar word-order for
full noun objects in Spanish to include pronoun objects (“Yo di ella el
mensaje), which in Spanish must be either before the verb or preceded by a
dative-marker preposition. However, the reverse, i.e. Spanish speakers
producing “I her gave the message, may not occur at all, because there is no
evidence forthcoming in the English the learners are exposed to that such
a possibility exists (for further discussion see Zobl 1980). In other words, a
contrastive analysis of two languages lacks the kind of predictive power
needed; we must include learners’ positive strategies of transfer. In this
case, where evidence from L2 supports transfer, transfer is more likely;
where supporting evidence is absent from L2, transfer need not take place.
However, Kellerman’s work (Kellerman 1983; 1986) suggests that
learners may play an even more active role in what and how and when and
where they transfer features between L1 and L2, and that aspects such as
their perception of how prototypical a feature is might affect their willing-
ness to transfer (e.g. a reluctance to translate metaphoric and idiomatic
extensions of words into L2). What is more, transfer may depend on the
perception of their role at any point in time by learners. Kellerman (1995)
notes that his own Dutch students may consciously transfer more Dutch
features into their English when they are communicating with peers with
whom they identify as fellow-sufferers than when performing ‘on air’ for
the teacher. All this suggests that the richest context in which to study the
influence of L1 on L2 might be real interaction rather than constructed
experiments, which might provide no more than a shrunken and impover-
ished picture of normally complex behaviour. Good case studies of individ-
ual learners attempt to capture as many relevant contextual influences as
possible and to appreciate learners’ individuality (Kellerman cites two
studies, by Giacobbe and Cammarota 1986, and Giacobbe 1992, which
probe individual transfer in depth).

4.5 Inside the laboratory

Some of the key questions listed in section 3.1 have led researchers to seek
answers by conducting experiments under laboratory conditions. These
78 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

include the question of type of instructional input (e.g. explicit teaching

versus more implicit input, the effects of error-correction and other types
of feedback), type of linguistic input (e.g. real utterances, invented lan-
guages), the effects of time (short-term and long-term retention of input),
and so on. In a recent survey of such research, Hulstijn (1997) tackles
both the problems and prospects for laboratory studies. It is quite often
difficult, Hulstijn points out, to conduct empirical research in natural
language-learning settings such as classrooms and workplaces, because
there will always be a ‘great number of potentially interfering variables in
such natural environments’ (p. 131). This is undeniably true, but whether
one considers this a problem that has to be overcome at all costs depends
on one’s view of language. If language is an abstract system that can be
adequately apprehended outside of any real context of use, and if acquisi-
tion is a question of absorbing the system at a ‘deep’ level, it should indeed
be possible to strip away the distracting variables inherent in real contexts
and get at what has or has not been acquired at the deep level. In the
laboratory, this implies having as ‘clean’ an input as possible for language
experimentation. For example, if one had a group of subjects individually
receiving the same instructional input, then we would not want subject
number ten to suffer from the tired, bored voice of an instructor who was
enthusiastic one hour earlier when addressing subject number one. The
researcher, in this case, in order to guarantee a consistent input, might
expose all subjects to a pre-recorded voice, or to the dispassionate and
imperturbable screen display of a computer (e.g. N. Ellis and Schmidt
1997). Likewise, such research might lean more towards words or senten-
ces as input, since they offer a window, or so it is believed, on the subject’s
competence by means of grammaticality judgements. The ‘messiness’ of
real contexts might sully the enterprise with considerations such as social
appropriateness and communicative adequacy, distracting the subject
from judging an item’s well-formedness or from acquiring a rule. Quite
telling in this regard is Hulstijn’s (1997) use of the term ‘interfering
variables’. If one’s view of language is that it is always embedded in its
social contexts, and has no meaningful existence outside of them, vari-
ables do not ‘interfere’ with performance or competence, nor with the
apprehension of underlying rules and patterns, since the system, and
one’s competence in its use, has no existence outside of how it communi-
cates in complex, variable-laden situations. Variables, in a socially embed-
ded view, become a positive factor in the investigation rather than a
nuisance. On the other hand, laboratory experiments where such variables
 4.5 Inside the laboratory - 79

are not allowed even to exist, for example by using artificially created
languages that carry the guarantee that subjects will not have had any
prior experience of them, run the risk of demotivating learners through
asking them to learn a language that has ‘no native speakers and no
apparent use’, to quote Yang and Givon (1997).
To be fair to Hulstijn, he recognises the need for research in naturalistic
contexts, and raises all the proper concerns about laboratory studies in his
indispensable and well-balanced survey, as do N. Ellis and Schmidt (1997).
He notes, too, that laboratory experiments should be based on proper
theoretical questions for investigation, and by and large such questions
are apparent in most studies. For example, the effectiveness or otherwise
of simplified input, and the enhancement of input (i.e. in some way
making important target items salient and more noticeable) are central,
practical and important theoretical questions which most language
teachers have pondered on at some time or other, and laboratory studies
would seem to be a genuine attempt to address them. What bedevils such
studies, though, are the metaphors that carry over from the science
laboratory into a domain which many feel is quintessentially humanistic.
Laboratory studies, as I have self-consciously done above, frequently refer
to their human participants as subjects, to the input the ‘subjects’ are
invited to participate in as treatment and to the attempt to understand
outcomes as testing (e.g. pre-tests and post-tests). The label ‘subject’ casts
the learner as powerless recipient, and the researcher as administrator-
cum-observer, for example, the animal psychologist observing and record-
ing the behaviour of monkeys from a darkened cubicle in the corner of a
laboratory.® ‘Treatment’ evokes notions of expert-driven therapy, and ‘test-
ing’ suggests some sort of objective metering of behaviour. This is not to
say that those who carry out laboratory experiments are soulless manipu-
lators: participants are always volunteers, and the overwhelming majority
of researchers are ethically concerned practitioners who have pursued
research in response to proper pedagogical concerns. None the less, the
professional discourse and terminology of any community of scholars
reflects and (re-)shapes its paradigms of investigation. Success in SLA is
thus measured by some according to the degree to which it works within
the paradigms of the hard sciences and the language of the laboratory.
This is clearly only one side of the story.
80 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

4.6 Classrooms and other settings

Those persuaded by a more socially oriented view of language are likely to

look at settings other than the laboratory as appropriate arenas for their
investigations. Most obvious and ready to hand of these is the language
classroom. In classroom studies, learners can be seen as more than recipi-
ent vessels processing input from an expert. What is more, where a socially
oriented view of language has been translated into a communicative
pedagogy, communication (whether between teachers and learners or
learners with one another) can become the focus of interest and the
‘window on acquisition’, rather than decontextualised sentences. Above
all, the teacher can become his or her own researcher, without the need to
have recourse to outside experts. Pioneers of this approach include Fan-
selow (1987:12), who addresses himself to teachers who are ‘fascinated by
observing, keen on generating alternatives on your own, interested in
classifying communications to discover rules, have a compelling desire to
explore teaching, and believe that ultimately we can depend only on
ourselves to learn and develop’.
More recently, task-based classrooms have offered researchers prepared
to take on the messiness of real teaching situations opportunities to study
their learners interacting to solve problems that simulate real-world tasks
(however imperfectly), and glimpses into learners’ communicative com-
petence in different task environments (an excellent example of which is
Foster 1998; see also Nunan 1989). Thus variables become ways of observ-
ing and interpreting communicative abilities in the target language,
rather than hindrances to measuring underlying competence. Such stu-
dies are usually at their best and most persuasive when their arguments
are not simply based on objective statistical measures, but on the plausible
interpretation of data. That is not to say that statistics can play no part in
unravelling the effects of variables in context. Recently, for example, the
possibility of harnessing the power of computerised expert systems in
coping with large numbers of variables in predicting language learning
achievement, in the way that medical doctors use computer software to
assist with, but not replace, diagnosis, has been seriously mooted (Wil-
helm 1999). But the classroom, with its variety of human participants,
with, ideally, the teacher-as-researcher (a role combined with that of
participant in many studies), and the inherent variability of the learning
and teaching process, is a place where tendencies, trends, exceptions and
their plausible interpretation can become as valid as ‘significance’ in the
purely statistical sense.
 4.6 Classrooms and other settings - 81

However, one problem with such studies is that the researcher is only in
a position to observe the products of acquisition (usually in the form of
linguistic output related to particular input), rather than the acquisition
process. For researchers such as N. Ellis and Schmidt (1997), this is a crucial
weakness of many SLA studies: a truly useful theory of SLA should be based
on apprehending the learning process, not just its end-points, and for N.
Ellis and Schmidt, this means careful, controlled laboratory experiments.
The point is a forceful one: N. Ellis and Schmidt assert that we would need
a complete log of the learner’s exposure to language input and intake, a
record of their attentional focus during the period of instruction, etc., of
such mind-boggling detail that would render near-impossible the task of
making a proper observation of the processes learners go through. Instead,
what we usually have are tantalising snapshots of learning waystages
captured on the hoof in class. Such snapshots cannot adequately illustrate
the central processes in language acquisition, but a combination of obser-
vation of the linguistic environment and participation frameworks, along
with the study of feedback (e.g. correction) and attention to learners’
introspective data is probably the best way forward within the limitations
imposed by the nature of classrooms (see Gaies 1983 for an excellent
survey along these lines).
People acquire second languages outside of classrooms, too. On the
simplest level, one can itemise the differences in the kinds of encounters
classroom learners and learners in non-classroom settings have with the
target language, as Lightbown and Spada (1993:71-3) do, in terms of
degrees of contact with native speakers of the L2, amount of corrective
feedback, time spent confronting the L2, exposure to different discourse
contexts, etc. (but see Rampton 1999 for a trenchant critique of such a
dichotomous view of acquisition within and without the classroom, and
its importunate influence on SLA thinking). However, in line with the
social orientation of much of the argumentation throughout this book,
the study of acquisition both in and out of class cannot ignore the wide
gamut of social and cultural factors that may affect progress in L2. Immi-
grant communities, for instance, often have ambivalent attitudes to the
host-country language, which can affect acquisition both in community
settings and in the host-country school system (see Lambert and Taylor
1996 for an excellent study addressing some of these issues). McGroarty
(1998) notes that, in the US setting, there is no way of predicting the
balance of language use in bilingual communities, and language users
may have quite a complex pattern of use of L1 and L2 depending on who
they are interacting with: learners are not mono-dimensional, and orient
82 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

towards multiple identities and social roles. Also censuring the tendency
to over-simplification and stereotyping of how individuals interact in
society, Holliday (1999) presents cogent arguments for a redefinition of
‘culture’ to embrace what he calls ‘small cultures’. Small cultures are
small groupings of individuals orienting towards cohesive behaviours, if
only temporarily, and Holliday proposes such groupings as a more appro-
priate arena for research than traditional, reductionist views of cultural
groups. This would seem to be particularly relevant to the complex reali-
ties of individuals in non-institutional language-learning settings, such as
immigrants (although Holliday’s conceptualisation necessarily forces us
to re-think notions of ‘cultures’ in the classroom too). McGroarty (1998)
warns against the snapshot tendency of classroom research to focus on
short spans of time (a lesson, a semester), and advocates attention to
learner biographies, which would seem to be especially important in
non-classroom and informal settings where acquisition takes place.
Indeed, it is hard to see how a decontextualised, abstract view of SLA
can contribute much to the real-world concerns of understanding the
deluge of cultural and social challenges faced by the immigrant in non-
institutional settings. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country and
struggled with its language and culture outside of a formal classroom
knows too well what the real issues are in relation to coping with and
mastering L2.

4.7 Competing and converging metaphors in the study of SLA

4.7.1 Associative approaches to learning

In recent years, the metaphor of ‘deep structure’, meant to capture the

concept of internalised rules, facilitated by the human predisposition to
acquire languages, with its concomitant metaphor of the ‘language acqui-
sition device’ (Chomsky 1965; McNeill 1966) has been challenged as a
model for SLA. The fundamental problem with the notions of deep struc-
ture and a language acquisition device is that they are invisible and
virtually irrefutable. They do not really ‘explain’ or ‘account for’ anything,
since they simply remove the problem to a more obscure level of investiga-
tion. In a way, the domain of debate is rather like the apocryphal medieval
Christian theological debates over how many angels could sit on the head
of a pin: the whole debate is meaningless unless you can first demonstrate
that angels exist. One of the benefits that N. Ellis and Schmidt see in the
 4.7 Competing and converging metaphors in the study of SLA - 83

sort of controlled laboratory experiment that they report in their 1997

paper is that observing the unfolding learning process can be supported by
more probabilistic or associative models of acquisition, rather than sym-
bolic, rule-based models. The basis of such associative models, often dis-
cussed within the general metaphorical construct of ‘connectionism’, is
the idea that important information about language can be extracted
from ‘probabilistic patterns of grammatical and morphological regu-
larities’ (ibid.). The mind makes connections among multiple nodes of
processed information; the more connections, the stronger the trace in
acquisition. The concept of rule or exception or constraint is not essential
to such a theory. In Chapter 5 we shall see that recent developments in
corpus-based grammars also depend on probabilistic models; the possibili-
ties of combining the external evidence of corpora with the internal
evidence derived from cognitively oriented probabilistic models of acquisi-
tion offer an immense potential for integrating two sometimes supposed-
ly opposite approaches to the study of language that has hardly been
explored.
But connectionist approaches do not only help to explain emergent
approximations to target behaviour. Important work by Shirai (1992)
suggests that connectionism can illuminate cross-linguistic transfer,
bringing us back to one of our stubborn issues noted above in section 3.2. If
SLA is not rule-based or driven by principles of universal grammar, then
doubt is cast on notions such as a ‘natural order’, and the kinds of
connections made between L1 and L2 and the ways in which learners use
cross-linguistic information may be a more fruitful line of investigation to
explain learning difficulties. Shirai (ibid.) argues that connectionism poses
new questions and revives old ones about language transfer. Unlike the
old behaviourism, connectionism is interested in cognitive processes, not
just responses to stimuli, in the same way that N. Ellis and Schmidt (1997)
argue for its usefulness in observing emergent acquisition. The nodes that
‘fire’ in the brain are stimulated by a variety of external phenomena, and
repeated firings create stronger connections, which constitute learning.
Shirai gives the examples of how a conversational setting might display
different semantic content, different interlocutors, different cognitive
pressures of the moment, etc., all sparking off different activations.” When
new languages are encountered, the existing representations of L1 are
activated and reshape L2 incoming information. In language transfer,
complex factors interact, including language distance (see section 2.3),
cognitive load, attention, sociolinguistic factors, etc. Lexical transfer is
84 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

likely to be strong, since associations of words and meanings across

languages are likely to be strong, with repeated activation of appropriate
nodes. Grammatical information may involve somewhat different kinds of
connections across languages. The connectionist approach also considers
the learning environment, and how such things as input-impoverished
environments are likely to fire translation-type associations, with a more
likely occurrence of transfer errors. Connectionism might also help ac-
count for difficulties in acquiring languages resulting from age: the most
salient problem is usually that of pronunciation, where a connectionist
approach would account for increasing difficulties experienced by older
learners in terms of robust connections in the L1, strengthened by the
passage of time.’
Connectionism is no mere dustbin for uncomfortable facts of language
learner behaviour. As we stated in section 4.4, the simple comparison of
two languages was never likely to be enough to explain errors in perform-
ance and difficulties in learning, and connectionism offers the potential of
a multiple perspective necessary for examining the complexity of transfer
phenomena without recourse to the notion of rule-governed behaviour.
Shirai (1992) notes that a large database would be necessary to investigate
fully learner transfer from a connectionist viewpoint, and, once again, the
probability built into the model would seem to lend itself to a learner-
corpus-based approach, where multiple aspects of contextual variability
could be studied. Connectionism certainly has much to gain from a
fundamental view of language as a social phenomenon, with its leanings
towards contextual variation, real-time processes of production and com-
prehension and its preference for patterning over rule. Above all, it offers a
rapprochement between learners, learning and the social and cognitive
contexts in which acquisition unfolds, rather than just seeing the lan-
guage learner as a vessel for the internalisation of deterministic rules,
with the success of input being measured solely in terms of output.

