Introduction: Applied Linguistics

and Language Teaching in the

Twenty-first Century
Vivian Cook and Li Wei

1 General Background

Since the days of Pit Corder, the founding father of British applied linguistics in
the 1950s, the discipline of applied linguistics has been usually described as ‘The
theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language
is a central issue’ (Brumfit, 1995: 27). Similarly the members of the American
Association of Applied Linguistics (AAL) ‘promote principled approaches to
language-related concerns’. The International Association of Applied Linguistics
(AILA) proclaims:

applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing

with practical problems of language and communication that can be identified,
analysed or solved by applying available theories, methods or results of Linguis-
tics or by developing new theoretical and methodological frameworks in
Linguistics to work on these problems. (AILA, 2009)

The AILA definition is both broader in including more areas and narrower in
relating applied linguistics to linguistics proper. If you have a problem with
language, send for an applied linguist.
The broad definition of applied linguistics as problem-solving was certainly true
in its early days. Definitions of applied linguistics now are more like lists of the
areas that make it up. The Cambridge AILA 1969 Congress encompassed first
language acquisition, computational linguistics, forensic linguistics, speech ther-
apy, neurolinguistics, second language acquisition research, and a host more.
Gradually many areas have declared unilateral independence from applied lin-
guistics; first language acquisition research soon disappeared from the fold to
found its own organizations, conferences and journals, as did much second lan-
guage acquisition research slightly later. Applied linguistics gatherings these days
are far less inclusive, though there is a growth in the Research Networks such as
Multilingualism: Acquisition and Use. The AILA Congress in 2008 had 9 papers on
first language acquisition compared with 161 on second language acquisition and
138 on foreign language teaching; computational linguistics and forensic linguis-
tics were no longer on the programme, though new areas like multilingualism
have been introduced. Professional organizations for applied linguistics are now
2 Vivian Cook and Li Wei

more like umbrella organizations, on the lines of the British Association in science,
that meet occasionally to bring together people whose main academic life takes
place within more specialist organizations; most second language acquisition
researchers for instance tend to go to conferences of the European Second
Language Association (EUROSLA), International Symposia on Bilingualism,
Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA), or the Interna-
tional Association for Multilingualism, not to conferences named applied
linguistics. Professional applied linguistics is now a fairly restricted area. Most prac-
titioners probably style themselves primarily as SLA researchers, discourse analysts
and the like, rather than seeing applied linguistics as their major avocation.
Journals too reflect this tendency with say the International Journal of Applied
Linguistics showing the same kind of agenda as the AILA congress, while Language
Learning, originally an applied linguistics journal, is now primarily concerned with
psychological approaches to second language acquisition, having dropped applied
linguistics from its subtitle.
The term ‘problem’ does, however, raise issues of its own. In one sense it means
a research question posed in a particular discipline; in another sense it is some-
thing that has gone wrong which can be solved. Talking about the problem of mult-
ilingualism, say, is ambiguous between defining it as a research area and claiming
that it is in some way defective. Calling areas ‘problems’ fosters the attitude that
there is something wrong with them. Bilingualism is no more intrinsically a prob-
lem to be solved than is monolingualism. Applied linguists have to be clear that
they are solving problems within an area of language acquisition or use, not regard-
ing the area itself as a problem except in the research question sense. Language
teaching is not itself a problem to be solved; it may nevertheless raise problems
that applied linguists can resolve.
A perpetual controversy has surrounded the relationship of linguistics to applied
linguistics. Despite AILA’s fond belief that linguistics is the core, many feel linguis-
tics is only one of the contributing disciplines. Applied linguists have explored
psychological models such as declarative/procedural memory and emergentism,
mathematical models such as dynamic systems theory or chaos theory, early Soviet
theories of child development such as Vygotsky, French thinkers such as Foucault
and Bourdieu – nothing seems excluded. Contemporary applied linguists feel free
to draw on almost any field of human knowledge; the authors in the present book
for instance use ideas from philosophy, education, sociology, feminism, Marxism,
Conversation Analysis and media studies, to take a small sample. David Block in
this volume (p. 229) calls applied linguistics ‘an amalgam of research interests’.
The question is whether applied linguists have the polymathic ability to carry out
such an amalgamation of diverse disciplines, or indeed diverse approaches within
these disciplines, when the disciplines themselves are incapable of making this
synthesis. It seems inherently unsafe or indeed arrogant when the applied linguist
redefines the human mind, human language or language learning to suit the
needs of an applied linguistic problem.
Linguistics nowadays plays a minimal role in applied linguistics whether in terms
of current linguistic theories or descriptive tools. Linguistic theories of the past
 Introduction 3

