Three Fundamental Concepts in Second Language Acquisition

Three Fundamental Concepts in Second Language Acquisition and Their Relevance inMultilingual ContextsAuthor(s): Claire Kramsch and Anne WhitesideReviewed work(s):Source: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 91, Focus Issue: Second Language AcquisitionReconceptualized? The Impact of Firth and Wagner (1997) (2007), pp. 907-922Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language TeachersAssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4626140 .Accessed: 29/02/2012 08:01

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Three Fundamental Concepts in Second Language Acquisition and Their Relevance in Multilingual Contexts CLAIRE KRAMSCH Department of German 5323 Dwinelle University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Email: [email protected]

ANNE WHITESIDE English as a Second Language 375 Alabama St. City College of San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94110 Email: awhitesi@ccsf edu

This article considers how 3 fundamental concepts of second language acquisition (SLA), the native speaker, interlanguage, and the language learner have fared since Firth and Wag- ner (1997). We review the ascendancy of these concepts and their relationship to the traditional dichotomies of language learning versus language use and individual mind versus social-context-as-environment. We discuss geopolitical changes of the 1990s and the related theoretical shifts from structuralist theories to discourse-based and constructionist social theories, which paved the way for Firth and Wagner. We examine subsequent efforts to reframe SLA as social process and knowledge as social action, arguing that such notions as collaborative dialogue, affordance, and investment have reconceptualized the concepts of output, input, and motivation without, however, escaping their structuralist roots. Looking at data from multilingual exchanges between immigrants recorded in shops in California, we suggest that 3 fundamental concepts be treated as discursive, socially, and historically relative categories, with the subject position of the researcher factored in.

SINCE ITS INCEPTION, SECOND LANGUAGE acquisition (SLA) research has tried to take into account the fact that acquisition does not hap- pen only in the learner's mind, but in the interaction of the mind and the social context (Brown, Malmkjaer, & Williams, 1996). Although the research domain of language and mind is firmly established within linguistics and psychology, the social dimension of SLA has come prominently to the fore only in the last 20 years or so (for excellent reviews of the social turn in SLA, see Block, 2003; Breen, 2001; Siegel, 2003). This social dimension of SLA is sometimes seen as being in tension with its psychological counterpart, as evidenced by the hefty debate elicited by Firth and Wagner (1997). This tension has been nowhere more apparent

than in debates surrounding the sacred triad of concepts that form the foundation of psycholinguistic SLA: native versus nonnative speaker (NS vs. NNS), learner, and interlanguage. By fo- cusing their criticisms on these three concepts, Firth and Wagner did much to illuminate the social aspects of a field that had been predominantly psycholinguistic in nature. What has been the fate of these concepts since 1997, and do they still have theoretical validity for SLA research today?

This article first gives the historical context in which to understand the tension between language learning and language use in SLA prior to 1997. It then discusses the impact that Firth and Wagner's (1997) article has had on the way we view SLA's fundamental concepts. Taking the concrete example of immigrants learning to survive linguistically in the multilingual environment of a global economy, it explores the implications of Firth and Wagner (1997) for the way we look at SLA data today. Last, it evaluates the theoretical

The Modern Language Journal, 91, Focus Issue, (2007) 0026-7902/07/907-922 $1.50/0 ?2007 The Modern Language Journal

908 The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)

validity of the three concepts for future SLA research.

HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The original purpose of second language (L2) learning research was to help improve language instruction and to better control the variables that went into instructed SLA. Learners were conceived of as NNS striving to acquire an L2 under the guidance of a teacher, who was usually thought of as an NS of the language. In the 1980s, the role of social context was addressed in various ways by psycholinguists exploring the learning that went on in curricula and classrooms (Breen, 1985; Breen & Candlin, 1980; Canale & Swain, 1980), through input and interaction (Long, 1981) and through the development of pragmatic and discourse competence (Allwright, 1980; Edmondson, 1985; Kramsch, 1981, 1985). All these research efforts to define and charac- terize the social context of SLA were ultimately meant to identify a teachable body of knowledge that would help the learner's interlanguage ap- proximate, ever more closely, NS ways of speaking. The NS was seen as the warrant of authentic use of language in real-life situations. Authenticity was at first found in NS use of standard grammar, id- iomatic lexicon, and pragmatic appropriateness, even though many psycholinguists soon became concerned with the social and cultural variation to be found in both NNS and NS speech (e.g., Ellis, 1985; Rampton, 1987; Selinker & Douglas, 1985; Wong-Fillmore, 1979).

The view of social context as an environment (cf. Doughty & Long, 2003, p. 153) for learning that was ultimately to take place in the mind was predicated on three basic concepts:

1. NS target: The NS was to be different from Chomsky's (1965) ideal speaker-hearer, who lives "in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is un- affected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance" (p. 3). SLA's concept of the NS was not based on some de- contextualized Universal Grammar, but, rather, on how real speaker-hearers used the language in everyday life. But the NS was still a generic reality. The spoken grammar of the NS suspiciously resembled linguists' standardized grammar of the written language and the etiquette conventions of middle-class verbal behavior. In a sense, the analyst had replaced the teacher in evaluating progress towards the NS target.

2. Learner: The notion of the L2 learner was coined at a time when SLA wanted to distance itself from research on teaching methods and focus instead on the one doing the learning (e.g., Tarone & Yule, 1989). Thus, the term learner, rather than student, was chosen to denote someone engaged in a psycholinguistic process of internalizing a body of linguistic knowledge, whether in an academic setting or in natural environments. That knowledge, or rather, its representation in the mind, was seen as the necessary prerequisite for the development of communicative competence, that is, language use. Hence the argument made by Kasper (1997) in her response to Firth and Wagner (1997) that the A in SLA stands for the individual acquisition of linguistic, cognitive, and pragmatic knowledge that can be separated from language use.

