1. Introduction
‘Trading Places, Creating Spaces’ – the title of this plenary symposium – was a considered choice because it captures in very many ways Candlin's view of the world and of intellectual endeavour. It is, of course, a difficult task to distil Candlin's contribution even in any single aspect of the landscapes he traversed across his career. Nonetheless, here we attempt to do just that in focusing on his work in LSP and professional communication, though that inevitably intersects with other domains. The title ‘Trading Places, Creating Spaces’ references Candlin's Reference Candlin2008 plenary at the inaugural conference of the Asia-Pacific Rim LSP and Professional Communication Association held in Hong Kong. The plenary was subtitled ‘Aligning Research and Practice in LSP and Professional Communication,’ reflecting Candlin's concern to highlight theoretical, methodological and analytical challenges in particular research problems in terms of practical relevance. His title not only points to what we should do, but how – that is, that it is in the processes of trading places between research and practice, in the very shuttling between them, that new sites of enquiry emerge. Reflexivity, which spans all of Candlin's work, is of course central to these processes, not as a goal but as a guiding principle – a point elaborated below. First, we provide a brief account of the settings in which ‘Trading Places, Creating Spaces’ was created in 2008 and recontextualised in 2017.
As already noted, Candlin's concern was always to engage with particular phenomena or practices in order to shed light on practical problems. He wanted to privilege a broad perspective on what those problems might be and where we might find them. The Asia-Pacific region had long been an important arena for research into LSP as well as for research into professional communication, and Candlin was concerned to bring these communities of interest together. Typically, he did this by engaging with others and acknowledging that engagement, in this case conceiving of the idea of a professional association with Vijay Bhatia in 2006. The first conference had as its theme ‘Partnerships in Action: Research, Practice and Training’, which clearly underscores the concern to bring together the worlds of research, practice and training through partnerships and reflexive action. Candlin's excitement about this new venture is palpable in his preface to the edited papers: he states that it ‘heralds what will become a force for exchange and innovation in . . .research, practice and training’ (Candlin Reference Candlin and Bhatia2009: 7). In referring to first exchange and then innovation Candlin echoes his view that it is in exchange, or in trading places between research, training and practice, that we create innovative spaces for enquiry and learning within and across all three.
This leads us to the 4th Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes & Professional Communication Association Conference, held in Wellington, and to our symposium honouring Candlin's contribution to aligning research and practice. In what follows we endeavour to capture the five presentations by Winnie Cheng, Stephen Moore, Srikant Sarangi, Alan Jones, and Janet Holmes and Nicki Riddiford – each focusing on a different aspect of Candlin's contribution to aligning research and practice. To this task we bring different experiences of working with Candlin: in his early engagement with English for special purposes (ESP) in Thailand in 1981 and his transformation of the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) in Australia, building on the philosophy of practitioner participation in research (Cynthia White); in Candlin's inspirational leadership in applied sociopragmatics at Lancaster University, combined with visionary research leadership and cutting edge research programmes which consistently focused on investigating real-world issues and improving social conditions for those he worked with (Janet Holmes); in Hong Kong, initiating a unique framework of international collaboration in research, combining discourse and genre analysis and professional practice in interdiscursive international commercial arbitration contexts, bringing together more than 20 teams of researchers from as many countries across the globe, thus establishing a successful framework for teamwork lasting more than ten years (Vijay Bhatia).
2. Methodologies, settings, critical moments and questions of relevance
We first consider four of the approaches Candlin developed to take us further towards aligning research and practice: through particular research tools and methodologies, through the investigation of professional settings, through a focus on ‘critical moments of interaction’ in ‘crucial sites of engagement’ (Candlin Reference Candlin2008), and through a concern with both rigour and relevance. These approaches are in no way prescriptions or even goals but can best be considered as guiding principles which we can draw on.
