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CRITICAL  APPPLIED  LINGUISTICS  AS  A  SOCIAL  FIELD  

Chapter for C. Leung & B. Street, Eds. Handbook of English Language Studies.

CRITICAL APPLIED LINGUISTICS AS A SOCIAL FIELD

Radha Iyer, Margaret Kettle, Allan Luke, Kathy Mills*

*authors listed in alphabetical order

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

INTRODUCTION
Their substantive differences in theory and method aside, Foucault and Bourdieu
shared a will towards making transparent the first principles, assumptions and
practices of academic fields. Bourdieu’s (1972) reflexive sociology is an attempt to
'objectify the objectification', to turn the lenses of the field upon itself as if it were a
hierarchical system of cultural exchange. While Foucault's (1972) archaeological and
genealogical methods divorced texts from historical speakers and reconceptualized
disciplines as discourses, Bourdieu's approach was to structurally outline the
relationships within a field, looking for the field’s codification in formal academic
institutions and structures, and naming its operational principles of exchange and
teleological principles of capital. In so doing, both stepped away from traditional
assumptions about the scientific disinterest or paradigmatic coherence of disciplinary
inquiry.
This chapter takes English language studies and critical applied linguistics as
historically situated social fields. We make the case that state and corporate
institutions, and specific political economies that redefined the English language as a
form of national and transnational capital, drove its genealogy. Our aim here is to
document three genealogies of the formation of English language studies and applied
linguistics:
(i) the emergence of applied linguistics as a service technology for the postwar
development and aid paradigm of English-speaking geopolitical and economic
empire;

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(ii) the turn towards 'critical’ applied linguistics and language studies over the
second half of the century in relation to 1960s social movements in the West,
and liberationist movements in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts:
(iii) current reformations of applied linguistics as a normative model for
promoting linguistic and cultural diversity in the contexts of globalization and
transnationalization.
Our aim i to move away from the description of the field as a set of foundational
truths about language (cf. Cumming 2008), and to identify and anticipate its historical
re-objectification and reformation in relation to current geopolitical, material, and
cultural contexts.

THE FORMATION OF A FIELD: POSTWAR APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Prior to World War Two, the field of linguistics remained focused on Saussurean
structural analysis of language as pre-existing systems (langue) with little interest in
everyday use (parole). The post-war period was characterized by large-scale
intranational and international efforts to reconstruct social and economic
infrastructure by and on behalf of the interests of victor states, led by the US, UK, and
the Soviet Union. In this period, applied linguistics emerged as part of a broader
development paradigm of post-war American economic and cultural expansion,
which coincided with Britain’s deliberate withdrawl from imperial governance.
Postwar development and aid via the Marshall Plan and the American and European
reconstruction of a neo-colonial order in Asia (modeled in McArthur’s governance of
postwar Japan) contributed to the expansion of English-speaking businesses,
corporations, and politico-military spheres of influence (Judt 2010), and the
ascendency of English as the new transnational language of diplomacy, media and
trade. Despite the unraveling of the British Empire, the legacies of British English
were adopted and sustained via postcolonial schooling and universities, systems for
governance, legal and civic life, religion and trade. American English extended its
dominance in post-war geopolitical reconfigurations and development agendas.
London and New York emerged as key corporate headquarters for banking and
financial services, corporations and transnational non-government organizations.
In this section we examine the relations between models of social and national
development, applied linguistics, and English in the post-war period. We argue that
the period was marked by the technologization of linguistics, that is, the enlistment of

