Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

43
British Applied Linguistics: impacts of and impacts on
Guy Cook
Take clinical linguistics for example. This is not usually listed as an area of
applied linguistics, nor one whose practitioners necessarily see themselves
as applied linguists. Yet by Brumfit's definition it is surely archetypal
applied linguistics when it interprets academic findings for the professional
practice of speech therapy, and mediates between them and the practical
concerns of patients and their families. There can be little doubt that speech
therapy does a great deal of good in the world, helping children and adults
with speech and communication impairment. Clinical linguistics is surely
an example of an applied linguistics at its best, and both applied linguistics
at large and clinical linguistics itself would benefit greatly if this were
widely recognised.
Or take deaf linguistics – an area of enquiry which is listed in Applied
Linguistics. This is surely an area where theoretical and empirical
investigation has had a very positive influence on a very practical problem:
namely misconceptions and prejudices about deaf sign languages.
Linguistic evidence has been deployed to show decisively that sign
languages are as complex - in some ways even more complex - than spoken
languages (Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999). Indeed, this is a battle which
has largely been won, in that deaf sign languages are now widely respected
and recognised for what they are.
So within the broad conception of contemporary applied linguistics, there
have definitely been cases of positive influence. Others examples are
forensic linguistics, medical communication, and workplace
communication. Indeed even in the applied linguistics heartland of
language teaching there are moves to create approaches which seek to
preserve and integrate students' own linguistic and cultural identity rather
than banish them from the classroom as before (Cooke and Simpson 2008,
Hall and Cook 2012).
But notice a trend. These areas of greatest influence (which could be
described as impact for the REF) tend to be dealing with language and
communication at the micro level: a child with a therapist, a deaf person in
conversation, a doctor with a patient. The picture is less rosy, however,
when we think of applied linguistics striving for influence on larger stages
– for example language planning and legislation, language education policy
or the use of language in political and public debate. Take for example, in
the UK, the discourse around demands for English language proficiency as
a precondition for British citizenship, the ending of the compulsory study