Candlin saw applied linguistics as a ‘many centred and interdisciplinary endeavour’ (Candlin & Sarangi Reference Candlin and Sarangi2004: 2). This meant he also saw value in drawing on a range of methodologies and tools to enquire into research problems. But this was not a case of methodological eclecticism per se. For Candlin, theory and method were always interrelated and those connectivities, he argued, need to be explored and made evident as part of the research process through focused and principled action. He welcomed the importance of methodological debates in relation to research tools, participatory structures, ethical dilemmas, vehicles for report and dissemination, all as important sites of engagement. The issue of the stance taken by researchers was also crucial, needing to be made explicit at each stage: in identifying the research problem, in deriving the research agenda from discussion and critical reflection, in capitalising on the expertise and interests of practitioners, and in striking a relationship between participants’ and analysts’ perspectives on the data. He took these ideas a step further in emphasising the need to maintain a commitment to an ongoing critical awareness of the kinds of understandings we are attempting to draw from enquiry – including for different audiences.
A second approach was to widen the focus of language-related research to include professional settings: topics included cross-cultural legal and arbitration practice, and matters of risk in social and healthcare settings, and within wider workplace and institutional settings. Candlin was interested in the social and contextual complexities of those sites and the kinds of interpretive engagement which are required of researchers to uncover the meanings made in texts and talk. In his preface to the edited collection from the 2008 conference, Candlin also drew our attention to the need to examine constructs such as trust, risk and quality which he described as characteristically discoursed; he proposed that these constructs can be examined in relation to a wide range of theoretical constructs: agency, identity, role, knowledge management, interpretive repertoires, reasoning and ethics (Candlin Reference Candlin and Bhatia2009).
A third approach to aligning research and practice was to underscore the value and significance of focusing on ‘critical moments’ in ‘crucial sites of engagement’ (Candlin Reference Candlin2008) – to which Candlin applied Goffman's question form: ‘what is going on here?’ This approach was used to develop understandings of presencing in the work of nurses whereby patients gain a sense of their centrality in what takes place and of empathetic support (Candlin & Candlin Reference Candlin, Candlin, Hamilton and Chou2014), leadership practices in complex encounters (Knight & Candlin Reference Knight, Candlin and Shrestha2015) and workplace communication challenges for skilled migrants (Holmes & Riddiford Reference Holmes, Riddiford and Bhatia2009), to give just a few examples.
A fourth approach to the ongoing alignment of research and practice was through attention to relevance rather than merely the enhancement of disciplinary knowledge. However, Candlin problematised the issue of relevance, arguing that for applied linguists to see themselves as ‘bringers of solutions’ (Candlin & Sarangi Reference Candlin and Sarangi2004: 4) is too simplistic an approach. He went far beyond the idea of motivational relevance to challenge us in terms of inter-relational dimensions at all stages of the research process. He argued that we need to work with practitioners throughout the research process: through processes of joint problematisation, for example, or by learning to code results in language understandable to professional colleagues and end-users. Taking care of the inter-relational dimensions with those who may be both sources of data and end-users of data is not only seen as a crucial obligation of researchers but also a necessity if the analysis and the outcomes are to be of use to the lived experiences of individuals in real-world settings. We now turn to the contributions from the participants in this symposium.
3. How to deepen our understanding of professional communication in English (Winnie Cheng)
Candlin was deeply committed to exploring and extending the potential of applied linguistics research. To this end, in 2004 he launched, with Srikant Sarangi, a new journal – the Journal of Applied Linguistics. Their inaugural editorial reads as a manifesto and a very clear challenge to the field of applied linguistics to move beyond educational arenas to engage with a much more extensive range of disciplines. It was around this time that Candlin became Honorary Advisor for a proposed Research Centre in Professional Communication in English (RCPCE) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Hong Kong was to become an important site for the emergence of the new kinds of applied linguistics research envisaged by Candlin. Winnie Cheng traced this in her session entitled ‘How to deepen our understanding of Professional Communication in English’. Drawing on early documents referring to professional communication research at PolyU, Winnie Cheng noted Candlin's view that ‘we have here a burgeoning academic discipline, closely linked, axiomatically, to professional and institutional bodies outside the academy.’ At this point we can see how Candlin was concerned to open out the field of applied linguistics and to integrate its practices with the communication needs of professional communities. These fields have indeed burgeoned: a vast number of transdisciplinary and collaborative research projects have been carried out in key industries in Hong Kong (such as financial services, engineering, construction, surveying, tourism) using a wide range of methodological approaches, constructs and tools, with a focus on collaboration throughout the research process. Winnie Cheng emphasises the prescience of Candlin's approach, evident now in the kinds of impact case studies required of researchers in many disciplines.