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linguistics qua foundational discipline to address perceived state and corporate needs
for large-scale foreign and second language teaching, language planning for culturally
and linguistically diverse populations, and universal compulsory literacy education
for poor and rich, females and males, metropolis and hinterland. Language thus came
to be a key institutional and cultural technology in the post-war competitive formation
of human capital, the expansion of Anglo-American corporate capital more generally,
and in a new transnational division of communications media, knowledge, and
information.
The term ‘applied linguistics’ first developed currency in specialized language
teaching programs in the USA after World War Two (Wei 2011). The field was
inaugurated in the journal Language Learning, published by the University of
Michigan and founded in 1948. Charles Fries was editor and the first volume covered
topics reflecting language priorities and perspectives in the emerging Cold War
period. Topics included the motives for studying modern languages; the grammatical
and phonological features of languages such as Russian and Spanish; accelerated
literacy through alphabet teaching; and the spoken language program of the army
Japanese language school at the University of Michigan. Davies (2007) argues that
the initial forays into applied linguistics were more ‘linguistics applied’, thanks to the
defining role of linguists such as Fries. Note also the significant role of the growing
government, military and security infrastructure in funding the university-based
expansion of language studies and expertise (cf. Reisch 2005).
Applied linguistics first constituted a field with postgraduate qualifications in
the 1950s. Its initial focus was on language teaching with a focus on practice and
policy. The process of defining the emerging field prompted debates between those
who saw applied linguistics as an umbrella for semi-autonomous fields and
disciplines (e.g., Spolsky 2005), and those who regarded it as a unifier of principles
around language knowledge and real world decision-making (e.g., Cook 2003). After
World War Two, applied linguistics was seen as an institutional means for improving
the language knowledge of teachers and teacher trainers. A key example of this
approach was the focus on language teaching with associated interests in language
planning and translation dominant during the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Corder 1973).
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dell Hymes and colleagues at Harvard and
later at the University of California, Berkeley, initiated a cross disciplinary dialogue
that conjoined their interests in Native American ethnopoetics, ethnography, semiotics

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and other fields into a consolidated focus on ‘language in use’ (Silverstein 2010: 935).
Their aim was formalise the work of Sapir, Levi-Strauss and others into the
‘ethnography of communications’, a field that would later extend root and branch into
work in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionist
sociology, developmental psycholinguistics, pragmatics and interactional
sociolinguistics. Though many of these initial efforts were funded by scholarly and
research organizations with an eye for applied dimensions, Hymes, Gumperz, Cazden
and colleagues clearly viewed their task as the foundation of a new transdisciplinary
field.
As editor of the first volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
(ARAL) journal, Robert Kaplan (1980) wrote of the challenge in identifying the areas
that were definably more ‘applied’ than ‘theoretical’. Kaplan (1990) argued that
applied linguistics was the practical nexus of all social science and was most fully
realized in the then emergent field of language planning. For him, language planning
brought together multiple disciplines for the task of normatively and technically
engineering language use in society. Applied linguistics, then, meant research and
development activity that responded to the ‘immediacy’ of locally-contextualized
institutional language problems (Davies 2007). Many of these problems were directly
affiliated with the social and demographic effects of colonization, decolonization
and/or migration, and also the need for specific linguistic expertise for the expansion
of postwar capitalism.
The propagation of English and its affiliated language ideologies, then, figured
centrally in the development of applied linguistics as a field (Kaplan 2001; Phillipson
1992). It is worth noting that, to this day, almost all international conferences and
scholarly forays into applied linguistics are conducted in English. Post-war applied
linguistics research, then, was primarily directed at efforts to resolve the language
planning and education questions characterizing the period, that is, nation-building,
the emergence of transnational capital trade and exchange, and the spread of Western
spheres of influence in the context of Cold War opposition and contestation.
Language policy and planning as a distinct field of study within applied
linguistics emerged in the 1960s through the work of Joshua Fishman, Charles
Ferguson and others. Language planning was problem-driven; it was the complex,
future-oriented process of planning and controlling language change for the purposes
of meeting perceived needs of social, economic and cultural development (Rubin and

