Applied linguistics and social contexts
Ethnography and applied linguistics
If mentalist accounts of language are criticized by applied linguists for their inadequacy in describing language practices, and conversation analysis attracts criticism for its failure to deal with social conflict, corpus linguists have been criticized for taking language data out of the context of its production (Widdowson 2000), and some applied linguists who are committed to the detailed study of language practices eschew the analysis of decontextualized corpus data in favor of research methods developed by anthropologists and ethnographers. In the 1970s, Hymes described an approach to language description (partly as a reaction against Chomsky) which he termed 'an ethnography of speaking', by which he meant 'a description that is a theory a theory of speech as a system of cultural behavior' (Hymes 1974: 89), and since then a number of scholars have conducted detailed studies in diverse social settings of various 'speech communities', looking at the range of language choices open to speakers and the ways in which variation is patterned. Examples of such studies are found in Gumperz (1982), whose introduction claims that 'communication cannot be studied in isolation; it must be analyzed in terms of its effect on people's lives. We must focus on what communication does: how it constrains evaluation and decision making, not merely how it is structured' (p.l). Gumperz and his associates have long been involved in the close observation of the ways in which different social identities and different language practices can lead to miscommunication among individuals and groups (see, for example, Roberts et al. 1992; Roberts and Sarangi 1999), and one practical effect of such work has been the involvement of applied linguists as consultants to companies and organizations seeking to ameliorate problems in communication, such as those of doctors in training or between managers and their work-forces. The British Association of Applied Linguistics recently established a special interest group to foster developments in contemporary theories and practices in linguistic ethnography, and their research involves areas such as literacy practices, institutional discourse, urban heteroglossia, multilingualism and children's home and school learning. The study of 'intercultural communication', has also benefited from some ethnographic studies, as advocated by Blommaert (1998, 2001a), with an increasing interest in using ethnographic approaches also in the teaching of languages and 'intercultural competence' (see Byram and Fleming 1998; LARA 2003).
