Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE
I examine some applied linguists’ work in order to gain an understanding of the problem-based need for applied linguistics, its purpose and the skills it draws on. I want to suggest that the skills that applied linguists bring to their work include their own reflection on their own experience of language problems. This of course is true of all professionals but is likely to be a stronger influence in a discipline which reifies language practices rather than, as linguistics does, language.
The importance of personal experience of institutional language problems becomes very clear in teaching applied linguistics. Those who have taught applied linguistics at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels will be aware how hard it is to give an undergraduate class the language-teaching (or other language professional) experience which they normally lack; as a result we may wonder whether applied linguistics is teachable at the undergraduate level. We often find that post experience graduates meet us half way. They bring their own experience, their intuition about language problems and are ready for the courses we offer; they want to find their experience illuminated. Undergraduates do, of course, have experience of their own language learning, but they are unlikely to have reflected on that learning, to understand what it is that needs illuminating, they have not recognized the problems for which we may discuss explanations. No doubt the pragmatic answer to this pedagogic difficulty is to teach a very different applied linguistics at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, but the danger always is of providing examples and exercises (for example error analysis, comprehension questions and Labov-type markers) that are as unreal and idealized as any workbook in descriptive linguistics.
The link between reflective personal experience and instruction from others is the message of George Fox’s account of his own spiritual quest. Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote in his journal:
Now after I had received that opening from the Lord that to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not sufficient to fit a man to be a Minister of Christ, I regarded the priests less and looked more after the dissenting people … I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition … I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy … Thus, when God doth work, who shall let it? And this I knew experimentally. (Nickells 1975: 11)
The Oxford English Dictionary still allows ‘experientially’ (in the light of experience) as one of the meanings of ‘experimentally’. Fox’s point is that he is rejecting scholastic theology (or as we might say theory) in favor of personal experience. It is not statements about God, however systematic they may be, that matter but personal experience.
However, relying wholly on experience brings its own problems. First, personal inspiration can be dangerous: the purpose of the religious intermediary such as a priest is to provide a necessary check on enthusiasm and a correction to delusion and at the same time to offer a framework within which individual experience can be understood. This framework was provided in Fox’s case by ensuring that there was always a group judgement to provide an interpretation of individual experience.
Second, even this community re-interpretation was eventually found wanting, in part no doubt because it could not cope with the inevitable tendencies towards populism and anomie. Some kind of theology was found to be necessary to explain and connect individual and community experiences.
Applied linguistics may seem a long way from Quakerism but the insistence on the necessity to begin with experience is the link. As we shall see, again like Quakerism, applied linguistics has found its own need for theorizing. The insistence on function, the appeal to looking at what applied linguists do, at their actual experience rather than what they say they do, these are also close parallels. What do applied linguists do?
But first I want to consider the question in the light of my own experience. In 1962 I came back to the UK after a four-year period as an English teacher in a Kenyan secondary school, where English was the medium of instruction. I had gone there after some years teaching English in England and had had no training whatsoever in teaching English as a Foreign/Second Language. My four years were disturbing and informing. They made me aware of language teaching and language learning and conscious of my own inadequacy. In particular, I observed that the African students I was teaching were weak in advanced reading techniques (as I later came to call them); they could not summarize, they could not understand moderately difficult texts; they could not write coherently; and above all they lacked awareness of the cultural background on which much of their reading depended.
Contrariwise, it seemed to me that the demands made on the students, their examinations, were unrealistic, though against the background I had come from and in the institutional context in which they studied, those demands were understandable. In essence, they were no different from those of the native speaker. The native speaker! That useful myth whose abilities we take for granted, ignoring the gap between our idealized model and the real-life variation that surrounds us (Davies 1991a, 2003). The examinations my students presented for were, I thought, unfair. (Later I would call them invalid.) It seemed that others thought the same since, during my stay in Kenya, Makerere University College (at the time the only university-level institution in East Africa) decided it would no longer require a pass in English language for entrance, on the observable grounds that many able students (passing well in science subjects, for example, all in the medium of English) were failing in the English language examination.
I came back to the UK looking for informed advice. At the time I might have said I wanted a solution to the problems I had met: problems of inadequacy in myself, in my students and in the system. I looked first in a university English department but soon found that they could not understand the problem I found it hard to articulate. A university education department was more helpful in putting me in the way of a partial solution by setting me the task of (and giving me the facilities for) con structing an English language test for one level of proficiency in English as a Second Language.
What I needed, I came to think, and still think, was not a solution to the problems of second-language teaching, but an explanation or (perhaps we should not avoid the word) a theory. Explanation is a torch-like term, we tend not to question it, though in real life we are aware of how infinitely regressive explanation can be. What I was looking for was some coherent view (or even views) on language and language development.
Shortly afterwards, I was appointed to the staff of the Department of Applied Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh. And no, I did not find solutions. Nor did I find the explanation, but I did find an atmosphere in which language was discussed in ways that I have found helpful. And I am not alone in this. My experience is not unlike that of many of the graduate students who come to Applied Linguistics courses every year with ‘problems’ to which they want solutions. What they find is that no solutions are provided but explanations are. What they also find among their teachers and fellow-students is a community they can identify with, which shares a common language in which they can make sense of their individual experience and which provides a discourse framework.
What all kinds of useful explanation have in common is that they demand generalization, that is that they must be applicable to similar events and causes. What those students have found is that language learning in Japan is not so different from language learning in Germany or in Manchester. This is both releasing personally and effective academically because it permits objectivity. And in its turn objectivity clears the way for the kind of theorizing which illuminates experience and is changed by it.
