Abstract
Applied linguistics is a discipline of design: it solves language problems by suggesting a plan, or blueprint, to handle them. These designs are sometimes promoted as highly innovative. Yet, are innovative language courses and tests in all respects truly new? This article will argue that most historically significant turning points in applied linguistic design demonstrate continuity with previously designed solutions. This was so for communicative teaching as well as for audio-lingualism. In testing, both interactive designs and socially responsible concerns have built on the past. Like innovation, reciprocity in design in applied linguistics is a foundational issue. How much reciprocity is there in the realms of language testing, language course design and language policy making? Why do we not explicitly check whether the design of a course should be as responsibly and carefully done as a test? How can we learn more from language policy development about making tests more accessible and accountable? What can test designers learn from course developers about specificity? There are many useful questions that we never seem to ask. The article will look across different levels of applied linguistic artefacts (language courses, language tests and language policies) at how we can enrich the principles of responsible design. We can continue to be surprised by innovation in the designed solutions that our profession provides, but we should also work on our understanding of what constitutes a responsible design framework. That foundation enables us to evaluate both the fleeting and the enduring in the new.
Highlights
Is history destiny?Will language teaching survive as a profession? Not for the first time in its modern history is the combination of new technological instruments and a belief in scientific progress yielding forecasts of its imminent demise
The point that I wish to begin with, is that, given that historical starting point for the fledgling discipline, it is hardly surprising that the expectation was that science and theoretical analysis would assist us in finding the correct ways of designing these plans, be they language policies, language teaching methods, or language tests
If one has to give an account of where the quest for innovation in applied linguistics derives from, one answer would certainly have to be that http://www.literator.org.za early applied linguistics provided the discipline with the expectation that innovation would flow from the best theory, combined with advances in technology
Summary
Is history destiny?Will language teaching survive as a profession? Not for the first time in its modern history is the combination of new technological instruments and a belief in scientific progress yielding forecasts of its imminent demise. The point that I wish to begin with, is that, given that historical starting point for the fledgling discipline, it is hardly surprising that the expectation was that science and theoretical analysis would assist us in finding the correct ways of designing these plans, be they language policies, language teaching methods, or language tests To put it differently: applied linguistics as a discipline has an unashamedly modernist origin (Weideman 2013a, 2013c). It is an origin that was from the outset reinforced by the combination of ‘scientific’ or theoretical analysis with technology, and nowhere was this more in evidence than in the elaborate machinery for listening to, recording and monitoring speech that accompanied the audio-lingual method in the shape of ‘language laboratories’ It is typical of a modernist bias, that no one readily objected to the use of the term ‘laboratory’ in this regard, though the machines in question were little more than sophisticated language drill and control devices. If one has to give an account of where the quest for innovation in applied linguistics derives from, one answer would certainly have to be that http://www.literator.org.za early applied linguistics provided the discipline with the expectation that innovation would flow from the best theory, combined with advances in technology
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