Proceedings of the - British Association for Applied Linguistics

The Impact of Applied Linguistics: Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of BAAL
University of the West of England
The purpose of CASL at least has the virtue of being explicit enough for
academics to express either support or disapproval for this aim. Some
second language acquisition (SLA) experts have expressed approval by
taking up posts in the centre. Other applied linguists have been critical
(Kramsch 2005). The battle lines here are at least clearly drawn. In the UK
the issues are not expressed so clearly; they are more in the PR tradition of
keeping things vague. In the UK, it is not only research which has been
hijacked, as in CASL, but also the language which is used to talk about it.
Hooray Words
HEFCE describes the importance of impact as follows:
Explicitly recognising the positive impact of excellent research is new to
research assessment in higher education (....) Its inclusion reflects [the]
policy of maintaining and improving the achievements of the higher
education sector, both in undertaking excellent research and in building on
this research to achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and
society. (HEFCE 2011)
Words exhorting us to achieve such qualities as excellence, indeed the
word impact itself, are much less concrete and much more slippery than
those used by CASL to describe its aim of supporting the US intelligence
services. They are what philosopher Jamie Whyte describes as hooray
words: ones which are so general that everyone can agree when they are
presented as goals. Hooray words refer to concepts and goals with which
everyone will endorse, until one gets down to the detail.
"besides justice, there is peace, democracy, equality, and a host of other
ideals that everyone embraces, whatever they believe these ideals to consist
in." (Whyte 2003:1-63)
Take, for example, the hooray word freedom. Everybody thinks freedom is
a good thing. It is when one gets down to detail that disagreements arise.
Some people think there should be freedom to carry a gun, freedom not to
recycle rubbish, freedom to build on sites of special scientific interest,
freedom to shoot birds of prey. Others disagree.
In the PR discourse of educational management, such hooray words are
ubiquitous. Consider for example two phrases used by the ESRC
(Economic and Social Research Council), revealing how they will "align
and shape our strategic research investment on three priority areas" in a
document significantly called (as though research were a kind of grocery
business) a "delivery plan".
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