Communication Modes: Exploring the Universal Appeal of Applied Linguistics
Introduction
How can Applied Linguistics promote interdisciplinarity?
When speaking with us, Duncan mentioned his “secret Drama background”; indeed, many teachers in the field have similar experiences of coming to Applied Linguistics through some other interest, such as Drama, Education Studies or English Literature. This makes the subject, at its heart, already interdisciplinary. Duncan’s experience teaching in a Chinese university, where he taught students majoring in a number of academic disciplines, made him realise that a major source of interdisciplinary teaching and learning comes from the students themselves. Linguistics welcomes an especially wide array of approaches because it can be treated quantitatively, as a science, or qualitatively, like an arts subject.
Speaking more generally about interdisciplinarity in education, Duncan emphasised the importance of not getting stuck in “silos” of separate academic disciplines. To achieve this Duncan believes: “establishing [interdisciplinarity] early on is better than chucking it in as an option later and expecting that it's going to work”. First-hand experience in interdisciplinary learning early in the students’ careers will help it to feel more natural, rather than like an academic concept that is only useful for teachers at university.
Dr Duncan Lees
Principles of Practice
Diversity in Applied Linguistics
Duncan’s teaching revolves around Applied Linguistics’ ability to encompass an almost unparalleled breadth of perspectives. Most obviously, the subject can be split into scientific and arts-based approaches. Duncan relates that he has previously experienced linguistics teaching to be focused on quantitative, “positivistic” approaches, recalling that his old university in China thought of Linguistics primarily as a science.
On the other hand, it can be compared to arts subjects that require subjective interpretations, for example similar to literature, which might focus on “explor[ing] what's important or how we understand meaning”. Duncan himself came from a mix of Drama and Education Studies; both of these have come in use for Duncan, combining ideas of self-expression in Drama with the “big language teaching strand within [Linguistics]”, for example exploring sign language interpretations of Shakespeare.
Student-Led Learning
When Duncan taught at his university in China, his students came from a variety of academic disciplines: Literature, Translation, Linguistics, Interpreting and even Information Management. The important thing for Duncan was that this resulted in students who were “doing totally different things and would have [had different] frames of reference and maybe different motivations or interest in what was going on.” This creates a beneficial learning environment because “when you're teaching in an interdisciplinary way, that's when you also start to open yourself up to the resources that the students have.” Duncan repeated an important idea in interdisciplinary teaching: that “there is loads that they will know that I don't know”. Rather than seeing the teacher-student dynamic as entirely one-sided, Duncan is interested in getting students to impart their own wisdom and experience to others in the classroom.
Guidance for Interdisciplinary Teaching
Duncan spoke extensively about how to bring interdisciplinarity into the classroom, and some of the challenges inherent within this. The need for interdisciplinarity is clear: for Duncan, it is “the way it should be”, providing students and teachers with the tools to break free from restrictive academic practices and open themselves up to deeper understanding. The need to communicate across departments is clear because: “There are people reinventing the wheel because they’re not paying attention, just because something is in a journal from a slightly different field, or is taught in a slightly different department.”
An important idea for Duncan in promoting interdisciplinary teaching is to avoid the reputation of interdisciplinarity as an abstract academic idea, or even as a gimmick: “some people from other perspectives may see it as fun, but they don't see it as serious”. One way to help combat this is to instil interdisciplinary teaching from an early stage in university teaching, so that everyone can experience it first-hand when they might otherwise dismiss it later on. It’s also important to ask the question: “why are you doing it?” – interdisciplinarity should bring tangible benefits, rather than doing it “for the sake of it” because it’s a popular idea in academia currently. Students have to feel that it is worth doing for themselves, and that they are empowered to give it a try. The main challenge to interdisciplinarity for Duncan is “embedded viewpoints”, where students have already begun to be set in one academic mode of thought. The way to combat this may lie in flexible, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary education even at the university level – Duncan points to the American system of higher education as an example of this (many Scottish universities also use a similar system).
Moving Forward
Feedback from Students
Much of the work in improving the Communication Modes module revolves around pre-empting issues students might have with integrating their disciplinary frameworks into an interdisciplinary space. For example, Duncan had students with a more scientific understanding who didn’t respond to the more qualitative aspects of the course because it felt “superficial”. On the other hand, there were some who felt their understanding was superficial because they lacked the tools or vocabulary to support a quantitative analysis. Duncan concluded: “I think one thing I would do in future is to be a bit more explicit about how evidence works in different contexts”. The key takeaway is not to wait until the problem arises, but to “try and pre-empt that rather than waiting [to deal with it]”.