4.7.2 Socio-cultural approaches

One of the most intractable metaphors that SLA investigators work with is
that of ‘the mind’. We all know we have one, but what is it? How is it
constituted? Is it synonymous with the neurological activity of the physi-
cal brain, which our present-day inadequate scientific knowledge has not
yet apprehended? Is it something more, that embraces slippery concepts
such as ‘free will’, ‘creativity’, ‘motivation’ and ‘intention’? Is it an internal
 4.7 Competing and converging metaphors in the study of SLA - 85

‘empty vessel’ soaking up external stimuli like a sponge? Is it internal, but

in some way genetically ‘primed’ to make sense of particular kinds of
sensory input (e.g. human language)? How one constructs the mind clearly
has a direct bearing on one’s theory of second language acquisition and
one’s approach to researching it. McLaughlin (1990) has this to the fore in
his critique of the notion of ‘conscious’ versus ‘unconscious’ learning,
arguing that without an adequate theory of mind, statements about
whether mental states are conscious or unconscious have no scientific
validity.
Well-entrenched views of second language acquisition, implicitly or
explicitly, are often based on the notion of the mind as an individual
organism that receives input, processes it and then outputs communica-
tion reflective of its own changed state. This is basically an internalist,
somewhat Cartesian account of the human mind. In this view of the mind,
processing happens ‘inside the head’. However, within philosophy, exter-
nalist views of the human mind, where the mind is seen as inseparably
linked with the environments within which it acts, are promoted with
equally convincing evidence (e.g. Rowland, 1999). The internalist meta-
phor may be argued to underlie a modelling of second language acquisi-
tion such as that espoused by Krashen (1981; 1982), which, in its day,
enjoyed considerable acclaim (including national promulgation in Great
Britain via an edition of the BBC TV populist Horizon documentary pro-
gramme in the mid-1980s), and echoes of which are still apparent in the
design of many SLA investigations. Krashen claimed that language was
acquired by the acquirer ‘receiving “comprehensible input’’’ (1985:2).
Already the notion that meaning resides in something ‘received’ by the
learner precludes much of what a socially oriented theory of meaning
would wish to foreground (for example that all meaning is constructed
interactively rather than ‘received’). This comprehensible input depends
for its comprehensibility on being just beyond the learner’s current com-
petence (the so-called i + 1 model, where i is where the learner is in terms
of knowledge of rules, and + 1 is the next stage of acquisition for which
the learners is poised). The outcome of receiving comprehensible input is
change of state to the next rule or stage of acquisition the learner is ready
for, as determined by natural orders of universal grammar. Because this
movement from one stage of acquisition to another is both individual and
pre-determined by natural orders, the cultural context in which it occurs
and the unfolding of its occurrence is largely irrelevant to the theory.
The inherent mental determinism of such a position inevitably led
86 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

Krashen and his followers to be suspicious of the value of conscious

attention to learning and of pedagogical intervention that in any way
strayed beyond the bounds of simply providing comprehensible input.
Widdowson (1990), however, takes a different view, and sees language
pedagogy as precisely circumventing any supposed ‘natural’ acquisition;
for him, ‘the whole point of language pedagogy is that it is a way of
short-circuiting the slow process of natural discovery and can make ar-
rangements for learning to happen more easily and more efficiently than
it does in “natural surroundings’’’ (p.162).° Pre-empting such criticism,
the dichotomy of ‘learning’ versus ‘acquisition’ was set up as a necessary
component of the Krashen theory, but only because the theory construc-
ted the mind in the way it did (see the reference to McLaughlin’s argu-
ments earlier in this section). There would seem to be no absolute or
logical reason why a learning-acquisition distinction has to be made in a
theory with a different construction of ‘mind’ and a different starting
point as to the nature of language. A social-semiotic theory of acquisition
such as Halliday’s, for example (on Halliday’s approach to language in
general, see section 3.3.2), needs no such distinction to explain the rela-
tionship between voluntary action, attention to form, etc., and the emerg-
ence of adult-like functions of language in first-language acquisition (Hal-
liday 1974). In Halliday’s model, the need to communicate comes as much
from the child as from outside agents, and the child’s own voluntary
language and attention to meaning is as concerned with achieving ‘com-
prehensible input’ for the world around him/her, as is the input provided
by the adults who care for him/her, and both are only achievable in dyadic
interaction.
Krashen’s model essentially cast the language learner as ‘a loner who
possesses a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that does all the acquiring
for the individual’ (Dunn and Lantolf 1998:423). It is true that later ver-
sions of the input-output metaphor that was the foundation of Krashen’s
theory admitted voluntary action on the part of the learner in the form of
‘negotiation of meaning’ (which embraced actions such as comprehension
checks, clarification questions, etc.) (e.g. see Long 1983). However, such
views of meaning are somewhat simplistic, and ignore the fact that mean-
ing is a constantly negotiable and negotiated aspect of real discourse, as
we shall explore in Chapter 5. The notion of local negotiation by means of
checks, clarification requests, etc. (see also Pica 1988), is simply a short-cut,
emergency procedure for problem-solving in the continuous process of
negotiation that drives all linguistic interaction. The way the notion of
negotiation has been classically interpreted in SLA studies manages con-
 4.7 Competing and converging metaphors in the study of SLA - 87

veniently to keep intact some underlying allegiance to a notion of ‘mean-

ing-as-input’ via some kind of conduit, that occasionally gets clogged, like
a kitchen drain. :
Not all approaches to SLA view the mind as a ‘black box’ within the head,
and, as has been noted with regard to Halliday’s model of first-language
acquisition, a distinction between conscious action (whether linguistic or
non-linguistic) and language development is by no means a pre-requisite
of a theory of acquisition. Recently, perspectives drawing strength from
the works of Vygotsky have offered a radical departure from the metaphor
of the learner as ‘lone receptor’, and are based on quite a different notion
of ‘mind’. So different is a Vygotskian approach that two of its proponents
have argued that it is profoundly ‘incommensurable’ (i.e. incompatible)
with Krashen’s theory (Dunn and Lantolf 1998). The Vygotskian approach
rests on two central notions that distinguish it sharply from conventional
approaches to SLA: mind as socially constructed, and the notion of the
‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD). If the mind is not ‘in there’ in the
child’s or second language learner’s head, the only way we can understand
mental development is by reconstructing the role of instruction and
learning so that they are conceived of as activities that ‘do not ride on the
tail of development but instead blaze the trail for development to follow’
(Dunn and Lantolf 1998:419). This would seem to be the very reverse of
Krashen’s view, where instruction serves the purpose of leading the
learner to the next, predetermined stage of development.
In the Vygotskian paradigm, instructors (or peers) and their pupils
interactively co-construct the arena for development; it is not pre-
determined and has no lock-step limits or ceiling. Thus any ‘learning-
acquisition’ distinction necessitated by the separation of voluntary action
and pre-determined outcomes is obviated. Learning and development are
in unity in the ZPD. The ZPD is the distance between where the child is
developmentally and what she or he might achieve in interaction with
adults or more capable peers (Vygotsky 1978:86). Meaning is created in
dialogue (including dialogue with the self) during goal-directed activities;
it is not ‘inside the head’, as conceived in the ‘conduit’ metaphor of
meaning. ‘Mind’ thus only has any reality in its social manifestations (such
as planning, deciding, acting, etc.). Applied to language teaching contexts,
the roles of teachers and learners are re-cast from inputters and lone
receptors into a relationship of joint constructors of the territory in which
meaning can be co-constructed in language the learner does not yet know
(Artigal 1992).
For Vygotsky, the division between language as representing the individ-
88 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

ual psyche and language as a social phenomenon is broken down (see

Emerson 1983 for further discussion). Thus in a Vygotskian view of SLA,
what is relevant data also shifts: learners’ own accounts of their learning
are as valid as the researcher’s observations, and both are data for interpre-
tation, rather than ‘findings’. Equally, learner-learner interaction data
(for example while performing tasks) becomes important not just as a
window on language competence, but in terms of how learners construct
the task for themselves and harness it for their learning needs (see Brooks
and Donato 1994).
Vygotskian approaches, firmly based on socio-cultural theory (SCT),
clearly marry better with socially oriented views of language as we have
conceived them throughout this book, and are quite opposed to the
abstract, rule-governed views we have reviewed. SCT, according to Lantolf
and Pavlenko (1995: 116):

...erases the boundary between language learning and language

using; it also moves individuals out of the Chomskian world of
the idealized speaker-hearer and the experimental laboratory,
and redeploys them in the world of everyday existence,
including real classrooms.

Vygotskians gain nothing by looking at decontextualised sentences. In-

deed, if the adherents of SCT within SLA might forge alliances with any
other branch of applied linguistics, it would seem that corpus linguistics
offers the best way forward, and notions of language as genre, with their
emphasis on the inseparability of language choices, social activity, the
construction of relationships and the pursuit of goals, would seem to link
in most effectively. We shall explore further such links in Chapter 5.

4.8 Conclusion

This chapter has considered the emergence and growth of SLA within the
framework of opposing views of language. That is not the same as a survey
of SLA in its totality, nor does it claim to be. What I have tried to demon-
strate in this chapter is that, even in SLA, which perhaps more than other
sub-disciplines within applied linguistics often lays claim to be scientific,
the paradigms within which researchers conduct their studies and debates
are infused with quite opposite basic views of what constitutes relevant
language data. Not to ask the question of what should constitute data for
understanding SLA, and not to refer that question to basic ideological
 4.8 Conclusion - 89

issues of what language is and what the object of study of linguistics

should be sits badly with our notions of bi-directional accountability to
theory and practice that we outlined in Chapter 1.
A complete theory of SLA of course embraces more than this one chapter
can hope to achieve. Issues not directly addressed in this chapter also play
a major role in how SLA theories are shaped and changed, such as
immersion-learning (e.g. Cohen and Swain 1976; Cummins and Swain
1986; Genesee 1987; Swain and Lapkin 1990), content-based language
instruction (Mohan 1985), the study of bilingualism and multilingualism
(e.g. Cummins 1991; Schreuder and Weltens 1993), the understanding of
real-world cognitively demanding abilities such as competence in transla-
tion and interpretation (Schweda and Nicholson 1995), and the effective-
ness or otherwise of methods of testing and assessment in relation to what
they can tell us about SLA. This last issue is by no means a simple matter of
efficient and objective metrics: social and cultural factors and the ideolo-
gical aspects of testing contexts raise very fundamental questions about
the use of testing as a measure of second language acquisition (Shohamy
1997; Larsen-Freeman 1997:90), and alternative methods of testing may fit
better with socio-culturally oriented approaches to SLA (see Hamayan 1995
for an interesting discussion). What is more, a complete theory of SLA
would need to account not only for language acquisition but also for
language loss, as perceived by those who do not use their L1 or L2 for a long
time (including myself, whose once-fluent Swedish is, to say the least,
‘rusty’ from lack of use for 19 years). Although an under-researched area,
what studies are available suggest that less is lost than users might think.
While immediate availability of language items may suffer, language can
be revived by short periods of immersion, and language users develop
strategies for counteracting loss. Somewhere in memory, the items and
structures are still stored, but social need does not call upon them. Such
findings, as with most findings, can be interpreted in different ways. If
things are still there ‘somewhere’ in memory, then perhaps rule-oriented,
universal grammar models are right, but if they shrink through lack of
use, equally this could be seen as evidence for the socially driven view of
acquisition (we ‘unlearn’ what we don’t need), or for associative models
of language (neural nodes not ‘fired’ regularly lose the strength of their
network connections). But that language loss is an important area of
applied linguistic study should not be doubted, as de Bot and Weltens
(1995) demonstrate: there are implications not only for language peda-
gogy but for broader issues of language planning too.
90 - Language acquisition: methods and metaphors

SLA is, therefore, a complex discourse in which different voices play out
their parts. Differing views of language project differing views of learners,
whether as information processors whose development can be picked to
pieces and examined in experimental settings, or as whole beings acting
in social settings with a consequent demand on holistic methods of obser-
vation. It is the epitome of applied linguistics as a catholic discipline, in
which opposing paradigms co-exist in continuous dialogue: as long as we
are prepared to let ‘all the flowers bloom’, in Lantolfs most memorable
(1996) image of the field, the kind of dynamic applied linguistics we are
promoting in this book will continue to flourish. In the next chapter, we
look at the notion of language as discourse, and more closely at spoken
and written differences, and how these have shaped the activities of
applied linguists.

Notes

1 Indeed, one wonders whether much has changed since Tarone et al.’s (1976)
admonitions concerning the shortcomings of SLA research and the resultant
lack of direct applicability in teaching. Many recent SLA studies still lack the
kinds of focus that Tarone et al. rightly highlighted as crucial to a proper
understanding of acquisition.
2 The front-matter of antiquarian language-learning textbooks include claims to
provide: ‘a most plain and easie way of examining the accidence and grammar by
questions and answers arising directly out of the words of the rules: whereby all
schollers may attain most speedily to the perfect learning, full understanding,
and right use thereof, for their happy proceeding in the Latine tongue: gathered
purposely for the benefit of schools and for the use and delight of masters and
schollers’ (Brinsley 1647); ‘a plain introduction into the rules of syntax ... very
much facilitating the translating English into Latine, to the great ease of both
master in teaching and scholar in learning’ (Huish 1663); ‘some improvements to
the art of teaching, especially in the first grounding of a young scholar in
grammar-learning: shewing a short, sure, and easy way to bring a scholar to
variety and elegancy in writing Latin’ (Walker 1717); ‘a short, but clear and sure
direction for the true pronunciation, accentuation and compleat acquisition of
the English tongue’ (Arnold 1718); ‘an attempt to make the learning of Hebrew
easy’ (Bate 1756), etc.
3 In the 1960s the audio-lingual method came under attack from Ausubel (1964),
who criticised its lack of attention to meaning, and for its simplistic notion of
cross-linguistic interference.
4 The British-based English Language Teaching (Oxford University Press; better
known by its later name ELTJ) had already appeared in 1946. Studies in Second
 Notes - 91

Language Acquisition first appeared in 1978 - an indication of how the field of SLA
research was beginning to find its feet by this time.
ul See also Huebner (1985) and R. Ellis (1988) for studies purporting to show such
regularities in acquisitional stages.
See the reference to Holliday’s (1996) critique of the researcher in Chapter 6.
“ Shirai (whose L1 is Japanese) notes the interesting autobiographical example of
his own proclivity to confuse the /1/ and /r/ sounds when under cognitive pressure
to discuss difficult concepts, using English as his medium of teaching, even
though he knows very well the difference in manner of articulation of the two
phonemes, and can distinguish them perfectly well in other, more relaxed
contexts (ibid.).
Though one should note that there is by no means universal agreement that
older learners cannot acquire native-like pronunciation; see Bongaerts et al.’s
(1997) study of Dutch learners of English, where some learners, especially those
who had intensive training in the sound systems of English, were able to receive
ratings on their English pronunciation comparable to native speakers. Anyone
who has taught older learners knows that considerable variation in achievement
occurs, just as in younger learners, and that it is dangerous to over-generalise on
older people’s ability to learn second languages. Wagner (1992) notes a distinct
lack of research concerning older second language learners. The age question
with regard to SLA and young learners is addressed in McLaughlin (1978). More
recently, serious doubt has been cast on the whole ‘critical age hypothesis’ (i.e.
that beyond a certain age, usually corresponding to puberty, language learning
becomes more difficult) in an important survey of all the evidence by Marinova-
Todd et al. (2000).
That teaching could or should follow the natural orders is by no means axiomatic
to their (supposed) existence is also discussed in van Els et al. (1984:236-9).
e)
Language as discourse: speech and writing in
applied linguistics

5 .1 Introduction

In the previous chapters, the discussion hovered around the dichotomy of

language as an abstract system and language as socially embedded. That
preoccupation will not be relinquished in this chapter, but the primary
emphasis will be on the differences between language in its common
written forms and language in everyday speech. However, in the history of
applied linguistics, it is apparent that the influence of the written code
and the predominance of abstract views of language have fed off one
another, while those whose research focus has been speech have tended
more towards socially oriented theories of language. This is inevitably a
simplification of a complex picture; applied linguists such as Hoey (1983;
1991a) and Swales (1990), although working with written texts, have a
socially and culturally embedded concept of language that is far removed
from the abstractions of a Chomskian approach. Equally, as was illustrated
in section 3.2, speech-act theory, and a good deal of what comes under the
heading of ‘pragmatics’, although overtly committed to including the
study of speech and language in use, have none the less displayed a
fondness for invented data and abstracted language as the basis of dis-
cussion.
The importance of examining both written language and spoken lan-
guage is three-fold. Firstly, it has implications for so-called ‘skills’ ap-
proaches to language teaching, in which the four primary skills (reading,
speaking, writing and listening) are constructed around a written-spoken
dichotomy. Secondly, the descriptive picture, in terms of lexis and gram-
mar, changes considerably depending on the source of one’s data, whether
written or spoken. Thirdly, the units of acquisition, such as clauses and
sentences, the ‘rules’ underlying them, for example word-order and com-
plementation patterns, and the metalanguage used to talk about them,

92
 5.2 Speech and writing - 93

are also brought into question. As always, the relationship between these
factors and how one ‘does’ applied linguistics is of great importance, for,
as in any discipline, questions of data, hypotheses, methodology and
interpretation are interlinked.

5.2 Speech and writing

It is generally agreed that there is no simple, one-dimensional difference

between speech and writing (see the discussion of relevant factors in
Hughes 1996:6-15). The most useful way to conceive of the differences is
perhaps to see them as scales along which individual texts can be plotted.
For example, casual conversation tends to be highly involved interper-
sonally (detachment or distancing oneself by one speaker or another is
often seen as problematic). Public notices, on the other hand, tend to be
detached, for example, stating regulations or giving warnings. Tend is the
key word here: we have all experienced detached conversational partners
and have deliberately distanced ourselves from difficult conversational
situations. Equally we have all seen written notices such as Don’t even think
of parking here!, which seem oddly personalised and ‘in your face’, with an
unusually high degree of author-involvement. Another feature that differ-
entiates speech and writing might be the tendency to be explicit in formal
written texts, while informal chat tends to be more implicit, leaving a lot
unsaid. It is not uncommon, for instance, for conversational partners to
pause and say Still, you know, ... and nothing more; such a remark will be
easily processed by a listener meshed into the talk, but would be out of
place in many written texts (except perhaps in a chatty letter or e-mail toa
friend). What is more, speech is most typically created ‘on the hoof and
received in real time. Writing is most typically created at one time and
place and read at another time and place, and there is usually time for
reflection and revision (exceptions would be rehearsed and pre-recorded
speeches, and real-time e-mailing by two computers simultaneously on-
line to each other). Textually, written discourses tend to display greater
tightness and organisation or integration; talk can appear rather frag-
mented and disorganised, though this may be merely a perception of the
researcher, and may not correspond at all to how participants experience
a conversation. These and other possible scales enable us to plot the
characteristics of different types of discourse as ‘more or less’ typically
written or typically spoken. We might illustrate the process thus:
94 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

@ typical chatty letter to a friend

typical casual, intimate conversation
HM academic textbook

involved «—_L)—- m— detached

implicit <—_D—_—_@—______—_—___ Bf explicit
realtime §=£<—[——___—_————__®—__ ~- lapsed time
fragmented «—-_T—_ —_———_-®—____Ee— integrated