The titles of seminars given by Candlin at PolyU in 2009 point to what Candlin sees as critical to the bringing together of research and practice. Here we focus on just two of the topics. One, entitled ‘Reflexivity at the theory–practice interface’, draws our attention to the need for any field to contextualise its intellectual practice. Reflexivity in Candlin's terms underpins a professional community and is based on an understanding of practice and action. This means that a professional community does not consist of simply applying existing practices but rather that reflexivity serves as the basis for ongoing transformation of professional practices, and of course for relevance.
Candlin focused on relevance in another seminar entitled ‘Meeting the requirements of practical relevance: achieving “thick” participation’. Relevance in Candlin's writings meant achieving reciprocity of perspectives at every stage of enquiry between such stakeholders as researchers, research participants, other professionals, end-users and at times lay people. The stages of enquiry might include identifying the research problem, selecting particular critical moments or episodes for analysis, and most particularly the warranting of results and their dissemination. ‘Thick’ participation was part of this method, requiring applied linguists to fully engage with and be immersed in the research process and outcomes. Elsewhere Candlin and Sarangi emphasise that thick participation takes place through ‘a process of collaborative discovery, incorporating the expert gaze of participating actors with their own values, criteria and purposes’ (Candlin & Sarangi Reference Candlin and Sarangi2004: 4). Appraising this process further from a reflexive perspective they add that collaborative, thick participation ‘may at times prove uncomfortable for some applied linguists with hot applicable models in their pockets as they confront the “multiple realities” of practitioners, with established models of tacit practice’ (Candlin & Sarangi Reference Candlin and Sarangi2004: 4). The kinds of problems arising in collaborative research, whether in interdisciplinary research or research involving diverse stakeholders, include the purposes of research, the choice of research paradigms, the perceived salience of different data points, interpretations of data and implications of the research.
Drawing on these kinds of principles and perspectives outlined so vividly by Candlin, Winnie Cheng described the range of collaborative research projects carried out by the RCPCE at PolyU, within and across diverse professional settings. A wide range of methodological tools have been deployed from multimodal analysis (of hotel websites), to corpus analysis (of financial services and engineering genres, for example), to surveys and interviews (to investigate engineers’ views of the importance of communicative competence in English in the workplace), to ethnographic accounts of workplace sites and the discursive practices of land surveyors in Hong Kong. In this, the reach of Candlin's influence is evident in extending applied linguistics to a diverse range of professional arenas as significant sites of professional engagement. Winnie Cheng also highlighted some of the training opportunities and resources from this work which are themselves sites of significant research. In closing, she looked forward to emerging work for a project based on instant messaging with a company called ‘Future Perfect’, working in the service banking sector, based on analysis of instant messages between customer service agents and customers, focusing on customer satisfaction.