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Jernudd 1971). Drivers for language change included: needs for scientific
information, nationalism and identity; trade and tourism; and the growth of
urbanization and bureaucracies (Baldauf 1990); and demands for education and
literacy (Wright 2004). Local demographic, political, social and economic contextual
conditions were incorporated into models that combined the social status of a
language or language variety (status planning) with the internal conditions and forms
of the language (corpus planning) (Haugen 1983). Status changes impact on peoples’
language rights while corpus changes develop orthography, vocabulary and
dictionaries for the purposes of extending a language’s functionality, particularly in
government, education and trade (Clyne 1997).
In the post-World War Two period, language planning was viewed as a key tool
for nationhood and modernization as former colonial states negotiated their positions
within the geo-political divisions and alliances of the Cold War. The push was for the
formation of new national identities, affiliations, and citizenships around the
formalization of official national languages (Gellner 1994; Hornberger 2002).
Linguistic nationalism was, therefore, a key component in nation-building and the
imagining of a nation as community (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawn 1987). The newly
formed nation states of Eastern and Western Europe – divided between the ‘West’ and
Soviet blocs – moved towards the reconstruction of models of cultural and linguistic
monoculture despite defacto multilingual and multiethnic development in the interwar
period (Judt 2010).
In many postcolonial states, language policy decisions had more to do with
operational efficiency than ethnic authenticity (Fishman 1969). Indeed, as European
colonialists withdrew from Asia and Africa, many of the new states (although not all,
for example, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) retained their previous colonial boundaries
rather than reestablishing prior shared or singular ethnic and language bonds (Wright
2004). Consequently, many postcolonial states were multilingual and multi-ethnic. In
this context, language planning decisions were often directed at resolving conflicting
agendas between development, education, secularization, and unity, on the one hand;
and local identity and participation, on the other. Under this new social equation,
nationhood in many African, Asian, and South and Central American states was
asserted through the assertion of singular, identifiable national culture and linguistic
homogeneity. In the case of India, Singapore and many other states, this entailed
balancing local vernacular and postcolonial political concerns with the demands for

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engagement with emergent American and UK geopolitical and economic power.

In theory, the processes of implementing language change involved
authenticating a chosen language and designating a group of persons as mother
tongue speakers (Kaplan 1990). But while governments – and emergent postcolonial
economic and political elites – were keen to establish national and economic
independence, they were also engaged in the development possibilities afforded by
relationships with former colonial powers (Luke, McHoul and Mey 1990). The
language planning focus was one of decolonization moving to modernization (Ricento
2000) with modernization often associated with English (and, in Africa, with French).
Indeed multilingualism was seen by some language planners as negatively correlating
with development and national prosperity (Lo Bianco 2002). The debates about the
continued reliance on former colonial languages such as English pitted the need for
local identity and sovereignty against the need for a language of wider
communication to access science, technology and infrastructure development.
In post-colonial contexts, then, education reform was a critical part of
decolonization and modernization. In nation-building programs in Southeast Asia
after World War Two, language of instruction policies ranged from ‘monoistic’ policy
prioritizing instruction in one national language, often a postcolonial language (e.g. in
Indonesia), to ‘dualistic’ instruction in both the national language and a foreign
language, usually a former colonial language like English (Abhakorn 2003: 80-81).
Dual instruction was most evident in post-colonial countries such as Brunei,
Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. In each case, the national language was
used to emphasize national identity and unity while English, already entrenched in the
postcolonial education, legal and civic administration systems, retained its importance
for science, commerce, and the state.
In India, Hindi was designated the official language and English, the former
colonial language, was given ‘associate’ official language status (Sonntag 2002). Also
acknowledged in the Indian constitution were the major regional or state official
languages. In India, as elsewhere in the colonial world, nationalists used the
ideological tools of colonialism, that is, English and Western education, to challenge
the legitimacy of colonial rule (Wright 2004). Nationalists such as Gandhi argued
against English as it was the tool of colonial oppression and an impediment to Indian
cultural identity and equality. Yet many of these arguments were marginalized after
independence when Prime Minister Nehru advocated English as the tool for the

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formation of a modern, industrial, and secular future for India (Sonntag 2000).
English was also deployed in the service of national unity objectives; its associate
official language status was legislated to allay Southern Indian concerns about the
adoption of Hindi as the official language. Similar decisions were made in African
countries. In Zambia, English was adopted as the lingua franca and language of
instruction on the basis that the selection of a Zambian language/languages would
invite fracturing along ethnic lines (Baldauf 1990).
Emergent African countries, like elsewhere, faced language-planning questions
about building capacity in areas of education, the civil service, economics, and
technology without the dependency of colonially imposed English. Debates divided
between those advocating a recentering of African languages in education and those
wanting continued reliance on English but with transformations originating in the
African experience (Mazrui 2002). Key education-related responses included
indigenization and domestication. Indigenization involved language of instruction
decisions in countries such as Tanzania that replaced English with Swahili.
Domestication was the insertion of indigenous imagery, pronunciation, and lexis into
local forms of English. Conversely, efforts to modernize local languages such as
Swahili for academic purposes by borrowing from English raised concerns that the
language would become not only more modern but also excessively Westernized.

