Applied Linguistics: A Theory of the Practice

Coming as I do from the German literary field, that I studied in France in the 1950s, and due to my subsequent emigration to the USA, I found myself in the 1960s, doing an unexpected amount of foreign language teaching in the highly intellectual environment of American universities. I didn’t know that teaching language was considered in the USA to be inferior to teaching literature, and I got to resent the language/literature hierarchy of American foreign language and literature departments. After all, I thought, isn’t literature made of language and doesn’t one have to understand the workings of language to understand the subtleties of literature? Over the years, I discovered that I was neither interested in dissecting literary texts nor in parsing sentences, but that what really intrigued me was how speakers and writers construct their worlds differently in different languages. Indeed, I was distressed by the fundamental differences in worldviews that I perceived between myself and my American students, even though we all spoke German in the classroom. I had a French outsider’s view on both English and German as they had an American outsider’s view on both French and German. This outsider’s perspective proved painful for the practitioner that I was, but extraordinarily fruitful for the researcher that I continued to be. It was a fertile ground for all kinds of questions I was asking of my teaching practice that I never saw other teachers asking. What cognitive categories was I teaching under the guise of teaching my students German vocabulary? What was the relation between the nominalizations and extended participial constructions so frequent in bureaucratic German and the power of grammar to construct ideology? And, why did my American students always want to use words like challenge or agency that had no equivalent in either French or German? Today, now that these questions have morphed in my mind into bigger questions of discourse, identity, and the very possibility of understanding one another across cultures, I realize that my own subject position as a scholar is perhaps different from that of the other contributors to this special issue. Although I have spent most of my career in the USA, I have deliberately remained at the intersection of Anglo-Saxon and Continental European educational and intellectual traditions, and have been privileged to be able to network with equal ease in France, Germany, and the English-speaking world. In fact, the misunderstandings between cultures and the frustrations they have occasioned have been, over the years, one of the major impetuses for my research.