In this way we avoid over-simplified distinctions between speech and

writing but still bring out key areas in which discourses may be differenti-
ated. Understanding these differences is a useful step on the road to better
organisation of skills-based language teaching, offering a window into the
immense variety of discourse-types that exist in our complex societies.
Scales like this have been used by linguists such as Chafe (1982) to capture
the different possible modes of expression.
In a similar vein, Biber (1988 and 1995), using computational tech-
niques, looks at how linguistic and contextual features cluster in different
discourses, and also offers a delicate, variation-sensitive framework for
plotting spoken and written differences. Biber’s underlying hypothesis is
based on the notion that linguistic features co-occur or cluster in texts
because they serve a similar basic communicative function (1988: 101),
and his analyses show that in written and spoken discourses of differing
types (e.g. romantic fiction, spontaneous and prepared speeches, tele-
phone conversations, personal and professional letters, etc.), the clusters
of linguistic features are distributed differently. One of the most import-
ant applications of this work has been to show how certain English written
styles have ‘drifted’ towards more oral characteristics over the course of
several centuries (Biber and Finegan 1989).!
Such findings are of importance not merely to philologists; our assump-
tions about the relative roles of speaking and writing in our societies, and
their consequent influence on priorities in language teaching may have to
undergo considerable re-thinking in a world where oral styles and oral
communication itself are increasingly taking over in global communica-
tion. In recent years, applied linguists have advanced critiques of a purely
linguistic approach to explicating the differences between speech and
writing, and have tried to locate them in a more relevant way both
historically and socially. Stubbs (1980), for instance, rejects the Bloomfield-
ian structuralist tendency to see writing simply as parasitic on speech, and
 5.2 Speech and writing - 95

traces how writing has acquired a social and cultural identity of its own.
Roberts and Street (1997), in a critique of approaches associated with
figures such as Chafe, Tannen and Halliday,? argue that spoken-written
differences can only properly be understood within the context of the
status of literacy and oracy in societies. Thus linguistics accounts of speech
and writing are challenged from applied linguistic bases.
Coming from a totally different angle from that of Biber, Fairclough
(1995:167ff), working within critical discourse analysis (see section 5.4),
has spoken of the ‘conversationalisation’ of political discourse over time.
In short, we can by no means assume that the relationship between speech
and writing in our society is a constant one, and language teaching may
have to adjust itself to new realities. When I entered the language teaching
profession in the 1960s, learner needs were often related to belletristic
academic study or professional contexts such as secretarial work and
high-powered business communication that was most often written, with
oral skills added for good measure. I am not sure that that framework
would still be as widespread globally as we step into the new Christian
millennium.
The intermingling of styles, in which writing borrows from features
normally associated with speech (e.g. e-mail discourse, ‘user-friendly’ in-
formation brochures, advertising copy, etc.), and in which the wider
spread of literacy and job opportunity gives greater access to features
associated with written styles (e.g. professional presentations, ‘eloquent’
speech, etc.) have led some to abandon a straight-down-the-middle view of
speech versus writing as a model for pedagogy. McCarthy and Carter (1994:
Ch.1) prefer to talk of modes of communication (which might be more or
less speakerly or writerly), as distinguished from the medium of communi-
cation (which is either spoken or written). Such a view suggests a blending
of the traditional four skills in language teaching, in which writing tasks
might be very ‘spoken’ in their mode, and, vice-versa, where spoken tasks
may explore a variety of different levels of detachment, planning, integra-
tion, etc. Also significant is Widdowson’s (1984:81-94) re-positioning of the
normal dichotomy of reading/writing versus speaking/listening in the
four skills paradigm, focussing instead on the difference between being a
reader and a speaker. Readers can allow themselves to be carried along by
the text, or can challenge its cognitive schemes, while speakers have to
enter a more negotiated process in real-time face-to-face talk. These acts of
blurring or integrating the separate skills has direct implications for
language teaching methodology, suggesting a breaking down of the com-
96 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

partmentalisation that often takes place in syllabuses and timetables.

5.3 Text and discourse

The terms text and discourse are often used interchangeably to refer to
language ‘beyond the sentence’, that is to say the study of any utterance or
sentence or set of utterances or sentences as part of a context of use. But
equally a distinction is sometimes made between texts as products of
language use (e.g. a public notice saying Cycling forbidden, or a novel, or an
academic article, or indeed a transcript of a conversation), and discourse as
the process of meaning-creation and interaction, whether in writing or in
speech. A further complication is that the terms text linguistics and discourse
analysis have, respectively, become strongly associated with the study of
either written texts or spoken recordings or transcripts. Both approaches
have made significant contributions to applied linguistics, and both go
beyond the notion of language as abstract system to examine language in
social contexts, that is to say attending to the producers and receivers of
language as much as to the language forms themselves.
A long tradition of text linguistics has persisted in Northern Europe,
beginning with attempts to account for how sentences are linked together
using linguistic resources. Werlich’s (1976) description of how linguistic
features characterise strategies used in different text types (narrative,
descriptive, expository and argumentative) was enormously influential
among German teachers of English in the 1980s, and is a classic ‘text
grammar’. Likewise, the Prague school and its followers, among whom was
Michael Halliday, focussed on how the construction of individual senten-
ces in terms of their theme (their starting point or topic) and rheme (what
was being said about that topic) contributed to the larger patterns of
information in extended texts (see Fries 1983; Eiler 1986; Francis 1989;
Firbas 1992). Thus in the sentence Werlich was enormously influential among
German EFL teachers, the theme (or starting point — usually the grammatical
subject) is Werlich, and the rheme is what is said about him (that he was
influential). Different ways in which themes can be repeated over a numb-
er of sentences, or ways in which the rheme of one sentence can become
the theme of the next, are among the preoccupations of the Prague school
linguists, and they represent a major strand of functional (as defined in
Halliday 1997: 16°) approaches to text.
The school of text linguistics associated with Northern European schol-
ars such as de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) and van Dijk (1972; 1980)
 5.3 Text and discourse - 97

addresses questions concerning the cognitive processing of extended writ-

ten texts, which has influenced views of reading, along with schema
theory (Rumelhart 1977), and applied linguists have not been slow to see
the relevance of such studies for the more effective fostering of reading
skills (Carrell 1983). If we take the following opening lines of a short British
women’s magazine text, for example, certain features of the reader’s
real-world-knowledge have to be activated if we are to make sense of the
text:

Supermarkets are on a mission to change the way we think

about — and buy - skincare products. They’re stocking the
shelves with more of their own-label products than ever before.
Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose have all launched
new skincare ranges in the past two months.
(B: November 1998: 110.)

Firstly we need to activate a necessary schema (or mental representation)

of how British supermarkets operate, with their ‘own brands’ (i.e. products
displaying the supermarket’s own name as manufacturer) often enjoying
a less glamorous status than national and international designer-brand
products. We also have to infer (if we do not know it) that Sainsbury’s,
Marks & Spencer and Waitrose are all names of supermarkets, rather than
designer-brand manufacturers, since this is not stated explicitly. Then
there is the meaning of we, again, not explicit, but dependent on how the
reader interprets it (The readership of the magazine? All British women?
Those who shop at those supermarkets? Anyone and everyone’). In all
these questions, cognitive approaches to text analysis emphasise what
readers bring to the text: the text is not a container full of meaning which
the reader simply downloads. How sentences relate to one another and
how the units of meaning combine to create a coherent extended text is
the result of interaction between the reader’s world and the text, with the
reader making plausible interpretations.*
Similar approaches to text analysis may be found in the school of
rhetorical structure analysis, where the emphasis is on how units of
meaning relate to one another in a hierarchy, and how such rhetorical
features as exemplification, summary, expansion, etc. build on core prop-
ositions to construct the complex artefact of the finished text (Mann and
Thompson 1988). This approach owes much to the text linguistics of
Grimes (1975) and Longacre (1983). Applications in reading pedagogy and
in the study of writing have been envisioned for these approaches (see
98 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

O’Brien 1995 for an example of a study of student mother-tongue writing).

Also influential amongst British applied linguists and language teachers
has been the very practically oriented types of text analysis that originated
in the work of Eugene Winter (Winter 1977; 1982), usually referred to as
clause-relational analysis. Working with everyday written texts, disciples
of Winter such as Hoey (1983) and Jordan (1984) have demonstrated how
culturally common patterns such as the situation — problem — response
— evaluation > solution sequence in texts is constructed by the reader in
interaction with the logical relations between clauses within the text and
by processing the overt lexical and grammatical signals of the pattern
employed by the author.
Hoey’s work, in particular, is a good example of an approach which sees
texts as interactive arenas for the creation of meaning, in which sentences
only have any status in relation to one another. The clause-relational
school and the other cognitively oriented models discussed can be seen as
attempts to break out of the sentence-internal view of language inherited
from traditional models, with their origins either in intuition or in the
study of written language alone. Cognitive text-linguistic models are
necessarily subjective in their interpretations of meaning in texts, but
subjectivity may not necessarily be a negative quality (see Reddick 1986 for
a discussion), and the levels of inter-subjectivity that can be achieved by
using groups of informants can often reveal remarkable consistency of
interpretation. In attempting to re-construct the cognitive processes
readers go through, they are seen as offering practical ways in which
classroom methods can be adopted, such as pre-text activities in the
reading class designed to activate background knowledge, or student
analyses of their own texts as a step in process approaches to writing skills
(for an extended survey of such applications of text linguistic methods, see
Connor 1987).
Also influential in shifting perspectives away from sentence-internal
preoccupations have been the studies of textual cohesion associated with
Halliday and Hasan (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Hasan 1984, 1985), again
overwhelmingly based on written texts, but with a strong social moti-
vation (see the summary of Halliday’s socially oriented view of language in
section 3.3.2). The study of cohesion is concerned with surface linguistic
ties in the text, rather than cognitive processes of interpretation, and thus
its categories are grammatical and lexical ones. The categories include
reference (e.g. how pronouns refer back and forth in texts to people and
things in different sentences), substitution and ellipsis (how reduced
 5.4 Discourse analysis - 99

grammatical forms such as co-ordinated clauses without subject-

repetition can be none the less interpreted textually), conjunction (how
the finite set of conjunctions such as and, but, so, etc. create relations
between sentences), and lexical links across sentences (e.g. repetition,
collocation). Hasan’s work on cohesion, in particular, has an applied
educational emphasis, using the framework of analysis to evaluate
children’s writing and to reflect on the relationship between linguistic
links across sentences and textual coherence.
Thus have the various schools of text linguistics taken the study of
language beyond the sentence and brought readers and writers to the fore,
laying emphasis on the text as an intermediary between sender and
receiver rather than as a detached object in which meaning is somehow
‘stored’. Above all, these approaches see sentences as interacting with one
another, and perceive no value in examining them in isolation; language
has become discourse (i.e. an interaction between sender and receiver)
rather than an abstract object.

5.4 Discourse analysis

Although Zelig Harris published a paper in the early 1950s entitled Dis-
course Analysis (Harris 1952), which was concerned with the distribution of
linguistic elements in extended texts, and links between the text and its
context, discourse analysis as a general approach to language and as an
influential force in applied linguistics did not really emerge until the early
1970s, and since then has predominantly been associated with studies of
the spoken language. In the 1960s, considerable interest was building up
in the sociologically embedded study of language, with Hymes’ work
(Hymes 1964), springing from ethnography and anthropology as much as
from linguistics, providing a grounding for a socially responsive
modelling of spoken language. Also in the 1950s, Mitchell had published a
seminal paper on the relationship between speech and the situation of
utterance, including factors such as participant relationships and roles,
and the physical settings in which talk occurred (Mitchell 1957). Discourse
analysis emerged in this climate of growing interest in the process of
meaning creation in real situations, where texts alone were insufficient
evidence for the linguist, and settings, participants and goals of interac-
tion came to the fore. It is this broader emphasis on settings and other
non-linguistic features of interaction that sets discourse analysts apart
from text linguists, although in recent years, with the emergence of genre
100 -: Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

analysis and critical discourse analysis, distinctions between (predomin-

antly written) text analysis and (predominantly spoken) discourse analysis
have blurred somewhat, and the situation at the time of writing is one of
considerable cross-fertilisation between the two tendencies.
A very important and influential study of spoken discourse was that
carried out by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), who tape-recorded mother-
tongue school classrooms and found recurring patterns of interaction
between teachers and pupils. Teacher- and pupil-behaviour were both
constituted and reinforced by the setting (generally large classes) and the
institutional roles. These roles were typically marked by the teacher as
knower and source of input, as evaluator of pupil response and as control-
ler of topics and the divisions of the lesson itself, with the pupils as
receptors and respondents, communicating with the teacher, not their
peers. The goals of the interaction were primarily the transmission of
knowledge through question and answer sessions or through controlled
discussion, the display of key knowledge and the testing of its reception.
All this was reflected in structural features, in the sense that regular
configurations recurred in predictable contexts and sequences. For in-
stance, teacher-question — pupil-answer — teacher-feedback occurred repeat-
edly as a sequence, while other possible configurations were proscribed,
for example an evaluating utterance by a pupil aimed at a teacher’s
utterance.
Sinclair and Coulthard’s analysis also underscored basic communicat-
ive functions of teacher-pupil talk in the traditional, teacher-fronted
classroom, such as the teacher asking questions to which she or he already
knew the answer, or the teacher withholding feedback until the desired
correct answer was proffered. Many second language teachers will recog-
nise their own instinctive behaviour here when faced with a large group of
learners cramming for an exam, or when resources militate against more
imaginative dispositions of the classroom space. Sinclair and Coulthard’s
work clearly struck direct chords with those of us active in language
teaching in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and their work played an
important role in underwriting the communicative revolution of the 70s
and 80s. Their model for the interaction between teachers and pupils was a
structural one, built upon a hierarchy, or rank scale, with smaller units of
interaction such as moves (a ‘move’ could be, for example, a teacher
question, or a pupil answer) combining to form exchanges (most typically
completed sets of question—answer-feedback moves). Exchanges in turn com-
bined to form larger units within the lesson, termed transactions, to reflect
 5.4 Discourse analysis - 101

their goal of transmitting key chunks of knowledge to the pupils.

Very soon, the Sinclair-Coulthard model was extended into the world
outside the classroom (e.g. Hoey 1991b; Francis and Hunston 1992), and
since its early days it has enjoyed continuous attention by those interested
in analysing second language classrooms. Second language classroom
studies have further extended the model, including a notable attempt to
interpret teacher-pupil interaction patterns within a Vygotskian perspec-
tive (see section 4.7.2) of supportive learning (Jarvis and Robinson 1997),
applicability of the model to student interaction in group-work (Hancock
1997), and the use of the model to analyse student-computer interaction in
computer-assisted language learning (CALL) sessions (Chapelle 1990). In
direct applications in language teaching materials, one can often see the
Sinclair-Coulthard basic notion of the exchange, with its three parts of
Initiation + Response — Follow-up reflected in very practical illustrations for
learners, of real day-to-day contexts in which such exchanges might occur,
as in this text book for learners of Burmese, where following up after a
reply is practised:

S1: 3) oncdn What <is> that? Da ba-léh?

S2: 3) (go8e5eln That's a museum. Da pya-daig-pa.
S1: gaan apfgo8eSe3u OH. What museum [is it]? Aw. Ba-pya-daiq-léh?
$2: SaSayd(Go3o5oln [It’s the] Bogyoke Museum. Bo-joug Pya-daiq-pa.
S1: SaSayS(eo8e5u The Bogyoke Museum. Bo-joug Pya-daiq.

Figure 11: (From Okell 1994: 21)

Sinclair and Coulthard’s work above all showed that it was possible to
jettison the sentence but still to retain the notion of language structure,
within a socially motivated linguistics. Their data was, admittedly, rela-
tively well-ordered and tightly constrained by the classroom setting, but
even those who have taken the Sinclair-Coulthard model out into the real,
messy world of casual conversation have found that the core structural
elements of moves and exchanges remain robust, albeit configured in
more complex and chained sequences than those found in the classroom
(see especially Hoey’s 1991b study). However, within a short time of the
publication of Sinclair and Coulthard’s influential model, Politzer (1980)
was suggesting that its ‘objectivity’ (in the sense of sequential, structural
analysis) was inadequate to the task of properly describing classroom
interaction, and that a more sociolinguistics-inspired approach was re-
quired.
102 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

5.5 Conversation analysis

The Sinclair-Coulthard model was concerned with apprehending the

structure of spoken language beyond the sentence, but there are other
ways of looking at talk that focus more on the local aspects of interaction,
and the joint efforts that participants put into conversation to make it
work. In its institutionalised and rather ritualised context of the class-
room, the talk that Sinclair and Coulthard examined appeared to progress
steadily and relatively smoothly: teachers knew more or less what they
wanted to say, and pupils were constrained to respond only in ways
permitted by the teacher-pupil relationship. Casual and spontaneous talk
between equals does not seem to occur in the same way. It appears, on the
face of it, to be a rather precarious exercise, wandering first this way and
then that, subject to interruptions, diversions, competition between par-
ticipants for the floor or control of topics, indeterminate in its duration,
unpredictable in its outcomes. Krauss et al. (1995) make a comparison
between talking and walking: walking appears to flow fluently; in scien-
tific fact it is ‘a kind of co-ordinated lurching’ (p.124), with constant
‘mid-course corrections’ (ibid.). This is even more remarkable in everyday
conversation, where the real-time adjustments made are in terms of ‘the
interdependent social behaviour of two or more people’ (p.125). Talk,
therefore, is an achievement rather than a pre-ordained object that simply
spills out, and it is this sense of work towards that achievement that
conversation analysts try to capture.
Conversation analysis (CA) is mainly (but certainly not exclusively) asso-
ciated with American sociolinguists and sociologists of language. Good
illustrations of the approach can be found in the works of figures such as
Schegloff and Sacks (1973), who look at how participants close down
conversations, Sacks et al. (1974), who study turn-taking in talk and how it
is smoothly achieved, Pomerantz (1984) on the way participants agree and
disagree locally, and in the many studies of oral narratives that have
developed within the sociolinguistic and CA perspectives (Labov 1972;
Jefferson 1978; Polanyi 1981). There are also more general works and
collections of papers covering the field and its methods (Atkinson and
Heritage 1984; Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Pomerantz and Fehr 1997).
Conversation analysts study local events in detail, for example, how pairs
of adjacent utterances constrain each other (adjacency pairs), how
speakers use discourse markers to signal interactive features (Schiffrin
1987), how they sum up the gist of the conversation at regular intervals
 5.5 Conversation analysis - 103

using ‘formulations’ (Heritage and Watson 1979), and so on. Transcription

is very narrow, indicating as many aspects as possible of the way talk
emerges, including speaker-overlaps, stutters and re-cast words, changes
in loudness, drawled syllables (typically indicated by colons), pauses,
laughter, sighs, non-verbal vocalisations, ‘ohs and uhms’, etc. Conventional
punctuation such as commas, full stops and underlining indicates not
sentence features but intonational features. An example taken from Drew
(1984) will illustrate a typical CA transcript. A complete description of the
transcription system is given in Atkinson and Heritage (1984:ix-xvi):