Because learners were seen as exclusively engaged in the process of acquiring a knowledge that by definition they did not have, it was only a small step to define learners by what they were not. Hence the concept of NNS, which measured all learners against an NS norm of communicative competence. This norm, determined by linguists and language teachers, made NNSs into deficient communicators. The difficulty, not envisioned at the time, is that, although the status of learner was a temporary condition (presumably one day the learning would be completed and one would no longer be a learner), NNS status was permanent. Someone who had not acquired the language from birth could not by definition become an NS, but only a near-native speaker at the most. Thus, the dyad NS-NNS essentialized both parties in an idealized status that occulted much variation, conflict, and change.

3. Interlanguage: Interlanguage was a psycholinguistic concept meant to validate learners' errors by considering them not as reprehensible lapses but as positive evidence of learning, that is, of the restructuring, generalizing, analyzing, inferencing, and testing of hypotheses going on in the mind. The original definition by Selinker (1972)-"a hypothesized separate linguistic system based on the observable output which re- sults from a learner's attempted production of a target language norm" (p. 117)-was a nonjudg- mental definition that stressed the coherence or inner logic of a learner's language. The definition given by Bialystok and Sharwood-Smith (1985)- "the systematic language performance (in production and recognition of utterances) by second language learners who have not achieved sufficient levels of analysis of linguistic knowledge or control of processing to be identified completely with native speakers" (p. 116)-focused on the

Claire Kramsch and Anne Whiteside 909

transitional nature of interlanguage, the gap between NNS and NS performance. Both internal coherence and transitionality were what analysts saw as the primary features of interlanguage (see Block, 2003). They also enabled language teachers to understand how best to intervene in or- der to facilitate the transition from interlanguage performance to fully developed language performance. Note that terms and expressions like observable output, production of a target language norm, and language performance did not entail any con- sideration of the social context, even though one could argue that output, production, and performance were not only part of language learning but also of language use.

By the 1990s, hefty discussions were taking place regarding the scope and form of SLA theory. A milestone special issue of the TESOL Quarterly on SLA theory (Spolsky, 1990) was followed by on- going debates as to whether we should strive for a unified theory with predictive power (Beretta, 1991; Gregg, Long,Jordan, & Beretta, 1997; Long 1990, 1993), adopt a new ontology altogether (Lantolf, 1996, 2007), or "accept the existence of multiple theories and, above all, multiple perspectives on research" (Block, 1996, p. 78). In addition, SLA research was starting to address concerns about language and culture (Kramsch, 1993), language and identity (Norton Peirce, 1995; Rampton, 1995), and language socialization (Poole, 1992).

In the late 1990s, the social dimension of SLA moved center stage when Firth and Wagner at- tacked head-on the distinction between language learning and language use at the 1996 Interna- tional Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) Congress in Finland. Two years before (March, 1994), a panel organized by Leo van Lier at the annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in Baltimore brought together scholars in psycholinguistics and educational linguistics' to discuss explicitly the relation between language learning and language use in SLA. Although the distinction between learning and using a language had been made before,2 it was the first time that it was the object of a public debate. The common forum broadened a discussion that had been confined to the dichotomy: cognition versus input and interaction, to a more complex dichotomy: knowledge as representation versus knowledge as action, or individual mind versus social context. At stake was whether the NNS was to be seen as a language learner or as a language user, and whether a theory of the mind or a theory of practice was better

for understanding the relationship between learning and use, representation and action.

Firth and Wagner, coming as they did from within a European tradition in applied linguistics, were more oriented toward the social than many of their American colleagues of the time. By reanalyzing the data of their European colleagues, Faerch and Kasper (1983, as cited in Firth & Wagner, 1997), in a broader ethnographic perspective, were trying to recapture a social dimension that they felt even a functionally oriented branch of SLA like interlanguage pragmatics was missing. Firth and Wagner's 1997 article represented a radical attack on traditional SLA because it challenged SLA's "fundamental notions of learner, nonnative, native speaker, and interlanguage" (p. 286)." They denounced the reduction of real-life encounters and natural social interactions to mere sources of input, rather than seeing them as processes of socialization, that is, learning processes in their own right. To understand why they brought into the discussion fields such as language socialization, conversation analysis, task-based research, and research on NNS identity, we have to remember that by the end of the 1990s geopolitical changes in the learning of En- glish, the rapid globalization of economic oppor- tunity, and disciplinary shifts in the social sciences were offering new vocabularies to explain SLA processes.

GEOPOLITICAL AND DISCIPLINARY SHIFTS

By the mid-1990s, the geopolitical situation had changed drastically and so had the focus of interest in SLA research. Firth and Wagner's (1997) push for a "holistic, bio-social SLA" (p. 296), that is, their call for decentering SLA and embed- ding it more firmly in a social, ecological context of language and language-related practices, echoed the social turn that applied linguistics was taking at the time under a series of geopolitical and disciplinary shifts (see Block; 2003; Kramsch, 2000).

On the geopolitical scene, the 1990s saw the exponential growth of English as an international language under conditions of increasing multilingualism, displacement, and migration (see, e.g., Coleman, 2006; Graddol, 2000). Mere mastery of a grammatical system was no longer seen as a guarantee of employment or continued employment on the job market (Canagarajah, 1993). More important than having the right mental representations was the ability to participate in conversations, to learn the communicative strategies and tactics necessary to be perceived and


accepted as a competent member of a community of practice (Heath & Kramsch, 2004).

