An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.2 Professional morality in applied linguistics
Ethics has a clear role in institutional settings where there is concern to declare and
to limit individual rights and responsibilities. This applies particularly to professions.
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House offers this definition: ‘Ethics are the rules or standards of right conduct or
practice, especially the standards of a profession’ (1990: 91).
These rules are often encoded in a Code of Practice or Code of Ethics. The British
Association for Applied Linguistics, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in
1997, issued a document for discussion in 1994 entitled ‘Draft Recommendations
on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics’. Good practice in applied linguistics, the
document makes clear, is based on the acknowledgement of responsibilities to a
variety of stakeholders, including the subject of applied linguistics itself:
Most of this document is organised around the different work relationships that
applied linguists engage in, and within these, it offers a checklist of important
issues, cross-referencing to other guidelines where these may be of value. This
document isn’t designed as a set of criteria for professional accreditation in applied
linguistics, and it doesn’t provide any recipes for professional decision-making.
In a changing climate of teaching and research, its suggestions are intended to
help applied linguists to maintain high standards and to respond flexibly to new
oppor tunities, acting in the spirit of good equal opportunities practice and show -
ing due respect to all participants, to the values of truth, fairness and open
democracy, and to the integrity of applied linguistics as a body of knowledge and
a mode of inquiry.
(BAAL 1994: 2)
The stakeholders are those with whom applied linguists have work relationships.
They include colleagues, students, the public, researchers, informants and sponsors.
The recommendations are quite admirable and, in want of anything more enforce -
able, necessary. But they do have something of the unrealistic about them. Thus:
Contracts with sponsors raise issues that are too numerous and too complex to be
treated adequately in the present document. These include: the composition of
steering committees; lines of communication; the ownership of data and findings;
publication rights; contract termination. Applied linguists need to be careful
about the terms on which they accept contracts for investigation, as well as being
very clear about the amount of autonomy which they will be able to exercise …
Before signing a contract, applied linguists would be well-advised to seek expert
advice, and to refer to the detailed suggestions in, for example, CVCP 1992,
Sponsored University Research; Recommendations and guidance on contract
issues.
(ibid: 13)
The harsh reality is that in these days of contract research, of over-production and
resource shrinkage, it is difficult in many cases to turn down a contract for a project
on the grounds of principle alone, on the abstraction of ethics which, however
admirable, is unenforceable in the profession as a whole. But we should not give up.
‘You must go on. I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ Beckett (1959: 418) wrote. The fact of
probable non observance of a code of conduct is not grounds for its abandoning.
These are early days for applied linguistics, the professional esprit de corps takes time
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to build and in the meantime the sense of the ethical milieu slowly develops.
Koehn (1994) considers that what characterises a profession is that it serves clients
rather than makes a customer-type contract. The profession’s moral authority is
established by its unconditional concern for the client’s good, by its willingness to act
when needed, by its willingness to sustain its service, by its certified competence, by
its preparedness to demonstrate its accountability, by its discretion on behalf of its
clients and by its self-monitoring. Professions make a public statement that dedicates
their agents to a position of public trust, and it is notable that it is the agent (the
member of the profession) who is bound not the client. In a contract, on the other
hand, the obligation lies equally on both parties. What the professional offers is
service or duty, to be professional, to act professionally rather than to be successful,
since success cannot be guaranteed.
The relativisation of all knowledge(s) within postmodernism inevitably bears
heavily on education. Those areas of education in which language is both means and
end, whether in the teaching of the first or the second/foreign language, have become
notable sites for struggle, since what is seen to be at stake is socialisation into a culture
as well as the shaping of modes of cognitive development. It is not surprising there -
fore that in applied linguistics there is both the yearning for an ethics and at the same
time a mistrust of what may be regarded as the imposition of a universal ethics.