An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

5 ETAL SERIES AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS CURRICUL A
Corder (1973) was well aware that in limiting the coverage of applied linguistics
to language teaching he was open to criticism. To some extent his defence was the
mirror image of the 
Language Learning
change of name. There the rationale was that
the input was too undefined and therefore it was sensible to remove the label of
applied linguistics. Corder argues that it is the output or target that is without shape
and therefore it makes sense to limit the area of concern to one main object, that of
language teaching.
Spolsky (1978) has proposed a different solution, that is to limit the name of the
output to Corder’s area of concern and to call it ‘educational linguistics’, a proposal
he has put into action in his 
Concise Encylopedia of Educational Linguistics
(Spolsky
1999 and Spolsky and Hult in press and see Chapter 4 below).
There are voices insisting that applied linguistics should fulfil a role wider than
language teaching (for example Kaplan 1980a). There is a seductive appeal in such
a view, an appeal which slips all too easily into a science of everything position.
M. Bloomfield appears to beckon to this:
This volume, then, concentrates on the human problems of language and tries to
identify some of them and so indicate what is being done about them. The rise
of ethnic consciousness and militancy as well as a general dissatisfaction with the
‘way things are’ have led to a new stress on what may be called applied linguistics
and the social dialect problems … Problems of literacy, translation, bilingualism,
language teaching, language and nationalism, the role of dialects and so forth have
become urgent and some of our best minds have begun to turn towards these
matters.
(M. Bloomfield 1975: xviii)
What Bloomfield is suggesting is no different from what others (for example
Brumfit) have proposed but the magnitude of the responsibility he lays on applied
linguistics makes the modest scope proposed by Corder quite appealing.
The extent to which applied linguists see themselves as agents of change is
controversial (Pennycook 2001, Davies 2003b, Sealey and Carter 2004). As current
concerns with the ethics of the human sciences remind us, there is a tension for social
scientists between their role as objective students of society and as agents of change.
Such an opposition was noted in the 1960s in the area of cultural anthropology.
Commenting on the field, Margaret Mead wrote:
There is some difference at present between (a) those who would regard applied
anthropology as a profession for which anthropologists, in addition to a
theoretical education in some branch of anthropology, must be specially trained
and within which professional standards should prevail; and (b) those who
identify applied anthropology with a form of anthropological research which
either continuously or at some point becomes part of and affects, the process of
change which it studies. It must be stressed that either view involves a search for
values, rooted in the discipline of anthropology, which can guide the applied
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An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
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anthropologist in any use of his knowledge at any level of interaction in human
affairs.
(Mead 1964: 33)
The more involved with human affairs the scholar becomes, the more difficult it is,
as Mead argues, to resist the second alternative, which means that scientific
objectivity is no longer possible (Skutnabb-Kangas, Phillipson and Bannut 1994,
Searle 1995). Like applied cultural anthropology, applied linguistics has also felt
the tug of the particular and the urge to identify locally. We take up this dilemma in
Chapter 2 and again in Chapter 7 where I discuss critical discourse analysis and
critical applied linguistics. 
A glossary, with all its limitations, is one way of defining the field. Another is to
survey the volumes that have followed the first edition of this