twenty years are barely mentioned by applied linguists. With the exception of
Chomsky and to some extent Jackendoff, the theories come from postmodernism,
psychology or sociology rather than linguistics. Indeed some practitioners radiate
hostility towards linguistics, preferring to draw on almost any other area. One
cause may be that the enthusiastic selling of the 1980s generative model by its
supporters led to the view that linguistics has nothing practical to contribute and
to a lack of interest in the many other approaches to linguistics practised today, say
the recent developments in phonetics and phonology.
In a well-regarded book representative of the field called Research Methods in
Applied Linguistics, the author announces ‘The book . . . will not be concerned with
. . . language data, unless it is submitted to non-linguistic analysis’ (Dörnyei, 2007:
19). In the west London suburb of Ealing there was a highly successful shop in the
1960s called the Confiserie Française (French cake shop), which in fact sold toys. The
reason was a clause in its lease that prevented the new owners from changing
the name. If language disappears from applied linguistic research, the applied
linguistics shop is selling toys. It should relabel itself as teaching methodology or
applied sociology or whichever discipline it uses as its source.
So what problems does applied linguistics solve? If you are worried about your
child’s speech, you are more likely to go to a speech therapist than to an applied
linguist. If your country is torn by civil war between people who use two scripts, you
ask for a United Nations Peacekeeping Force. If you are drafting a new law, you go
to a constitutional lawyer or a civil servant. The problem-solving successes of
applied linguistics have included devising orthographies for languages that have
no written form and inventing simplified languages for mariners; applied linguists
have played a part in EU projects on translation and on linguistic diversity. Most
successes have, however, had to do with language teaching, such as the syllabuses
and methods that swept the world from the 1970s onwards, particularly associated
with the Council of Europe.
At a general level we can draw three implications from this. Needless to say,
these personal interpretations are not necessarily shared by all the contributors.

(1) The applied linguist is a Jack of all trades. Real-world language problems can
seldom be resolved by looking at a single aspect of language. Since applied
linguistics is interdisciplinary, the applied linguist is expected to know a little
about many areas, not only of language, but also of philosophy, sociology,
computer programming, experimental design and many more. In a sense,
applied linguists are not only Jack of all trades but also master of none as they
do not require the in-depth knowledge of the specialist so much as the ability
to filter out ideas relevant to their concerns. An applied linguist who only does
syntax or discourse analysis is an applied syntactician or an applied discourse
analyst, not a member of the multidisciplinary applied linguistics profession.
In other words multidisciplinarity applies not just to the discipline as a whole
but also to the individual practitioner.
(2) The applied linguist is a go-between, not an enforcer, a servant, not a master. The
problems that applied linguistics can deal with are complex and multi-facet-
4 Vivian Cook and Li Wei

ted. As consultants to other people, applied linguists can contribute their own
interpretation and advice. But that is all. The client has to weigh in the
balance all the other factors and decide on the solution. Rather than saying
‘You should follow this way of language teaching’, the applied linguist’s advice
is ‘You could try this way of language teaching and see whether it works for
you.’ Alternatively the applied linguist should be responding to problems put
forward by language teachers, not predetermining what the problems are; the
applied linguist is there to serve teacher’s needs, a garage mechanic interpret-
ing the customer’s vague idea of what is wrong with their car and putting it
right, rather than a car designer.
(3) Sheer description of any area of language is not applied linguistics as such but descrip-
tive linguistics. Some areas concerned with the description of language are
regarded as applied linguistics, others are not. Make a corpus analysis of an
area or carry out a Conversation Analysis and you’re doing applied linguistics;
describe children’s language or vocabulary and it’s first language acquisition;
make a description of grammar and you’re doing syntax. Overall making
a description is not in itself solving a problem, even if it may contribute to the
solution.

