Critical linguistics developed in the 1970s as an influential school of early discourse analysis because it was able to demonstrate the close relationship between the detailed linguistic choices and the production of ideology in media texts (especially news) and, by implication, to explain how media ideology contributed to the reproduction of a social order characterized by inequality and oppression. Critical linguistics adheres to an early version of linguistic constructionism, according to which the words of our language function as a conventionalized mental grid through which we perceive reality. Words constitute the reality that they designate, and when newspapers inform about social states and events they inevitably construct those very states and events. Going one step further, critical linguistics claims that also the syntactic choices made in a text have a constraining effect on the construction of social reality. The most important of such syntactic–ideological processes are those of passivization and nominalization. This should not be taken to mean that the verbal choices in news reports can be made by journalists at will. As mentioned previously, the formation of public opinion through the media in capitalist societies is controlled by those with economic and social power over the mass media, who will see to it that social affairs are represented in such a manner as to not jeopardize their interests and privileges. Consequently, there is a power dimension in all public communication, an ideological thrust that by its sheer omnipresence in the aggregate media landscape manages to establish the current social arrangements as natural and inevitable and to discredit alternative perspectives as being contrary to common sense.
James Tollefson was born in San Jose, California. He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara and both his M.A. and Ph.D in linguistics from Stanford University. He started his career in theoretical linguistics, working in syntactic and semantic theory, and taught initially at Stanford University and later in the School of Language and Communication at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. After doing some research in psycholinguistics at Northeastern University in Boston and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, Prof. James’ research focus switched to studies on discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and applications of linguistics to literacy and education. He went on to teach in the School of Education at Boston University, where he was the chair of the Department of Developmental Studies and Counseling, and later in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. At Boston University he established new graduate programs centered around an integrated approach to language and literacy, combining programs in reading, writing, bilingual education, ESL, and applied linguistics. From 1993 to 1997 he held the Jacob Hiatt Chair in Education in the Hiatt Center for Urban Education at Clark University in Massachusetts. From 1997 until 2007, he held the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2007, he relocated to Arizona State University, where he was the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. James trained as an articulatory phonetician, and has written textbooks on semantics and grammar, two books on numeral systems and three books on the origins and evolution of language, beside articles on phonetics, syntax, phonology, language acquisition and pragmatics. His interest is in reconciling various traditions in Linguistics which have tended to conflict. His work is interdisciplinary, based in linguistics, but reaching out to, and taking insights and data from, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, genetics, artificial intelligence and philosophy. His thinking relates the work of formal linguists who study sentences out of their communicative context, psycholinguists and neuroscientists who study the brain processes underlying language use, and anthropologists and sociolinguists who emphasize how language is embedded in social groups. This effort considers how representations of languages in individual minds interact with properties of languages used in communities, and emphasizes the interaction of evolution, learning and communication.
Preface
1. LANGUAGE MINORITIES
2. RESEARCH METHODS FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS: SCOPE, CHARACTERISTICS, AND STANDARDS
3. SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
4. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
5. SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON LANGUAGE LEARNING
6. LITERACY STUDIES
7. FASHIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODOLOGY
8. COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING (CALL)
9. LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION
10. THE PRACTICE OF LSP
11. BILINGUAL EDUCATION
12. LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
13. LANGUAGE PLANNING AS APPLIED LINGUISTICS
14. LANGUAGE TESTING
15. CRITICAL APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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