Article In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics: Online-First Articles
Applied and ‘Appliable’ Linguistics in Australia
Empiricism and functionalism
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Abstract
From the mid-1970s in Australia, there was a notable complementarity between the efforts of applied linguists and
the theoretical developments emerging from the work of systemic functional linguists. This collaboration was the outcome of
sharing an institution — the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA). Conferences addressed the shared, inevitable
challenges that teachers of languages faced in all the subdivisions of language pedagogy — for example, ESL; TESOL; Second
Language Learning; Speech Disorders; Literacy in specific contexts (from schools to workplace); and child language development (by
contrast with the innatist assumptions associated with “Language Acquisition,” which carried the imprimatur of American
linguistics after WWII). At well attended meetings, classroom experiences and cultural variations in migrant communities were
discussed alongside, and with a mutuality between, those more narrowly focused on the problems of semantics, lexis and grammar,
stylistics, and phonetics/phonology. It was a privilege to participate. The ALAA association worked keenly to make its conferences
inclusive and its publications cover a broad spectrum of language research topics. Those “at the coalface” of language teaching
and social practice brought their experiences to those adding to the sociosemantic foundations of the Systemic Functional model of
languages. The arrival of the linguists Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan at Sydney and Macquarie universities (respectively)
opened out the ways languages could be appreciated as different means of getting things done in social contexts…of language as a
“resource” in lived experience; and therefore, as paradigmatic systems analogous to combinations of ‘choice’.
Article outline
- 1.Personal Reflection: An international conference of “applied linguists”
- 2.Halliday, Hasan and Firthian perspectives on linguistics
- 3.Variation by register
- 4.Halliday, science, and the ‘Drift’ of English
- 5.Characterology and Typological work and the context of brain sciences
- 6.The Australian Context: Indigenous and migrant communities
- 7.The genre of personal reflection
- 8.The Macquarie Dictionary and mentoring styles
- 9.The Crucial contribution of the teachers of general linguistics
- 10.Appliable linguistics and international students
- Author queries
References
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