Together with these geopolitical changes, the 1990s witnessed important developments in sociolinguistics, away from structuralist views and toward discourse-based and even constructionist views of the social world. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, the spectacular rise of discourse analysis and its application to SLA (e.g., Hatch, 1978; Kramsch, 1981; Larsen-Freeman, 1980) had raised hopes that the social construction of reality through discourse would come into its own in SLA (for a review, seeJaworski & Coupland, 1999; Trappes-Lomax, 2004). It was hoped that SLA researchers would reconnect with the Hymesian ethnographic tradition of inquiry that had pro- vided the field with the notion of communicative competence, and that L2 acquirers would be seen not as learners of a linguistic system but as new- comers to a given discourse community. But the power of Chomskyan theory in linguistics and the preeminence of the cognitive over the social pre- vented discourse analysis from having the deep impact it could have had on SLA research.

In addition, SLA research in the 1990s witnessed a shift in interest away from theoretical linguistics and Western psychology as the primary relevant disciplines toward more socially grounded theories, such as those offered by So- viet psychology, sociology, and anthropology and their attendant linguistic branches, and also ecologically based theories of knowledge. As a result, we saw the growing influence on SLA research of various fields dedicated to the study of the social aspects of language:

1. Sociocultural theory, that is, the adaptation ofVygotsky's (1978) theory of the mind and Leon- tiev's (1978) activity theory to the study of the relationship of language, thought, and activity in the internalization of L2 knowledge from the social to the psychological plane (Lantolf, 2000).

2. Language emergence theory, that is, the view that language learning is a complex and dynamic process in which various components emerge at various levels (Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006).

3. Conversation analysis, that is, the sociologi- cal analysis of conversations in everyday life and its application to SLA (Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Markee, 2000; Seedhouse, 2005; Wong, 2000).

4. Language socialization, in both its sociocultural and sociocognitive strands. The sociocultural strand, represented by Bayley and Schecter (2003), Duff (in press), Duff and Hornberger (in press), Watson-Gegeo (2004), and Zuengler and Cole (2005), defines language socialization as the way "linguistic and cultural knowledge are

constructed through each other, and language- acquiring children or adults are active and selective agents in both processes" (Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003, p. 157). The sociocognitive strand, represented by Atkinson (2002) and Atkinson, Churchill, Nishino, and Okada (2007), stresses the fact that the social and the cognitive in SLA are mutually constitutive.

5. Language ecology, that is, the critical study of the interrelationship between the L2 and the natural environment of its users (Kramsch, 2002; Leather & van Dam, 2002; van Lier, 2004).

It is within this social turn in SLA research (Block, 2003) that we have to read Firth and Wag- ner's (1997) assertion that the "social and contex- tual orientations to language [are] unquestion- ably in the ascendancy" (p. 295). Since then, the growth of interest in the social dimension of SLA has gained momentum and is reflected in the way SLA's three fundamental concepts have been interpreted in the last 10 years.

RECONSIDERING SLA'S THREE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS

In their critique of the exclusively linguistic or psycholinguistic frame of SLA, Firth and Wag- ner (1997) advocated broadening its three fundamental concepts to include the social and the cultural.

NS Versus NNS

Firth and Wagner's (1997) critique of the NS echoed some of the misgivings voiced in the early 1990s by Cook (1992), Davies (1991), Medgyes (1994), Rampton (1990), and others. The object of their criticism was two long-held assumptions: that the NS was a stable, monolingual entity speaking a homogeneous standard language, and that the NS of a first language (Li) should be the model for all L2 learners. We consider each of these assumptions in turn.

The NS notion was meant to shift the attention of teachers and researchers from the formal properties of the linguistic system as described in grammars and dictionaries to the living properties of language as it is actually spoken in everyday life in a monolingual, homogeneous speech community. But, in fact, according to Firth and Wagner (1997), the NS notion was the product of a prevail- ing monolingual orientation of SLA that did not take into account the enormous variations among NSs with regard to their adherence to any (standard) language or language use. Much of SLA was based on the "tendentious assumption that NSs represent a homogeneous entity, responding on


each and every occasion in a patterned and predictable fashion" (p. 292). Unlike rules of usage that could be standardized, rules of use definitely could not; there was no "general, universal set of rules," no "comparable baseline of NS-NS interactions" (p. 292) as there was for grammar. In the last 10 years, homogeneous speech communities made up of monolingual, monocultural nationals have become less and less of a reality. The speech communities envisaged by SLA have turned out to be imagined communities populated by imagined speakers-hearers (Kanno & Norton, 2003), and researchers like Pavlenko (2006) have accused linguistic theory of "militant monolingualism" (p. xiii).

Furthermore, in the last 10 years, the issue of the NS has been caught up in the politics of recognition. Many of the world's NSs do not speak the standard language, which is in many cases an ex-colonial language, nor do they speak only one language. Many immigrants to industrialized countries are NSs of minority languages who code- switch or code-mix naturally between the minority and the dominant language (e.g., Spanglish or Chinglish). They are NSs of minority languages, but their NS status is not recognized because their languages are not the standard, literate languages taught in schools, and their NNS status vis-i-vis the dominant language is associated with low social status and levels of education. Applied linguists have fought to valorize the nonstandard variety of both their Li and their L2 and the social status of such speakers (e.g., Valdes, 1995, 1998; Valdes & Geoffrion-Vinci, 1998). The debates surrounding the notion of NS have given renewed attention to variation in SLA and have problematized the notions of standard language and pedagogical norm (Gass, Bardovi-Harlig, Magnan, & Walz, 2002).

