An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Oxford English Dictionary
still allows ‘experientially’ (in the light of experi -
ence) as one of the meanings of ‘experimentally’. Fox’s point is that he is rejecting
scholastic theology (or as we might say theory) in favour of personal experience. It is
not statements about God, however systematic they may be, that matter but personal
experience.
However, relying wholly on experience brings its own problems. First, personal
inspiration can be dangerous: the purpose of the religious intermediary such as a
priest is to provide a necessary check on enthusiasm and a correction to delusion and
at the same time to offer a framework within which individual experience can be
understood. This framework was provided in Fox’s case by ensuring that there was
always a group judgement to provide an interpretation of individual experience.
Second, even this community re-interpretation was eventually found wanting,
in part no doubt because it could not cope with the inevitable tendencies towards
populism and anomie. Some kind of theology was found to be necessary to explain
and connect individual and community experiences.
Applied linguistics may seem a long way from Quakerism but the insistence
on the necessity to begin with experience is the link. As we shall see, again like
Quakerism, applied linguistics has found its own need for theorising. The insistence
on function, the appeal to looking at what applied linguists do, at their actual
experience rather than what they say they do, these are also close parallels. What do
applied linguists do? That is the central theme of this chapter.
But first I want to consider the question in the light of my own experience. In
1962 I came back to the UK after a four-year period as an English teacher in a
Kenyan secondary school, where English was the medium of instruction. I had
gone there after some years teaching English in England and had had no training
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whatsoever in teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language. My four years were
disturbing and informing. They made me aware of language teaching and language
learning and conscious of my own inadequacy. In particular, I observed that the
African students I was teaching were weak in advanced reading techniques (as I
later came to call them); they could not summarise, they could not understand
moderately difficult texts; they could not write coherently; and above all they lacked
awareness of the cultural background on which much of their reading depended.
Contrariwise, it seemed to me that the demands made on the students, their
examinations, were unrealistic, though against the background I had come from and
in the institutional context in which they studied, those demands were under -
standable. In essence, they were no different from those of the native speaker. The
native speaker! That useful myth whose abilities we take for granted, ignoring the gap
between our idealised model and the real-life variation that surrounds us (Davies
1991a, 2003). The examinations my students presented for were, I thought, unfair.
(Later I would call them invalid.) It seemed that others thought the same since,
during my stay in Kenya, Makerere University College (at the time the only
university-level institution in East Africa) decided it would no longer require a pass
in English language for entrance, on the observable grounds that many able students
(passing well in science subjects, for example, all in the medium of English) were
failing in the English language examination.
I came back to the UK looking for informed advice. At the time I might have said
I wanted a solution to the problems I had met: problems of inadequacy in myself, in
my students and in the system. I looked first in a university English department but
soon found that they could not understand the problem I found it hard to articulate.
A university education department was more helpful in putting me in the way of
a partial solution by setting me the task of (and giving me the facilities for) con -
structing an English language test for one level of proficiency in English as a Second
Language.
What I needed, I came to think, and still think, was not a solution to the problems
of second-language teaching, but an explanation or (perhaps we should not avoid the
word) a theory. Explanation is a torch-like term, we tend not to question it, though
in real life we are aware of how infinitely regressive explanation can be. What I was
looking for was some coherent view (or even views) on language and language
development.
Shortly afterwards, I was appointed to the staff of the Department of Applied
Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh. And no, I did not find solutions. Nor did
I find 
the
explanation, but I did find an atmosphere in which language was discussed
in ways that I have found helpful. And I am not alone in this. My experience is not
unlike that of many of the graduate students who come to Applied Linguistics
courses every year with ‘problems’ to which they want solutions. What they find is
that no solutions are provided but explanations are. What they also find among their
teachers and fellow-students is a community they can identify with, which shares a
common language in which they can make sense of their individual experience and
which provides a discourse framework.
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What all kinds of useful explanation have in common is that they demand
generalisation, that is that they must be applicable to similar events and causes. What
those students have found is that language learning in Japan is not so different from
language learning in Germany or in Manchester. This is both releasing personally
and effective academically because it permits objectivity. And in its turn objectivity
clears the way for the kind of theorising which illuminates experience and is changed
by it.