THE CRITICAL TURN IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

A critical turn in applied linguistics emerged with the discourses of domestic civil
rights and multiculturalism in America and Europe, and ‘third world’ liberation in the
1960s. Our use of the term ‘critical’ here draws from neo-Marxian and Frankfurt
School critical theory. These set the terms for a sociological analysis of relations of
language to social, economic and cultural power in contemporary capitalist societies
(Mey 1985). They also set the grounds for the normative, revolutionary work on
language and literacy by Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire (1970),
which brought together Marxian hermeneutics, liberationist theology, and Christian
existentialism to argue for a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’.
Inaugurating the field of the ‘ethnography of communications’, Hymes and
Cazden (1972) coined the term ‘speaking rights’ to refer to the linguistic rights of
cultural and linguistic minority and vernacular speech communities. Following the
landmark case of Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, which declared the racial

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segregation of students unconstitutional, language studies focused on lexico-

grammatical descriptions of Black English and an awareness of the silencing of
Native American languages, communities and children (Gumperz and Hymes 1972).
Applied linguists observed the rapid loss of vernacular languages and loss of fluid
bilingualism by immigrants in the US and other predominantly English-speaking
countries. Works in interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of
communication defended the speaking rights of cultural minorities, set against the
hegemonic effects of the spread of English – a legal and cultural battle that continues
to this day in the United States.
William Labov’s (1970) influential essay – ‘The Logic of Non-standard
English’ – argued for the cognitive and social equality of all languages regardless of
their political or economic status. Hymes (2001) and colleagues consistently argued
for the need to study and document the everyday linguistic practices of speakers in
minority and Indigenous speech communities. Researchers combined ethnography
and linguistics to document the differences between available narrative language
resources in users’ early socialization (e.g. dialect variation, genre mastery, cultural
semantics, discourse strategy), and mainstream institutional functions and uses (Ochs
and Capps 1996). Concepts that were nominally derived from linguistics and
affiliated fields of semiotics, such as speaker-listener, speech act, speech community,
and appropriateness, began to be seen as socio-cultural variables that explained the
production of educational and social inequality. Comparative studies of the role of
language showed that the nature and evaluation of language ability varies cross-
culturally (Hymes 1996).
This social and critical turn in the field of English language studies was
accelerated by decolonization, with countries throughout the world moving towards
the formal recognition of vernacular languages (Jirgens 1998). For example, Bahasa
Malay became the national language of an independent Malaysia in 1957. Similarly,
different ethnic and linguistic communities within nation states claimed language
rights, such as Catalan, Kurdish, or Quebecois French where colonial settlements or
nationalist imposition had overridden those rights. Hence, strands within applied
linguistics were concentrated on understanding language loss and language
revitalization, and on documenting the political, cultural, and economic forces and
effects of linguicide in Indigenous, postcolonial and developing communities
(Zagorin 1999). The development of English-speaking human capital via

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instrumental approaches to second language learning – the core functions of what we

referred to as the post-war technologization of applied linguistics – were implicated
empirically in migrant and vernacular language loss, via the institutional suppression
of minority student language rights (Crawford 1992).
In the United States, the English Only Movement emerged in 1981. American
Senator S.I. Hayakawa, a high profile Asian American scholar and semanticist,
sponsored a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the
United States. Such moves contrasted the formalization of a Universal Declaration of
Language Rights (UNESCO, 1996). In the United States, English teaching
organizations like the National Council of Teachers of English issued major position
statements on ‘students’ right to their own language’ (NCTE, 1974).
From these historical contexts, a newly minted ‘critical’ approach to applied
linguistics emerged. It brought together neo-Marxian social analysis, philosophic
post-structuralism and Frankfurt School critical theory in models such as critical
discourse analysis and critical language studies (Kress 1990), critical linguistics
(Fowler and Hodge 1979), critical applied linguistics (Pennycook 2004), and
educational models of critical literacy (Luke and Freebody 1997). Objects of inquiry
included language, gender, and sexuality, language and cultural difference, post-
colonialism and resistance (Canagarajah 1999), racism (Van Dijk 1984), colonialism,
linguisticide, and the rights of linguistic minority communities (Phillipson 2004). This
work builds a theoretical account of the relations between language, society, power,
and ideologies, and the deploys practical ways to critically analyze texts of everyday
life. The critical turn in language studies moved away from a positivist definition of
linguistics as neutral science, and from the instrumental definitions of applied
linguistics as operating in the service of dominant ideologies, states and capital
interests. It effectively set out to redefine applied linguistics as a critical intervention
on behalf of linguistic rights, within the context of normative models of economic
redistribution, political democratisation and social justice.

