Introduction

2.2 Problems with ‘problem’ You may have noticed that quite a few of the scholars you encountered in Activity 6 mentioned language-related ‘problems’. This goes back to the much-cited definition of the academic discipline of applied linguistics put forward by Brumfit in 1995, which you saw in the animation. This useful and widely quoted definition is precise in one sense: it pinpoints applied linguists’ concern with investigating the ‘real world’, and thus differentiates it from other types of linguistics. But there is a problem with the word ‘problem’. Activity 7 Allow 20 minutes Listen to the interview with applied linguist David Block below. He describes a particular language-related problem he has investigated, and defines this ‘problem’ as something he wished to understand rather than solve. Make notes on what situation he was investigating and the distinction he draws between issues which are ‘problems’ and those which are ‘problematic’. Think also about the following: To what extent was Block’s study about language? What does he mean by ‘violating the research process’ when he describes how his students sometimes try to approach research? I can give you an example from something I’ve done in the last few years where I have a, a few cases of research, mainly based on interviews, where I asked people living in London who weren’t British to tell me their sort of life stories, their contacts with languages in their lifetimes and also how they lived their lives in London, and some of this research is taken up in the 2006 book, er, ‘Multilingual Identities in a Global City’. So if I look at, you know, one of the chapters is about Spanish speaking Latinos which I thought was an interesting topic, for many reasons. The whole issue of Spanish speaking Latinos in the world, if you look at the United States of course everybody knows there’s a huge, you know, millions and millions of Spanish speaking Latinos, but there has been a spread around the world of people from different parts of Central and South America who are Spanish speakers to places like different European countries, for example. And so I was taken, going back over ten years ago, by how much Spanish I heard in London and London was, was to me, sort of, it was a Spanish speaking city, much more than people could imagine and that, that led me, that very kind of local issue in my day to day life, led me to investigate that. But of course I was mindful of all the research that had been done in the United States, but no research really that had been done in the UK on this topic or very, very little. I did a very small scale study in primarily, as I said, around interviewing people, and I wrote this up as a chapter in the book, and what I found was maybe different types, different ways of living the London experience that these different people I interviewed had. And just to give you a couple of examples, I mean you could go from one extreme where somebody was living a life, and a very marginalised life socially and economically, very little contact with the English language, for example. On the other end you might have somebody who’s living a more middle class-type existence, probably came to London university educated and was having a considerably easier time of things if you like. And so, I then could take this as this is only London this is happening, speculate about other, say, urban environments in Europe, and also connect this up with the general issues around globalisation and migration that are taking place. So, for example, somebody from Colombia is specifically from Colombia specifically living in London, but their migration is similar maybe to people migrating from other countries. And so some of the language and cultural issues that come up in the specific migration in London is also perhaps generalisable back to the general literature of, of what happens when people leave their homes and go somewhere else. So that would be an example, I suppose, of a particular type of research which is not so much in the realm of language. It’s not in the realm of language teaching but more in the realm of sociolinguistics where you have, er, a locally generated problem, puzzle if you like, that I’ve encountered, and then I can write about it in a local context and say well I have to be careful because this is specific to London but at the same time there are issues around migration that I can connect to bigger debates about migration on the global scene. I think my using ‘problem’ in this context is not the more prosaic use of ‘problem’, I think. I think it’s almost more a technical word and I think I also used the word ‘puzzle’ which is used by a lot of people, and maybe puzzle’s a less contentious word because when you say ‘problem’ people think not only are you identifying something to focus on but you think that there’s something wrong in some way, and I, I don’t mean to suggest that. And the word ‘problem’ is a problem because of the way it’s used in day to day speech and what people understand in it because it seems to have negative connotations. I think in the realm of research it’s usually -what is the focus of the research-? But I think maybe some of the confusion is what people really mean when they say ‘problem’ is they’ve identified something that is problematic, that there’s, er, it’s not so much that it’s negative but it’s something that I have trouble understanding in a way. So, when I’m looking at Spanish speaking Latinos and I say there’s a problem I don’t mean to put the onus on the Spanish speaking Latinos as they are the problem. What I mean to say is maybe their, their lives in London is, is problematic for me, because maybe I don’t understand it or I, I think I don’t understand it and I want to understand more and so I set it up as, as a focus of enquiry. And once I do that then the whole sort of ball gets rolling that I maybe start doing reading about issues around that will help me understand. So migration in general, possibly