There are also increasing doubts as to whether any monolingual speaker can be upheld as the norm for L2 learners who are, by definition, as- piring bilinguals (Cook, 1999; Kramsch, 1997; Seidlhofer, 2001). Furthermore, an increasing number of language learners are not monolingual native speakers of one L1, but are already proficient to varying degrees in one or several languages besides their mother tongue. Firth and Wagner (1997) put into question the very notion of target competence in a socially oriented SLA. It is impossible, they argued, to evaluate an NNS's performance independently from that of his or her interlocutor because they are not only dependent on the environment but also on each other, according to a "division of labor between participants, the skillful and artful application of a mechanism to effect collaboration in talk" (p. 294). Collaboration and negotiation

are not only about referential meaning. In Firth and Wagner's analysis, although it seemed as if the participants were exchanging words, what they were exchanging were identities and perceptions: "NNS/NS identities... appear to be exchanged, while alternative identities-instantiated in the talk-are made relevant" (p. 294). Thus, NNS and NS identities should not be taken as stable, pre- existing categories but as emergent, contingent, interlocutor-relevant frames of participation in a highly ecological game.

Language Learner Versus Language User

Firth and Wagner (1997) argued that the notion of learner had been reduced to a decon- textualized mind internalizing rules of grammar and applying those rules to produce grammatically correct sentences. By considering discourse merely as a source of input, SLA researchers had ignored the "effects of setting and setting-related tasks on the structure of discourse" (p. 294). Firth and Wagner proposed to broaden the notion of language learner to mean someone engaged in the contingent, turn-by-turn negotiation of meaning of conversational practice and who learns the language by using it to solve problems and achieve tasks set by the social setting itself.

Indeed, with the trend toward the deinstitu- tionalization of knowledge and the call for em- powering minorities and other non-mainstream speakers, the term learner started to sound in many instances condescending and reductionist. The stigmatization of nonstandard accents and grammars and their equation with lack of education or lack of culture (e.g., Lippi-Green, 1997) seemed unacceptable. Other notions were advanced. Pavlenko (2006), following Cook (1992), proposed the notion of a multicompetent, bilingual individual who uses whatever communicative competence is required by the task, the activity, or the situation in variable social contexts in real life. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) used the metaphor of participation, with the learner being a participant in collaborative exchanges. Variation has now moved center stage: Code-switching and the marking of identity through nonstandard, un- conventional ways of speaking are now seen as a privilege of the bilingual speaker (Zentella, 1997).

Much of the broadened agenda proposed by Firth and Wagner (1997) for SLA in natural settings is now to be found in research on bilingualism (Pavlenko, 2006). This field of research is interested in the cognitive makeup of the bilingual individual, in linguistic and discursive relativity, in multilingualism, language socialization, code-switching, emotions and identity, echoing


Firth and Wagner's call to focus on "multilingual- ity, language socialization, linguistic variability, 'foreignness' and 'nativeness"' (p. 296). However, as Block (2003) and others noted, research on bilingualism does not investigate bilingual development, that is, how someone becomes bi- or trilin- gual, only what it means to be bilingual. And that is always the rub from an SLA perspective.

Interlanguage Versus Emergent Learning

Given the misgivings many applied linguists now have regarding the notions of NS and NNS, target language, and learner, how has the notion of interlanguage, defined as it is by the relation of a learner to a target or NS language, fared in the last 10 years? Firth and Wagner (1997) argued that interlanguage was a metaphor heavily influenced in SLA by instructional settings and by transac- tional encounters between NSs and NNSs, where the power differential replicates the power differential in classrooms. They argued that it did not reflect the emergent, contingent, complex way people learn languages in natural settings. In particular, one central notion of interlanguage, fossilization, has been contested. Fossilization, defined by Selinker (1972) as a mechanism by which speakers "tend to keep in their interlanguage [certain] linguistic items, rules and sub- systems" from their L1 (p. 177), was originally seen as a permanent failure. Recent evidence shows that stabilization might be a better concept (Long, 2003) because the claim of perma- nence has not been conclusively demonstrated. Moreover, what was seen as a failure might in fact be evidence of an imaginative plurilingual competence (Houdebine, 2002; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1998) with code-switching, in particular, not being a strategy of avoidance or deficiency, but a display of identity (e.g., Zentella, 1997).

One could say that in the last 10 years researchers have been implicitly, if not explicitly, broadening the following five central processes of interlanguage to encompass other cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural processes:4

1. Language transfer, usually seen as transfer from L1 to L2 linguistic forms, has been ex- tended to a bidirectional transfer, including from an L2 or third language back to an L1 (Fuller, 1999; Pavlenko & Jarvis, 2002), with this transfer in both directions, including not just linguistic forms but also conversational styles, rules of pragmatic use, and conceptual mappings (see Gardner & Wagner, 2004; House, Kasper, & Ross, 2003; Pavlenko, 2002).

2. Transfer of training, originally referring to the pedagogic method used in classrooms, has been broadened to encompass all effects of setting and setting-related tasks on the structure of discourse, which includes both positive effects such as in task-based SLA (Bygate, Skehan, & Swain, 2001) and negative effects such as in some foreigner talk or classroom discourse (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Lantolf & Genung, 2002).

3. Strategies of second language learning, originally seen as ways in which "learners approach the material to be learned" (Selinker, 1972, p. 179), have now included socially inflected strategies like selective learning, for example, learning the grammar, but refusing to learn the discourse (Canagarajah, 1993; Lin, 1999); learning only that which facilitates comprehension (Seidlhofer, 2001); or "performing" rather than actually "doing" learning, for strategic purposes (Lantolf & Genung, 2002).