E: ... and I had to have my foot up on a pillow

for two days, youknow ,and- hhhmhh
N: ah?
E: But honey it’s gonna be alright I’m sure,
N: Oh I’m sure it’s gonna be alri:ght,
E: Yeuh,
—N: Oh:: do:ggone. a bin maybe we Kould
—E: rd like to get some
little slippers but uh,

Conversation analysts prefer to work with individual conversations

analysed in depth rather than multiple conversations analysed more
quantitatively (which a corpus linguist might do: see section 6.3). In this
latter respect, one might hesitate to envision easy, straightforward appli-
cations of CA in language pedagogy, since the generalisability of such
analyses is not always apparent. The fact that features such as turn-taking
are achieved locally in individual, unique conversations on the one hand,
but that general principles or ‘rules’ of turn-taking are, on the other hand,
so general, commonsensical and obvious (e.g. that normally only one
speaker speaks at a time, that speakers may nominate the next speaker,
etc.), might be seen as a weakness of CA. But others have seen its tech-
niques as a strength, enabling the linguist to get new perspectives on
things taken for granted, and indeed offering convincing applications to
language teaching problems. An exemplary study of this last kind is
Aston’s (1995) investigation of the use of thank you in service encounters in
English. Many English language teachers will recognise themselves in the
classroom vainly attempting to square the desire to teach typical service
encounter features such as requesting goods and services and the various
pleases and thank yous that punctuate such events in the typical Anglo-
American context. Often students protest that such florid and gushing
104 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

behaviour is unnecessary and something that sticks in their craw when

asked to perform in a target-language fashion. What Aston’s study shows,
with its careful attention to placement and sequencing of thank you in
service encounters is the important way in which thank you marks the
phases of the encounter for the participants, that it is far from being a
decorative token or a badge of obsequiousness. A better understanding for
the teacher, resulting from meticulous analysis of language features such
as thank you, is the first step on the road to better ways of dealing with
them in class, and more satisfying explanations for learners uneasy with
their conventional conceptualisations. In the context of mother-tongue
usage, too, CA studies can help to remove prejudices about spoken lan-
guage, for instance that use of markers such as like, you know, sort of and see
are evidence of sloppy conversational habits (see Watts 1989 for an excel-
lent study and discussion). Not only can such items usually be shown to be
part of the regular vocabulary of even the most educated of speakers, but
studying their placement and role in talk in the fine detail of a CA
approach can often show that they are far from superfluous, fulfilling
important functions like projecting and checking the state of shared
knowledge and softening what might otherwise be too blunt and possibly
threatening to the listener.
The significance of the emergence of discourse analysis and CA for our
overall discussion of approaches to language in this book is that both
schools showed that it was possible to incorporate social dimensions into
language study, and to account for the creation of meaning without
reference to syntactic rules, sentences, and elusive qualities such as ‘deep
structure’. Additionally, both schools worked with a terminology that was
largely independent of that elaborated over the centuries for the study of
written language, and it is this latter point that is most immediately
relevant for the present chapter. With a ready-to-hand metalanguage for
talking about spoken language, the stage was set for a more principled
approach to curricular targets such as ‘speaking skills’ and ‘oral profi-
ciency’, and applied linguists began to publish books and papers exploring
the possibilities of translating discourse analysis and CA into pedagogical
guidelines, teaching materials and practical classroom tasks (e.g. Bygate
1987; Cook 1989; McCarthy 1991a; Hatch 1992). Richards (1980), in an early
example of taking on board insights from CA, stresses the importance of
‘strategies of conversational interaction’ (p.431) in the development of
conversational competence, and refers to CA studies to back up his argu-
ments. Soon more specific areas of language teaching activity began to
 5.6 Discourse grammars - 105

come under scrutiny using CA as a means of evaluation. Van Lier (1989) is

one such study which takes to pieces the oral proficiency interview and
draws on CA insights to answer the question of whether or not conversa-
tion should serve as an appropriate model for oral assessment. More
recently, some scholars have detected a major shift in approaches to
communicative teaching, and a growing orientation toward the bottom-
up content of communicative competence, with discourse and conversa-
tion analysis playing a central role in the re-thinking of what teaching
input should be (Celce-Murcia et al. 1997).

5.6 Discourse grammars

The move away from the sentence as the unit of linguistic investigation by
text grammarians and discourse and conversation analysts had profound
effects on the study of grammar. Linguists began to question not only the
validity of many of the rules sentence grammarians elaborated, but the
very meanings of grammatical forms, so long taken for granted, were now
up for re-interpretation. Semantic meaning (in the sense of inherent
qualities of grammatical configurations, for example that in English the
-ed forms of verbs denotes pastness) came to be seen as inadequate for the
description of meaning-in-interaction, both in written texts and in spoken.
Items occurring in texts seemed to have meanings in context that ex-
tended greatly the ‘core semantic’ meaning, or which even contradicted or
obscured those core meanings. For example, in a British service encounter
such as leaving clothes to be cleaned, or films to be processed, a customer
might well be asked What was the name?, where any meaning of ‘pastness’ is
almost irrelevant to an account of the use of was, and the only sensible
statement of ‘meaning’ is one which foregrounds institutional politeness
and service conventions. It is this type of concern which discourse gram-
mars address, building descriptions which attempt to incorporate lan-
guage users, textual cohesion and coherence, and relevant features of
context to explain usage.
In the field of written text, discourse grammar is epitomised in the work
of Waugh (1991), who looks at the French passé simple (‘simple past’ or
preterite) form. Waugh shows convincingly that the key to the meaning of
the form rests in an investigation of its distribution in real discourse.
When the form is scrutinised in its contexts of occurrence (e.g. novels,
newspaper articles), pragmatic, textual, modal, discourse, expressive and
referential meanings of the passé simple are all relevant and, Waugh
106 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

concludes: ‘None of these should be disregarded nor treated as derivative’

(p. 241). One of the central points, she asserts, is the notion of detachment
in written texts: texts such as novels, stories, historical works, tales,
legends, newspaper and magazine articles, etc. ‘are addressed to whom it
may concern’ (p. 243). It is this factor rather than the pastness of events per
se which determines the use of the interpersonally detached passé simple
form; in conversation, the same events would normally be expressed with
the ‘involving’ present perfect tense form.
A similar, English example of written discourse-grammar is Zydattiss’
(1986) study of ‘hot news’ texts, in which the typical textual pattern of
initial scene-setting with the present perfect tense (which grabs the
reader’s attention) is followed by the details of the hot-news event, which
are normally in past tense. McCarthy (1998: Chapter 5) shows how initial
scene-setting and following-detail devices in news reports and literary
narratives are not confined to present perfect and past tense, but operate
in the same way in future reference with pairs such as be to plus will, and in
past habitual reference with used to and would.
These kinds of studies attempt to re-define the purview of grammatical
description and view grammatical meaning as interactively determined,
rather than being inherently ‘in’ the structure under scrutiny. It is clear
that such a view of grammar is well out of kilter with an idealised,
sentence-based, Chomskian approach to language description or a
Krashen-type model of SLA where grammatical morphemes are cognitively
acquired with abstract meanings. On the other hand, it is ideally placed to
serve a Vygotskian, socio-culturally embedded view of language use and
language acquisition (see section 4.7.2), although such links have not been
drawn explicitly or explored in any great depth to date. Discourse gram-
marians do not deny that past tense forms can have the meaning of
pastness; it is just that pastness is one of the possible senses that may be
foregrounded at any point in discourse, just as other senses may be too. In
looking at isolated sentences, however, it may be that a detached, referen-
tial meaning such as pastness might be the only plausible mental contex-
tualisation, since no interpersonal evidence is available. It is only in
context that a sentence such as I wanted to talk to you gains its meaning
either as a report of a past-time state of affairs, or as a present-time
indirect/polite request.
Spoken discourse grammars operate in a similar way to written ones,
with senders and receivers, and strategies of planning and sequencing
playing the same central roles as in written discourse-based approaches.
 5.6 Discourse grammars - 107

Hughes and McCarthy (1998) look at several examples of grammatical

features that require a new perspective when examined in their actual
contexts, both spoken and written. They use corpus evidence, but their
approach goes beyond statements of statistical distribution of items (see
the discussion of corpus linguistics in Chapter 6) to qualitative interpreta-
tions of grammatical relations based on evidence across a range of texts
(just as Waugh did with her studies of the French past tense). Hughes and
McCarthy find, for instance, that conventional paradigms for arranging
items such as demonstratives and pronouns (for an example, see sections
1.5.1 and 3.3.2 of this book) often fail to capture the real strategic choices
reflected in discourse. They take the trio it, this and that and show that
speakers (see also McCarthy 1994a; 1998: Chapter 4.2) select among the
three items for various types of focussing upon topic entities:

[Conversation between a medical adviser and a patient]

Adviser: Okay. So the same pharmaco-dynamics is going on with
every medicine you take virtually.
Patient: Mm.
Adviser: But no that really isn’t a problem. Okay. You can
sometimes in the first week find your, your complexion,
your skin’s a bit more spotty.
Patient: [wails] Agh. Oh I don’t want that.
Adviser: That’s the only risk though.
Patient: Just the for the first week?
Adviser: Yeah, usually it’s not a long-term problem. Again this is,
initially tends to be an early thing which will settle itself
down.
(CANCODE data)

The point Hughes and McCarthy make is that the conventional paradigms
such as those of the subject and object pronouns on the one hand (where it
is typically contrasted with he and she), and the demonstratives on the
other (where this/that are in contrast only with these/those) in effect separate
what should be brought together, and that, at the discourse-grammar
level, the relevant paradigm consists of it, this, and that in opposition. In a
similar way, Carter and McCarthy (1995) show how, in everyday conversa-
tional speech-reporting, speakers have a choice between past simple re-
porting verbs (X said that...; X told Y that...) and past continuous ones (X was
saying that...; X was telling Y that...) as alternative ways of framing reports
108 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

of the same events, with the difference residing in the status of the
reported item as either ‘report’ (past simple reporting verb) or ‘topic
opener’ (past continuous reporting verb).
Even more fundamentally, conversation analysts and corpus linguists
present evidence for a re-assessment of the sentence as a viable unit of
grammatical description. Well-formed sentences are the exception rather
than the norm in many kinds of everyday conversation (e.g. casual talk,
some service encounters), and the clause emerges as a better candidate for
the base unit of description (see Miller 1995), which was noted as being
Halliday’s position, in section 3.6. What is more, the units of grammar are
often co-created by participants, such that an element of one speaker’s
turn may only be grammatically coherent when seen as a continuation of
another speaker’s utterance. One such (attested) example is:

[The speakers have just come back from a swim, and are feeling good about
their efforts to do some exercise]
A: I can feel that it was a good thing
B: lTo have done
A: Yeah
B: Mm

B’s ‘perfect infinitive’ to have done only makes sense as a ‘post-modifier’ to

A’s nominal a good thing; the whole noun phrase is therefore an interactive-
ly created unit, not something constructed in isolation in the first
speaker’s head, even though that was clearly his meaning, as evinced by
the yeah that follows. Speaker A need not have continued after thing; his
utterance was perfectly ‘well-formed’ as it was, but it becomes a different,
and equally well-formed utterance when B adds her piece. Similarly, Tao
and McCarthy (in press) found that non-restrictive which-clauses could be
added to a first speaker’s utterance by a second speaker, as in the following
example:

[Speakers are planning a family holiday, and discussing train and ferry
times]
<speaker 1> It leaves, it gets in at ... I’m sure I said the night crossing
<speaker 2> You said 12 till 10
<speaker 1> No that’s coming back 12 o’clock coming home midday but
that one the one going out it gets in at 7 in the morning
<speaker 3> Which is fine isn’t it
(CANCODE data)
 5.6 Discourse grammars - 109

Examples such as this one illustrate grammar as joint-construction,

rather than just an encoding by one speaker and a decoding by another,
and one is reminded of Farr and Rommetveit’s (1995:265) admonition that
‘when expression is ... equated with “encoding” and impression with
“decoding” ... one has bought the language of the telecommunication
engineer and one ends up with a totally artificial system of communica-
tion’. In their view, grammar would partake in that ‘commonality’ that is
the hallmark of the discourse process, and ‘commonality is established
when two persons construct a temporarily shared world by engaging
in dialogue’ (ibid.: 271). The shared world is as much expressed in grammar
as it is in lexical selection, and co-construction is one of its key
manifestations.
Beyond-the-sentence investigations of grammatical choices suggest that
discourse grammars do more than just add ‘bolt-on-extras’ to existing
sentence grammars, and precipitate a complete re-assessment of how
grammars are written, especially spoken ones. In the pedagogical domain,
observations of real spoken data also underscore the need to re-evaluate
many of the taken-for-granted rules as presented in course books and
reference books. Kesner Bland (1988), for example, looks at progressive
tense forms used with static verbs in attested utterances such as I’m hating
this weather and I’m really loving it, forms which would normally be ‘forbid-
den’ in most text books and course books. Kesner Bland concludes that the
existence of such forms in everyday conversation, and the useful com-
municative functions they perform, ‘force us to reassess constantly the
relationship between the grammar book and the language students are
apt to encounter’ (p.67).
Celce-Murcia (1991) sees value in a discourse-based approach to gram-
mar as stemming from a study of learners’ communicative needs and the
assembly of a corpus of material relevant to those needs; after these stages,
and only then, should the decision be taken as to the most useful grammar
to be taught. The teaching of the grammar then proceeds on the basis of
the relevant discourse contexts and the texts that belong to them. Celce-
Murcia shares with Larsen-Freeman (1991) a firm conviction that focussing
on grammatical form without looking at its functional meanings in dis-
course paints only an impoverished picture of language for learners and
fails to unite grammar with its uses in interaction. Grammatical errors too
have been re-assessed from a discourse-grammar point of view: Zalewski
(1993) argues that even apparently ‘local’ errors in 12 English such as
wrong inflections of person and number can have global effects on
110 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

comprehensibility in text, owing to the discourse-cohesive role such mor-

phemes can often play.
Thus, discourse grammars force us to re-assess our pedagogy, in both the
written and spoken media, while the latter, the spoken grammar, has yet
to be fully articulated for a language such as English. Furthermore, the
very metalanguage for talking about grammar can no longer be taken for
granted. The example, noted above, of a choice in speech reporting be-
tween indirect reports with past simple (X said that...) and those with past
continuous (X was saying that...) have no name in conventional grammars,
and structural labels fail to capture the distinction between speech-
oriented reports (past simple) and topic-oriented ones (past continuous).
The problem is that there is no agreed metalanguage for talking about
spoken grammars, and the applied linguistics profession, at the time of
writing, still lacks one.> It is perhaps one of the most important tasks
applied linguists face: to re-orientate our metalanguage so that our profes-
sional discourse reflects the changed landscape sketched out by explora-
tory studies of spoken grammar. As with everything else within our shared
discourse, the effects of different perspectives on language, and the ways
we talk about them, ultimately permeate our attitudes to teaching or
whatever other applied domain our efforts occupy.

5.7 Language as genre

Much good research has been done on genres in more specialised varieties
of written language (most notably Swales 1990; also Christie 1986; Reid
1987; Martin 1992). Most of this work emphasises the socially rooted
nature of genres and their recognisability for participants within dis-
course communities. Swales in particular (ibid.) relates genres to the
discourse communities that produce them (e.g. academics writing for one
another and reporting their research, constructing and critiquing their
discipline, etc.). But the fact that lay people, i.e. not expert linguists, can
also label everyday written and spoken discourses with genre-names (e.g.a
soap opera or documentary on television, or a joke-telling session) is
clearly significant from the point of view of the recognisability of genres
for participants themselves (see Walter 1988:6). You do not have to be a
linguist to recognise a ‘story’ or ‘an argument’. The degree to which genres
are institutionalised is also an important factor, and is most obvious in
highly regularised contexts such as academic writing, scientific and tech-
nical reports, literary genres such as the short story or the sonnet, and so
 5.8 Speech genres - 111

on. Stubbs (1996:12) talks of the mutually defining nature of institutions

and genres (though he alternates between ‘genre’ and ‘text-type’ to refer to
typical modes of communication): as institutions evolve, so do the text-
types that communicate their activities to those within and without the
institution.
The question remains as to how we recognise the relevant linguistic
features that typify different genres, how participants orient towards
them and how they reveal their awareness of them. These questions are
particularly salient in spoken language, where, apart from well-
documented genres such as service encounters (Merritt 1976; Hasan 1985;
Ventola 1987; Aston 1988a; Iacobucci 1990) and narratives (Labov 1972;
Jefferson 1978; Polanyi 1981; Goodwin 1984), many of the everyday forms
of talk we experience are still unclassified in generic terms. There have
been a number of studies of register, i.e. the relationship between language
features and their context of utterance (see Halliday 1978), many of which
focus on formality and informality, interpersonal aspects of meaning, and
spoken/written differences. Biber’s (1988) seminal work on the distinguish-
ing features of written and spoken texts and how significant language
features cluster in different types of texts overlaps to a considerable extent
with the study of genre. In his later work, Biber uses the term register for
‘all aspects of variation in use’ (Biber 1995:9), and his research covers
aspects that are close to what in other research traditions is referred to as
genre. Register studies contribute much to our understanding of the
different factors that influence linguistic choice, but do not offer a clear
model of what, for example, a personal narrative is, or how participants
show their engagement in an activity such as joketelling or having an
argument.

