An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.7 Combined approach
In 1999, the journal 
Language Testing
published a special issue devoted to ‘assessment
in speech-language pathology. The editors introduced the issue by noting that
speech-language pathology is a ‘field in which the assessment of linguistics and
communicative abilities is a regular and integral activity but one which to date has
not figured highly in the pages of this journal’ (Baker and Chenery 1999: 243). Their
purpose in assembling the papers for this issue was to link the fields of speech-
language pathology and language testing. Such an attempt is reminiscent of the
bridging model which, I suggested, informed the development of the ETAL Series
(see Chapter 2 above). Making such linkage is at the heart of applied linguistics; it
informs and illuminates both specialisms and helps clarify what it means to be doing
applied linguistics.
It is no surprise, then, that those who have produced the necessary instru -
mentation for diagnostic assessment are not in the main linguists (but see Crystal
et al. 1975/1976) but applied linguists (including speech therapists who have been
trained in applied linguistics), pho neticians, medics and engineers. Thus Anthony
et al. (who produced the Edinburgh Articulation Test 1971) included an engineer,
a medical doctor specialising in neuro pediatrics and two speech therapists. Laver
et al. (1981) who produced a normative Vocal Profiles Analysis scheme included a
phonetician and two speech therapists. Wirz writes that current practice tends to
favour approaches more from cognitive psychology (Byng and Coltheart 1986) than
from medicine, which in the past was heavily dominated by the anatomical (and
therefore localisation) view of impair ment. She characterises the development in the
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twentieth century from individual diagnostic to comparative group assessment with
a return to a greater (and better informed) study of the whole communicative person.
In all of this linguistics plays a part, but a small part. We see in the training of clinical
linguists such as speech therapists both a parallel with the development of applied
linguistics in their need to draw on a wide variety of informing disciplines and in part
an insight into the role of applied linguistics within speech therapy itself, since for
many (but not all) practitioners, speech therapy is a branch of applied linguistics.
Wirz (1993) writes of ‘the richness of variety that offers the speech and language
therapist the challenge in any assessment undertaken’ (Wirz 1993: 14). That richness
of variety is also necessarily seen in the training the therapist receives. Crystal (1995:
434) writes of a ‘broad-based course of study, including medical, psychological,
social, educational and linguistic components, as well as the fostering of personal
clinical and teaching skills’.
Courses can be broad-based in two ways: either by ranging widely across many
subject areas (medicine, psychology, sociology, education and (applied) linguistics)
or by taking for granted a wider than normal frame of reference to any one subject.
Thus the applied linguistic approach to clinical linguistics is likely to consider im -
pairment as an aspect of loss, itself the negative inverse of positive language retention
in the individual. The parallel type of loss in society is represented as language decay
or language death (when a whole language dies through abandonment by its speakers,
most commonly through death), while the parallel social retention is referred to as
spread. All parameters may be regarded as aspects of language shift. Now placing
shift as the superordinate means that applied linguistics has admitted its own interest
in language change. But we should make two comments here. The first is that
applied linguistics comes to this theoretical construct not from above but through
the need to explain and understand different types of loss; and the second is that the
applied linguist remains not fundamentally interested in shift in itself: what he/she
is doing is attempting to understand it better in order to stabilise it, however
momentarily, and so orient and remedy the impaired to that stable moment.