Towards a Critical Applied Linguistics for the 1990s

Abstract

7 Editorial REFERENCES Banhes, R^ (1986). In Bruissement de la langue [Rustle of language] (DD 97-103I Transiais by R. Howard. New York? Hill & Wang. Bickexton, D. (1973). The nature of the creole continuum. Language 49 3 640 f>f>Q Eliot. T.S. (1943) Lulle Cidding. London: Faber & Faber James. ^(J^.^Towards^reaJistic objectives in foreign language teaching. A DFL W Towards a Critical Applied Linguistics for the 1990s Rainbow. P. (1986) Representations are social facts: Modernity and post-modernity in anthropology. In J. Clifford & G.E. Marcus (Eds.). Writing culture- The ( ^ { O T ^ ^ ' ( P P - ) - Berkeley: University of P l C S f e t h n g r a p k y Alastair Pennycook Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ^ony.R.^^)PMt^hy s nsoc and ihe mirror cf nature. Princeton. NJ: Princeton Tharp. R. & Gallimore. R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning and Twi„ l/ontext. New York: Cambridge University Press. i?. ' ^ ' ^ . ^ ethnography: From document of the cuculi to occult document. In J Clifford & d.E. Marcus (Eds.). Writing culture: The poetics and pohncs of ethnography (pp. 122-140). Berkeley. C A : University of ^aiuomia nress. y Antony John Kunnan. Editor of M L . is a doctoral student in applied ingutstics at UCLA. He holds masters' degrees in literature and applied linguistics, has co-authored five academic ESL texts, has taught applied linguistics ESL and literature, and has also worked as a freelance journalist Currently, he is a research associate on a joint UCLA-University of Cambridge language testing project. s Like many other areas of the social sciences, applied linguistics developed into its present form during the age of high modernism. Yet, while many other areas are going through a difficult stage of reappraisal in response to postmodern critiques of modernism, applied linguistics has remained to date steadfastly bound to its modernist paradigm. The significance of the challenges to this mode of thinking, however, suggests that applied linguistics urgently needs to look afresh at its view of language and research, and to acknowledge new thinking on discourse, the subject, culture, objectivity and knowledge. Applied linguistics also needs to address the fundamental limitations of asocial, ahistorical and apolitical modes of inquiry for the highly political domain of second language education. Wliat I am arguing for here is a pedagogically and politically engaged critical applied linguistics which is responsive to its social, cultural and political context and which uses a notion of transformative critique as its main mode of inquiry. INTRODUCTION We live in a world marked by fundamental inequalities: a world in which 40,000 children die every day in Third World countries; a world in which, in almost every society and culture, differences constructed around gender, race, ethnicity, class, age! sexual preference and other distinctions lead to massive inequalities; a world increasingly threatened by pollution and ecological disaster! I believe that to understand such inequalities we need to go beyond a view of politics as residing in the hands of nation states or political leaders and to understand ourselves within a set of global power Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 1 No. 1 1990