4. Strategies of second language communication when speaking with NSs have been expanded to include communication with other NNSs and language choice as a symbolic marker of power or identity (e.g., Kramsch, 2003; Pavlenko, 2002).

5. Overgeneralization has been implicitly applied notjust to "TL linguistic material" (Selinker, 1972, p. 179) but also to the overgeneralizing or stereotyping of social and cultural characteristics of language in use (see 1 in this list).

Broadening SLA ?

These changes in the notion of interlanguage correspond to new SLA theories that include other forms of learning than just the internalization of rules and the restructuring of knowledge representations. Sociocultural theory (SCT) posits that learning, as a mediated activity, develops from the social situation of interlocution along a zone of proximal development (Lantolf, 2000). Sociocognitive theory reconceptualizes the NS target as emergent opportunities for sociocognitive realignment (Atkinson et al., 2007). Chaos- complexity theory proposes that learning is an emergent, configurational process of linguistic, social, and cognitive adaptation and restructura- tion on various scales (Larsen-Freeman, 1997). SLA researchers do not agree as to whether these new theoretical advances invalidate or enrich the fundamental SLA concepts. For example, in both Ellis (1997) and Doughty and Long (2003), the concept of motivation is treated under the rubric individual differences in SLA and is generally understood as being social-psychological in nature. But in Ellis (1999), investment is discussed


in the chapter "Social Aspects of Interlanguage," suggesting thereby that the concept of interlanguage itself can be stretched to accommodate social phenomena like discourse, identity, style, and culture. In Doughty and Long (2003), investment is dealt with by Siegel (2003) as an aspect of the social context and is kept quite separate from the discussion of interlanguage. In fact, Siegel argued, "the deficit view of L2 competence implicit in the notions of interlanguage, fossilization, and non-native speaker holds only in particular social contexts. SLA researchers need to examine both the functions of the L2 in social interaction and its symbolic associations before applying such notions" (p.193).

These new ways of including the social dimension in SLA differ in how they consider social categories either as stable givens (structuralist view) or as discursive constructions (poststructuralist view). Researchers working within SCT have argued against SLA's conventional core constructs, but they seem to have maintained the categories NS target norm and interlanguage and the structuralist approach to the social world characteristic of traditional SLA. For example, Swain (2000) reconceptualized output as collaborative dialogue but added "we see [the students] 'stretching' their interlanguage" (p. 101) through a collaborative dialogue that "mediatesjoint problem solving and knowledge building" (p. 102). Van Lier (2000) replaced the concept of input with affordance, but affordances, like input, are defined as "properties of the environment relevant to active, perceiving organisms" (p. 252); they are not defined as discursive constructs, even though their relevance is negotiated by active organisms. Although she draws on poststructuralist feminist theory, Nor- ton (2000), referring to the learner and his or her multiple, conflictual, and changing identities, still took a pretty structuralist view of categories of identity and their multiplicity (Price, 1996). Drawing on Bourdieu's (1991) theory of symbolic action, she reconceptualized motivation as investment, but her notion of investment seems to hail of a more structuralist rational actor theory than Bourdieu had in mind. It is difficult within structuralist theories of SLA to capture the complex relationship of symbolic power, subject positions, and language learning that the geopolitical developments of recent years have brought to light (see next section).

It may be that structuralist approaches to SLA can only bring us that far into understanding the complex, discursively constructed world of SLA. Theories with a more poststructuralist ecological orientation like chaos-complexity theory (Larsen-

Freeman, 1997), language emergence (Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006), and ecological theories of language (Kramsch, 2002) offer not so much a new ontology (Lantolf & Johnson, 2007) as a broader metaphor within which to explore how the cognitive, the emotional, the social, and the cultural are produced and reproduced in the discourse of everyday life.

A CASE IN POINT

To illustrate the challenges brought about in SLA by this broadening of the three concepts under discussion, we now turn to data that have not traditionally been used by mainstream SLA. They were collected by Whiteside (2006) as part of her project on Mexican Yucatec Maya immigrants to the United States trying to learn enough language to make a living in the multilingual service sector of California. Their situation is typical of workers in a global economy that knows no national bor- ders, no standard national languages, and thrives at the informal economic and social margins of national institutions. The data illustrate dramati- cally the complexity that SLA research faces nowa- days.

By some estimates, there are now 50,000 to 80,000 Yucatec immigrants in California,5 including some 25,000 in the greater San Francisco Bay area. Many come from primarily Maya-speaking towns and rural areas, where changes associated with the passage of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have rendered agri- cultural life unsustainable. Heading north to Cal- ifornia for jobs in service industries that rely on low-wage and, increasingly, undocumented immi- grant labor, they typically work with other NNSs of English, using English as a lingua franca and Maya or Spanish with their compatriots, and pick- ing up bits of other languages at their multilingual worksites.6

Based on a survey questionnaire distributed between January and March 2004 to 170 adults born in the Yucatan peninsula with Maya-speaking parentage, Whiteside (2006) attempted to find out the language practices of the group.' She identified four focal Yucatecans with whom she worked closely for over 2 years, following them in their daily lives, helping them to organize community events, and exchanging lessons with them in English and Spanish literacy for lessons in Maya (for example, with Don Francisco; see following). She gradually learned the relative values of Maya, Spanish, and English in particular social spaces. She found that Maya was used at home and among work teams, but often avoided in public, as it is in


the Yucatan where negative racialized stereotypes link Maya with poverty and ignorance (Gilemez Pineda, 2006). Spanish, on the other hand, al- lows undocumented immigrants to blend with Latino legal residents and citizens, reinforcing solidarity with other marginalized Spanish-speaking workers. Because Yucatec Spanish is marked and may provoke discriminatory treatment by speakers of other varieties of Spanish, some Yucatecans choose to adopt new accents. English provides an escape from such distinctions, particularly when it is a lingua franca used among immigrants. It also has portable value as the language of tourism. But to those immigrants for whom illegal status makes long-term residence uncertain, learning English is a low priority. Thus, when speakers of Maya choose to use Spanish, English, or any other immi- grant languages, they are often making strategic rather than ideological choices.