4. To Sir with Love: Recalling Chris Candlin the teacher (Stephen Moore)
Reflexivity spans the whole of Candlin's work including in the classroom. In Stephen Moore's session intriguingly entitled ‘To Sir with Love: Recalling Chris Candlin the Teacher’ we gained glimpses of Candlin's enacted philosophy as a teacher. Stephen Moore drew directly on his experience as both a student and a co-teacher to give what he described as a ‘multi-perspectival account’ of that philosophy. In this he mirrored Candlin's multi-perspectival approach (Candlin & Crichton Reference Candlin and Crichton2011, Reference Candlin, Crichton, Petersen and Engberg2012, Reference Candlin, Crichton, Candlin and Crichton2013) involving the collection of data from a variety of discursive practices within the particular context being investigated – in this case the course ‘Discourse in Context and Action’ offered at Macquarie University – including texts, interpretative accounts of participants, recordings and observations from sites of engagement. In fact, for Candlin the data were everything and Stephen Moore described how Candlin would exhort those teaching with him, ‘Go find some data’, indicating his focus on actual moments of text or talk. Within this data-driven approach (for which the film ‘To Sir with Love’ provided rich data sources) a typical class would start with new data, then key questions would be raised, then Candlin would give a mini-lecture continually referring back to the data; students would then engage with new data by way of group tasks and directive questions, followed by feedback and class discussion (sprinkled with interesting anecdotes), then wrap-up or consolidation and homework suggestions for further enquiry and learning. The kinds of typical questions used included: ‘What is it that's going on here?’ ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Why that now?’ and ‘What actions are being taken here, by whom and why?’ These questions form some of the chapter headings in Candlin's co-authored book entitled Exploring discourse in context and in action (Candlin, Crichton & Moore Reference Candlin, Crichton and Moore2017). Candlin was really interested in what discourse is, why it matters to particular people, at particular sites, in particular moments, and how we can enquire into it. This was about a much broader remit, that is, how to foster research and enquiry that are relevant to social and professional practice and to bigger questions, such as ‘How do discourse and social change drive each other?’, also the title of one of the book chapters. The key theorists Candlin drew on were vast in number and range: Bourdieu, Cicourel, Fairclough, Foucault, Garfinkel, Goffman, Gumperz, Habermas, Sacks, Schegloff, Scollon, but of these it was to Bourdieu and Goffman that he would return most often, for the explanatory power of their theoretical and conceptual frameworks.
A further aspect of Candlin's enacted philosophy of teaching was what Stephen Moore calls ‘the open-minded sharer’. Candlin was concerned that the course on exploring discourse at Macquarie should be made available to all students, not only those formally enrolled, so it was open to auditing students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. For these students, as the course drew to a close Candlin rued the fact that course evaluations always looked backwards; he instead was always forward-looking, asking at the end of the course such questions as ‘what can you do now that you couldn't do before?’ and ‘do you feel ready to research discourse in your workplace?’ and ‘if not, what else would you need to know or learn or experience?’. In this he was crucially concerned that what students had learned would be truly relevant to the social and professional practices in their lifeworlds, and, more than this, that they would have the tools to research those practices in informed ways that were meaningful for them.
5. The communicative basis of professional expertise (Srikant Sarangi)
To begin his session, Srikant Sarangi reminded us that Candlin had a number of passions, one of which was enquiring into the communicative basis of professional expertise. His early work in healthcare settings brought to the fore many of the challenges and dilemmas in researching practice: here we are thinking of his exploration of ‘one expert or two’ concerning how doctors and patients interpret the term ‘viral loads’ of HIV positive people (Moore, Candlin & Plum Reference Moore, Candlin and Plum2001), and nursing expertise in presencing in palliative care (Candlin & Candlin Reference Candlin, Candlin, Hamilton and Chou2014), to name but two. In studies such as these Candlin brought to light different dilemmas of rigour and relevance, a point discussed further below.
Of course, the notion of expertise is integral to all forms of professional practice – in education, banking, journalism, social welfare, healthcare, and so on. Srikant Sarangi emphasised that research into applied linguistics and professional expertise has encountered and foregrounded problems of the definition, description and measurement of expertise. Adopting a language-based perspective, a number of important questions arise from this: Is there a communicative basis of expertise? How might we investigate this? Can communication or interaction be an indicator and tool of measurement of professional expertise? As background to these questions we need to understand the move away from a psychological approach that sees expertise as something that resides in the individual to seeing it as distributed and systems-dependent. We are thus faced with questions about what counts as individual expertise and collective expertise, and contentious claims, such as that by Lingard (Reference Lingard, Hodges and Lingard2012), that individual expertise and competencies can result in incompetent teamwork: an example would be when individuals largely operate in terms of their individual expertise and may not be able to come together effectively in a team. The notion of contested expertise in teamwork applies equally well in researching professional practice (S. Candlin Reference Candlin2003; Sarangi Reference Sarangi, Gotti, Maci and Sala2015), and a reflexive awareness of contested expertise is central to expert practice. These are big questions that emerge within and across the vast domains of professional practice.
