LINGUISTICS,

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED VOL. 7 , NO. 1, 1997 79

Autonomy and interdependence:

language in the world

MONICAHELLER
University of Toronto

This discussion of Ramptons and Couplands papers argues that

applied linguistics should take as its central focus the concept of
language in the world. Extending Hymes notion of a socially-consti-
tuted linguistics, I argue that it is necessary to examine directly the
question of the relative autonomy or interdependence of linguistic,
cognitive and social processes, and to define research questions which
address the mutually embedded nature of these processes in an inter-
disciplinary fashion.

In their introductory and focal papers. Rampton and Coupland describe well
the tensions faced by applied linguistics today, tensions arising from debates
over how to define the central set of concerns of the field. To some degree
applied linguistics may be feeling these tensions more acutely than some other
disciplines because, on the one hand, it is a discipline which has inherited a
positivist and empiricist mandate to describe the natural world of language,
seen as part of a set of autonomous (albeit interlocking) systems. At the same
time, however, applied linguistics addresses itself precisely to questions involv-
ing the articulation among systems. Linguists who take as their central concern
the discovery of the systematic nature of language can operate on the assump-
tion that they are dealing with a natural phenomenon which has regularities
which can be autonomously described. Linguists who are concerned with other
kinds of problems, specifically who are concerned with what language can tell
us about cognitive o r social processes, or who are concerned about the cogni-
tive and social dimensions of language development or language learning, must
directly address the problem of interdependence among cognitive, social and
linguistic systems, among ways of being, knowing and acting. And, of course,
once one admits of the possibility of interdependence among systems, it is also
necessary to bring into the picture the interdependence between our own ways
of knowing and what we can say about what we think we know.
80 MONICAHELLER
It seems fairly clear to me that the term applied linguistics is inherited from
the historical dominance (and precedence) of the first kind of linguistics, the
kind that assumes that the central job of linguistics is to describe language as
an autonomous, natural system. That knowledge then becomes available for
other purposes, much as knowledge about physiological systems is useful in the
invention or discovery of medical treatments. What we are experiencing now is
the slide from this linguistics applied to the kinds of questions which explore
the fuzzy boundaries of linguistic systems and may even call into question the
usefulness of the dominant linguistic paradigm, because it is not clear whether
even the notion of autonomous system will hold long enough to allow us to
explore the interlocking of systems, or whether we need to find some other way
to think about things.
I think this means three things for applied linguistics:

- an increased focus on the problem of autonomy, interdependence and

embeddedness as an explicit research problem
- a shift from objective description to phenomenological, but also criti-
cal, enquiry
- increased interdisciplinarity.

