Positivism and Postpositivism

Abstract

Abstract Positivism/postpositivism is one of several kinds of categorization that can be used to describe applied linguistic designs. Designs in applied linguistics include language policies, language tests, or language courses, for example. The different styles of working professionally within the discipline provide theoretical rationales for these three kinds of artifacts. Seven such paradigms or styles of doing applied linguistics can be distinguished in the short history of the discipline: the first four are modernist in orientation, though the third (a multidisciplinary approach) and the fourth already foreshadow the 180° degree turnabout that postmodernism brought about. Postmodernism harbors a variety of orientations: ethnography, critical applied linguistics, poststructuralism, narrative enquiry, and even posthumanism. Its most serious challenger, which harks back to modernist starting points, is to be found in complexity theory, and its dynamic systems approach. While many styles of applied linguistics exist side by side, there are now calls for integrating methodologies in a theoretically deliberate rather than a merely pragmatic or eclectic manner.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.