Srikant Sarangi observed that a hallmark of Candlin's writings was connecting everything to everything else in an orderly fashion yet at lightning speed. In adopting this approach Candlin foreshadows the connexity that characterises much contemporary activity and practice, that is the complex interdependence and interrelationship between and among individuals, actions and networks – local, virtual and global. To locate the topic of professional expertise in everyday concerns Srikant reviewed the emergence of expert systems, often imposed by management, which are characterised by standardisation, proceduralisation, and routinisation of practice. To bring this to the topic of discourse and interaction, Srikant Sarangi noted that currently in the UK and many parts of Europe, for example, expert systems underpin nurse-led telemedicine or emergency calls; those interaction systems based on derivative knowledge in the form of algorithms and triage potentially constrain how nurses interact and may undermine their experiential knowledge.
The importance of partnerships in enquiring into the communicative basis of professional expertise was a theme running throughout Srikant Sarangi's talk. He reminded us that the broad span of work carried out into professional practice has shed light on interaction as an essential component of the healthcare expert system (see, for example, Sarangi Reference Sarangi and Streeck2010a, Reference Sarangib). Professional practice itself can be defined as ‘expertise mediated in interaction/communication through ethical/responsible conduct for accomplishing desired ends’ (Sarangi Reference Sarangi2017). Given this, communicative expertise is integral to expert knowledge, and constitutive of different dimensions of that knowledge (including its scientific, experiential and organisational dimensions). While communication researchers have high levels of analytic expertise, they are likely to have differential levels of access to two key areas: content-specific knowledge and context-specific knowledge. How then do we address this imbalance? Professional partnerships are key. Candlin and Sarangi have both argued that we need to develop research that is long-term, ethnographically informed, and collaborative, based on professional partnerships. Without access to those partnerships we may well be acting naively, that is, as novices rather than as experts in engaging with the complexity of professional practice. This brings us back to Schön's (Reference Schön1983) dilemma of rigour or relevance: that is, as language professionals, do we stick with analytical rigour in terms of our own ways of looking at communication or interaction? Alternatively, do we try to model what is going on in terms of what might be relevant to that particular context? Srikant Sarangi concluded by emphasising that Schön's dilemma applies equally well to professional expertise within our own field. That dilemma is a highly meaningful lens through which to view our research-cum-practice, and to consider what actions or behaviours we consider to be professionally and ethically responsible.
6. Chris Candlin's ongoing engagement with the concept of interdiscursivity (Alan Jones)
Alan Jones began his tribute to Candlin with a painting – La Danse (1942) – by Fernand Leger, reminding us that Candlin used a number of modern paintings as metaphors for different approaches to language, discourse and language teaching. Candlin's reference to La Danse was particularly memorable, as it was used to portray the idea that ‘systems need to be peopled’ during an early address to an AMEP audience in Australia; he argued that it is all very well for analysts to develop theoretical systems to account for data, but those systems have to be ‘peopled’, that is, they have to be relevant to the lives of socially embedded individuals, not an end in themselves. This was another way Candlin resolved the paradox of rigour and relevance in his own practice – by trying to make systemic understandings of language relevant in academic, professional and organisational contexts. Alan Jones then moved on to how Candlin's enduring ambition to make linguistics and applied linguistics relevant runs through all his work – including his focus on interdiscursivity, a pivotal concept which involves the idea of distinct, contextually appropriate discourses and their endless potential for recontextualisation. The concept of interdiscursivity is particularly relevant to today's world because it is an indispensable component of professional expertise, and it can be seen as a challenge, as a resource, or as quite a major problem (Jones Reference Jones2017).