globalisation, and at these different scales if you like, and maybe I would read things about how to do research in micro settings. And so all of it starts coming together, but it starts with the problem. And I think if I expand on that a little bit I mean one of the things I’ve always found interesting talking to students on MA programmes is when it comes time to do a piece of coursework or to do an MA dissertation or report or whatever, you might have somebody come up to you and say well I want to do classroom observation. Because they maybe have been to a seminar where this came or up or they read something and what they took from what they read, an article, research based article, was not so much what the point of it was but how they thought the observation was like really, you know, cool or something, this is something I really want to do. Or other people just come up and say I want to do a paper on motivation, right. And the, the problem with both of these, I want to do observation, I want to do a paper on motivation is it kind of violates the research process. Now I’m going to make a sort of universal claim here maybe, maybe I shouldn’t, but it’s about going back to what I said about ‘problem’ and ‘puzzle’. All research has to begin with something that, that you don’t understand, you want to understand, puzzle, problem, whatever you want to call it. And it must proceed then to say well how do I, what are the questions that derive from my puzzlement, if you like, and then you get these questions. And once you get these questions, these become your research questions. When I say research questions I don’t mean that necessarily everything that comes after would be research. It could be it develops into an argumentative essay. But it is something that you want answered, these are questions you want answered. And at that point, what is the best way to answer the questions? And it could be the questions are of a nature that the best way to answer them is to argue them, so you might go off and read lots of different points of view on the, on the issue and you write your paper. But the other end of it is, if, if it’s research based and the best way to answer the question could be to observe but it might be to do interviews, it might be to use questionnaires, or any number of things. I think inside the broad umbrella of applied linguistics, the problem solving activity we’re calling research, it might proceed in the way I’ve just described; that, there’s, people think and they come up with an idea, a puzzle or whatever they have, they have questions they want answered and then they either do research or not and they write to the end. In applied linguistics being applied there’s an assumption maybe that, or at least a suggestion that, they will have some real world. I mean Chris Brumfit’s old definition of applied linguistics about real world problems that they’ll have some sort of value outside just this is interesting. I think what currently passes for applied linguistics, there are elements of kind of two general results. One is, oh that’s very interesting and I could read lots and lots of that and it makes me think and maybe on a sort of secondary level I can find some application. And in other research that very, either because the author explicitly makes that clear, or it’s just clear anyway, there is a practical application. So if somebody is doing research on task based language teaching, almost from the beginning there’s going to be some payoff at the end probably about language teaching, pedagogy if you like, whereas if they’re doing, if I go back to the work I’ve done on migrants, I think, I would hope maybe something I’d read about Spanish speaking Latinos, and I’d say that’s very interesting. At the policy level what kind of recommendations can I make, I’m really still kind of putting out ideas that, for example, we cannot assume that just because people are in London they’re going to have access to language and all kind of social, economic issues and everything else. So it’s really kind of creating the ground work maybe for policy still because there are ideas that still need to get out there and float around. So there’s less of a direct applied element. Whereas other researches I’ve mentioned maybe has that more clearly. David Block was trying to understand how Spanish-speaking Latinos lived in the context of multilingual London. He gives a subtle and complex take on the notion of language-related problems which will help to guard against any simplistic notion that they can be ‘solved’ by ‘experts’. He outlines how he needed to locate the issue he had encountered locally (in London) in the wider context of research conducted in other countries and contexts, and in terms of migration and globalisation, and how this led him beyond a narrow view of what language and applied linguistics research means. Block describes the focus of his research as a ‘puzzle’ rather than as a problem. He is clear in particular about the need to avoid framing his research subjects – the Spanish speakers – as a ‘problem’; rather, he chooses ‘focus of enquiry’ to make it clear that his interest in them is not geared towards ‘fixing’ them. When Block describes some of his students violating the research process, he means that they sometimes don’t begin from a puzzle – something that they want to understand. He describes how such puzzles then naturally lead to research questions that then guide the rest of the research process. Aside from the issues with ‘problem’ that Block outlines, as we noted earlier, not every area worthy of investigation by applied linguists necessarily constitutes a ‘problem’. Some scholars therefore prefer to adopt an alternative, broader, definition to allow for a range of contexts in which an understanding of language can be useful or simply of interest: Applied linguistics is the academic field which connects knowledge about language to decision-making in the real world. (Simpson, 2011, p. 1).