In the late 1970s, Critical Linguistics was formulated by Australian and

British linguists and cultural theorists (Hodge and Kress 1979). Their approach was
based on Halliday's (1995) Systemic Functional Linguistics, which described the
relationship between the grammatical system of English and the social functions via
three interconnected linguistic metafunctions – ideational (field), interpersonal

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(tenor), and textual (mode). Formalizing this into the subfield of ‘critical discourse
analysis’, the work of Fairclough (1985, 1989) sets out ‘…to help correct a
widespread underestimation of the significance of language in the production,
maintenance, and change of social relations of power’ (Fairclough 1989: 1). He
examines how orders of discourse are themselves dimensions of the social orders of
institutions or societies that are constituted by relations of power (Fairclough 1989).
Lemke’s (1995) analysis of film and media is based on a view that all meanings are
made in communities, and consequently, the analysis of meaning should not be
separated from their social, cultural, historical, and political context.
Critical work of the last four decades has focused on inequality and power in
institutional language use. Many other studies examine various genres of institutional
and professional discourse, such as texts and talk in the courtroom (Lakoff 1990),
bureaucratic discourse (Burton and Carlen 1979), corporate discourses (Ehlich 1995),
political discourses (Wilson 1980) and educational discourses on pedagogies, social
class, and institutional power. Taken together, this corpus of work refocused applied
linguistic studies on language as a means for power and dominance, cultural
hegemony and ideological control. A key feature of the critical turn was to retain the
Hymsian commitment to a focus on everyday language practices and uses, while
connecting this with a broader, normative political analysis of institutional and social
structures. The latter was achieved through the enlistment of new theoretical
resources for applied linguistics, specifically the foundational political and social
analyses of Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, Bakhtin and others. This had the effect of
further moving applied linguistics away from its positivist and descriptivist
foundations in Saussurean linguistics and raising foundational questions about its
development as a postwar technology for capital and the state.

GLOBALIZATION, ENGLISH AND COSMPOLITAN ELITES

According to Giddens (1994: 5), ‘globalization is not a single process but a complex
mixture of processes, which often acts in contradictory ways, producing conflicts,
disjunctures and new forms of inequality’. A key impact has been the creation of new
linguascapes (Pennycook 2007), which display immense diversity in the face of a
seemingly inexorable homogenising process. Bourdieu (1998) describes globalization
as “ a myth”… a powerful discourse, an idée force …which obtains belief” ( p. 34).
This definition begins to explain why many non-English speaking countries continue

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to move towards the adoption of English as a second language (L2). The global flow
of information, accessible technology, and the emergence of powerful transnational
corporate products, brands and affiliated discourses have made it easy for languages
that cross borders like English. New world languages, like Mandarin and Hindi are
blending with English in cosmopolitan settings, in particular, taking the lead to
integrate diverse interests from trade and media to education. Further, the outsourcing
and off-shoring of service, language-intensive service work (e.g. call centers,
financial services) to English-speaking workers in India and the Philippines are
indicative of the manner in which global media, telecommunications and internet
technologies are increasing the proliferation of English as a medium for service labor
(Cowie, 2007). They are generating new conditions for its dialectal variation and
regionalization. Quite literally, global economic and cultural relations are creating
new, distinctive and blended kinds of speaking subjects and speech communities.
The ascendency of English as a language of transnational work has enhanced
popular perception that it is central to cosmopolitanism and to the creation of a
‘glocal’ identity (Harris, Leung and Rampton 2002; Pennycook 2011). Working
without a political economic analysis, linguists like Crystal (2003: 120) acknowledge
the imposition of English via colonization, but then argue that its global ascendency is
due to its ability to be ‘in the right place at the right time’. This is a naïve view of the
complex linguistic markets and fields of exchange that have emerged with shifts in
material conditions and geopolitical relations in a ‘post-Cold War’ period (Chen,
2010). The proliferation of world language English, and economic and cultural
globalization sit locally in reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relationships
(Tollefson 2007). English has gained currency as a global language through the
merging of European and Anglo-American economic interests, global white collar
and refugee migration, global politics, and the proliferation of the internet and
telecommunications links.
Kumaravadivelu (2008: 32) perceives the social, cultural and individual
engagement with globalization as a significant factor in language learning. A reason
for English taking such a lead is to be found in it being a ‘post-imperial’ language,
where the struggle to retain a neo-colonial language is often projected as an essential
aspect of employment (Fishman, Conrad and Rubal-Lopez 1996).
In this new linguascape, Pennycook (2011) observes English has become a
conduit for the transfer of technology as of culture, while at the same time capacity

