2

Prescribing and describing: popular and academic views of ‘correctness’

            At the heart of the aspiration to relate theory to practice is a costant tension between language as viewed by ‘the expert’ and language as everyone’s lived experience-including the applied linguist’s own.

Children’s language at home and school

            As every parent knows, young children speak idiosyncratically, a child growing up in an English-speaking family. At school, however, the situation is very different. Here the child is expected, and taught, to use language ‘correctly’.

            The standard is generally used in written communication, taught in schools, and condified in dictionaries and grammar books. Dialects are regional and social-class varies of the language whic differ from the standard in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, and are seldom written down at all.

            There is no reason why children cannot grow up knowing both a dialect and the standard form.

            Some social-class variation indicate not only differences but deficits. The language used in some sections of society is a restricted code whic lacks the full resources of the more elaborated code of the standard.

            Schools are a good barometer  of both languages use and social values, and their approach to teaching the national language or languages, which is much the same all over the world, arises from two interesting facts; any language is subject to enormous variation and many people intolerant of this variation.

Description versus prescription

            Description; saying what does happen, prescription; saying what oguht to happent, such facts as following;

-         deviation from the norm,

-         a single standard was absolute and unassaible then regional standards,

-         consistent rule governed grammars,

-         usage of the most economically and politically powerful class or region,

-          the grammar of written language, and

-          grammarians through analogy with another language.

            Applied linguistics have a responsibility to investigate the reasons behind the impasse between descriptive and prescriptivists.

-         Some prexisting notion

-         What does count as an example of the language

-         Despite descriptivist insistence on the equality of all varieties

-         Describing and explaining facts about languages

-         Paradoxically

An applied linguistics perspective

            Applied linguistics has the very difficult task of trying to find points of contact in the contrary views so that necessary decisions can be made.

            In the case of speech therapy, foreign language teaching, and language testing. A major task for applied linguistics is to bring out what these criteria are and how they are decided. Language is a lived experience intimately involved with people’s sense of worth and identity. The task of applied linguistics is to mediate between these two very different perspectives. This is a difficult task, but it is what applied linguistics does and what makes it worthwhile.

Applied Linguistics 

by Guy Cook