The starting point for Candlin's work on interdiscursivity was in relation to English for academic purposes (EAP). He was aware that students were going to be plunged into different disciplinary discourses, each with its own way of languaging its values and practices (Candlin & Plum Reference Candlin, Plum, Candlin and Hyland1999). His concern was, how could EAP/ESP teachers deal with this complexity? Alan Jones observed that, at this stage, Candlin saw interdiscursivity primarily as a challenge, but one that he was relatively optimistic about meeting. Focusing on law, for example, he worked closely with Vijay Bhatia and Christian Jensen. Together, they identified mediational contexts and pathways that could scaffold the kinds of language-based practices that university students planning to practise law would need. Analytical, reasoning and writing-related practices all came within the scope of this work.
Research Candlin carried out with Judy Lucas was central to a second understanding of interdiscursivity which he developed, that of interdiscursivity as a resource (Candlin & Lucas Reference Candlin, Lucas, Ensink, van Essen and van der Geest1986). It was a critical moment in the work of a counsellor in a family planning setting that led to this understanding. At that time in the mid-1980s in that specific community and institution in Hawaii advice was to be given only by licensed physicians not counsellors. Thus when clients asked for advice, in relation to such matters as smoking, the counsellor faced a conundrum in terms of how to respond responsibly. What she chose to do was to use anecdotal stories from her experiences, including within her own family, to portray the potential negative effects of actions such as smoking. Here, then, interdiscursivity was deployed strategically, as a resource. Later, Candlin was to take this idea a step further and show how steps involved in offering advice or breaking bad news can be strategically rearranged or played with by expert communicators (see, for example, Candlin Reference Candlin, Gotti and Giannone2006).
From a third perspective, interdiscursivity can be viewed as conflict, antagonism and contestation. Early on in his career, Candlin had investigated the topic of conflict in discourse (Candlin Reference Candlin, Steele and Threadgold1987), but more detailed enquiry came through his work with Vijay Bhatia and Maurizio Gotti on international arbitration practices. The impetus for this work lay in a real-world problem, namely the evolving nature of international arbitration. Together, these three carried out an ambitious evidence-based investigation involving analyses of textual, narrative, and discourse data of international commercial arbitration practice, to identify the degree to which arbitration practices are in fact marked by the influence of litigation practices and procedures (Bhatia, Candlin & Gotti Reference Bhatia, Candlin and Gotti2012). The conclusion was that the overwhelming influence of litigation over arbitration threatens to undermine the integrity of arbitration practice. Interdiscursivity in this case conflicts with and compromises the spirit of arbitration as a non-legal practice. In concluding, Alan Jones underlined the way Candlin worked with identity as a dynamic construct, inextricably linked to discourse, and noted that for him interdiscursivity was the indispensable vehicle mediating between conflicting ideologies, interests and institutions. These different seams of work on interdiscursivity show how Candlin pursued and addressed paradoxes of rigour and relevance through his wide-ranging studies of language-in-use in complex sites of engagement.
7. Research that works: Applying workplace research to assist new migrants (Janet Holmes and Nicky Riddiford)
Janet Holmes and Nicky Riddiford paid tribute to Chris Candlin as a major inspiration for the research of the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) team. They described Candlin as an applied critical discourse analyst with a theoretical stance very similar to the LWP's critical realist approach (Holmes, Marra & Vine Reference Holmes, Marra and Vine2011), which acknowledges the influence of societal ideologies and sociocultural constraints on the negotiation of interaction in social context.
Their contribution focused on two specific and related ways in which Candlin's research philosophy has influenced the work of the LWP team: firstly, Candlin's participatory approach to data collection and methodology, and, secondly his passionate commitment to practical outcomes combined with action. Drawing on Candlin (Reference Candlin, Gotti and Giannone2006) they discussed four challenges to research accountability: an ethnomethodogical approach, the issue of authentication (or warranting one's interpretation of the data), practical relevance, and practical action (i.e. a response to the so what? question).