5.8 Speech genres

The most notable early example of a study that pointed the way forward
for describing spoken genres was Mitchell’s (1957) observations of the
language of trading at markets and shops in Cyrenaica (in what is present-
day Libya). Mitchell was interested in how different features of the situ-
ation (the participants, their purposes, the setting, etc.) influenced the
language that was used between vendors and purchasers so that there
merged a recognisable, recurring form of discourse. Like later genre re-
searchers such as Hasan (1985) and Ventola (1987), Mitchell identified
stages in the service encounters he observed at first hand. Service
112 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

encounters are interactions whose purpose is the transaction of goods,

information and services, typically exemplified by conversations in shops,
hotels, information bureaux, etc. Mitchell identified phases of the conver-
sation, such as salutation — enquiry as to the object of sale — investigation of the
object of sale > bargaining — conclusion. Within each phase, variation was
possible (for example, influenced by different spatial conditions — open air
market transactions displayed different patterns of interaction to those in
closed markets).
Since Mitchell’s day, the notion of spoken genre has been developed by
various other linguists, including Hymes (1972), who describes genre as a
higher-order feature of speech events. Hymes emphasises the dynamism of
genres. Genre is something separate from the speech event itself: a genre
may coincide with a speech event, but genres can also occur within speech
events, and the same genre can show variation in different speech events.
Since Hymes, debate has continued round the question of dynamism and
variation in how genres are realised. Most linguists working in the area
accept the notion of genre as norm-governed social activity that manifests
linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour to varying degrees of institutional-
isation. Coupland (1983) accepts this variability and offers the example of
the difference between buying and selling something trivial like a stamp
or a newspaper, and a large item of expenditure such as buying a holiday
at a travel agency. Both are service encounters but the travel agents
example is less likely to be ritualised or to follow a well-worn template,
and is likely to offer more opportunites for interactional/relational talk
(i.e. talk whose purpose is the establishment or reinforcing of social
relations) alongside the transactional talk (i.e. the talk that gets the buying
and selling business done). Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris (1995) make a
similar argument in distinguishing between the more institutionalised
participant roles in events such as service encounters compared with
business meetings, where the interaction may be more fluid and prone to
variation.
Ylanne-McEwen (1997) reveals in detail how transactional and relational
features intermingle in service encounters (once again in the travel agency
context) and shows persuasively that descriptions of genre that do not pay
at least equal regard to the interactional/relational process as well as the
transactional in typical encounters are inadequate. Similarly, Lindenfeld’s
(1990) account of small talk in urban French market places reveals that
small talk does not occur randomly: vendors’ small talk is directed mainly
to utilitarian matters, while customers’ small talk tends to focus on
 5.8 Speech genres - 113

personal topics. Vendor and customer are both building and consolidating
their social identities in the course of the conversation. Komter’s (1991)
study of job interviews also considers the small talk that typically occurs at
the beginning of an interview as a significant phase in the interview
process, and in an echo of Mitchell’s (1957) original study, talks of the phase
structure (p.54) of the interview.
The building of personal relationships manifested in the discourse
process have also been shown to be important in academic genres. Thomp-
son (1997) studied university research presentations. She, too, stresses the
work of building an appropriate relationship between speaker and audi-
ence and the participant roles as being an integral part of the oral research
presentation genre. In such discourses, the presenter typically projects
him or herself as ‘the modest, self-deprecating expert’ (p.334) and engages
in serious facework, that is to say attempts to protect him or herself and
the listeners from threats to mutual esteem. Once again, studies such as
Thompson’s are important since they suggest that models of genre that
consider relational elements (concerned with creating and consolidating
social relations, in contrast to ‘doing business’) as secondary events which
disturb the conventional flow of the transactional discourse are incom-
plete. Here I take the position that an approach to genre that pays equal
attention to the relational elements is the most relevant kind of model for
applications to the teaching of spoken language. Even learners with appar-
ently strongly oriented transactional needs in spoken language usually
also feel a desire to ‘be themselves’ and to relate in a human way to their
interlocutors.
Some genre-type studies focus more on variability and mixing of activ-
ities. Duranti (1983) argues that the same genre can be realised in different
ways according to the nature of the speech event, depending on who the
speakers are, what their purposes are, etc. Walter (1988: 2-3), who investi-
gates jury summations, also considers the setting in which speech occurs
as an important variable. Fairclough (1995:167ff) underscores the way
genres are sequenced and often intermixed. He takes broadcast political
discourse as an illustration of how genres change over time, and in
particular the process of ‘conversationalisation’ of public discourse. The
sequencing of elements, distinguishing compulsory and optional ele-
ments, and how such elements are recognised amid the variation evident
in genres is explored by Eggins and Slade (1997:230-5), who also acknowl-
edge the importance of lexico-grammatical analysis as well as the analysis
of elements beyond the sentence such as turn-taking or adjacency pairs.
114 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

Bakhtin (especially Bakhtin 1986) has been very influential in contribu-

ting to the overall understanding of genre. Bakhtin’s concept of genre is
based on the utterance, an abstract unit of talk which may vary in length
from one speaker-turn to a whole monologue or (in written language) a
whole novel. The utterance is defined by its termination at a point where
an interlocutor may potentially respond.® For Bakhtin, utterances reflect
specific conditions and goals of different types, not only by their lexical,
grammatical and phraseological makeup, but by their ‘compositional
structure’ (1986:60). Whilst utterances are locally determined and individ-
ual, ‘each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively
stable types of these utterances’ (ibid.), and these stable characteristics are
what constitute genres. Interpersonal aspects are also important for Bakh-
tin: ‘each speech genre in each area of speech communication has its own
typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre’ (ibid.: 95).
The Bakhtinian perspective is taken further by Kelly Hall (1995), who
explores the links between the institutionalised/socio-historical meanings
of the generic resources available in interaction and the practical stra-
tegies interactants engage in in each new situation. The importance of
Bakhtin’s approach (and indirectly, too, that of Vygotsky; see Emerson
1983; Wertsch 1985) is that it breaks down the distinction between lan-
guage as the product of the individual psyche and language as a social
construct. Any theory of genre needs to include that perspective.

5.9 Goal-orientation

Conversational participants, especially in more casual settings, are social

beings with practical goals, and it is their goals that drive the interaction
forward, rather than some sense of obedience to institutional norms.
However, goals need not be fixed or pre-ordained, and may emerge as the
discourse progresses (i.e. they may become apparent as a result of the
unfolding interaction, rather than predetermining it), and they may be
multiple in number (Tracy and Coupland 1990). If we take a goal-orienta-
tion approach to genre, it becomes possible to integrate better the transac-
tional features of conversations and the relational/interactional ones.
Iacobucci (1990), for instance, shows how the relational aspects of cus-
tomer calls to a phone company are not tangential or to be considered
merely as ‘side sequences’, but are often purposefully directed towards
fulfilling the transactional goals of the discourse more effectively and
efficiently.
 5.9 Goal-orientation - 115

Casual conversation is possibly the prime example of how useful the

study of goal-orientation can be. Casual conversation displays features
which have led some to conclude that it is too vague a notion to qualify for
the title of genre, or else that it is defined by the very fact that, in terms of
genre-mixing, anything goes. But casual conversation, on closer scrutiny,
is no less goal-driven than any other kind of talk, even though the goals
may be multiple, may only emerge in real time and may be largely
relational. Considering the relational goals can often assist in the under-
standing of casual conversation much more than the pursuit of notions
such as ‘topic’ or ‘matters under discussion’.
Nevertheless, one major problem in the study of goals in interaction is
how one actually determines what the goals are, since these will very often
not be explicitly stated by participants, and the evidence for the analyst is
usually indirect, and available only in the shape of phenomena such as
‘formulations’, and other similar kinds of linguistic evidence. Formula-
tions are paraphrases or summaries of positions reached in the ongoing
talk, whereby participants externalise their perspectives on the directions
and goals of the unfolding discourse (Heritage and Watson 1979), which
the analyst can use as evidence for statements about the way the discourse
is progressing. But it is only this kind of indirect evidence that is usually
available, short of adopting a more ethnographic approach and using
participants themselves as informants to tease out the goals of any given
speech event.
Goal-orientation ties the notion of genre closely to action. Dolz and
Schneuwly (1996) put forward the link between genres and social action as
a defining characteristic of genres, and consider the ability to use the
generic resources to pursue goals to be inseparable from the ability to act
in the immediate social situation. However, once again, such notions are
elusive in real data, and the analyst is working with only an indirect
record, a trace of what actually took place as an event. But still, attempting
to see things from the participants’ viewpoint and to appreciate how they
articulate their own understandings avoids at least the worst excesses of
the imposition of structure and order by the linguist, using analytical
frameworks that may not reflect in any way the reality of the conversation
for those who were involved in it.
Comparisons of spoken texts from different settings and involving dif-
ferent participants often show up lexical and grammatical similarities
that enable us to observe generic patterns wherein the local features of
lexis and grammar correspond to global features of goal-type and types of
116 - Language as discourse: speech and writing in applied linguistics

participant relationship. By the same token, differences in lexical and

grammatical features across texts may indicate different relationship-
types as well as different goal-types. Biber and Finegan (1989) illustrate this
well with differences between written and spoken texts that can be in
many respects similar, but in key respects different. For example, in their
data, personal letters often share features with non-conversational spoken
genres, but are distinguished by a greater number of ‘affect markers’ (e.g. I
feel; see Biber 1988:131-3 for further discussion).
Other dimensions may also be brought into play in the plotting of
features in texts. Plotting texts in terms of their features and how they
cluster and pattern enables us better to grasp the variation present in texts
that share similarities at the global level, and enables us to make at
least some links between higher-order features and the basic lexico-
grammatical choices which speakers make in line with their goals and
relationships in individual settings. The gradability of spoken genre fea-
tures thus displayed is in line with Wikberg’s (1992) arguments for the
importance of gradience and variability in the classification of written
genres, which are often subject to over-simplified text-typology labels. As
Biber and Finegan (1991) state, genre study should include both a charac-
terisation of typical texts as well as a characterisation of the potential
range of variation.
A genre-based approach to the study of spoken and written texts has the
potential to offer a highly relevant model for the applied linguist seeking a
tangible level of generalisability in the design of syllabuses or the identi-
fication of skills as targets for language learning. It offers the possibility of
using powerful categories to get a handle on the otherwise bewildering
world of texts and their individuality. When we move away from the
deterministic certainties of traditional, sentence-based grammars, genre
studies offer access to a higher level of organisation that can regulate the
apparently infinite variability of texts and contexts.

5.10 Conclusion

This chapter has explored further how different ways of approaching

language have influenced applied linguistics and language pedagogy. It
has examined the significant trend in recent years to examine language
more and more in its real contexts of use and to bring to centre stage the
participants and their social worlds. It has focussed on the idea of lan-
guage as discourse rather than language as sentences, but that has also
 Notes - 117

had implications for a more basic question of the nature of the evidence
with which applied linguists work. The chapter has taken the line that
speech and writing need to be looked at in their separate manifestations,
and that separating them raises important questions for issues of descrip-
tion. But what has united written and spoken language in this chapter is
that both media of communication can be studied in social contexts, and
through real texts. This means, in terms of a theory of language, that the
evidence is essentially external, existing in the social world, and not inside
the linguist’s head, in his or her intuition. This last point has profound
resonances in the practical ways in which applied linguists conduct their
own discourse, and in the final chapter we shall shift our focus away from
language as an object of study for linguists and applied linguists, and look
at applied linguistics itself as a ‘discourse’ with, as with any discourse, its
contexts of activity, its methods and ways of doing, and, finally, with its
own ways of talking about, and thus constructing, itself as a discipline.

Notes

1 By far the best source of further information on writing is Ehlich et al.’s (1996)
Bibliography on Writing and Written Language. The papers in Coulmas and Ehlich
(1983) are also important.
E.g. Halliday (1989).
wnSee section 3.6 for Halliday’s definition of ‘functional’.
4 However, see the debate between Ghadessy and Carrell in the TESOL Quarterly
Forum (Ghadessy 1985; Carrell 1985) as to whether ‘world knowledge’ or normal
linguistic decoding is paramount in reading.
5 See also the discussion of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in Chapter 6 as another example of
problems in the terminology of spoken grammars.
6 See Hasan (1992) for a critique of the ambivalence of some of Bakhtin’s categor-
ies. Hasan is right to criticise Bakhtin’s work as being difficult to operationalise.
However, as long as one does not regard Bakhtin’s ideas as a model or instrument
of analysis, but rather as a thought-provoking set of theories, their value in
assisting our understanding of and our ability to construct the nature of the
spoken language remains intact.
6
Applied linguistics as professional discourse

6.1 Introduction

So far in this book we have characterised applied linguistics as different

ways of approaching understandings of language in the service of address-
ing and possibly solving both theoretical and practical problems in lan-
guage teaching. But applied linguists are, by definition, practical people
working as a community, and it is their modes of practice and com-
municating with one another, as much as anything, which define them as
a professional group. Although we may all be interested in language, and
in the problems and issues of language teaching and learning, our ap-
proaches and methods, and the discourses we engage in to communicate
those approaches and methods will be very different. So much has already
been implicit (and often explicit) in everything we have said about differ-
ent views on language in the previous chapters. In this chapter, we look at
just some of the ways in which applied linguists practise their trade,
position themselves and communicate with one another. We cannot hope
to cover them all in detail, but we shall focus on some of the central types
of activity that are currently shaping and influencing the profession.
Although we shall somewhat artificially separate out the different types of
applied linguistic activity, we should always bear in mind that many
applied linguists, during their professional careers, engage in more than
one type of practice, often simultaneously. It is this which, in part, charac-
terises the humanistic nature of the applied linguistic enterprise, and
which is one of the important ingredients in the cement that binds
applied linguists within their professional community.

6.2 Research

Some applied linguists spend part of their career engaged in research. This
is a professional profile most immediately associated with applied linguis-
tics departments in colleges and universities, where, if one is fortunate,

118
 6.2 Research - 119

grant-funded projects can be the focus of important research questions

concerning aspects of language teaching and learning. There is, however,
no unified notion of what constitutes research. In the United States, the
word research has been, for many, conventionally synonymous with experi-
mental, empirical investigations into teaching/learning problems, usually
accompanied by quantified statistical evidence validated by techniques
associated with the harder sciences. Such investigations, or ‘studies’ as
they are usually called, may take place in classrooms, or in laboratory-type
settings (see section 4.5 for a discussion of the latter). The British tradition
of applied linguistics tends to attach a wider scope to the word ‘research’,
embracing activities such as corpus linguistics, textual analysis, historical
research, lexicographical research, researching material for descriptive
and pedagogical grammars, etc. This is perhaps an oversimplification, but
the beginning applied linguist should not be surprised at encountering
such different perceptions of the meaning of the term ‘research’ amongst
his or her international peers. Indeed, in the excellent Research Notes
section of the TESOL Quarterly, established under the able editorial eye of
Diane Larsen-Freeman in Volume 10 of the journal in 1976, the definition
of research was implicitly that which is synonymous with quantitatively
oriented empirical studies.1 Larsen-Freeman refers to the reporting of
‘results’ of studies (p. 347) in outlining the purpose of the nascent Research
Notes section, and, during the late 1970s and the early years of the 1980s,
the overwhelming majority of the research investigations reported are of
the empirical/quantitative kind.
Recently, however, the emphasis on both sides of the Atlantic and
internationally has shifted away from purely quantitative notions of re-
search in applied linguistics towards qualitative research paradigms.
Qualitative research focusses more on observation, close contact and
cooperation with the target participants, case studies, critical insights,
holistic interpretations, judgements, and so on (see Eisenstein 1986), or,
put another way, ‘identifying the presence or absence of something and
with determining its nature or distinguishing features (in contrast to
quantitative research, which is concerned with measurement)’ (Watson-
Gegeo 1988:576). Gaies (1983), referring to the ‘recent’ incorporation of
qualitative research into language teaching and learning, points to the
influence of research methods from related disciplines such as sociology
and anthropology.
Still in the pages of the TESOL Quarterly, by 1986, we find Chaudron
persuasively arguing the usefulness of both quantitative and qualitative
120 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

research methods in classroom-based investigations, with an especially

important link between the qualitative assessment of important variables
and the quantitative exploration of them (Chaudron 1986). In the 1990s,
qualitative research was now seen as embracing ‘naturalistic inquiry,
longitudinal case studies, educational ethnography, the ethnography of
communication, discourse analysis, and other approaches that employ
qualitative methods’ (Johnson and Saville-Troike 1992:603), though de-
bates were entered as to the reliability of qualitative research findings
(ibid.). By the mid-1990s, the TESOL Quarterly was publishing guidelines for
submissions both for quantitative and qualitative research, and these
represent clear, definitive statements of the perception of at least this key
journal in our field as to the important differences between the two
research paradigms. Finally, the journal dedicated Volume 29, number 3,
in the autumn of 1995, entirely to qualitative research, showing how the
qualitative paradigm had definitely come of age in the language teaching
research community, and howits status, side-by-side with the quantitative
tradition, was now recognised. This is a very clear example of the chrono-
logy of a many-voiced discourse that has shaped our present-day percep-
tions of how applied linguists ‘do’ applied linguistics.
A third type of activity (in addition to quantitative and qualitative
research), perhaps not often thought of as research, but sharing in the
fundamental investigative urge that fuels all research, is theory-building
and model-building. This last type might seem, on the face of it, to be
anything but ‘applied’ linguistics, and yet its practitioners, epitomised by
figures such as Henry Widdowson (1979; 1980; 1984; 1990) and Bernard
Spolsky (1968; 1990), have done much to map out the philosophical terri-
tory in which the practice of applied linguistics takes place and its inde-
pendence from linguistics as a discipline (see section 1.2 for an example of
the kind of modelling of the profession Widdowson has contributed). In a
sense, too, applied linguist theorists such as Widdowson have honed the
discourse of applied linguists, and often held us all to account as much for
how we use or abuse our common language as for what we practise. This
type of research is one of accumulating learning, wisdom, and experience
in both practical and theoretical domains, and is, by definition, not asso-
ciated with the beginner. These three broad notions of research (the
quantitative, the qualitative and the theoretical) are seen by Wray et al.
(1998:7-8), in their excellent practical manual of research projects in
linguistics, as a natural consequence of the fact that the study of language
spans the sciences and the humanities.
 6.2 Research -: 121

