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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: APPLIED LINGUISTIC APPROACHES1.1. The use of linguistic description
My original aim in undertaking this research was to provide a characterization of aspecified area of scientific English which would serve as a basis for the prepara-tion of teaching materials for people learning English as a service subject for thefurtherance of their scientific studies. Such an aim seemed to fall neatly within thescope of applied linguistics since it was directed towards meeting an existing pedagogic need on the one hand, and on the other involved the application of anexisting model of grammatical description which had already been used for thekind of textual analysis I had in mind. The pedagogic need had arisen from an increasing awareness that the teach-ing of English was being called upon to perform an essentially auxiliary role to which existing attitudes and techniques were not naturally suited: specialist groupsof learners were emerging who needed the language to gain access to the basiccontent of their speciality. From the mainstream of general ELT were appearing tributaries of ESP (English for Special Purposes) and EST (English for Scienceand Technology). There was a call for the provision of courses directed at meeting specialist needs and based on a sound description of the different “varieties” of English to which these needs corresponded (see Perren 1969, 1971). The linguistic model which promised to provide the means of describing these different “varieties” of English was Halliday’s scale and category grammar.In Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) we find what amounts to a manifestofor the applicability of this grammar for the analysis of different areas of Englishusage as a preliminary to the preparation of specialist teaching materials. Pointing to the need to direct English teaching to meet the emerging requirements of “aninstitutional kind”, mention is made of “English for civil servants; for policemen;for officials of the law; for dispensers and nurses; for specialists in agriculture; forengineers and fitters.” (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964: 189). To cater forthese special needs for English, linguistic analyses of the “registers” associated with each have to be carried out:
Every one of these specialized needs requires, before it can be met by ap-propriate teaching materials, detailed studies of restricted languages and spe-cial registers carried out on the basis of large samples of the language usedby the particular persons concerned. It is perfectly possible to find out just what English is used in the operation of power stations in India: once thishas been observed, recorded and analysed, a teaching course to impart suchlanguage behaviour can at last be devised with confidence and certainty.(Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964: 190)
Here it seemed was a clear delimitation of a relevant area of research in ap-plied linguistics with a ready-made descriptive model provided. It soon becameapparent, however, that it was based on two very questionable assumptions. Thefirst comes to light when one begins to consider what kind of information
2 An applied linguistic approach to discourse analysisemerges from the analysis of a corpus of language in terms of grammatical catego-ries. What emerges in fact is information about the relative frequency of the to-kens of different types of linguistic element: the passive, the past tense, the non-defining relative and so on. What we get from such an analysis is a characteriza-tion of a corpus of language as an exemplification of the code as represented by aparticular model of grammar. This may serve in some sense as a validation of themodel but it gives little indication as to how the code is being put to actual use inthe performance of different acts of communication. It is not enough, for exam-ple, to say that the passive is of common occurrence in scientific texts: we also want to know how this fact contributes to the particular character of a scientificstatement. In spite of what is said in the above quotation, in other words, the ob-servation, recording and analysis of text with reference to linguistic categoriesdoes not constitute a characterization of “language behaviour” if by this we meanthe way people use language to communicate. The first questionable assumptionthen has to do with the extent to which a grammar can be used to account forlanguage use and consideration of this question must be the first step in outlining a satisfactory approach to the analysis of discourse. The first difficulty in pursuing my original research aim arose then with therealization that the characterization of language use was not simply a matter of applying existing models of grammatical description to the analysis of data. To putit another way, discourse was not simply linguistic data but a form of communica-tion whose character could not be captured by a statistical statement of the rela-tive frequency of its constituent linguistic elements. Lurking behind the assump-tion that it can be so characterized, as implied in the quotation cited above, is theold ambiguity in the term “language”, which both de Saussure and Chomsky havebeen at such pains to resolve, and a fundamental confusion about the scope of grammatical description. This issue is taken up in the next chapter.
1.2. Theoretical value and pedagogic utility
The first assumption has to do with basic theoretical issues concerning the natureof language and the proper domain of linguistic description. The second has to do with the relationship between linguistics and language teaching and the manner in which such a relationship is mediated by applied linguistic studies. What is sug-gested in the quotation, and indeed throughout the whole book from which it hasbeen drawn, is that the satisfactory preparation of language teaching materials isdependent upon a prior linguistic analysis. The image one has is of the appliedlinguist in attendance on the linguist, and waiting for an exhaustive linguistic de-scription which he can then apply to the production of “appropriate” teaching materials. But of course the linguist’s criteria of theoretical adequacy do not haveto coincide with the language teacher’s criteria of pragmatic appropriacy, and theapplied linguist’s concern must be with the latter rather than the former. It is truethat the precision with which the linguist is required to investigate linguistic phe-nomena may lead him to discoveries beyond the reach of the relatively untrainedawareness of the teacher, but it does not follow that such discoveries will alwaysbe relevant to a particular teaching situation. What is theoretically valid may have
Introduction: applied linguistic approaches 3little pedagogic utility and what has pedagogic utility may have little or no theo-retical value (see Corder 1973). This is a point which the more proselytizing lin-guist tends to ignore. Again we may quote from Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens(1964) since, again, this book expresses a very common and very pervasive view of the role of linguistics in language teaching pedagogy:
(the teacher) is teaching something which is the object of study of linguis-tics, and is described by linguistic methods. It is
obviously
desirable that theunderlying description should be
as good as possible
, and
this means that it should be based on sound linguistic principles
. This is the main contribution that the linguistic sciences can make to theteaching of languages: to provide good descriptions. Any description of alanguage implies linguistics ... It is a pity then not to apply the linguisticsbest suited to the purpose.
The best suited linguistics is the body of accu-rate descriptive methods based on recent research into the form and sub-stance of language.
There is no conflict between application and theory:
the methods most useful in application are to be found among those that are most valid and powerful in theory
.(Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964: 166-7; my emphasis)
The notion that what is a good description from the linguistic point of view must necessarily be good for language teaching appears to be a matter of faithrather than of reasoned argument. Moreover it leads to a number of practical dif-ficulties. The establishing of “accurate descriptive methods” has proved to beextremely elusive, and there is a good deal of controversy as to what “sound lin-guistic principles” might be. One has only to refer to Postal (1964) to see how precarious the kind of methods and principles that the above quotation are refer-ring to can prove to be. One can hardly expect language teachers to be pedagogiccamp-followers after the style of Paul Roberts (see Roberts 1956, 1962, 1964) andto adjust their approach to teaching in accordance with the shifts of linguisticfashion. In fact, Halliday himself later acknowledges (Halliday 1964) that it may bepossible to think of various descriptions of language, subject to different stan-dards of adequacy according to their purpose, rather than of one “correct” or“accurate” one. Although such a view might be criticized on theoretical grounds,as it is for example, in Wales and Marshall (1966), it would appear to be the only valid one for the applied linguist to take. It happens that the line taken by Halliday in Halliday (1964) runs counter to the psycholinguistic orientation to languagestudy which Wales and Marshall adopt: paradoxically the idea that there may bedifferent linguistic descriptions according to purpose does not suit their particularpurpose. But there is no reason why their special pleading should be given specialstatus.But if linguistics cannot provide descriptions which are good for all purposesand which therefore can automatically serve as a basis upon which teaching mate-rials “can at last be devised with confidence and certainty”, what contributiondoes linguistics offer to language teaching pedagogy? I think the answer to thisquestion is suggested by the distinction that Wilkins makes in a recent book be-tween three ways in which linguistic theory may have an effect on the practice of the language teacher.
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