Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: 16.713: Controversies in Applied Linguistics |
| Submitter: | Ronald Sheen |
| Description: | In the opening post on this subject, I claimed implicitly that the field of
applied linguistics has tended to foster the advocacy of theoretically- motivated teaching options whilst failing to encourage subjecting them to critical scrutiny. Such a claim constitutes a serious charge against the whole apparatus of AL. The fact that the initial post can appear on LL and not provoke a single response is in itself support for the charge. It is so for, given the reasonable assumption that many applied linguists read LL, it is plausible that a number of them have published work which has been unintentionally complicit in legitimising the charge. Now, this would constitute serious stuff in a field which functioned on the basis of transparency and accountability. Unfortunately, though many applied linguists may assume that such principles form the bedrock of published AL work, much of what has been published in recent decades does not reflect this. In fact, what has been published has been more a demonstration of blackboxing (Latour 1987). That is, the undiscriminating citing of research findings which do not, in fact, withstand critical scrutiny. Should any reader of LL wish to challenge me to support this claim, I will happily do so by taking the degree to which the assumed validity of the principles of incidental learning and development sequences have played a role in contemporary advocacy but the classroom application of which has NOWHERE been demonstrated to result in an ability to produce accurate grammatical language. In fact, there is empirical evidence to demonstrate that such an application is more a recipe for fossilisation. In spite of this, contemporary publications are replete with both the implicit and explicit assumptions of the validity of those principles. Reference: Latour, B. 1987. Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. |
| Date Posted: | 14-Mar-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Applied Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.763 |
| Posted: | 14-Mar-2005 |