Whichever type of research applied linguists carry out, within language

teaching and learning, the aim is normally to ameliorate something,
whether it be our understanding of how vocabulary is incorporated into
the mental lexicon, the design and use of materials and resources such as
text books and dictionaries, selecting techniques for teaching and learn-
ing, an understanding of learners’ personal experiences and their failures
and successes, their affective responses, knowledge about the actual lan-
guage we use as raw input, etc. Few would disagree that these are laudable
research aims. However, considerable debate continues as to where and
how research is carried out, as we saw in Chapter 4. Apart from the
laboratory, there is the classroom as a natural arena for research, and here
debates have arisen as to whether investigations are best carried out by
dispassionate observation on the part of an extra observer, whether special
lessons or activities should be staged and carefully controlled for experi-
mental purposes, or whether teachers in their own environment are their
own best researchers, and whether the normal lesson, with all its vagaries,
is the best milieu for investigation (see Foster 1998). Thus, while much
classroom research focuses on specific types of innovative pedagogical
intervention to judge their effectiveness, other research investigations
work more with the status quo. For example, Peirce et al. (1993) investigate
the relationship between a relatively new practice — self-assessment — and
objective measures of language proficiency. On the other hand, Jarvis and
Robinson (1997) take what they assert to be the existing norm in many
primary classrooms around the world (i.e. the teacher-fronted lesson with
a large class), rather than investigating the effectiveness of any new
methodology, and relate the normal teacher-pupil discourse to the theor-
etical postulates of a Vygotskian approach to language acquisition, itself a
relatively recent growth-area in SLA (see section 4.7.2). Nunan (1990),
meanwhile, sees classrooms and learners as providing vital research evi-
dence for broader issues of curriculum development. Or the problem
under investigation may simply be one that has always been there but
neglected, as in Ellis’s (1995a) study of vocabulary acquisition in the
classroom arising from oral input (as opposed to, for example, reading,
which has more often been the focus of vocabulary research), and which is
then subjected to specific manipulation of the conditions of occurrence.
Another apposite example comes from Dérnyei and Malderez (1997), who
focus on group dynamics in the classroom, and how these have implica-
tions for success and failure in language learning. They bring a perspective
from social psychology to bear upon the typical, now well-entrenched
122 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

practice of present-day language teaching to get learners working and

interacting in groups, and argue convincingly that awareness of the group
dynamic factor is important for teachers.
Others would argue strongly that classrooms, and the kinds of data
available there, are inadequate to the research aims of understanding
educational processes such as language learning. Holliday (1996) offers a
mordant critique of the way much ethnographic research ‘emicises’ verbal
data (i.e. abstracts from it) without consideration of the wider cultural
context of curriculum planning, educational management, and the wider
cultures of communities and societies beyond the classroom. Holliday
enjoins researchers to develop a ‘sociological imagination’, and the re-
search community to integrate the ethical issues of research practice (such
as invasion of privacy, empathy with those observed, cultural sensitivity,
the observed having a voice, etc.) with a broader, more cosmopolitan
perspective in the research environment. Such a view repositions the
relationship between observer and observed and challenges the fairly
narrow focus of much applied linguistic research in and out of classrooms.
As such, it is another important voice in the ongoing discourse that shapes
applied linguistics.
The third kind of research activity referred to above, theory-building,
has also spawned many debates and questions in applied linguistics. In an
article responding to a special issue of the journal Applied Linguistics
devoted to theory construction in SLA (volume 14 (3), 1993), van Lier (1994)
raises several issues that have wider implications for the kinds of theories
applied linguists build. Firstly, there are questions of what the field of
investigation is, whether a field such as SLA is part of linguistics, or
education, or psychology, or whatever. Taking a stance on this basic
question obviously influences the kinds of theories that are considered
relevant and useful. Van Lier makes the important point that different
theoretical foundations arise because our ‘discourse worlds’ (p.330) are
different. In other words, the very way we construct and communicate our
professional activities shapes our theorising just as much as extant the-
ories shape our practice.
Much of what has been said in this book so far concerning how theorists
and practitioners work with and view language itself underscores this
perspective: applied linguistics is essentially a discourse, an ongoing and
shifting conversation among its adherents rather than a set of inscribed
tablets that lay out the field and its spheres of activity. Difference and
variation in theorising applied linguistics, van Lier argues, is not necessar-
 6.2 Research - 123

ily a sign that the profession has not yet matured (i.e. become a well-
established discipline), but rather is a reflection of the different work to be
done ‘and all these kinds of work need theoretical and practical dimen-
sions’ (ibid.). Van Lier also proposes that theorising in a field such as SLA
(and, one might extrapolate, for much of the rest of applied linguistics)
must include addressing basic questions such as the nature of evidence,
the adequacy of documentation and the relationship between explanation
and understanding. In this last respect, van Lier sees the human sciences
as quite different from the natural sciences. While in the natural sciences,
causation might be a central feature of explanation, a human science such
as SLA must seek for more: understanding, and understandings, says Van
Lier, are dialogic processes, socially constructed, that is to say they are part
of the professional discourse of applied linguists.
Van Lier’s programme for theory in SLA is therefore one based on
research of a humanistic kind, founded in intra-professional discourse,
the rhetoric of academic argumentation, and a rationality that springs
from human understanding rather than the positivism associated with
the natural sciences. Once again, the work of an applied linguist-theorist
like Widdowson would seem to fit squarely within such a research tradi-
tion. Widdowson (1990) also outlines a basically humanistic programme of
theory appraisal for applied linguistics in stressing the importance of
mediation, interpretation and evaluation, without which one cannot
properly judge the usefulness of a theory to practical matters of pedagogy.
It is indicative of the ongoing nature of the debate and the likelihood that
it will never resolve itself into a cosy world of mutually back-patting
applied linguists that Widdowson (2000) returns to the theme of
what constitutes the discipline and how it should operate in the new-
millennium edition of the journal Applied Linguistics. Here he takes to task
corpus linguistics, a relatively recent development, one which, on the face
of it, seems to replace the vagaries of intuition with ‘objective’ evidence,
but which is doomed to be no more than ‘linguistics applied’ if it fails to
subject itself to the mediating and relevance-constructing principles of
applied linguistics.
Thus it is by no means universally accepted that theory in applied
linguistics should be of the rationalist-positivist kind centred on causation
and demonstration, and the research tradition in theory construction has
an ever-growing humanistic character which reflects the discourse of our
profession.? Nor is there agreement that applied linguists should unite
around any particular theoretical stance. This lack of a unified consensus
124 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

of criteria for theory-building is commented on by Ellis (1995b), who notes

that ‘theory evaluation is perhaps more an art than’a science’ (p.77); the
value of theories in applied linguistics will usually be measured by their
impact on the consumer, and can only properly be evaluated ‘in relation
to their intended purpose’ (ibid.: 88).
One last point that needs to be raised in this brief discussion of theoreti-
cal research is the way theory communicates itself (or fails to do so),
between theorist and consumer. We have already commented upon the
unease that some practitioners have voiced concerning the discourse that
does (or does not) take place between theorists and practitioners (e.g.
Lennon 1988; Kirby 1991; see section 1.6). Van Lier (1994) quite rightly sees
the problem of communication between theorists and practitioners as
two-sided: theorists often have a ‘fear of practice’ (p.340), and practi-
tioners often display a fear of theory and reflection/research. Van Lier
takes the position that theorists justifiably react against the notion that
everything should be transparently applicable, but that theory should be
‘constrained by ordinary everyday goings-on’ (ibid.). Equally, teachers un-
der pressures of various kinds (time, peer suspicion, etc.) and displaying an
understandable rejection of jargon-laden and obfuscating theory deserve
an environment in which research is promoted and collaboration with
theorists facilitated.
My own experience of communicating with teachers at professional
conferences in more than 30 countries leaves me with the conclusion that,
at the time of writing, yawning gulfs still separate what we ‘research-
oriented’ applied linguists find interesting and what ‘action-oriented’
applied linguists (ie. the teachers) find relevant. We can either shout
across these Grand Canyons and hope to hear one another, or lower a few
ropes on either side and meet and talk in the silent valleys that lie in
between. What I have learnt (a lesson not always easy to apply) is that it is
my ethical duty as an applied linguist to make my theoretical position
clear and understandable and to mediate the theory of others. If I do the
opposite, and make theory appear too complex and too hard for practi-
tioners, I have failed. From my own perspective, at least, the discourse of
applied linguistics should be plain and lucid.

6.3 Principle and practice: the case of corpus linguistics

It may seem odd to be turning our attention to a question of technology

and methodology when the direction in which I have taken the debate in
 6.3 Principle and practice: the case of corpus linguistics - 125

this chapter so far has been more towards applied linguistics as a dis-
course. However, the discourse of applied linguistics would have little
grounding in reality ifit could not be measured against change in method
and practice (see, for example, how Rampton 1995 perceives criticality in
terms of the concrete influences of socio-political forces). It so happens
that corpus linguistics both represents cutting-edge change in terms of
scientific techniques and methods, and presents us with dilemmas that
arise from the humanistic contexts in which an (apparently) detached
technology operates. Corpus linguistics probably also foreshadows even
more profound technological shifts that will impinge upon our long-held
notions of education, the roles of teachers, the cultural context of the
delivery of educational services and the mediation of theory and tech-
nique as the twentieth century becomes history.
Corpus linguistics occupies an uncertain territory in applied linguistics.
Its origins are in the search for objectivity about language use (e.g. see
Halliday 1966 and Sinclair 1966 for early visions of its usefulness) by
freeing the linguist from the subjectivity of intuition. It is based on the
fundamental notion that external evidence, i.e. evidence of actual use, is a
better primary source than internal evidence, i.e. the intuition of the
native speaker. Its method, gathering large amounts of representative
data, whether written or spoken, immerses it in the social, the world of
texts and users, of producers and consumers. And as with all other aspects
of applied linguistic activity, different ideological perspectives prevail.
One way of doing corpus linguistics, for example, is simply to see it as an
exercise in numbers, where the goal is to import as much language data as
possible (say, a billion words of running text), from as wide a sweep of
sources as one can practically manage (though this might include a fair
dash of opportunism - if the data is on offer, grab it). Such data is then
analysed dispassionately by the computer and its output is a series of
statistics that tell us something about frequency of occurrence of word-
forms, lexical items or structures, and frequency of combinations (collo-
cations, phrases, etc.). These statistical data then become the yardstick for
dictionaries, grammars, thesauruses, course books, and so on. In recent
years, led by pioneers such as Sinclair and his COBUILD corpus team,
successful and immensely useful and innovative practical products have
been made available to language learners. Behind such an apparently
mechanical operation, though, there lurk ponderous issues that relate to
ideology, both in terms of views of language, what it is we ‘apply’ and
wider social and cultural issues.
126 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

How one deals with the results of corpus analyses varies, and depends on
one’s aims and perspectives. Computers are good at presenting figures,
and good at showing probabilities. This has led some, recently, to propose
that grammars could be re-conceived on the basis of probabilities, rather
than deterministic rules. A deterministic rule would be, for example, that
the third person singular present simple form of English verbs ends in-s. A
probabilistic rule, on the other hand, states what is most likely to be
selected in a given set of contextual circumstances. In any language,
structures which appear to belong to the same meaning sets, but which
contrast with one another in some way (e.g. simple versus continuous/
progressive verb-forms in English), will often display quite different statis-
tical distributions for those forms in a corpus (e.g. one form may be twice
as frequent as its partner-form). These statistical facts can either be ignor-
ed as irrelevant to a description of the internal systems of a language, or
they can be brought on board as part of the meaning of those forms, rather
in the way that Firth argued that dark was part of the meaning of night
because of the likelihood of their co-occurrence (Firth 1951/1957). Taking
such statistical data into account enables grammarians to propose the
construction of probabilistic grammars. In an early discussion of probabil-
ity in grammar, Halliday (1961: 259), for example, pointed to the funda-
mental nature of language as probabilistic and not as ‘always this and
never that’. Halliday has recently turned to corpus linguistics to put flesh
on this notion. He asserts that probabilities of occurrence are ‘an essential
property of the system - as essential as the terms of the opposition itself’
(1991:31). Halliday (1992) argues further that the different probabilities of
occurrence in different registers is also significant, since it is not likely
that items in opposition will be equiprobable in a corpus reflecting any
given register.
Probabilistic explanations of grammatical features necessarily open up
the question why?, and answers can only be sought in social and contex-
tual motivation. In this way, attention to statistics cannot be paid without
equal attention to the social factors that produce them. This is one way of
‘applying’ corpus insights to, say, a pedagogical grammar. If one takes the
line that learners might find it extremely useful to know that a particular
structure is more probable than another in a given situation, all other
things being equal, then the probabilities thrown up by a corpus might be
as genuinely usable and helpful as the time-honoured practice of the
teacher saying ‘well, you could say it, but I don’t think I personally would
say it in that situation’. This last utterance is, as anyone who has taught a
 6.3 Principle and practice: the case of corpus linguistics - 127

language that is not their first one well knows, even more difficult for the
non-native-speaking teacher to make with confidence. So probabilistic
grammars need not be just the academic indulgence of teams of applied
linguist computer nerds remote from ordinary consumers. As with every-
thing else we have discussed in this book, it largely comes down to how
relevant teachers and learners perceive them to be.
Foremost in seeing even more profound implications of corpus linguis-
tics for a radically different view of language as a whole has been Sinclair
(1991). Sinclair’s work represents the classic case of independent applied
linguistics, in that he has come from practice to a new theory, not vice
versa. This, I have argued, is one of the key ways in which applied linguis-
tics carries out its discourse and defines itself (see also Sridhar 1993).
Sinclair, engaged in the eminently practical pursuit of writing a learners’
dictionary in the early 1980s, began to be aware more and more that
certain dearly held principles of language study (e.g. the primacy of
syntax, the unpredictability and ‘irregularity’ of lexis) were simply no
longer tenable when faced with corpus evidence.* Lexis was far from
irregular; regular vocabulary patterns appeared everywhere in the cor-
pus. Idiomaticity, far from being a minor, or marginal affair in language,
appeared to be ubiquitous and at least as important as syntax in the
construction of meaning (1991:112). Idiomatic constructions were every-
where in the corpus Sinclair was working with, especially in the patterns
formed by combinations of the most frequent words in the language (as
opposed to the quaint, infrequent idioms often associated with language
teaching manuals). This and other factors led Sinclair to posit a close
bond between sense and structure, and to conclude that features such as
collocation and particular idiomatic (in the sense of individual) but very
frequently occurring combinations were the real cement that held
texts together. Syntax was more, as it were, an emergency repair kit for
filling the occasional gaps and cracks amid the flow of idiomaticity. Sin-
clair’s proposal is radical, and many will find it problematic, but it
stands as a good example of how a ‘neutral’ technology can throw up
fundamental questions for theory, and how a practical, ‘applied’ prob-
lem, in this case writing a dictionary using computer evidence, can
bounce back and challenge theory. We should not doubt that galloping
technological change will bring many more such upheavals over the
coming decades.
Neutral stands in scare quotes in the previous paragraph because
profound ideological issues rear their heads at every turn in corpus work.
128 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

In my own work, for example, with my colleague Ronald Carter, on the

CANCODE® spoken corpus, we have encountered difficulties with the
metalanguage of corpus linguists that have forced us to re-think how we
express ourselves. Our corpus is informal spoken language, and our initial
interest was in features of spoken grammar (see Carter and McCarthy
1995a). One area that interested us was how speakers used the resources of
the clause and word-order to focus on particular aspects of information
and evaluation. We collected examples of the type Jenny, you never know
where you are with her, and He’s a builder, my brother. Conventionally, the
words in bold are known as ‘left-’ and ‘right-dislocated’ items, respectively
(Ashby 1988; Geluykens 1992). And yet, clearly, spoken language has no
‘left’ or ‘right’; it exists in time, not space. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ are page-driven
metaphors, and even more narrowly, western-orthographic page-driven
(other cultures write right-to-left, or vertically). Left and right are conveni-
ent to refer to the page-like output on the computer screen, or the page of
a printout, but they dangerously metaphorise speech into writing — the
very opposite of what Carter and I were attempting to do in our advocacy
of the independence of spoken grammar. The best option for expressing
the facts of spoken language seems to be to adopt temporal metaphors
rather than spatial ones and to speak of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-positioning’, etc.,
rather than left or right. The point here is that apparently neutral tech-
nologies and the practices associated with them rarely are neutral, and
that it is in the practice of those technologies that applied linguists are
often obliged to return to the basics of metalanguage and the mutual
discourse with which they define their activities. Corpus linguistics, with
all its impartial hardware, is no exception to this.
Widdowson (2000) sees even greater dangers in the kind of reality that a
corpus creates. For some, the technology dazzles, and the evidence of
corpus analyses is seen as incontrovertible ‘facts’, which must trounce
feeble intuition in the language classroom. The language of the corpus is,
above all, real, and what is it that all language learners want, other than
‘real’ contact with the target language? But for Widdowson, the very act of
freezing language in a computer database wrenches it from its original
context and reality and renders the task of using such material as ‘authen-
tic’ or ‘real’ in language teaching an impossibility. Widdowson rightly
assails the tendency on the part of some to assume that because corpus
language is ‘real’ (i.e. actually attested) it will do for injecting reality into
the contrived world of the classroom. He touches a deep instinct in
language teachers when he argues for the classroom to be seen not
 6.3 Principle and practice: the case of corpus linguistics - 129

necessarily as a place into which the real world must be dragged at all
costs, but as a place of ‘created context, like a theatre’ (ibid.: 8). He sees
immense potential in the use of technology and in corpus insights, but for
him, the pedagogical mediation, the ‘applied linguistics’ as opposed to the
‘linguistics applied’ side of things is paramount.
No one could really disagree with Widdowson, and if he falls into error
at all, it is that he pushes too heavily against an open door. Very few
applied corpus analysts (as opposed to descriptive ones) would ever advo-
cate simply dumping large loads of corpus material wholesale into the
classroom. Language teaching is a far more complex affair than simply the
choice of texts to be used in the class. I and others have argued that there
are potentially several ways of approaching corpora (McCarthy 1998:22;
Tognini-Bonelli 1996). One can assume one knows it all already and just go
to a corpus to find texts that demonstrate the known facts (the ‘corpus-
based’ approach). One can do the opposite, and go with a completely open
mind to a corpus, willing to be guided, illuminated by it in ways one could
not dream of (a ‘corpus-driven’ approach). But one can also mediate the
corpus, design it from the very outset and build it with applied linguistic
questions in mind, ask of it the questions applied linguists want answers
to, and filter its output, use it as a guide or tool for what you, the teacher,
want to achieve (a ‘corpus-informed’ approach). It is this last approach that
Widdowson (2000) fails to explore. Some examples of a corpus-informed
approach could be the design of better and new kinds of reference ma-
terials (e.g. databased dictionaries on CD- or DVD-ROM, automated self-
updating thesauruses to which new corpus material can be added by the
user), the use of corpus evidence to (re-)prioritise the syllabus (for example,
relegating structures prominent in writing but rare in speech to a second-
ary position in a syllabus for learners for whom writing is irrelevant or of
lesser importance), using corpus evidence from 25 restaurant conversa-
tions recorded in target contexts to help you in the writing of one, typical
restaurant dialogue, albeit concocted. In the real world of real applied
corpus linguists, some of Widdowson’s fears seem far removed from actual
practice, though his voicing of the possible dangers and abuses serves an
important function in the overall debate as to what applied linguists do
and how they should be doing it.
Remaining with corpus linguistics, there are also some wider social and
ideological implications that affect our professional identity. These relate
to questions arising from technological potential and the choices that
have to be made in exercising it. The CANCODE corpus, for instance, has
130 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

been referred to by me and my colleagues, in the past, as a collection of

data gathered in the British Isles, in order to reflect'the inclusion of data
from the Irish Republic, in an attempt to broaden the geographical and
socio-cultural base. However, Irish applied linguists do not necessarily
perceive their native island as a ‘British’ isle at all, and may interpret such
nomenclature as a claim to British ownership of the English language and
its culture in these islands that J inhabit. In our more recent presentations,
we have therefore adopted the term ‘the islands of Britain and Ireland’ to
describe our catchment area.° This is by no means an act of precious
political correctness, but an acknowledgement that assembling a corpus is
itself an ideologically embedded activity, where choices and perceptions
are conditioned by the limitations of the world-view of the applied lin-
guists who undertake the task.
Resource limitations usually forbid idealistic enterprises, and most
corpus projects fall foul of the limitations of their own data. CANCODE is a
spoken corpus of English, but, whose speech and whose English? Although
its founders set out to break the hegemony of middle-class, southern-
England English by including speakers from across the social and geo-
graphical spectrum of Britain and Ireland, this immediately raises the
question of a) the viability of such a sample as a model of ‘standard’
English, and b) the usefulness of an old-world, northern European set of
English dialects in a global community where English is multi-dialectal
and includes many non-native dialects. In connection with the case of
British and Irish English mentioned above, for example, Farr and O’Keeffe
(2000) show how even the most frequent items in the grammar (in their
case, modal verbs) can have quite different usages reflecting different
cultural perspectives in British and Irish English corpora. Corpus linguis-
tics can by no means, therefore, exclude itself from the broader debate on
the status of different groups of native-speakers and of the ownership of a
world language like English.

