sciences which have become completely detached from the practical
concerns that originally motivated most sciences.
(467)This is to a certain extent also true of AL, which started as an attempt to
create a scientific basis for language teaching. As Heidi Byrnes mentions, the
need to gain respectability as a real science led to a focus on psycholinguis-
tics that had already a high status and could serve as a stepping stone for AL
to show its credibility. In her view that was a“false start”that continues to
hound thefield because it largely ignored the social and the emotional that is
so pervasive in language learning. For Claire Kramsch the impact of psycho-
linguistics was a positive development. For a long time the applied linguists
and other people involved in language teaching were“the plumbers”in language
and literature departments, and they had little prestige.“The Mike Longs of
this world have given AL the respectability it now has. The hard core,
quantitative, statistically reliable data, not the messy post-structural stuff.”
Lyle Bachman in this context refers to“the relative credibility”of AL as an
academic discipline. Chris Candlin makes an interesting socio-geographical
comparison:“AL is like Portugal, looking outward only!”
The inferiority syndrome is also mentioned by Henry Widdowson, in
particular with respect to the early emphasis on language learning and teaching,
which is“not terribly prestigious”. Therefore, taking notions and theories
from academic disciplines with a better pedigree helps to enhance the status
of thefield. But in his view that hinders the engagement with real world
problems. Chris Candlin is characteristically open about his views on this:
“Applied linguistics as solving real world problems? I don’t like solving by
experts, it can only come from joint participation.”
All descriptions of the development of AL discuss the relation between
AL and linguistics, or, more specifically, theoretical linguistics. While in the
old days, the 1950s until the late 1970s, linguistics was seen as the main sci-
entific basis for AL, the gap between them has been growing ever since.“For
the contribution of linguistics to language teaching we have to remember,”
says Lyle Bachman,“that the old Fries/Lado approach, usually referred to as
the audio-lingual method, was based on American structural linguistics,
which grew out of extensive empirical research with‘Amerindian’languages.
The same cannot be said about current input from linguistics”.
Widdowson (1980, 2000) makes a distinction between AL as concerned
with language related real world problems and“linguistics applied”as an
approach in which“the assumption is that the problem can be reformulated
by the unique and unilateral application of concepts and terms derived from
linguistic enquiry itself”(5). William Grabe agrees:
Linguistics applied makes no sense to me. We are not linguists applying
linguistic knowledge. The idea that a, or every, linguist could be an
applied linguist makes no sense to me. We all bring knowledge fromDefining AL 29