In the following three excerpts, Don Francisco (DF), a 49-year old Yucatecan and, for those who knew him from the Yucatan, a successful farmer, takes the researcher with him through his neigh- borhood as he goes shopping for food for his popular informal restaurant. DF frequently shops on this street, spending a lot of money each week on large quantities of meat, vegetables, and masa for tortillas; he is therefore a preferred customer with local merchants. His status is apparent in the community, signaled by the way he moves through space, wearing his black som- brero, chaperoning the researcher around. On that day, he was looking to get a good price on meat. As he enters Tommy's Vietnamese grocery store, the protagonists are (a) Tommy, the Viet- namese storeowner who speaks Vietnamese, Can- tonese, Mandarin, English, some Spanish, and a few words in Maya; (b) the Vietnamese clerk, who speaks Vietnamese, English, and a little Span- ish; (c) the Yucatecan butcher, who speaks Maya, Spanish, and a little Vietnamese; (d) Don Fran- cisco, who speaks Maya and Spanish; and (4) the Anglo-American researcher (AW) who speaks En- glish and Spanish, and a little Maya. (For transcription symbols, see the Appendix.)

The three excerpts are part of the same short visit to the store. We give a content analysis of each

excerpt followed by a discussion of how valid the notions of NS, learner, and interlanguage might be in interpreting the data.

In Excerpt 1, DF and AW have just entered Tommy's Vietnamese grocery store. DF introduces his visitor, AW, to the Vietnamese store owner, Tommy; the Vietnamese clerk; and the Yucatecan butcher, a fellow townsman. He knows AW's research interest in the Maya language and culture

and is keen to show her how the Maya language is alive and well in the community. It is clear that DF has an impressive presence. Rather than trying to speak Vietnamese or English, he manages to make others speak Maya or Spanish. He uses simplified Spanish syntax in line 1 with AW, and in line 11 with the clerk. The Vietnamese clerk responds in line 4 in uncertain Spanish and shows even more uncertainty in Maya (line 6). She clearly feels more comfortable speaking English, even if her English is far from perfect. DF introduces the butcher to AW in Spanish, the language he rou- tinely speaks with her.

In Excerpt 2, DF and the butcher are dis- cussing things in Maya, their common native language, and AW and the clerk are conversing in English. AW and the clerk engage in a little history lesson (in English), reminiscent of an English conversation class, on the parallels between Maya and Spanish on the one hand, and Chinese and Vietnamese on the other. AW falls at first into the information giving role typical of teacherese (lines 22-28), facilitating comprehension through foreigner talk (e.g., line 26, 28). The clerk's backchannel "o::h"s are either politeness markers, or else they express surprise and the acquisition of new knowledge. In line 29, she becomes more assertive ("yah"), as if trying to establish equal footing with AW, or at least to impress her, but AW's three confirmation checks "that's right," in lines 30 and 33, seem to reinstate her authority as an English maestra.

In Excerpt 3, DF and the butcher have been bargaining in Maya over the price of meat. All of a sudden DF switches to Spanish. DF, having completed his negotiations with the butcher in Maya, decides to buy a piece of meat and announces to Tommy, the Vietnamese store owner, in Span- ish, that he will come and get it later in the day. He then takes leave from everyone in the store in Maya. AW takes leave from Tommy and the clerk in English. Thus, the two NS maestros, DF and AW, close the visit in their own native languages. By contrast, the two Vietnamese shopkeepers respond to each of the customers in their language: Tommy responds to AW in English, and the clerk responds to DF in Maya.

DISCUSSION

These excerpts could be interpreted in different ways depending on how one interprets the notions of NS, learner, and interlanguage. One conventional way of looking at these data is as actual language lessons going on at the margins of a commercial transaction. In lines 5-9, DF teaches


EXCERPT 1

1. DF: ((to AW, referring to clerk)) ahi esta amiga (0.2) es mi amiga (Spanish: this is friend, is my friend)

2. Clerk: ((to another customer)) thank you 3. DF: ((to clerk)) ah (0.2) hola amiga

(Spanish: hello friend) 4. Clerk: ((to DF)) hello (0.2) co(.)mo(.) esti ?

(Spanish: how are you?) 5. DF: wani ma'alob ?

(Maya: how are you, good?) 6. Clerk: u:::m (0.2) how you say 7. Tommy: ma'alob

(Maya: good) 8. Clerk: ma'alob 9. DF: ma'alob

10. Clerk: ((talks with other customer in Vietnamese)) 11. DF: Eh (0.2) <esa es:: maestra> yo

(Spanish: this is teacher me) 12. Clerk: >oh yeah?< 13. AW: yeah 14. Clerk: you be teacher? 15. AW: I'm a teacher (.) yah 16. Clerk: wo:::w. that's goo:::d. 17. DF: ah (.) y::: eso

(Spanish: and this) 18. ((gestures to butcher behind counter)) es Yucateco

(Spanish: he's Yucatecan) 19. AW: oh si ?