6.4 Should applied linguistics be a critical discipline?

In recent years there has also been considerable debate over the role of
ideology in applied linguistics. This is a complex area, and one that does
not resolve into a single, clear image, but in which common threads are
apparent. ‘Critical’ approaches to language study are essentially con-
cerned with the roles of ideology and power in views of language and of
 6.4 Should applied linguistics be a critical discipline? - 131

language use. A simplified characterisation might be to say that at one end

of the spectrum is the stance that it is the business of linguists and applied
linguists simply to describe language and to describe the processes of
learning and teaching languages. At the other end is the view that lan-
guage is never neutral, is always bound up with particular ways of seeing
the world, and that applied linguists are always engaged in a politically
and ideologically embedded activity. There are also, of course, many
possible positions in between.
Kramsch (1995) offers us an insightful way into the debate when she
refers to the historical change in the discourse community of language
teaching professionals and consumers over recent decades. There has been
a shift from language teachers seeing literature specialists as the guiding
lights of language education, and a shift from a ‘consensual discourse
community of belletristically inclined students’ (p.44). Applied linguists
have taken over the role formerly occupied by literature experts, and the
learning community has become diverse, culturally heterogeneous and
often without any clear internal identity. This broadening and demo-
cratisation of what was, until relatively recently, a comfortable consensus,
has brought with it new political awareness as well as new tensions and
suspicions. Above all, it has created a multi-voiced discourse that provides
a platform for widely opposing views as to what the ideology of the applied
linguistic profession is or should be. All this reflects not merely the
changes within educational institutions and shifts in relative power be-
tween exponents of different disciplines (the usual historical process of
the rise of new academic élites and the rout of the old), but also social
changes that affect language use (e.g. the ‘democratisation’ of discourse
itself in the wider world of mass media and global communications). In
the case of English, the politics of language are inevitably tied up with the
decline of British political dominance and the growth of English as the
ordinary property of the global community, put crudely, an inexorable
shift from English as associated with Shakespeare to English as more likely
to be associated with the Internet or pop culture. In this democratic
climate, ideological stances are inevitably more divisive and controversial,
and to take the position that the role of language in our professional
activity is unrelated to ideological and political concerns becomes harder
and harder to sustain in a climate where it is politically incorrect to do so.
Two strands of debate stand out as relevant to our concerns in this
chapter, the one centring around the notion of critical language study
(epitomised in the field of critical discourse analysis, or CDA)’ and the
132 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

other around the broader notion of models of language in a culturally

heterogeneous world of language education, which we shall address in
section 6.5. The former involves (usually) the role of specific texts, the
latter broader questions of applied linguistic methodology. The fact that
this distinction is problematic and undesirable has not escaped the notice
of those centrally involved in trying to define applied linguistics in recent
years (e.g. Stubbs 1997).
Critical discourse analysis, represented in works such as Fairclough
(1989; 1995) and Kress (1990), sees the task of the (applied) linguist as
taking a critical stance towards language use, and as analysing texts in
such a way as to illuminate and bring to the fore the ideology of their
producers. Language is seen as ideologically embedded, and never neutral,
and CDA analysts are interested in exposing acts of linguistic manipula-
tion, oppression and discrimination through language and the use of
language in the unjust exercise of power. Critical text analyses might, for
instance, reveal how language choices such as transitive versus intransi-
tive verb, or active versus passive voice, or particular choices of modal
verbs or pronouns enable writers to manipulate the realisations (or con-
cealment) of agency and power in the representation of action (see Fair-
clough 1997 for a brief exemplification). Or, in a similar vein, a critical
analysis of a particular lexeme or set of lexemes might purport to show
how shifts in meanings over time both reflect and construct ideological
perspectives (see Stubbs 1997 for discussion of some relevant examples), or
how particular speech-acts reflect power relations in unequal spoken
encounters (e.g. Wodak 1997).
CDA is not without its critics, sternest among whom recently have been
Widdowson (1995a and b; 2000) and Stubbs (1997), both of whom have
taken it to task for its lack of rigour, its sometimes cavalier attitude to
form-functional relations and (particularly from Stubbs) its faith in the
usefulness of very small amounts of data. Equally, there is a whiff of
political correctness in much of what CDA presents, and a middle-class
left-wing bias and academic élitism which is often only thinly disguised
behind the unquestioned caring for minorities and the oppressed which
CDA practitioners sincerely possess. However, its voice within applied
linguistics is a powerful one; it is part of our professional discourse, and its
effects on the lives of those touched by the influence of applied linguistics
will depend, as with other philosophies and stances described in this book,
upon the persuasiveness of its rhetorical constructs and its perceived
relevance to a practical pursuit such as language teaching.
 6.4 Should applied linguistics be a critical discipline? - 133

Stubbs (1997), occupying a less opposed position than Widdowson, sees

possibilities for CDA to speak with a more persuasive voice by adopting a
corpus-based approach (see Chapter 6), acomparative methodology (across
texts and across cultures) and more attention to the reception of texts
(readers, intended audiences, etc.), rather than to the agenda of the ana-
lyst. Certainly, one can see the possibilities for a useful critique of the
discourse of English language teaching within Stubbs’ proposal. For
example, over the more than three decades that I have been involved in
ELT, there has been a largely unchallenged assumption that the world-
view of learners should coincide with the ideological concerns of a benign
middle-class. Thus teaching materials often display anodyne content re-
sulting from passing through the concerned hands of authors, editors,
reviewers, curriculum planners, etc. to an outcome guaranteed not to
offend any bourgeois sensitivity wherever it might rear its head on the
globe (see Dingle 1999). Or again, another interesting area for critical
research is the (shifts in) the dominant metalanguage of language teach-
ing research and methodology. Kramsch (1995) points to the metaphors of
freedom and individuality (natural approach, learner-centred instruction,
learner needs, etc.) which ‘happen to fit nicely into a certain dominant
democratic discourse that values learner autonomy and self-reliance, and
views with distrust any artificial manipulation of a learner’s interlan-
guage by social or political forces’ (p.50). But we are all prisoners of our
times, and in the decades that I have been in English language teaching I
have watched the metaphors of learning shift, from a rather Victorian
notion that language learning was a hard slog rewarding only the discip-
lined and assiduous (notions such as ‘drilling’, course book titles such as
Practice and Progress), through to the recent technological fetishism of
metaphors such as ‘processing’ and course books with titles such as
Streamline and Interchange. This is not to suggest that a conspiracy is afoot,
but simply to sketch at least a couple of agenda items for a critical
approach to the professional discourse of language teaching, nor is it to
deny the excellent conference presentations of late which are beginning
to question sexist, racist and culturist bias in teaching materials. Indeed,
in the area of language testing, one might say that a healthy critical
discourse has already developed which is asking many pertinent questions
about the power relations immanent in tests and the ideological founda-
tions of superficially ‘objective’ testing programmes (Shohamy 1994; 1997;
McNamara 1997; 1998).
In truth, one of the most apparent pieces of evidence that applied
134 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

linguistics has already been deeply influenced by critical approaches is the

very growth of the scope of the profession. A decade ago, Candlin (1990)
asked the question ‘What happens when applied linguistics goes critical?’
and answered by defining applied linguistics as both problem-oriented
and socially oriented, and by claiming for it territory far wider than that of
only language pedagogy. For Candlin, at that point in time, and one might
remark still true to a great extent now, what was lacking in applied
linguistics was a stance on ‘what our relationship was with our under-
standing of social structure, what our research methodology implied for
those whose data we were glad to have, [and] what impact we might expect
to have on language-related and language-sourced problems of our time’
(p.461). In the intervening decade, and very much influenced by figures
like Candlin, we have seen applied linguistics spread its net more and
more into the uses of language outside of the classroom, into other
professional contexts, and into social domains such as ageing, literacy and
counselling.
Rampton (1995) detects even more fundamental shifts in the political
ecology of applied linguistics (in Great Britain at least), and makes a
fascinating comparison between opposing models of literacy, as ex-
pounded by Street (1984), and opposing paradigms of applied linguistics.
In Street’s work, two basic views of literacy are propounded. On the one
hand it is ‘neutral technology’, a cognitive issue, a social advantage,
related to writing, which is itself distinctive, and the object of politically
neutral, objective research. This is the ‘autonomous’ model. It is opposed
by the ‘ideological model’, wherein literacy is seen as value-laden and
embedded in socio-political processes, where research is focussed on social
rather than cognitive issues, where illiteracy is not seen as a disadvantage
but as one of a set of social identities, and where writing has no special
privilege. The parallels with changes in applied linguistics as a whole are
striking. In the Britain of the 1980s, socio-political factors caused a shift in
the dominant applied linguistic paradigm towards an ‘ideological’ model.
Rampton cites Carter’s co-operative work with practising school teachers
on the Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project in mother-
tongue education as an example of the shift away from the autonomous,
academy-dominated model for such research that had prevailed in earlier
times (see Carter 1990 for an example of the products of this work).
Rampton’s arguments underline the way a profession such as applied
linguistics is or can become ‘critical’ in the broadest sense, even without
paying homage to the trappings of a specific sub-discipline such as CDA.
 6.5 Texts and users - 135

What is very clear is that applied linguistics is an ongoing discourse and

one which, in particular configurations of socio-political forces (in Brit-
ain’s case, 1980s free-market Thatcherism) engages in a self-critique and
embarks on new programmes of action that re-define it as a professional
enterprise. We have come to an applied linguistics which is far beyond the
rather simplistic notion of ‘applying linguistics’, the crow-bar approach
where linguistic theory provides the tool to dislodge the obstinate prob-
lems of language teaching and learning. Seeing applied linguistics as a
socio-politically embedded activity actually has the added advantage that
it underpins the autonomous notion of the profession, defined by Phillip-
son (1992), as a ‘scientific activity requiring the elaboration of its own
theoretical base in relation to its intended applications’ (p.176). That
theoretical base will flourish more independently when served by a critical
consciousness than when the profession simply acts as a conduit for
theories derived from linguistics. Corson (1997), for example, sees the
ideal context for the social embedding of applied linguistics in ‘critical
realism’, a body of theory originating in the philosophy of science
that values as real and valuable the non-human properties of the social
world, including people’s reasons and accounts of their experiences. For
Corson, too, applied linguistics should not just borrow its discourse from
linguistics.
What emerges from the debates over ‘criticality’ in applied linguistics is
the common thread of socio-political awareness of the status of applied
linguistics and its practices, whether directly in its day-to-day encounters
with language (CDA) or more diffusely in its general ethics and self:
positioning vis-a-vis linguistic theory and the societies and practitioners
that support its existence as a professional activity. Applied linguists, in
short, are not just people who apply linguistics; they are ‘applied’ in the
sense of ‘social practice’, and they exist and work in the language teaching
community, or whatever professional or social community their work
bears upon.

6.5 Texts and users

Corpus investigations work with texts, selected however imperfectly from

the spoken and written production of target populations, and it is tempt-
ing for the applied corpus linguist to believe that the texts in a corpus will
be a good resource for language teaching, which, in most ofits present-day
136 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

manifestations, considers the use of texts important. Critical discourse

analysts also have texts as their central resource. Once again, large ideo-
logical questions loom. Some of the questions include:

How representative are the texts in the corpus of the target culture?
Written corpora often include literary texts and newspaper texts. How
many people read literature as opposed to newspapers? Should a British
written corpus, for instance, contain 10 times more popular, tabloid
newspapers than quality broadsheet ones, to represent sales and dis-
semination?® Are literary texts useful in second language pedagogy
anyway?
Should texts be taken without editing from the corpus and imported
‘raw’ into the classroom? Does editing a corpus text destroy its natural-
ness and status as a piece of ‘real’ language (see the discussion in section
6.4 above)?
Is the fact that something is a real sample of language the same as saying
that it is authentic as a sample for language learning?
Can any texts (especially spoken ones) be wrenched from their cultural
context and dealt with mechanistically by corpus analysis and still yield
useful teaching material (Widdowson 2000)?

All of these questions are ideological ones and, as always, one’s stance
towards questions of language itself, the status of teachers and learners in
the teaching/learning process, and one’s view of how learning should
ideally occur affect how we frame our answers to the questions.
In one sense, of course, all texts ‘represent’ their culture, since texts
both reflect and construct cultures, but for language teachers and learners
the question is a more pressing one concerning cultural biases and cul-
tural relevance to the local situation. That even our most neutral texts are
culture-laden should not be in doubt, and one of the services CDA might
perform is to spotlight cultural bias. But often it is only the perspective of
history that enables us to see just how culture-laden language teaching
texts can be. If we take an example of a British-based text for English as a
foreign language teaching from as recently as the 1930s (Figure 12), we can
see in it a culture many of us would nowadays abhor and react to with
embarrassment. It is by no means certain that the consumers of the text in
the 1930s would have felt anything was wrong with it or that it was
abnormal as a piece of text for reading comprehension:
 6.5 Texts and users - 137

BREATH-TAKING ADVENTURES AMONG

CANNIBALS
|. |presume you have heard of James Chalmefs, a missionary in New Guinea, who was
eaten by cannibals?
J. Yes. | have heard the story. He was the son of an Aberdeen stone-mason, and
seems to have imbibed the passion for roaming with the first breath of sea air he drew.
|. He was sent to the far South Seas as a missionary, and after many years in New
Guinea he met a tragic end. One day he visited the natives of Gearibari Island along with
a friend. He knew that the natives he was to visit were among the most bloodthirsty in all
New Guinea.
J. |suppose he was courteously received by the islanders.
|. Yes, and escorted to the neighbouring village. On the way, without a moment's
notice, cowardly blows were rained on the head of Chalmers and his friend. Both fell
senseless.
J. What happened next?
|. Their heads were instantly cut off, and their bodies given to the women to cook for
the expected banquet.
J. When | was a missionary there | performed the bravest act of my life.
|. You took part in a cannibal brawl?
J. That is so. A native girl had run away to escape an unwelcome marriage, and an
attempt to bring her back by force led to a fierce fight between her sympathisers and
those of the would-be bridegroom.
|. Did you frighten the natives off with your rifle?
J. |was without firearms. The girl was in the centre of a wild-eyed surging throng, and
was in danger of being pulled limb from limb. | came single-handed to her rescue.
|. Did you use your walking-stick on the heads of the fanatics?
J. 1grasped a stout stick, and rushing amid a hail of arrows and stones, |forced my way
through the crowd. | took the girl, who had fainted, in one arm and charged the mob,
hitting right and left with the other. Never had | looked on death more closely. | expected
every moment to be my last.

