ABSTRACT
In this final section of the book, we feature a collection of applied linguistic studies which are largely located in professional and academic practices. But this emphasis on practices is not prompted by a nomothetic desire to test out theories — even critical theories. Pennycook takes applied linguistics to task for its reliance on its psycholinguistic black-box emphasis on the cognitive processing of language, on formal semantic systems, but he also criticises more Marxist forms of critical language pedagogy, which tend to impose a deterministic theory of material imperatives on the analysis of discourse. One of the tensions that have emerged in poststructural linguistics has been that between a nomothetic search for language universals, whereby cultural variations tend to be accounted for as forms of ‘variable rule’, and the more descriptive idiographic approach to understanding difference on its own terms, such as the ethnographic studies of discourse practices. In searching for an alternative epistemological paradigm, it has been tempting for poststructuralist linguists to construct equally totalising accounts of discourse behaviour, to be drawn to the highest common factor uniting the data. More idiographically-driven theorising, such as we see in these papers, seeks to divert energy from the search for explanations to a constructive search for strategies and solutions to practical academic and professional problems.
