An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

a text
rather than how to analyse and read 
texts
. Where have we heard this before? Isn’t it
reminiscent of Lyotard: there is no one unique reason, there are only reasons?
What this suggests is that Corder, and that era of applied linguistics, were indeed
‘modern’ and ‘structuralist’, and that in its subsequent practice applied linguistics
has become less concerned with over-all solutions. As with the development of
communicative competence in part, this has been influenced by the lack of success
in using applied linguistics to improve language teaching in any direct way. What
it also shows is that applied linguistics is really concerned with approaches and
questions and not with solutions. As it actually has always been. What has changed
is that this has perhaps become more explicitly marked in the practice.
‘The context determines and affects the learning’ – that comment helps explain
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the phenomenon World English(es). This expression, Bolton writes, ‘is capable of a
range of meanings and interpretations’ (Bolton 2004: 367). More widely, it refers to
the global use of English, and is sometimes referred to as international English(es).
More narrowly, ‘the term is used to specifically refer to the “New Englishes” found
in the Caribbean and in West Africa and East Africa, societies such as Nigeria and
Kenya, and to such Asian Englishes as Hong Kong English, Indian English,
Malaysian English, Singaporean English and Philippine English’ (ibid).
There is a third sense of the term, associated particularly with the scholar Braj
Kachru and the journal 
World Englishes
with which he has been closely associated for
over twenty years, and is informed by an explicit political concern, well stated by
Kachru and Smith in their 1985 editorial: ‘The language now belongs to those who
use it as their first language, and to those who use it as an additional language,
whether in its standardised form or in its localised form’ (Kachru and Smith 1985:
210).
For the applied linguist, such a claim raises the issue of what it means to be a
native speaker (see the discussion in Chapter 8) and how far ‘localised forms’ which
are, presumably, not standardised, can be owned by those who use them. In other
words, if Indian English, Kenyan English and so on are not standardised (as are
Australian English, Canadian English etc.) then what distinguishes them from a
combination of British standard English and some vocabulary differences? These
are central applied linguistic issues because they reach into syllabus, textbook,
proficiency test and teacher education (which model is expected?) as well as issues
of identity and discrimination (see Davies, Hamp-Lyons and Kemp 2003). What
distinguishes the growth of World Englishes from earlier spread of English is that this
expansion is of English as a second language. The question for applied linguistics is
what norms World Englishes speakers observe and, by implication, how far language
spread requires native speakers.