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applied linguistics, that our comparison should focus. While leaving a discussion
of the theorising (in particular the approach of so-called critical applied linguistics)
to the last part of this chapter, we recognise that such a distinction between theory
and practice is difficult to support. For those who profess a critical applied linguistics
approach to the subject, what they do is as much practice as it is theory. Nevertheless,
to facilitate discussion, we will maintain the fiction that practice and theory are
separate.
Corder s Part 3:  The Techniques of Applied Linguistics contains the following
subsections:
Comparison of varieties
Contrastive linguistic studies
The study of learners language: error analysis
The structure of the syllabus
Pedagogic grammars
Evaluation, validation and tests
The first three of these he tells us concern selection; it would appear that the next two
deal with grading or sequencing and the last one is a free-standing discussion of
monitoring the outcomes of the other five chapters. To an extent, therefore, this
division by Corder represents an older model, that of language-teaching method-
ology (Mackey 1965) or methodics, the division of language-teaching studies into
three parts: selection, gradation and presentation. Here we miss out on the last part
which Corder presumably regards as not properly part of applied linguistics, more
the concern of language-teacher education.
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Applied linguistics: no  bookish theoric 137
Varieties, contrastive analysis, error analysis, syllabus development, pedagogical
grammars and testing: that was the practice of applied linguistics in the 1960s. When
we compare the 1960s and the 2000s there are two differences. The first is the
expected one that these areas have developed over time: the comparison of varieties
has branched into world Englishes, stylistics, discourse analysis, gendered language
and so on. Contrastive linguistic studies and the study of learners language (error
analysis) have moved on apace, at first contrastive studies being revitalised by
the study of learners language to become the current study of second-language
acquisition, itself also heavily influenced by developments in linguistic grammars.
Syllabus studies have become curriculum studies, widening their brief and thereby
taking far more of the context in which language teaching takes place into account.
Pedagogical grammars might well now be called a pedagogical approach to grammar,
while evaluation, validation and tests may well be termed assessment or even perhaps
classroom-based assessment.
The second difference concerns what was glaringly missing in the list of chapters
in the Corder book. It contained no single chapter with sociolinguistics in its title.
This omission seems grave in view of the take-over of applied linguistics by the social
turn since 1975. The same is not true of linguistics in its Chomskyan canon, where
the quest is still very much in the realist tradition for the truth of language in itself
or in the head, with no appeal to context. There are many linguists who do not share
this view of linguistics and who consider that a linguistics without the social
dimension is a contradiction. But in applied linguistics the social aspect dominates,
and it does do for two reasons. The first reason is that it has been accepted that the
social is essential to all understanding of language in use, that in the specific case of
language teaching all formal language learning must take account of the context in
which that learning takes place and furthermore that the context determines and
affects that learning, hence the imposing on to linguistic competence of the super-
seding communicative competence.
The second reason (and this is not wholly unrelated to the influence of the social)
is that there is noticeable now a loss of confidence in the techniques offered by Corder
and widely used in the 1960s and 1970s (and indeed 1980s) as general statements
of how to proceed. Discourse studies is a good example of that loss of confidence
since what it does with exemplary success is to discuss how to analyse and read a text
rather than how to analyse and read texts. Where have we heard this before? Isn t it
reminiscent of Lyotard: there is no one unique reason, there are only reasons?
What this suggests is that Corder, and that era of applied linguistics, were indeed
 modern and  structuralist , and that in its subsequent practice applied linguistics
has become less concerned with over-all solutions. As with the development of
communicative competence in part, this has been influenced by the lack of success
in using applied linguistics to improve language teaching in any direct way. What
it also shows is that applied linguistics is really concerned with approaches and
questions and not with solutions. As it actually has always been. What has changed
is that this has perhaps become more explicitly marked in the practice.
 The context determines and affects the learning  that comment helps explain
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138 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
the phenomenon World English(es). This expression, Bolton writes,  is capable of a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]