Theorising academic language and learning: Past, present and future

Abstract

“Language is the only true and verifiable a priori framework of cognition.” George Steiner (1975, p.81) In this introduction to the symposium papers collected here I offer my own perspective on the past, the present – as represented by the papers before us – and the future of academic language and learning. The first is to remind ourselves of the restricted, not to say arid, theoretical state of our field of study when I first began this work in the 1970s. The widely used tags “study skills” and “remedial English” revealed this poverty of almost exclusively Anglo-American thought in all its nakedness. In the present collection readers will find many approaches to theorising with varying starting points, the great majority – with the partial exceptions of genre and rhetorical theory – stemming from the thought of Continental Europeans. I shall list these, making a few comments in passing, and then try to distil a few themes that struck me. Notably, there is an absence: the almost total abandonment of psychological learning theories as being at all helpful. Then there are three closely interconnected themes on which I focus. First, identity and difference raises its head in many of the theories, a question which has wide ramifications in what follows. The other two are the fortunes of the theory of power/knowledge regimes and the degree to which linguistic and rhetorical (or genre) structures constrain students as learners and human agents. This introduction concludes with a meditation on how the Academic Language and Learning (ALL) field might deal with the plethora of theories being offered, how a sophisticated “theory of practice” seems already to be emerging as a common pursuit, and how this development might be handled in the future amidst constricting Enlightenment ways of thinking – beliefs and practices which are seriously at odds with the kind of culture towards which most of these papers are striving.