Practice Without Theory and Theory Without Practice

THE AUTHOR
Diane Larsen-Freeman is a professor of education, professor of linguistics, and research scientist at the English Language Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
She is also a distinguished senior faculty fellow at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, United States.

Practice Without Theory and Theory
Without Practice
ROBERT KAPLAN
University of Southern California (Emeritus)
Los Angeles, California, United States

Dr. Drew Diligence, Vice-President and Provost (hereafter P): TESOL as a field of
study seems to lie at the disjuncture between three war zones of theory—
linguistic theory, applied linguistics theory, and educational theory. The
problem is disjunctive enough to require a thorough investigation and a
number of experts from each of the three disciplines to be deposed. The
following deposition—representing only one vision—constitutes one of a
potential series of statements intended to clarify the situation and to
propose a solution.
Please state your name and your academic qualifications.
Subject (hereafter S): My name is Isaac Bullington, and I am emeritus professor of applied linguistics. I have worked in the field for 40 years and
have taught applied linguistics courses in the Department of Linguistics
and language teacher preparation courses in the Department of Education. I have published widely in the field and have been recognized by
(among other distinctions) awards from AAAL and TESOL.
P: Clearly, you are qualified to offer information in this matter, and we
stipulate that your comments shall be accepted. Please state your
general view of the respective roles of theory and practice in the field.
S: It is important to look at this matter from a historical point of view
first. As Docherry has remarked (in the early 1990s), there has been
a gradual shift over the past 40 years away from what might be
thought of as scientific knowledge toward some sort of narrative knowledge—a rejection of notions of Marxism, liberalism, democracy, and
the changes attributed to the industrial revolution—in short, a movement in the direction of the relative and the local. This was a movement across structuralism (in the sense of a correction and modernization of the ideas of the Enlightenment), rejecting the subjective in

existentialism and psychoanalysis in favor of a quest for the objective
in the patterning of social life (see, e.g., the work of Saussure &
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Levi-Strauss), to poststructuralism, rejecting the scientific aspirations
of structuralism, and asserting that there is no truth and so there can
be no appropriate methodology, and so demonstrating the ancient
clash between nominalism and realism. The result of this intellectual
shift lies in the identification of the political, but with the following
problem: Does the shift reveal the quest of a just politics or the quest
for just a politics? This question resulted in a development that led to
what might be termed critical applied linguistics. The work of Pitt
Corder (in the 1960s and 1970s) was an early attempt at a modernist
theory; Corder’s ideas were replaced by theories arising from poststructuralism and postmodernism—critical theory, critical discourse
analysis, and critical applied linguistics. Are language teachers, now,
to abandon skills training, to conduct lessons which are really discussions of the distribution and use of power, or are the new theoretical
perceptions intended merely to guide the selection of texts for learners so that they must focus on cultural relativity (as it is manifested in
film and the media)?
P: Excuse me, Professor Bullington, but it seems to me you are lecturing
and thereby not dealing with the question at hand. You seem not to
have said anything about practice or of the relationship between
practice and theory.
S: Please, you are rushing me and you seem not to understand that the
question must be addressed from both a synchronic and a diachronic
perspective. Now, in critical discourse analysis there was a serious
fallacy, as Stubbs (around 1997) noted; practitioners “look in the
wrong place for something, then complain that they can’t find it, and

suggest that it is being concealed from them.” In other words, theorizing from the critical perspective means using the techniques of
discourse analysis to provide a political critique of the social context—one that is Marxist from a Marxist viewpoint, feminist from a
feminist viewpoint. The “critical” theorists claim that there is a need
to develop a socially responsible theory of language—one committed
to social justice. However, is the theory to represent a movement
toward a just politics or toward just a politics? The “critical” theorists
expose the way in which language is exploited through the covert
insinuation of ideological influences by carefully selecting and interpreting whatever linguistic features suit their ideological position and
simply ignoring the rest.
P: Professor Bullington, while I’m reluctant to interrupt the flow of your
thought, may I point out that you haven’t yet said anything about
practice. Our time is limited.
S: Yes, yes, but you are in fact interrupting my train of thought. You
must understand that it takes weeks in a teacher-training course to
cover the material I am trying to synthesize for you briefly and concisely. No doubt students will have some difficulty in grasping all the
subtleties of the development I’m trying to outline, but the brighter
ones will be able to manage. In any case, your interruptions and your
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pressing me to address the matter of practice creates a position somewhat akin to that taken by some contemporary scholars—e.g., Rampton—to the effect that “all is practice”; that is, there is no theory, no
reason, but rather only lots of reasons, uncoordinated, disjointed, the
extreme of postmodernism. In such a solution, there is no role for
linguists or applied linguists, and the role of educators consists of
dealing with a disconnected group of individual teachers working in
some vague sense of collaboration. You see, if it is not possible to
trace the development of the field both synchronously and diachronically then there is nothing left to talk about; all that remains is a
disjointed kind of practice unhinged from the sort of structure that

supports all social science and leaves odd bits that can exist only
within teacher education.

THE AUTHOR
Robert B. Kaplan, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States, was the founding editor-in-chief of the
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, a member of the editorial board of the Oxford
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1992, 2002), and editor of the Oxford Handbook
of Applied Linguistics. He has served as president of NAFSA, TESOL, and AAAL.

TESOL, Applied Linguistics, and the
Butterfly Effect
ALAN DAVIES
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland

What interests me in this discussion, initiated by Alister Cumming, is
the use of the term theory. Let me start with the butterfly effect. This term
is often attributed to Ray Bradbury in his science fiction story “A Sound
of Thunder” (Bradbury, 2005, pp. 203–215), which first appeared in
1952, but the idea goes back to Duhem (1906/1954). It was taken up by
Edward Lorenz (1972) in his talk to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, which was given the title: “Does the flap of a
butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
Is this a theoretical question or, rather, does it make a theoretical
claim? Obviously not in the strict sense because there is no way of reversing time so as to experiment with and without the flap of the butterfly’s wings. At the same time, in a different—wider—sense of theory,
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