An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

2 PROBLEMS
Language matters so much in our everyday thinking, our learning outside school, our
communicating with one another that it inevitably arouses passions and creates
problems. Applied linguistics exists to try to explain the passions and suggest sol -
utions to the problems. To some extent, as we shall see, the passions and the problems
are connected so that explanation of the passion is itself part solution of the problem.
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What are some of these problems? There are problems of language use, the well-
known ones of what it means to be correct (and whether it matters), of whether some
accents are better than others, of the language disadvantages some children face at
school because of their social class or ethnicity, of understanding instructions on
domestic appliances and on official documents (such as tax forms). And then there
are the lesser known problems of institutionalised misunderstandings such as police
transcripts, doctor–patient communication, the language–content relation among
subject specialists (e.g. chemical engineers, information scientists), and authenticity
in simultaneous interpreting.
In each case what we have is what appears at first sight to be a straightforward
language problem. That of course is true, but that is not all there is. In the first place
the problems are about language and its users or its context; in the second place, they
often concern our feelings about ourselves, our insecurity and our identity, our
children and their future, our attitudes to others, including our prejudices, our view
of truth and of community.
The role of applied linguistics is to recognise that these problems (often) cause
deep passions and need to be viewed as more than language issues. Thus debates
about the teaching of reading are often presented as a polarity (for mother-tongue
speakers) between the phonic method (sounding out the letters) and the whole word
(or whole-language) method and (for second/foreign-language learners) between the
use of simplified reading materials and authentic reading materials. Which is right?
Why do these debates arouse such passions? Are the opposing views in the event
incommensurable?
The well-known problems of language usage may be similarly deconstructed.
The notion of correctness, of using correct English/French and so on arouses strong
feelings, especially among those who contribute to the letter columns of newspapers.
For them (as indeed for all prescriptivists) the problem is one of simple error that
language use is always right or wrong. And yet a more engaged analysis, an approach
from applied linguistics, will ask questions about the currency of alternative forms
and about the role of language change. Such an analysis may suggest that the appeal
to correctness may be a vain attempt to restore a form or a meaning which is already
lost or disappearing (such as ‘It’s I’ now lost to ‘It’s me’, or ‘uninterested’ now re placed
by ‘disinterested’, or ‘different from’ now losing ground to ‘different to’).
Just as errors, both of grammar and of word choice, are condemned as simply
wrong by those who wish to uphold standards, so some accents of English (e.g.
Birmingham, Broad Australian) are stigmatised as ugly and uneducated. There are,
of course, no intrinsic grounds for such stigmatising, any more than there are for
racial prejudice. Those who see accent prejudice as solely a language problem are
inclined to wax indignant, to maintain that all accents are equal (forgetting perhaps
the continuation of the 
Animal Farm
motto: but some are more equal than others).
For them, therefore, there is no problem: society has the duty to behave differently
and overcome its prejudices. The applied linguist, however, is likely to recognise that
it is indeed a problem and that it extends beyond language, reflecting social and
political (and possibly ethnic) values. Accent stigmatising is 
par excellence
a socially
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embedded language problem. Maintaining that it is a real problem, that some
accents are more valued socially than others, does not mean approval any more than
it lays claim to a solution. In attempting to make sense of language problems, by
contextualising them, applied linguistics does not necessarily solve but it does hope
to explain.
The accent problem parallels the educational code problem whereby working-
class children (we might extend the involvement to ethnic-minority children) are
said to be disadvantaged educationally because the code of communication they use
at home is different from the school code, which is largely verbal and is close to the
code of the middle-class home. As such the middle-class child has little gap between
home and school, while the working-class child has a chasm. The model in which
Basil Bernstein (1971) put forward this proposal in the 1970s was heavily attacked
from two quarters: first, because these ‘codes’ were not describable linguistically and,
second, because the proposal appeared to attack the language of the working class.
And yet the model appealed greatly to teachers, since it offered an explanation of
why working-class children often performed less well at school. In consequence,
Bernstein’s model of restricted (working-class) and elaborated (middle-class) codes
became common knowledge in educational circles, especially among teachers of
English.
In fact, Bernstein had never claimed that his model was primarily about language:
for him language was only part of the communication code, which also involves
context and social role and sense of self. Indeed, what he was proposing was a kind
of applied linguistic model while what he was mistakenly attacked for was for
appearing to be talking only about language. Or perhaps there were other reasons
for the attacks, since similar proposals in the USA (by, e.g., Brice Heath 1983) have
not been so pilloried.
Problems with instructions and information (on machinery and appliances, on
official forms) are of two kinds: inadequate translations from the maker’s language
into the user’s language and inadequate conceptualisation of the nature of instruction
and of the need to make the language of instructions accessible to all readers, whose
literacy skills will vary hugely. Consider this advice from a telephone directory:
‘HYPHENS: Names which contain a hyphen are treated as two words and are sorted
according to the first name. The second name is treated as initials. This does not
apply to hyphenated names which begin with a prefix.’
Examples follow:
A-Grade Machines
Afnan G.
Agar L. F.
Agar-Lyons B.
Agar P. M.
AGRA Products
Alfonso M.
Some of the examples have hyphens, some don’t; there are no obvious prefixes. Given
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the mass audience for whom local telephone directories are intended, this advice is
somewhat opaque.
Organisations such as the Plain English Movement offer a kind of applied
linguistic approach to such problems, proposing ways (both verbal and non-verbal)
in which the language may be simplified and the reader’s attention engaged.
Institutionalised misunderstandings may not be so well known but for those
affected they can be overwhelming. One such problem concerns the interaction
between the police and members of the public who are involved in some way in
police investigations, both witnesses and accused. The taking of a statement by the
police (analogous to the taking of a clinical history of a patient by a doctor) gives
considerable scope for error, ranging from complete fabrication of what was sup -
posedly said to a biased interpretation of what was meant by the interlocutor to a
genuine misunderstanding. Such errors need not be deliberate, even though they
sometimes are. More likely perhaps is the situation in which the police are convinced
of the guilt of an accused and therefore find themselves impelled to an interpretation
of what was said which could lead to a conviction. In the days before tape recordings
of statements were mandatory, the room for error between what was said and what
was actually written down was wide. The written statement was signed by the
accused, of course, but even then error was possible: the accused might be only