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with English has become a dividing line for new ‘social, political and economic
inequalities’ (Tollefson 2000: 8). Bauman (1998: 102) adds that the ‘uninhibited
transfer of information and instantaneous communication’ has been accompanied by
‘an almost complete communication breakdown between the learned elites and the
populous’. Hence, notions of free trade, connectivity, and borderless exchange have
become covers for a new species of transnational language planning: where
transnational organizations – from NGOs like the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and their aid and development proxies to transnational corporations – operate through
and with English (Phillipson 2004). This has the effect of redefining the processes of
technologization of language that we described earlier in new material contexts: re-
creating centre and periphery relationships between the developed largely English-
speaking industrial and postindustrial blocs, and non-English speaking rural and
industrial countries.
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or English as a Second Language (ESL)
are multi-billion dollar industries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas.
While this work might have had relatively humble, if overtly ideological beginnings
in government-supported and controlled organizations like the British Council and
Voice of America, in present day contexts, such colonization operates through the
emergence of large-scale corporate edubusiness (Luke 2011). Thomson Reuters, for
example, owns both the IELTS Cambridge assessment systems and is one of the
largest EFL textbook publishers in the world. Online English teaching has become a
large-scale financial enterprise in China, with multiple state and private providers
teaching English-language to the largest cohort of English learners in history (Kettle,
Yuan, Luke, Ewing and Shen, in press). Further, the ‘neutral’ (native British and
American) accents are most popular, preferred and emphasized in call centre training
in countries like India and the Philippines.
Even though English is not the most widely spoken language in the world,
varied nation states promote English instruction as an official or ‘defacto’ second
language (Tollefson 2007). The countries that have designated English as a
mandatory school subject include Germany and China. As Bolton (2008: 6)
illustrates, about 812 million speakers of English exist in South Asia, South East Asia,
and East Asia. This is based on ‘informed estimates’ in the countries that constitute
the outer circle. For example, 30% speak English in India, 50% in Singapore, and
48% in the Philippines. In the expanding circle, 25% speak English in China, 10% in

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Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan, and 20% in Japan. One outcome of such growth
has been the increased dialectal variation of English, with Indian English, Singapore
English, or emergent Malaysian English. These hybrid dialectal variations and their
speech communities are resistant to the colonial imposition of inner circle native
speaker English (Canagarajah 2006). At the same time, scholars like Kobayashi
(2011) document the aspirations of Japanese students to learn a version of Standard
English, with non-native varieties viewed as deficit (Siedlhofer 2004). In these ways,
conditions of globalization are leading to a hierarchical stratification of capital
affiliated with specific varieties of English, stratification that is beginning to replicate
the traditional centre-periphery relations.
Old habits die hard. English and French now sit in re-established relationships
of ‘communicative imperialism’ (Cameron 2002: 70) where ‘global’ communicative
norms … involve a one-way flow of expert knowledge from dominant to subaltern
cultures’. As Cameron (2002: 81) observes, such communicative imperialism results
through one communication style, often American, being sanctioned largely through
‘multinational corporations and Western consultants’. Thus, while the control exerted
by English is attributed to British colonialism in many parts of the world, the global
norms are currently dictated by an American version of English being sold by native
speakers undertaking TESOL related jobs and the American media. Regardless of the
variety of English used, learning English is perceived as acquiring cultural capital that
enables social, cultural, and economic viability and prestige (Sasaki 2008). Even
though English attained the status it holds at present through a violent history of
enforced vernacular in countries like India and Sri Lanka, the power it holds and the
advantages it bestows retain for it a dominant position in language learning. In
countries like India, Korea, China, Pakistan, meritocratic status is achievable through
learning English (Ross 2008); this applies as well in many Spanish-speaking countries
in the Americas. As Lin and Martin (2005) argue, long after the imposition of
colonialism, and long after the Cold War, English educated elites continue to accrue
social and economic advantages in postcolonial settings.
Niño-Murcia (2003) documents the cultural capital that English has in
agricultural-villages in the Andes. In Dubai, the investment in English learning in
public schools has given rise to private schools and English learning, with steady
displacement of Arabic over the past 50 years (Randall and Amir Samimi 2010).
Despite such studies that document the rhizomatic spread of English, the irony is that,