The LWP team has consistently avoided what Candlin describes as ‘the objectivist, scientific mode of inquiry, leading. . . analysts to impose or transform the “observed” into a form of order’ (Sarangi & Candlin Reference Sarangi, Candlin, Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin2001). Rather, Candlin argues for an ethnomethodological approach, working with participants to identify overlapping research goals and agree on methods of data collection. As he points out: ‘acknowledging the demands of accountability in research implies achieving an appropriate degree of partnership which goes beyond the consultative’ (Candlin Reference Candlin, Gotti and Giannone2006: 21). The LWP team has followed this agenda since 1996, working with participants to negotiate goals, develop appropriate and acceptable data collection methods (both to the participants and the researchers), and agree on desirable outputs. This has sometimes involved an ongoing commitment to a company or organisation to be available for advice, workshops, and discussion well beyond the time span of a particular project.
With respect to authentication in relation to the interpretation of the data, Candlin emphasised the crucial importance of the insights of practitioners to inform data analysis, that is, ‘[m]ost basic to collaborative interpretation is the alignment of the participants’ and analysts' stances i.e. the fusion of emic and etic perspectives’ (Sarangi & Candlin Reference Sarangi, Candlin, Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin2001: 274). Corroborating this, the team has learned from long experience the great value of working with those whose interactions they are analysing about what was intended and what understandings were inferred in complex interactions.
Turning to the third issue, Candlin argued that practical relevance ‘is essential to maintaining a productive reflexivity between research and practice’ (Candlin Reference Candlin, Gotti and Giannone2006: 21), challenging the researcher to be committed to co-participation and ‘to the research site rather than to his or her research tradition’ (Candlin Reference Candlin, Gotti and Giannone2006: 21). This means identifying desirable outcomes from the participants’ point of view and committing to working together to achieve them. The LWP team began with broad goals such as ‘improved workplace communication’ and ‘improved workplace relationships’, and as a result of collaboration with practitioners developed these into much more specific goals of developing practical materials and teaching and learning resources.Footnote 1
In relation to the fourth issue of practical relevance, Candlin asked, ‘What practical application will the research have? How will it impact on the research site? Does it have the potential to improve situations?’ (Candlin Reference Candlin, Gotti and Giannone2006: 22). Such questions orient to ‘impact’ which, as noted in Winnie Cheng's contribution, has recently become a very fashionable criterion in the evaluation of research proposals by funding agencies in a number of countries. Candlin raised this issue more than a decade ago. The LWP team always begin discussion with collaborating organisations by asking ‘what do you want out of this collaboration?’, and importantly ‘what are the costs and benefits for each party?’, issues regarded as crucially important by the participating organisations. Typically, the team offers seminars and reports, and collaborates in workshops with the participants, using the material collected and analysed from their workplace. In addition, video resources are developed,Footnote 2 as well as teaching and learning resources which aim to assist those teaching professional migrants and those teaching refugees seeking employment in New Zealand. These are devised to teach analytical skills and thus empower newcomers in navigating unfamiliar sociocultural norms in their new country. They are available free of charge at the above LWP website.
The team has also collaborated with the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, contributing to their website with advice and materials for use by both employees and employers, with the goal of highlighting the mutual responsibilities involved in working with those from different cultures.
Most recently the team has added a resource with advice and practice on negotiating job interviews in New Zealand,Footnote 3 which draws the attention of those from different cultural backgrounds seeking work in New Zealand to the expectations of employers (Riddiford Reference Riddiford2017). It is also intended to assist employers by identifying strategies used by skilled interviewers to encourage migrants to perform at their best and to show their real worth.
Finally, as Candlin & Sarangi point out, ‘it is for the practitioners with whom we work to acknowledge and decide what matters and what is applicable’ (Candlin & Sarangi Reference Candlin and Sarangi2004: 4). To this end it is important to seek feedback from those with whom researchers work, on the extent to which they have found the collaboration valuable. Feedback to the LWP team has been encouraging and positive as they continue to strive to provide insights from applied sociopragmatic research to illuminate and contribute to successful workplace interaction.
