An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

8 CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have considered recent attempts to define applied linguistics,
emphasising the importance of various ostensive methods of definition and
comparing the lack of clarity about applied linguistics to that of other applied
History and ‘definitions’ 11
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disciplines. The chapter ends with the unorthodox suggestion that all linguistic study
is basically applied linguistics, with applied linguistics seeking out and working on
language problems which linguistics responds to by idealising and then analysing in
terms of current linguistic theory.
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An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
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Chapter 2
Doing being applied linguists:
the importance of experience
‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to drive life into a
corner and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to
get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.’
(H. D. Thoreau (1854), ‘Where I lived and what I lived for’,
in 
Walden
, published in 
Writings
(1906), vol. 2, p. 101)
1 INTRODUCTION
Chapter 2 begins with a brief discussion of the importance of individual experience
in applied linguistics and on its drawbacks. I then illustrate the variety of language
problems addressed by applied linguists by reference to seven case studies. Finally,
four pairs of study areas are described in order to illustrate the range of research and
development work in applied linguistics.
2 INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE
In Chapter 2 I examine some applied linguists’ work in order to gain an under -
standing of the problem-based need for applied linguistics, its purpose and the skills
it draws on. I want to suggest that the skills that applied linguists bring to their work
include their own reflection on their own experience of language problems. This of
course is true of all professionals but is likely to be a stronger influence in a discipline
which reifies language practices rather than, as linguistics does, language. 
The importance of personal experience of institutional language problems
becomes very clear in teaching applied linguistics. Those who have taught applied
linguistics at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels will be aware how hard it
is to give an undergraduate class the language-teaching (or other language pro -
fessional) experience which they normally lack; as a result we may wonder whether
applied linguistics is teachable at the undergraduate level. We often find that post -
experience graduates meet us half way. They bring their own experience, their
intuition about language problems and are ready for the courses we offer; they want
to find their experience illuminated. Undergraduates do, of course, have experience
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of their own language learning, but they are unlikely to have reflected on that learn -
ing, to under stand what it is that needs illuminating, they have not recognised the
problems for which we may discuss explanations. No doubt the pragmatic answer to
this pedagogic difficulty is to teach a very different applied linguistics at postgraduate
and undergraduate levels, but the danger always is of providing examples and exer -
cises (for example error analysis, comprehension questions and Labov-type markers)
that are as unreal and idealised as any workbook in descriptive linguistics.
The link between reflective personal experience and instruction from others is
the message of George Fox’s account of his own spiritual quest. Fox, the founder of
Quakerism, wrote in his journal:
Now after I had received that opening from the Lord that to be bred at Oxford or
Cambridge was not sufficient to fit a man to be a Minister of Christ, I regarded
the priests less and looked more after the dissenting people … I saw there was
none among them all that could speak to my condition … I heard a voice which
said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when
I heard it my heart did leap for joy … Thus, when God doth work, who shall let
it? And this I knew experimentally.
(Nickells 1975: 11)
The