(Spanish: oh yeah?) 20. DF: habla Maya

(Spanish: he speaks Maya)

the clerk how to perform greetings in Maya. This lesson develops naturally from the clerk's immedi- ate need as an NNS learner to respond to the Maya NS teacher (DF) in the L2, and from her appeal to him for help ("how you say"). The response is given in line 7 by another NNS, Tommy, who

provides sufficient input for the clerk to produce the word. Following an Initiation-Response- Feedback pattern typical of an instructional setting, DF validates in line 9 the learner's utterance in the previous line. In Excerpt 2, the English NS teacher (AW) similarly imparts new knowledge

EXCERPT 2

21. Clerk: Maya is different (.) uh Spanish 22. AW: very very very different 23. Clerk: o:::h 24. AW: <before (.) way before Spanish people came there were Maya> 25. Clerk: uh huh (.) o:::h 26. AW: <many thousand years (.) then five hundred years Spanish (.) that's all> 27. Clerk: o:::h 28. AW: befo::re? only Maya. 29. Clerk: yah (.) look like before all Chinese (.) no speak Vietnamese Vietnam 30. AW: that's right that's right 31. DF: ((talking in Maya to butcher)) 32. Clerk: look like that 33. AW: that's right


EXCERPT 3

34. DF: ((to butcher)) dame esto (Spanish: give me that)

((butcher gives him the piece of meat requested, DF pays)) 35. Butcher: gracias

(Spanish: thanks) 36. DF: ma'alob ((turning to AW and referring to Tommy)) 37. su::esposa habla un poquito maya

(Spanish: his wife speaks a little Maya) 38. AW: oh si?

(Spanish: yeah?) 39. DF: ah (.) ah (.) ((pointing to butcher)) pero no esposa eso

(Spanish: but no(t) wife this one) 40. DF: ((talks with the butcher in Maya)) 41. DF: ((to Tommy)) ah adios (0.2) y al rato las cuatro de la tarde vengo a 42. comprar carne

(Spanish: uh, goodbye, and later four in the afternoon I come to buy meat) 43. DF: ((to clerk)) bueno amiga

(Spanish: OK friend) 44. Clerk: si

(Spanish: yes) 45. DF: si (0.2) dios botik Tommy

(Maya: thanks Tommy) 46. Tommy: oh ((laughter)) 47. DF: dios botik

(Maya: thanks) 48. AW: ((to clerk)) nice to meet you 49. AW: ((to Tommy)) nice to meet you Tommy 50. Tommy: thank you 51. DF: ma'alob saama

(Maya: good see you later) 52. Clerk: ma'alob ata saama

to an NNS learner (the clerk), whose utterances the teacher evaluates and applauds in lines 30 and 33.

But can we really speak here of learners and teachers, NNSs and NSs? Tommy and his co- worker have not asked to learn Maya, nor would they consider themselves to be learners of Maya in these circumstances. AW, who exchanges Maya lessons for Spanish lessons with DF during the week, could legitimately be called a learner of

Maya, but in this particular situation, she refrains from participating in the lesson and speaks En-

glish or Spanish instead. What about NS teachers? AW is explicitly introduced by DF as a maestra in line 11. This fact is confirmed by AW in line 13 and

duly admired by the clerk in line 16. The kind of English foreigner talk AW displays in Excerpt 2 gives a distinct teacherly flavor to her utterances. DF, on the other hand, does not introduce himself as a teacher of Maya, even though he is an NS of the language and likes to teach it to others. In the

presence of the clerk, he uses Spanish foreigner

talk (lines 1, 11), a verbal behavior usually characteristic of NS-NNS interactions, even though he himself is not a native speaker of Spanish. (He learned it in school at age 14.)

Another way of looking at these data is to see them as the social achievement of a service encounter in a multilingual setting, which entails

taking on certain roles, among which are "doing" learning and teaching (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Ochs, 1993). For example, in Excerpt 2, AW seems to be teaching the Vietnamese clerk about the history of Maya and Spanish in the

simplified English used by NS teachers talking to NNS English speakers. But it is equally clear that the clerk does not perceive herself as a learner. The structural parallel between AW's utterances about the Maya in Yucatan (lines 24 and 26) and the clerk's utterances about the Chinese in Vietnam (lines 29 and 32) index equality of conversational power. It establishes the clerk as conversational equal rather than as learner, de-

spite her less-than-standard English interlanguage


performance (e.g., lines 14, 29). It also matches her cultural pride with the pride of the researcher about Maya culture. However, through her re- peated backchannelings (uh huh, o:::h) the clerk seems to accept, or at least not to contest, the role of learner given to her by the teacher-a role that could also be seen as expressing courtesy or def- erence to someone who has been introduced as a maestra, or to a customer. Furthermore, by em- phasizing her maestra role, AW disambiguates her relationship to DF, which might otherwise be socially marked in terms of class, race, and ethnicity.

We find a similar role performance in Excerpts 1 and 3 when DF takes on the role of Maya NS teacher. Indeed, the Maya lesson seems to serve as a way for DF to position himself as a male Maya-speaking maestro, displaying an equal status with AW, the female English-speaking maestra. He seems to be displaying his native language for joviality and public relations purposes, rather than teaching Maya. In turn, Tommy and the clerk are willing to please a valued customer by engaging in what Rampton (1995) has called language crossing, and to establish a non-White (or mainstream) fictive co-ethnicity among immigrants (Smith, 2006).