Together this moves applied linguistics from a peripheral sub-discipline into a

merging with other modes of inquiry which share a concern with what has
become a leading question in social science. I will now take up each of these
consequences in turn.
The first entails a recognition of the privileged position of applied linguistics
with respect to these fundamental questions of social science and its practice.
U p until now, we have mainly approached them through discussion of the
tenets of the discipline (in addition to Ramptons paper here, see, for example,
Corson 1997). But I find it difficult to imagine how progress can be made in the
absence of data, so I think instead we have to develop research questions and
procedures which allow us to more directly apprehend the nature of the
phenomena we are dealing with.
We can find a parallel in research on code-switching, a widely observable
phenomenon which so far has resisted efforts at typologizing and description.
No one questions its systematicity, and indeed, I think the thrill of the chase for
theoretical linguists comes in part from the exciting possibility that roping this
steer once and for all will serve to elucidate not just what makes code-switching
work, but more importantly what is universal and what is local in linguistic
systems, what is fixed and what is variable. Of course, there remains the
possibility that there are no universals and nothing is fixed, but at least code-
switching data are useful for figuring that out. At the same time, code-switching
is connected to observable cognitive processes (aphasia, learning, and so on) as
well as to social, economic and political ones. For years, researchers have
argued that code-switching research has the potential for facilitating the discov-
e r y of how linguistic, cognitive and social processes are linked (Heller 1988;
 AUTONOMY
4ND INTERDEPENDENCE: LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD 81
Myers-Scotton 1993a, 1993b; Milroy & Muysken 1995). We may be far from
having achieved that goal, but the goal remains worthwhile. However, it may
not be enough to recognize the potential; we may have to discover new ways of
working in order to get there. And a t the heart of the debate over which way to
go is precisely the question of the relative autonomy and interdependence of
linguistic, discursive, cognitive and social systems, indeed the extent to which
they can be described autonomously at all, or rather as varied manifestations
of complex, variable, mutually embedded, situated phenomena (cf. Auer in
press; Meeuwis & Blommaert 1994).
Second, Coupland describes cogently the experience of encountering the
limits of ones paradigm, an experience he and his colleagues share with
increasing numbers of applied linguists. The traditional domains of the field,
qut>stions like How do we learn first or second languages?, are being
approached not as questions of linguistic systems but as questions of linguistic
practice, socially situated and historically contingent (cf. Peirce 1995;
Rampton 1995). The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand, applied
linguistics finds itself in the classic Kuhnian position of having too many data
that cannot be explained through existing paradigms. On the other hand, the
social and political conditions underlying the exercise of the discipline are
pushing to the forefront questions that hitherto it had been possible to ignore,
questions like In whose interest is it to know what constitutes effective L2
pedagogy?, Who defines what counts as effective in the first place? and,
even more fundamentally, In whose interest is it to master any given language
variety? This reorients the discipline in two ways. First, it shifts the way tradi-
tional questions are asked towards more phenomenological, hermeneutic, but
also more interdisciplinary ways. It assumes the centrality of interconnections
among linguistic, cognitive and social processes. Second, it opens up a whole
new set of critical, reflexive questions about the role of language in society, and
therefore about the role of linguists, too.
The third consequence for applied linguistics flows from the second: a ques-
tioning of the coherence of disciplinary boundaries, and of the very sense of the
term applied linguistics. I would agree with Rampton that applied linguistics
can no longer afford to orient itself away from other forms of inquiry - e.g.
sociolinguistics certainly, but also psycholinguistics and cognitive science,
anthropology and political economy. If applied linguistics takes as its central
concern the nature of language in the world, it is understanding language as
embedded in human ways of knowing, being and acting.
The challenge is to try to imagine what applied linguistics might look like if
we take these three consequences to the next phase, namely doing applied
l i n p k t i c s on those terms. In many respects, what I have suggested is that we
are no longer doing applied linguistics at all, in the way we have come to know
it traditionally. Instead, what we are inventing is a way of doing what Hymes
(cited in Ramptons paper) terms a socially-constituted linguistics, but which
I have just finished arguing might be somewhat differently conceived. That is, I
would want to include what we have usually thought of as cognitive processes,
82 MONICAHELLER
albeit recast in a Vygotskian, constructivist perspective. For me, this consti-
tutes a focus on language in the world.
The methodological problems raised by such recasting are, of course,
numerous. There are problems finding your way in, and problems finding your
way out, problems drawing boundaries, problems figuring out which part of the
elephant we have our hands on. But I think it is necessary to abandon our
traditional aims at holism (whether positivist o r ethnographic), and recognize
instead that the object is to understand the links among phenomena, and that
any given research project perhaps has to be understood as part of a larger
research agenda with threads leading off in different directions, to be pursued
to the extent possible over time. I can perhaps best illustrate this with some of
my own current efforts in this direction, efforts which have been both reward-
ing and frustrating.
My way into my research agenda was certainly socially-constituted, moti-
vated b y a desire to understand the clearly powerful role of language use in
articulating and defining relations of power among those around me. Growing
up in Quebec, these issues are hard to miss (although you can hide for a while).
I started where I first felt things happening, in daily interactions. It was imme-
diately clear that the local patterns of interaction certainly have local conse-
quences - there is much to be said about who said what, how, when and why,
and how that is linked to what happened next, and how that makes people feel,
about French, about English, about francophones and anglophones, and so on.
But the linkage between those local patterns and other obvious facts, like
language legislation constraining who can go to English- or French-language
schools o r what language you can write in at work, or bombs and demonstra-
tions, is less evident. That is, there certainly intuitively seems to be a connec-
tion, but what it is and how it works is harder to discover. On the other hand,
if you dont work at making those linkages, it is hard to explain either why
people vote for political parties which pass such legislation o r why some people
get angry when you say Excuse me, do you have the time? without first asking
if they happen to speak English. (Or how this emerging etiquette of language
choice can then get exploited for other purposes; for instance, many years ago
as I was walking along on a busy Montreal street, I was approached by a man
who politely asked me if I spoke French, to which I responded that I did. Once
he had me engaged in conversation, he then used the opportunity to conduct
what amounted to a verbal sexual assault.)
Most recently, I have been trying to understand the relationship between
language practices in French-language minority schools in Ontario (a province
in which English is the dominant language), the very existence of those schools,
and more broadly the construction of identity and of relations of power among
ethnolinguistic groups in Canada, as well as within the francophone community
(see Heller 1995, 1996). I do this in order to understand the nature of the
development of francophone political mobilization in Canada: what it means
for individuals who do or do not speak different varieties of French, English
and other languages, and what it means for the social, political and economic
 AUTONOMY
AND INTERDEPENDENCE: L4NGUAGE IN THE WORLD 83