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as Bruthiaux (2002) argues, the poor are rarely concerned with the relevance of
English as a language.
When critics have noted a decline in the position of native speakers of English
(Graddol 2003), it has been largely due to the increase in the speakers of other
languages such as Hindi and Mandarin rather than a decline in the interest to learn
English. In these regions moreover, while the native language speakers have
increased, English still maintains its status as the preferred language of trade, politics,
diplomacy, tourism, and research (Bolton 2008). With the increase in English
language teaching and learning in countries like China, Japan, and India, the
ideologies that surround it are determined by official policies, often via mandated
school curriculum. Subsequently, although globalization has brought about a
dispersed sense of citizenship leading to many languages becoming transnational, it is
English that has become an iconic signature of the global cosmopolitan elite – even
for those whose first language is French, a colonial language that similarly competes
for the status of global lingua franca.

THE CHALLENGES FOR APPLIED AND CRITICAL LINGUISTICS

We have here attempted to objectify the field of applied linguistics in relation to the
past six decades of the expansion and articulation of English as a dominant world
language. Our argument is that the development of applied and critical linguistics as
a field has been informed by an emergent political economy of English. By political
economy, we refer to the complex relations between the expansion and spread of
capital, the state, corporations, and markets. It is here, in the classical definition of
political economy, that language is a principal site for the interests of capital to shape
everyday cultural and relations of exchange.
In sum, the field of applied linguistics was codified in the postwar period to
address the specific sociolinguistic problems of language teaching and use. But as an
applied field, its agenda and formation were institutionally supported, funded, and
evolved in relation to specific social, economic, and political problems identified by
the state, by corporations, and by cultural and political elites. The three pathways we
have discussed here are themselves historically and materially produced. As such,
they can be seen in terms of a movement of a field in relation to specific historical
material conditions – both in terms of the global division of wealth, power, and
information, and in terms of intra and international social and cultural relations.

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We have here argued that there are two distinctive historical genealogies for the
field of applied linguistics. The first was the postwar aid and development model,
where the disciplinary knowledge and models from ‘linguistics’ were allied with
those of other fields, including sociology, social policy, psychology, and
anthropology. This set the grounds for a technologization of linguistics – where it was
transformed into a field defined by its practical focus on the problems of the postwar
era. Specifically, the need for English language teaching occurred in a period when
the US became the world’s largest economy and most powerful geopolitical force.
This required systematic governmental and social policy approaches to language in
postcolonial and multilingual settings. The result was that the development of applied
linguistics, and its subfields language planning and language teaching, were yoked to
the postwar expansion and extension of English.
Yet this very connection yielded its theoretical and political ‘other’: the
emergence of strands of language studies, linguistics and sociolinguistics that were
critical of the collateral effects of the powerful model of English as a form of
transnational social and economic capital (Luke 2004). That is, however ideologically
neutral and scientific the founders of the field of applied linguistics may have wished
the field to be – it was more informed by postwar material conditions and geopolitical
polarization than it might have appeared. In short, state, capital and ideology defined
the horizon of what would count as a ‘language problem’, a ‘language planning’ need,
or even a green field site for the development of second language or dialect
instruction.
The same could be said about the post-1968 infusion of ideology critique and
social movements across the social sciences. In effect, the second genealogical turn
towards ‘critical’ studies is a re-objectification of the field of applied linguistics: that
is, a dialectical ‘othering’ of the predominant assumptions and discourses of
Eurocentric development, and a reconnoitering of the possibilities for a critical or, as
Hymes (1996) put it, a ‘meditative science’ that would ethnographically represent the
experiences, aspirations, histories and cultures of those who were the objects of, first,
colonization and ‘civilization’ and, later, development and modernity.
But following the logic of our first two ‘objectifications’ of applied linguistics –
the field articulated its applied dimensions in relation to the new relations of
language-knowledge-power emergent in this century’s seeming inexorable embrace
of the social, cultural and economic phenomenon that we now refer to as