Figure 12: From Wenlock (1937:49-50)

It is easy to laugh at such an obviously contrived text, but we should not do

so, for it is certain that our successors will find equally ridiculous many of
the texts we present learners with today, however well-meaning and
politically correct we may consider ourselves. We cannot escape the cul-
tural confines of our language, and only the most insipid sentences can
hope to escape reference to the culture in which they exist. Modern-day
corpora are full of equally culture-bound texts, and the applied linguist
who would apply them to pedagogy must always have this in mind. In this
respect, applied corpus linguists are not immune from the general debate
as to whether the teaching of English as a second language can distance
itself from the political, cultural, racial, gender and power issues raised by
138 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

the dominance of English in the present-day world, as convincingly laid

out by Pennycook (1999).
One option when faced with the problem of how to use the contents of a
corpus is simply to let the corpus decide, that is to say, to take the
‘corpus-driven’ approach mentioned in section 6.4, where no preconcep-
tions are allowed as to what the corpus will throw up, whether in form or
content (Tognini-Bonelli 1996). Another option is to attempt some sort of
editing, or to simply use the corpus as a source of guidance for the creation
of authentic-looking texts or for extracting lexico-grammatical informa-
tion, what I have called a ‘corpus-informed’ approach, which admits of
common-sense and experience in editing texts so that they are not off
putting or counter-productive in the pedagogical context. These two op-
tions are no mere practical issues, but involve ideological stances with
regard to faithfulness to external evidence versus the intervention (some
would say interference) of internal evidence (intuition, experience), as
well as the political and cultural issues mentioned above.
A further problem arises, though, and one which Widdowson (1998)
points to. Authenticity is not an objective characteristic of texts, but one
which users bring to texts by their ability and willingness to re-contex-
tualise them, to re-create the world of their original utterance. Widdow-
son takes the line that so-called ‘real’ language in the classroom (such as
corpus-driven materials) can hardly be experienced as authentic in the
sense that original participants experienced their creation: ‘The classroom
cannot replicate the contextual conditions that made the language auth-
entic in the first place’ (p. 715). Widdowson has a point. But his weakness is
that he tends to see the problem solely from the viewpoint of the savant
applied linguist. What we really need to test authenticity and relevance is
learners’ own reports. If learners find such texts fascinating and a chal-
lenge to the imagination (or at least as fascinating and challenging as
Widdowson’s alternative - a piece of literary text), then what is relevant is
not the texts’ claim to be real samples of the language, but their claim to
be more socially and culturally engaging than bland and lifeless sentences
and drills. 1am constantly struck by the way many L2 learners of English
report to me how useful they perceive TV soap operas in English to be in
their learning experience (and I can vouch for the same in my attempts at
learning Swedish). Learners, in the main, are imaginative folk, and quite as
capable of immersing themselves in the world of a conversational tran-
script as they are of doing so in a piece of literary fiction.
Literary texts are not mentioned idly here, for an important branch of
 6.6 Native speakers, expert users - 139

pedagogical applied linguistics uses literary texts as vehicles for language

learning. The work of Carter and Long (1991) and McRae (Carter and McRae
1996) is at the forefront of a movement passionately committed to the
value of literary texts as a source of language awareness and of productive
activity in the language classroom. Such work is a reaction against both
the belletristic approach to the reading of literature that passes as lan-
guage teaching in many quarters in the world, as well as against the banal
and dumbed-down world of shopping and vacations that informs the
content of so much language teaching elsewhere these days. Carter and
his associates (see Carter and Simpson 1989; Carter, Walker and Brumfit
1990) exploit the analytical resources of discourse analysis, modern prag-
matics and other types of language analysis to make our understanding of
literary creation as relevant as possible to our understandings of text
production and reception in general. Theirs is an applied linguistic dis-
course that attempts to bridge the gulf that grew up between the old,
belletristic tradition of academic literary studies and the rejection and
suspicion with which the communicative approach confronted it in the
1970s and 1980s. It is an ideology founded in a humanistic view of lan-
guage and language acquisition; as such it can be accused of being a mere
act of faith in an unproven methodology (see Edmondson 1997 for a robust
attack), but it is an important part of our applied linguistic discourse,
since literature teaching is still a significant element in the delivery of
language education in many parts of the world.
The use of texts, from whatever source, is a central aspect of language
pedagogy, but it raises issues of cultural ownership, and of the authority of
producers, too - a question that will re-surface in the next section.

6.6 Native speakers, expert users

One question that arises in any language teaching context is that of a

standard or norm for the target language. Traditionally, this has been
associated with the native speaker and, in the case of English, with old-
world educated native speakers and, even more narrowly, with writing
emanating from those sources (see Honey 1997 for examples of this view).
However, the reality of its target domains in many parts of the world
militates against the usefulness of such a model of standard English.
Examples to be considered are the role of English as a language of ‘develop-
ment’ rather than as a cultural vehicle in Modern India, as described by
Dasgupta (1993), or as a language of spoken business negotiations between
140 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

non-native users, as evidenced in the work of Firth (1995). The picture is

further complicated by the fact that written English, in its many manifes-
tations in the world, displays far less variety than spoken English. When
writing, users orientate towards standard norms; when speaking they are
as likely to orientate towards and accommodate to one another, and to
express themselves in one of the myriad English accents and dialects,
whether native or non-native. This raises an ideological problem for
corpus-designers. Should corpora play safe and stick to written data, or
should we plunge wholeheartedly into the kaleidoscope of spoken lan-
guage? The answer will depend on one’s ideological stance, rather than
some objective notion of representativeness based on statistico-metrics.
Carter and McCarthy (1995a) and McCarthy and Carter (1997) opt for an
informal spoken corpus, on the basis of what we can learn about spoken
language per se rather than any particular dialect, and place their faith in
the universality of spoken features such as indirectness, topicalisation,
modality, etc., even though realisations might differ from corpus to cor-
pus, depending on where it is sourced.
Another ideological issue is raised by using a spoken corpus of native
speakers, such as the CANCODE corpus. If the range of speakers is demo-
graphically representative, then clearly many levels of competence
(whether linguistic or communicative) will be apparent among the
speakers in the corpus, just as in writing. Traditionally, the great and
the good in written languages have been accepted as those defined by the
academic canons of university literature departments (itself a process not
without huge ideological bias, e.g. the exclusion of women writers). We
have no such list of the great and the good for spoken language, especially
ordinary, everyday communication. The spoken corpus will include many
speakers who seem intuitively able, clear, communicative and expressive;
it will also include those who stumble, who make a poor fist of getting
their meanings over, who display eccentric usages, and so on. Many of the
native speakers in a corpus will be less proficient than many non-native
speakers known to us.’ The automatic claim of the native speaker to be the
target user is therefore questionable. Seen from a communicative point of
view (and in many cases also from the point of view of grammatical
accuracy vis-a-vis standard grammars), there will be expert and inexpert
native speakers, and expert and inexpert non-native speakers. The ideo-
logical shift required is one that takes us from the notion of the native
speaker to the notion of the expert user, in the knowledge that both may
be rather difficult to define within our present discourse-frameworks. As a
 6.6 Native speakers, expert users - 141

programme for research within applied linguistics, identifying criteria for

expert use of a language like English in different cultural contexts is an
urgent one, and one which will be necéssary if we are to develop a notion
of standard that is not tied to old-world, written norms and perceived as
another manifestation of linguistic imperialism (see Rajagopalan 1997 for
further discussion). The alternative is probably unattainable: to assemble a
database that is truly representative of all the thousands of types of spoken
English that occur in thousands of contexts around the world, 24 hours of
every day.?°
Alongside all of these questions is the issue of local accountability: a
grammar or lexicon, or speech-act inventory even founded with the best of
intentions on expert-user based international research will need to show
its relevance to local contexts. We should bear in mind Kramsch’s (1993)
powerful vision of the learner as someone struggling not just with lexico-
grammar and pronunciation, but making the long and arduous journey
from one cultural context (the classroom) to another (the target culture),
crucially seeking that third place in between, where a transformed ident-
ity is forged. The texts (whether spoken or written) that learners are
exposed to are voices from the target culture; we necessarily owe it to
teachers and learners to identify target cultures in a relevant and usable
way. Corpora have the potential to build cultural bridges; they also have
the potential to reinforce cultural barriers. Local contexts are all-
important, but they may be unable to have their voices heard because of
lack of technological resources. In issues of technology, as in so many
other respects, applied linguistics suffers from the unequal weight of the
influence of the westernised industrial societies, and technological im-
perialism often goes hand in hand with linguistic and cultural dominance
and insensitivity. A new discourse is badly needed, one in which the
perceptions of technology and usefulness and real needs in local contexts
is embraced, one which requires a shift in the modes of dissemination of
applied linguistic professional discourse and a shift in level of awareness
within our profession."
Corpus linguistics, then, cannot bury its head in the sand and ignore the
ideological issues its growth has spawned. In its desire to get at real
language use and to reflect what ordinary users do with language, it has
disturbed a hornet’s nest of issues that pull in questions of standards, of
the status of native speakers, of cultural and technological imperialism,
and of how it expresses its own conceptual world in its metalanguage. It is
not special in these respects, as I have tried to argue throughout this book.
142 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

No view of language or way of approaching language is neutral; but corpus

linguistics, with its commitment to the world of-linguistics and to the
‘world-out-there’, epitomises so many of the issues in one go.

6.7 Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to home in on applied linguistics as a kind of

discourse. All discourse takes place in a social context, and applied linguis-
tics, because of its very definition as an applied, problem-oriented disci-
pline, cannot confine its discourse to within the walls of the ivory towers
of academe. I have argued that applied linguistic discourse is, and should
be, multi-voiced, and that the process of forming a disciplinary identity is
enacted on many levels, in theory, research practices, methods and tech-
nologies, and in the day-to-day fabric of our professional conversations.
The main risks to the healthy growth of the organism are ones touched on
in this chapter and elsewhere in this book: an over-enthusiasm to tie up
loose ends, get us all in line and singing from the same hymn-sheet, a lack
of awareness and sensitivity towards our ethical responsibilities to our
language-teacher peers and to language learners, a lack of awareness of
the social, political and cultural contexts that condition our activities, a
cosiness that comes from working in a narrow circle that excludes so
many of our peers from less privileged parts of the world, an over-inflated
sense of our importance in the world of language teaching, and a lack of
self-criticality.
The strengths of our profession are its willingness to engage in cross-
disciplinarity, the fact that a good many applied linguists are either still
in, or not too far away from, the classroom and the field to remember why
the profession exists, the fact that we are talking to one another, that
universities and governments are slowly coming to realise the value of
applied linguistics and are prepared to accord it validation as a discipline
and to fund its efforts, and the fact that we are, generally speaking,
curious people always interested to look at something new.
Setting out to write an introduction to applied linguistics is, in many
ways, a fool’s errand, and one over which I have vacillated and procrastin-
ated many times during the long period of gestation of this book. One
thing is for certain: there is no one introduction to issues in applied
linguistics that will cover everything and please everyone. Some will find
this book full of gaps, perhaps because their own area of applied linguis-
tics has received scant or no attention; others will find in me nought
 Notes -: 143

but bias and selfjustification. If I have a bias, and if you have not already
found comfort in it or been enraged by it, it is in my belief that, because
we are responsible to society in a unique way, we owe it to our interlo-
cutors to make sense of language as a social phenomenon. We also have a
duty, wherever we can, to mediate scientific explanations of its psycho-
logical and cognitive aspects, but without a social sense, such explana-
tions are merely interesting. I have attempted to do much, but, as the
Irish writer James Stephens said, ‘Nothing is perfect. There are lumps
in it’.??

Notes

= The Research Notes had a predecessor in the journal in the Recent Research in TESOL
column inaugurated by Spolsky in 1968, where, again, the ‘research study’ was
the centre of focus.
N See also Edge and Richards (1998) for an interesting discussion of the basis of
qualitative research in applied linguistics.
ioe) For example, chaos and complexity theory has recently been explored as an
alternative scientific paradigm for SLA, in which causality and linearity no
longer occupy a central position (Larsen-Freeman 1997). And this is by no means
only applied linguistic theorising at the level of the academy. At the time of
writing, at least one group of hard-headed chalk-face language teachers are
involved in serious investigation of chaos and complexity theory and its practi-
cal implications, in the city of Nagoya, Japan, centring round the JALT (Japan
Association for Language Teaching) Chapter.
4 I speak from personal experience here, having had the privilege of working as
an ‘apprentice’ with Sinclair in the 1980s at the University of Birmingham. I and
other colleagues watched with admiration as he progressively rewrote the
ground rules for interpreting linguistic data.
5 CANCODE stands for Cambridge and Nottingham corpus of Discourse in Eng-
lish. It is a 5-million word corpus of everyday conversation assembled in the
islands of Britain and Ireland, and forms part of the Cambridge International
Corpus. The corpus was established at the School of English Studies at the
University of Nottingham, UK, with funding from Cambridge University Press,
with whom the sole copyright resides. For a full account of the corpus and its
construction, see McCarthy (1998).
6 Iam grateful to Anne O’Keeffe of Mary Immaculate College/University of Limer-
ick, Ireland, for pointing out this problem to me and for suggesting a more
appropriate alternative.
7 Fairclough (1997:4) says of CDA that he assumes it ‘to be part of applied
linguistics’, though, in his case, an applied socio-cultural linguistics rather than
pedagogical linguistics.
144 - Applied linguistics as professional discourse

8 I am grateful to Henry Widdowson for raising this particular, very pertinent

question (personal communication).
This relates back to our question in section 4.3, as to whether non-native
speakers should be seen as users of other languages rather than as ‘failed
monolinguals’ (Cook 1997).
10 English, as usual, is the subject of argumentation here, though it should be
noted that similar problems exist in choosing models of multi-national lan-
guages such as French and Spanish. North American universities will often
adhere to the spoken model of metropolitan France rather than that of the
near-neighbour, French Canada, and publishers will vet language teaching
materials for use in Latin America in terms of their faithfulness to Castilian
Spanish norms.
11 It is well-known, for instance, that the major journals in our field tend over-
whelmingly to disseminate views emanating from the technologically ad-
vanced English-speaking centres (see Block 1996 for a discussion).
12 James Stephens (1882-1950) The Crock of Gold.
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Index

Page references followed by n refer to notes. Italicised terms refer to journal titles

abstract systems 44-7, 51, 60, 78 collocation 35, 36, 42n 62, 127
academic genres 113 comparative/contrastive studies 24
academics 19 compounding 29, 64, 67n
accountability 4-5, 7, 15, 89 computer-based projects 42n
acquisition studies 63 connectionism 83-4
age see critical age hypothesis context 56, 62, 116
allegiance 7 conversation analysis 102-5
Applied Linguistics 123 corpus linguistics 62, 88, 124-30, 141
applied linguistics 21n critical age hypothesis 91n
relationship with linguistics 4 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 131-5,
applied linguists vi 143n
associative approaches 82-4 cross-linguistic comparison 28-43
attitudinal approach 43n cultural issues 136-7, 141
audiolingualism 70-1, 90n
authenticity 138 deep structure 82
demonstratives 14, 55, 107
bachelor, semantic properties 17 derivation 29, 64, 67n
bilingual communities 81-2 description 15, 20
dictionaries 8, 9, 16, 19, 24
CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham discourse 96-9, 142
Corpus of Discourse in English) spoken 26, 100-1, 128
128, 129, 130, 140, 143 discourse analysis 36-41, 49, 99-102
Cartesian linguistics 46 discourse grammars 11, 105-10
case grammar 45 discourse-marking 39
casual conversation 101, 115
chaos and complexity theory 143n ellipsis 56
Chinese 29, 31 expressive need 78, 79
Chomsky, N. 70
language as an abstract system 45, Fairclough, N.
46, 106 on critical discourse analysis 132,
transformational-generative 143n
approach 57 form 40
chunking 63-4 frame theory 17-18
classroom settings 80-2, 121, 122 functional grammars 59
clause-relational analysis 98 future time 33
clauses 59, 108
co-construction 109 generalisation 49
cohesion 59, 98 genre studies 116
college composition 14, 15 genres 111-14

173
174 - Index

German 43n literary texts 138-9

goal-orientation 114-16
grammar marking see discourse marking
cross-linguistic comparison 31-4 mediation v
future time 33 metalanguage 111, 128
history 23-6 methodology 15
it and demonstratives 10-15, 55, 107 mind metaphor 84-5, 87
models of 53-60 mis-communication 40
problem solving 7-8 mode 95
models 5, 20, 44-67, 120, 144n
Hallidayan grammar see systemic morphology 28-31, 64, 67n
grammar
historical perspective 22-6 native speakers 139-42
Neo-Firthian approach 62, 67n
ideology 130-41
idiomaticity 127 paradigms 54, 55, 90
inflexion 28 pastness 105-6
input-output metaphor 86 pedagogy-induced difficulties 34
instruction 87 phase structure 113
interference 12 phonetics 65-6
interlanguage 74-7 phonology 36, 65-6
intonation 36-8, 43n 66 pluralism 74
it 10-15, 55, 107 poor, dictionary entry 19
Italian 43n power 132
practice v
Japanese 43n practitioners see language teachers
journals 2, 68, 71, 117n, 144n pragmatics 11, 39, 47
Applied Linguistics 123 Prague school 96
TESOL Quarterly 119-20, 117n probabilistic grammars 126-7
problem-solving 1-5
Kernel Lessons Plus 58 pronouns 14, 32, 54, 55
Krashen, S. 85, 86, 106
regularity 127
laboratory conditions 77-9, 81 research 118-24
language 9, 22-43 Research Notes (TESOL Quarterly) 119-20
as abstract system 44-7, 51, 60, 78 143n
knowledge about 27 responsibility see accountability
as social phenomenon 47-9, 56, 60 rhetorical structure analysis 97
language data 88 Roget Thesaurus 16
language loss 89
language teachers 3, 19, 48, 124 schema theory 97
language teaching v 9-19, 29, 51, 95, second language acquisition (SLA)
104 68-91
languages 22-3 semantic fields 35
Latin 23, 24, 31, 42n 54 semantics 45
lexico-grammatical analysis 39 sentences 11, 51-3, 67n 99
lexicography 8, 16-19, 35 service encounters 103-4, 111-12
lexis 34-6, 56, 60-5 settings 80-2
linguistics 21n Sinclair, J. McH., on corpus linguistics
relationship with applied linguistics 127
4 small talk 112-13
literacy 134 snapshots 81, 82
 Index : 175

social orientation 66 theory-building 120, 122, 123

socio-cultural approaches 84-8 thesauri 16-19
socio-cultural context 40-1, 47-9 tones 43n
Spanish 54 topic 15
speech 93-5 traditional methods 70-1
speech genres 111-14 transcription 103
speech-act theory 39-40, 47, 67n transfer 12, 74-7, 83
spoken discourse 26, 100-1, 128 transformational generative (TG)
stance 6, 41 grammar 57-8, 67n
standard English 139, 141 translation 41
stereotypes 40, 43n typology 28-31, 43n
strategies 13
Swedish 54 universal grammar 23, 25, 45, 74
syntax 56, 127 users 135-42
systematicity 74, 75 utterances 56, 99, 114
systemic grammar 59-60, 86
variation/variability 75, 76, 78, 80
teachers see language teachers Vygotsky, L. 101, 106
TESOL Quarterly on zone of proximal development
Forum 117n 87-8
Research notes 119-20, 143n
testing 89, 133 Welsh 49
text 96-9 Widdowson, H.G.
text linguistics 96, 98, 99 on authenticity 138
texts 135-9 on corpus linguistics 128, 129
thank you, use in service encounters on theory-building 123
103-4 word-formation 64, 67n
theory 4, 5-7, 20, 40 writing 93-5, 117n