institutions which function more or less well to produce and distribute valuable
resources (more or less well, of course, depending on who you are).
The pieces of the puzzle are multiple and interlinked. The pieces I have
gathered so far include observations and tape-recordings of language practices
in a variety of school settings (that is, inside and outside the classroom, involv-
ing speakers possessing a variety of linguistic repertoires), interviews with
participants in school life who occupy different social positions with respect to
the school and to the community in which it is situated, official documents
stating vision and policy, and historical and legal documents concerning the
establishment of French-language minority schools and the nature of the
clientde of those schools. What seems clear so far is that there is a linkage
among groups of people possessing certain kinds of life histories and linguistic
repertoires, their views on French-language education, their language prac-
tices, and social selection processes in the school. There is, for instance, a
connection between official preferences for monolingual-type standard French,
teacher-centred conversational structures, teacher preference for conversa-
tional sequentiality (as opposed to jointly constructed talk) and unified conver-
sational floors, and the relative academic success of middle-class students (as
opposed to the difficulties of working-class speakers of the bilingual vernacu-
lar). Specifically, I have argued that the political mobilization of Canadian
francophones is predicated on a notion of monolingual zones where franco-
phones have control, and achieving such zones permits middle-class franco-
phones to achieve the goals of their mobilization, namely, to enter the modern
world, the global networks where mainstream resources are distributed.
Schools are about providing mobilized francophones with their power base,
and with the linguistic resources (monolingual-type standard languages) which
are valued in the arenas they wish to enter. Unified floors and sequentiality
provide a means for regulating the linguistic production of students, so as to
both provide them with that valued linguistic capital and also so as to retain the
basis for the legitimacy of the very existence of the schools.
Work in other school sites, notably (but not exclusively) in Africa, points to
the same kind of linkage between language ideologies, language choices, conver-
sational sequencing and the role of the school in social and cultural reproduc-
tion. Notably, several authors have argued that rhythmic repetition of rote
learned material, as well as code-switching between the language of instruction
and students first language, serve to maintain the impression that education is
functioning democratically while in fact acting to reproduce the position of the
Clite (see papers by Arthur, Lin and Ndayipfukamiye in Martin-Jones & Heller
1996; Bunyi 1996; Chick in press).
Clearly there are pieces missing from all these accounts. For example, I am
aware that I cannot explain where the preference for sequentiality comes from;
nor am I able to account entirely for what happens to the working-class
students by focussing so much on language varieties and the value attached to
them. At the same time, while I have something to say about academic achieve-
ment, I really am unable to say what all this has to do with, for example, learn-
84 MONICAHELLER
ing processes. Nonetheless, by situating language practices in the world, I can
begin to uncover ways in which saying, knowing, being and acting are
connected.
An approach centred on language in the world also raises ethical questions
(see again Corson 1997). My own preference has been to first try to understand
what is going on, and then to ask myself how I feel about it, and what, if
anything, I want to do about it. I realize that the process of constructing under-
standing is at the same time a process of doing which one can scarcely control,
but I need to situate myself in this way in order to be clear about what I am
prepared to accept being responsible for. There are, however, other ways of
organizing things, and it is not clear to me that one is better than another in
any absolute sense (see discussion in Cameron et al. 1992).
Thus there are certainly difficulties and a great deal of unknown territory
in making the shift we are in the process of making. However, by placing
language in the world, applied linguistics not only stands a better chance of
answering its own long-standing questions, it also makes its domain of expertise
available to other domains in social science, and can thereby engage in the
generation of new sets of questions we have only begun to try to imagine.

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[Received 7/11/96]

University of Toronto
Centre de recherches en 6ducation franco-ontarienne
Ontario Institute for Studies in EducationIUniversity of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6
CANADA
e-mail: mheller@oise.utoronto.ca