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globalization. This involves the challenge of representing and responding to the

problems raised by new material conditions and social relations. It includes the
emergence of new markets and political economies of language, information, and text
as these spread across culturally and politically diverse, non-synchronous life worlds
and communities.
However, even in the case of the hegemonic spread of English, the binary
development and critique models have their explanatory limits. Much of the current
work in applied critical linguistics traces this ambiguous pattern of development. The
shift to World Englishes from Standard British or American English is seen as a
nativization (Dissanayake 1985) or as Kachru (1987) perceives it, hybridization.
Capturing the dialectics of development and critique, Pennycook (1994: 262)
observes that English is not only a language of ‘international capitalism’ but it also
has become the ‘language of opposition’. Clearly, the unequal status such varieties
occupy (Shin and Kubota 2008), and the ‘structures of inequality’ that dominate such
hybridization processes (Ruanni and Tupas 2004: 50) must be taken into account.
Contrary to Kuhnian (1962) models of paradigm change, largely derived from
his analysis of progress in the physical and biological sciences, academic disciplines
and applied fields of study do not change solely or principally through radical shift in
epistemic or methodological orientation wrought by persistent and irresolvable
problems. Instead of epochal shift within applied linguistics, we have traced the
interconnected genealogical strands whose continued institutional half-lives depend
upon the continued salience of their concrete problems and contexts. In the non-
synchronous work of cultural and economic globalization, there is a remaining place
for development work, for the spread of language teaching and learning, and for the
coming of Eurocentric knowledge and languages as the media of modernity pace the
burgeoning markets for English language teaching in China and India.
There remains a continued need for critical work in applied linguistics that
maintains the interests of poor, marginalized and culturally diverse communities
against the effects of state-sponsored linguistic nationalism, the expansion of
multinational corporations and exploitative forms of capital, and the proliferation of
new media messages and ideologies. The next wave of applied linguistics will need to
respond to a renewed set of problems that do not necessarily have their origins in
colonization, the Cold War, or its aftermath. These include emergent conditions such
as the rise of Mandarin, Spanish, and other world languages as the media of cultural

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CRITICAL  APPPLIED  LINGUISTICS  AS  A  SOCIAL  FIELD  

and economic exchange; the shift in the critical mass of English-speakers away from
the UK and US; and the affiliated hybridization of English. In the coming decades,
we might even encounter a Handbook or encyclopedia of applied linguistics that is,
indeed, written and published in languages other than English.

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CRITICAL  APPPLIED  LINGUISTICS  AS  A  SOCIAL  FIELD  

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FURTHER READING
 

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CRITICAL  APPPLIED  LINGUISTICS  AS  A  SOCIAL  FIELD  

Paltridge, B. and Phakiti, A. (2010) Continuum companion to research methods in

applied linguistics, London: Continuum.
This book covers a range of approaches, methods and issues involved in researching
applied linguistic topics including second language macro-skills, learner variables and
gender.

Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction, Mahwah,

NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
This book argues for the adoption of critical social perspectives in the field of applied
linguistics.

Sonntag, S. (2003) The local politics of global English: Case studies in the linguistic
globalization, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
This book engages with the current debates and complexities characterizing the
globalization of English.

Word count: 8184

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Radha Iyer is a lecturer in The School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education,
Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her
publications and research interests are in literacy, multiliteracies, media, new media
literacy and critical discourse analysis.

Margaret Kettle is Lecturer in TESOL at Queensland University of Technology,

Brisbane, Australia. She teaches a range of ESL and applied linguistics courses. Her
research interests include second language teaching and learning, international Higher
Education, and Critical Discourse Analysis.

Allan Luke is Professor of Education at Queensland University of Technology,

Brisbane, Australia. He previously taught language and literacy education,
educational sociology and policy at Simon Fraser University, James Cook University,
University of Queensland, and Nanyang Technological University.

Kathy Mills is Lecturer of language and literacy education at Queensland University

of Technology. Dr Mills has published widely in the fields of multiliteracies,
multimodality, reading comprehension, new pedagogies, cultural diversity, critical
ethnography, and literacy assessment.

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