An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

3.3 Defining a profession
The definition of a profession appears to be straightforward. In Webster’s Third
Dictionary (1994), the definition of profession is:
a calling requiring specialised knowledge and often long and intensive prep -
aration, including instruction in skills and methods as well as in the scientific,
historical and scholarly principles underlying such skills and methods, main -
taining by force of organisation or concerted opinion high standards of achieve -
ment and conduct, and committing its members to continued study and to a kind
of work which has for its prime purpose the rendering of a public service.
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What has happened this century is a flight into professionalism, a result of the
rising proportion of occupations that have required a high standard of education.
Many of these occupations have aspired to professional status. In the first half of the
last century the number of males in professional employment in the UK increased
five-fold (from 1 to 5 per cent). The criteria for professional status can be short-listed
(by Wilensky 1964, for example) or long-listed (Musgrave 1965). On the basis of the
short-list (full-time, a training system, a professional association, a code of ethics),
applied linguistics makes the cut. The issue is less clear on the long-list: knowledge
base, conditions of service, public recognition, all yes; control of entry, controlling
professional association, code of professional conduct, all are queries.
3.4 Need for reflection
We can distinguish perhaps between a profession and a trade union in terms of
knowledge and what the teacher-education literature calls theory. Accounts all
emphasise the need for the professional of reflection, of being aware. Educationists
such as Wallace (1991, 1998), Woodward (1991) emphasise the need to operation -
alise this awareness through action research, whereby all teaching is a means of
reflecting on theory, fusing the one into the other. This is not a new idea: Michael
Young’s 
Innovation and Research in Education
(1965) argued for making education
a continuing experiment. In applied linguistics much of the teaching at Master’s
level can be thought of as innovative, as a form of action research, encouraging
reflection.
Where does the reflection, the ability to reflect, come from? Is it innate, to be over-
easily labelled as a matter of personality and therefore not our responsibility,
or can it be taught? In my view it is teachable. The bringing together of the how 
to reflect and the what to reflect on is, I suggest, exactly what applied linguistics is
about. It is after all a commonplace among those who teach applied linguistics that
new students (with or without language-teaching experience) begin their courses by
not seeing why applied linguistics asks the questions it does ask and end their courses
by asking those very questions themselves through their projects, and their disser -
tations and their seminars.