Conclusion
Candlin has clearly been a major influence in developing applied linguistic theory, innovative methodologies, participatory analytical approaches, and in advocating practical applications of research. He was an inspired and inspiring teacher and a supportive colleague in every way. At a fundamental level Candlin was concerned with how language-based research can be applied in the real world. That concern is neither new, nor is it still waiting to be addressed. However, what Candlin brought to that question was a deeply nuanced understanding of why this is important, what our accountabilities are, and how we might engage in ways that embody those accountabilities at each stage of the research process. He did more than that – he showed us what these questions might mean: through a strong grounding in critical moments during the research process he showed us when, where and why our accountabilities matter. He also complexified those accountabilities – there are no easy answers or algorithmic formulas for how to engage responsibly to make applied linguistics matter. Instead, what is required is ongoing reflexivity to guide enquiry and practice. Candlin challenged us to interrogate both the means and the ends of our research, in terms of our gaze, our agendas, our practices, our interrelationships and so on. He also challenged us to probe the social, personal, professional and institutional relevance of how we choose to engage, what we choose to do, and the kinds of understandings we generate about the lived experience of ourselves and others, and the ways we make those understandings of value to the world in which we live. In this he underscored the need for awareness of our accountabilities to individuals and to communities with possibly divergent stakes in the research, as both sources of and potential recipients of the data and outcomes. Importantly too, he argued that in the end the relevance of our research is not for us to judge – ultimately it will be professional practitioners and other communities of interest who will decide whether, how and to what extent our research matters.
Cynthia White is Professor of Applied Linguistics, Massey University, New Zealand. She has published widely on distance and online learning, autonomy and agency, and language and settlement issues among migrants and refugees. In 2004 she received the International TESOL Virginia French Allen Award for Scholarship and Service to the TESOL profession. She is a member of the editorial boards of seven international journals, is Associate Editor for Language Learning & Technology, and has been plenary speaker at international conferences in Germany, Thailand, Singapore, China, UK, Hawai'i and Malaysia. Her publications include two books (Cambridge University Press, Multilingual Matters), 48 refereed articles, 17 book chapters, and several guest editorships of journal special issues. Cynthia has completed collaborative research projects with Oxford University, Open University UK and Nottingham University in online language teaching. Her most recent project focuses on emotion and agency in teacher narrative accounts of conflict in the L2 classroom.
Janet Holmes is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Language in the Workplace Project at Victoria University of Wellington. She has published on workplace discourse, language and gender, and many topics within pragmatics and discourse analysis, including intercultural communication. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her most recent books are the 5th edition of An introduction to sociolinguistics (co-authored with Nick Wilson), Negotiating boundaries at work (co-edited with Jo Angouri and Meredith Marra), Research methods in sociolinguistics (co-edited with Kirk Hazen), The handbook of language, gender and sexuality (co-edited with Susan Ehrlich and Miriam Meyerhoff), Leadership, discourse, and ethnicity (co-authored with Meredith Marra and Bernadette Vine), and Gendered talk at work. Her research team is currently investigating the discourse of those involved in the tourism industry and the language used in eldercare facilities to assist those seeking work in these areas.
Professor Vijay K Bhatia retired from City University of Hong Kong, and is now a Visiting Professor in Hellenic American University in Athens, and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He was also the Founding President of the LSP and Professional Communication Association for the Asia-Pacific Rim. His research interests include critical genre analysis, academic and professional discourses in legal, business, newspaper, and promotional contexts; ESP and professional communication. He has numerous publications to his credit, which include journal articles, books chapters, edited volumes, and individually written research monographs. Three of his books, Analysing genre: Language use in professional settings; Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view; and Critical genre analysis: Investigating interdiscursive performance in professional communication are widely used and referred to in genre theory and practice.
