Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
INSTITUTIONAL APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Instead of trying to define applied linguistics, it is instructive to look at what is actually going on institutionally. Applied Linguistics defines itself by actions rather than by definitions. The International Association of Applied Linguistics (commonly referred to as AILA, the acronym of its French name, Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée), for example, constantly runs into this definition problem and equally constantly avoids it by refusing to be tied down. So what does AILA do? The former scientific commissions have been disbanded and succeeded by Research Networks. In 2007 these included:
• Applied linguistics and literacy in Africa and the Diaspora
• Content and language integrated learning
• Discourse analysis
• Language and migration
• Language in the media
• Language policy
• Learner autonomy in language learning
• Multilingualism at the workplace
• Multilingualism: acquisition and use
• Standard language education
• Task complexity
• Translating and interpreting
Of course, not all these commissions are active, and of course a good deal is omitted. But this open-ended list is a better definition than any sentential definition. Its danger is that it leads to an anything linguistics, in which any kind of activity remotely connected with language can be brought under the applied linguistics umbrella. That is both otiose and unscholarly.
Some steady view then is necessary and this must surely now mean an appeal to theory. New academic disciplines, like new religions, may manage without a theoretical base: just as Fox and his early followers found their own experience adequate so did the founding applied linguists. But later applied linguists like later Quakers, removed from the original inspiration, need to theorize about their own experience.