Outside language teaching, applied linguists have taken important roles behind
the scenes as advisors to diverse governmental and EU bodies, for example Hugo
Baetens Beardsmore’s work with bilingualism. But they have had little impact on
public debate or decision-making for most language problems, the honourable
exceptions being the work of David Crystal and Debbie Cameron, whom many
might not consider primarily as applied linguists. Problems are not solved by
talking about them at applied linguistics conferences; the solutions have to be
taken out into the world to the language users. Take the political correctness issue
of avoiding certain terms for reasons of sexism, racism and so on. This is based on
one interpretation of the relationship between language and thinking: not
having a word means you can’t have the concept, as George Orwell suggested with
Newspeak. Yet applied linguists have been reluctant to contribute their expertise
to this debate, despite the extensive research into linguistic relativity of the past
decade. Public discussion of language issues is as ill-informed about language as it
was fifty years ago at the dawn of applied linguistics.
A recent theatre piece by the Canadian director Robert Le Page called Lipsynch
was crucially concerned with language. The dialogue took place in three languages
with the aid of subtitling running along the front of the stage; it took for granted
the multilingualism of the modern world. The heroine was attempting to recover
the voice of her father who had died when she was young. All she had was a silent
home movie. So she engaged a lip-reader to find out the words, then a lipsynch
actor to read them in alternative voices till she recognized her father’s. This didn’t
work until she herself uttered her father’s words. In another scene an elderly apha-
sic patient delivered a monologue, judging by audience reaction the first time that
most of them had encountered this kind of discourse. At a dinner-party, film actors
and agents attempted to converse simultaneously in three languages, to comic
 Introduction 5

effect. Lipsynch movingly showed the importance of language to people’s lives and
the language problems they encountered.
As this reminds us, language is at the core of human activity. Applied linguistics
needs to take itself seriously as a central discipline in the language sciences dealing
with real problems. Applied linguistics has the potential to make a difference.

2 The Applied Linguistics of Language Teaching

This volume attempts to reassert the importance of the applied linguistics of lang-
uage teaching. It assumes that the unique selling point of applied linguistics that
distinguishes it from the many domains and sub-domains of psychology, education
and language teaching is language. At its core it needs a coherent theory of lang-
uage, whether this comes from linguistics or from some other discipline, a set of
rigorous descriptive tools to handle language, and a body of research relevant to
language teaching.
This is not to say that the language element has to dominate or that linguistics
itself has to feature at all but that it does not count as applied linguistics of
language teaching:

1. If there is no language element. This does not mean it could not justifiably be
studied as language teaching methodology, applied psychology and so on. But
why call it applied linguistics if there is no language content?
2. If the language elements are handled without any theory of language. The theory of
language does not need to come from linguistics but might be philosophy or
literary theory: crucially applied linguistics cannot treat language as if there
were no traditions of language study whatsoever. Nor can the methods of
language description be based solely on folk ideas from the school tradition of
grammar or the practical EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching
tradition, which would be rather like basing physics on alchemy or folk beliefs.
Doubtless some aspects of these may be interpreted in a more up-to-date and
scientific fashion, but this applies equally to alchemy.
3. If the research base is neither directly concerned with language teaching nor related to it in
a demonstrable way. That is to say, a theory from outside language teaching
cannot be applied without a clear chain of logic showing how and why it is
relevant. An idea from mathematical theory, computer simulation or first
language acquisition needs to show its credentials by proving its link to second
language teaching through L2 evidence and argument, not imposing itself by
fiat, by analogy, or by sheer computer modelling. If one were, say, to adopt
knitting theory as a foundation for the applied linguistics of language teaching,
one would need to demonstrate how warp and weft account for the basic phe-
nomena of language acquisition and use by showing empirical evidence of their
applicability to second language acquisition.

