An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

EXERCISE 5 (ON CHAPTER 5)
The following passage refers to work on police communication. The author makes
clear in the last paragraph quoted that he regards this as part of applied linguistics.
How would you suggest applied linguistics rise to the challenge ‘to contribute to
increasing understanding of the linguistic aspects of communication’?
Exercises 177
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178
Exercises
5.1 Police radio procedures
Report after report into modern disasters tells the same story. Many are at least partly
caused, and almost all are exacerbated, by poor communication procedures, such as
misleading wording by the initiator, or failure by the recipient to check under -
standing. One writer refers to ‘the deadly problem of communication under stress’,
and comments that ‘too many lives have been lost as a result of confusion over
words’.
1
Fortunately, most faulty communication practice does not result in disasters,
although the potential is always present. The cost in inefficiency, nonetheless, is
incalculable, even at the most apparently trivial level. I was a member of a team
which conducted extensive research into police radio procedures in the United
Kingdom in the early 1990s. In one typical region, officers were making on average
one communicative exchange every two minutes over a forty-eight hour period.
More than 12% of these exchanges required two or more transmissions simply to
establish the identity of the calling officer (which should be the first utterance in the
exchange: ‘This is Alpha Delta 1-0 calling control’). Air-time, which had an actual
monetary value to the force, was being squandered because of an elementary failure
in procedures. An example occurs in the following exchange, which was typical of
many in our data. None of the three officers (A, B, D) calling control (C) has given
any identification, although C appears to recognize one of them (204). The first
three transmissions are simultaneous:
A
Somebody making off through the graveyard …
B
Yeah, we’ve got a van coming in with a few – …
D
… [name] please
C
Yeah, several callers there er caller saying [name]
B
Yes, control, we’ve got three coming in
C
Yes, 2-0-4, can you confirm three in custody?
D
Yes
C
2-0-4 can you confirm three in custody?
D
Yes, yes
After nine transmissions, nothing has been achieved. Such confusion probably
causes nothing worse than annoyance and inefficiency, but routine communication
can at any time, without warning, have to deal with an emergency, with predictable
results: ‘in the crash of Air Florida into the Potomac River … more than ten com -
munication channels were used chaotically’.
2
The challenge for applied linguists is to contribute to increasing understanding of
the linguistic aspects of communication. Most of the limited amount of research and
development in the area of operational communication is linguistically naive, with
the result that procedures and guidelines are, at best, vague or, at worst, positively
misleading.
1. Silverstein, Martin E., 
Disasters: Your Right to Survive
, Washington DC 1992, p. 7.
2. Silverstein, p. 123.
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(Extract from M. Garner, ‘Tell them to mind their language’, 
Australian Language
Matters 
(Oct/Nov/Dec 1998), p. 13.)