Over the years the applied linguistics of language teaching has had its most
important relationships with linguistics and psychology. Applied linguists have
6 Vivian Cook and Li Wei

designed syllabuses and tests used around the world; some have ventured into
coursebook writing. Most of this has been based on general ideas about language
learning, going from the early influence of structuralism and behaviourism that
led to the audiolingual teaching method, the influence of Chomskyan ideas about
the independence of the learner’s language and of social arguments by Dell
Hymes that jointly led to the communicative syllabus and communicative language
teaching, and the wave of cognitivism in psychology that contributed to task-based
learning. By and large this has been application at a general level, not based on
detailed findings about second language acquisition. It is hard to find teaching
drawing on, say, specific information about sequence of phonological acquisition
or studies of learners’ errors.
The dangers with this have been twofold. One is that for many years it was
assumed that the implementation of language teaching ideas was universally ben-
eficial; the applied linguist’s hired gun was on the side of the goodies. But it
became clear that many changes in language teaching methodology were not cul-
turally, politically or morally neutral. Communicative methodology for instance
required a classroom where the teacher was an organizer rather than an authority.
In countries where teachers are treated as wise elders who know best, the image
of the teacher as friendly helper ran counter to the students’ beliefs. So language
teachers became proselytes for Western individualistic views, not seeing them-
selves as serving the students within their own cultural situations for their own
ends but as converting them to another role. As a Chinese minister said, ‘For Eng-
lish language teaching in China we need a method that is Chinese.’ The types of
language teaching advocated by applied linguists then commonly incorporated
Western values rather than being culturally neutral, if such neutrality were even
possible.
Alongside this cultural bias came a growing realization that language teaching
was inherently to do with power and politics. The choice of language to be taught
was one issue: why choose say French as the language to be taught in English
schools? Choosing a language because of its international currency reinforced the
language power structure of the globe, adding to the power of ex-colonial lan-
guages like English and Spanish or of religion-linked languages like Arabic and
Hebrew. Spreading English to the world may provide a neutral lingua franca for
the world to use or it may impose the hegemony of a hypercentral language on the
world if it fails to detach itself from the power of the native speaker.
The choice of the native speaker as the target of language teaching has indeed
become increasingly problematic. On the one hand it was a matter of which native
speaker: why were dialect speakers in one country excluded, say Geordies or
Glaswegians? Why were alternative standard languages across the world excluded,
say Singapore English or Indian English? Clearly the choice of which native speaker
to use was based more on status and on power than on objective criteria, such as
number of speakers or ease of learning.
On the other hand it was a matter of the value of monolingual native speakers.
If your goal is to speak English to other people who are not native speakers of
English, what has the native speaker got to do with it? While there is an argument
 Introduction 7

for a form of English that ensures mutual comprehensibility, this does not neces-
sarily imply a status native speaker variety. The overwhelming importance of the
native speaker in language teaching has taken away the rights of people to speak
like themselves and to express their own identities as multilinguals; Geordies or
Texans can show with every word they utter that they come from Newcastle or
Houston; Frenchmen must try to avoid any sign in English that they come from
France. Hence applied linguistics has had to enter a harsher world where the value
of language teaching cannot be taken for granted as it may be a way of establishing
or reinforcing a subordinate status in the world.
The other main danger is that applied linguistics may be losing contact with
actual teaching and so giving up much of its impact. The interest in theories from
different disciplines among applied linguists means that what they are saying gets
further and further from answering the teacher’s question ‘What do I do with my
class of 14-year-olds learning French next Monday at 10 o’clock?’ One obvious
retort is that it is not the applied linguists’ job to provide detailed advice of this
kind since they do not know the specifics of any teacher’s classroom and should
not over-ride the teacher’s feel for the complexity of their situation and the needs
of their students; at best applied linguists can provide general guidance on which
teachers can draw for their specific teaching situations.
But, as Michael Swan’s contribution to this volume illustrates, the applied
linguist still tends to impose theory-based solutions that ignore the reality that
teachers face in the classroom and that are unsubstantiated by an adequate body
of pertinent research evidence. The implication is still that their recommenda-
tions, currently say task-based learning and negotiation for meaning, should
apply to the whole of language teaching rather than to the limited area and spe-
cific cultural context that is their proper concern. In the audiolingual teaching
method of the 1960s, a crucial phase was exploitation; you teach the structure and
vocabulary through dialogues and drills and then you get the students to make
them their own through role-plays, games and the like: ‘Some provision will be
made for the students to apply what they have learnt in a structured communi-
cation situation’ (Rivers, 1964). The language teaching methods advocated by
applied linguists such as communicative language teaching and task-based learn-
ing have been a great help in developing exploitation exercises. But, as Michael
Swan points out, to exploit something it has to be there in the first place; you can’t
do the communicative activities or the tasks without having the basic vocabulary,
syntax and phonology to draw on: communicative language teaching and task-
based learning presuppose a prior knowledge of some language. The crucial
question for language teachers is how to prime the pump sufficiently for the com-
municative and task-based activities to take place. Applied linguists have never
solved the problem of bootstrapping posed by Steven Pinker many years ago: how
does the child get the initial knowledge that is necessary for acquiring the rest of
the language? So applied linguistics has concerned itself with the analysis and
frequency of vocabulary but has seldom described the teaching techniques through
which new vocabulary can be taught. If you want to find out about the techniques
for teaching new elements of language, you have to turn to the teacher-training
8 Vivian Cook and Li Wei

tradition such as Ur (1996) and Harmer (2007), not to books written by applied
linguists. Just as applied linguists used to lament that linguistics had become too
rarefied for any application, so applied linguistics is becoming too rarefied for
language teaching.

3 This Volume: Individuals Looking to the Future

This volume is then intended to show the importance of the contribution that
applied linguistics can make to language teaching. It does not start from some
currently fashionable method but from the overall purpose of language teaching
and the implications of general ideas of language. The contributions do not resem-
ble the genre of book currently called handbooks, which mostly have state-of-the
art surveys of the field or histories of past achievements. Rather the contributors
here are individuals laying out their ideas of a future for language teaching.
The volume starts with three chapters that try to base twenty-first century
language teaching on sound ideas about how people learn a second language.
Macaro makes suggestions for strategies-based intervention in language teaching
based on the new revitalization of the learning strategies field. Building on the
emerging consensus about non-native speaker teachers, Llurda argues for a rebal-
ancing of the roles of native and non-native speaker teachers. Cook applies the
multi-competence approach to suggest that teaching has to recognize the diversity
of groups of second language users.
The next three chapters (4–6) are concerned more with the classroom. Pica
presents the case for language-focused content-based tasks, illustrated with class-
room examples. Nation examines the advantages of simplified vocabulary in
language teaching through the lens of simplified readers. Swan appeals for applied
linguists to look at language itself and not to abrogate the distinctive skills of the
course-writer.
Two chapters (7–8) look at the nature of the second language user. Han pro-
poses a mathematical model to account for ‘fossilized’ learners who never pass
beyond a particular stage of acquisition. Dewaele argues for multiple approaches
to learner factors rather than an analysis based only on quantity.
The final four chapters (9–12) adopt more theoretical perspectives. Byram
looks to a future of intercultural citizenship within the history of modern language
education culminating in the Common European Framework. Block puts identity
research on a firm post-structural concept of interaction, balancing the social with
the psychological. Kramsch applies the concept of thirdness, which refuses to treat
the world as a series of dualities, to yield people who can operate between two
languages. Kelly Hall shows how the concept of discursive practice leads to a
classroom rooted in social activity.
These thumbnail sketches do no justice to the richness and scope of the contri-
butions. These chapters stimulate because of the strength of their individual views
of language teaching from an applied linguistic perspective; contrast the optimism
of Byram about multilingualism in Europe with the Emperor’s Clothes views of
 Introduction 9

recent language teaching methods by Swan. These are very much individuals
looking to build the future of language teaching grounded on a solid concept of
language in applied linguistics, united by a common belief in the importance of
multilingualism to individuals and to societies.

References

AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) (2009), ‘What is AILA?’,

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B. Seidlhofer (eds), Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 27–42.
Dörnyei, Z. (2007), Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Harmer, J. (2007), The Practice of English Language Teaching. 4th edition. Harlow:
Longman.
Rivers, W. M. (1964), The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Ur, P. (1996), A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.