The actors in this encounter are not only align- ing themselves cognitively, linguistically, socially, and culturally with one another and with their environment (Atkinson et al., 2007), but they are also acting out various present perceptions of one another and memories of past language uses. DF and the butcher haggle over the price of the meat in their private language, Maya, as they would have done in their hometown back in Yucatan; they both switch to the official, public language, Span- ish, a language more accessible to the clerk, when they officially close the deal (lines 34-35). Simi- larly, the clerk talks in her private language, Viet- namese, when she wants to show solidarity with her fellow countrymen (line 10), but she switches to the public language, English, with customers from other ethnicities like AW (lines 2, 10).

By performing English, Maya, Spanish, or Viet- namese, rather than only learning and using these languages, the protagonists signal to each other which symbolic world they identify with at the time of an utterance. Because the store is lo- cated in a predominantly Spanish-speaking area, DF's efforts to get Tommy to respond to him in Maya can be seen as a form of public resistance to Spanish colonial discourses that hold Maya in low esteem. The clerk's use of Vietnamese can be seen as indexing either her national identity as Vietnamese, or the special intimate role that she wants to assume and cultivate with her Vietnamese

customers, or the individual voice she feels enti- tled to retain even in the presence of other customers who do not understand Vietnamese and who are trying to impose Spanish and Maya at that moment. This voice requires tactful negotiation in multilingual settings and an acute sense of the distribution of status and symbolic power (Kramsch, 2003).

It seems inappropriate to call the protagonists in this encounter NNSs or even learners- measured against what norm? They are, if any- thing, learning to get along with each other, indeed, to survive in a global workplace where multiple symbolic systems are simultaneously at work with ambiguous signs to be deciphered minute by minute. Nor does the concept of interlanguage seem to apply to them. How should DF's nonstandard Spanish utterances in lines 1 and 11 be understood?-as evidence of his Spanish interlanguage, as foreigner talk, or both? And what would be their initial state between Maya, Spanish, English, and Vietnamese? What would be the target model? It is far more important that the participants know a smattering of Spanish, Maya, Vietnamese, and English-not standard English-and that they learn when it is appropri- ate to use what language, with whom, in what circumstances, to make what kind of impression, and to display what kind of identity, role, or voice. It is here of paramount importance to be perceived or regarded as a legitimate social actor, in whatever language or mixture of languages you speak, not to become an objectively measurable near-native speaker on any interlanguage proficiency scale.

THEORETICAL VALIDITY OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION'S MAIN CONCEPTS TODAY

These data seem to present a problem for concepts like NS and NNS, learner and interlanguage. Are these concepts still valid in our present world of multilingual migrants, where everyone is more or less native and nonnative, more or less novice and expert, more or less a capable peer? where it seems less important to learn a full linguistic system than to participate as a legitimate social actor in multiple contexts of social life, verbally and nonverbally? where learning and using have become co-extensive? Going beyond the meaning of the three fundamental SLA concepts in light of the research we have reviewed and the data we have discussed would mean that native speakers are not only individuals who speak a given language from birth, but people who have learned other languages, dialects, or sociolects along the


way, and who may not speak any standard variety at all. A language learner would be someone who not only accrues new linguistic knowledge, but who also feels, thinks, behaves in new ways, and who puts his or her various languages in relation to one another and in relation to his or her many roles and subject positions. An interlanguage would be a language that unfolds not only in the mind but also in the body of a learner, that is, in his or her perceptions, memories, and projections linked to the language and its past and present use. It would not develop in a more or less predictable progression from NNS to NS, but would emerge in a dynamic, recursive fashion through reconfiguration of the total social, cognitive, and emotional landscape.

But does all this broadening of the fundamental concepts of SLA facilitate researchers' attempts to carve out a scientifically researchable domain for which they have had to use categories like NS and NNS, learner, and interlanguage in a very limited, specific way? Does it reflect the reality of practitioners' attempts to teach languages in classrooms where the NS target is alive and well, learners are learners, and the original notion of interlanguage makes a lot of sense?

It seems that the ascendancy of the social dimension in SLA has not invalidated the fundamental concepts of the field but has brought to the fore their structuralist nature. Data like those we have discussed suggest that the symbolic, historical, and social aspects of SLA have to be interpreted from a poststructuralist, ecological perspective on language learning, one in which categories of people, actions, and events are not fixed but are discursively constructed, reproduced, and contested; where subject positions (not identities) are negotiated relative to perceptions of symbolic power and a practical sense of the possible and the feasible. In classrooms or in any normative environment where a deficit view of SLA is institutionally constructed, the three concepts have theoretical validity only inasmuch as they reproduce the dominant discourse of educational institutions. In other environments, like grocery stores, playgrounds, and workplaces, these concepts do not reflect the discourse of shifting opportunities, fluid subject positions, and tactical contingencies typical of our global times. An individual like Tommy or Tommy's clerk, who uses a language not his or her own, is not nec- essarily an NNS or a learner when serving customers in a grocery store. The clerk's nonstandard English might not be an interlanguage at all, let alone a fossilized one. She might be "performing" Spanish or Maya to please the customer. In turn, the Vietnamese NS category applied to

Tommy might not have much relevance or weight for Don Francisco, who perceives all Vietnamese as Chinos.8 The traditional SLA concepts cannot deal with the construction of perceptions, the displays of symbolic affiliation, and the exercise of power evidenced in Tommy's grocery store.

Of course, classrooms too can be seen as a site for assuming subject positions and exercis- ing symbolic power. The generic entities originally conceived by SLA research-NNS and NS, learner, and interlanguage-can also be seen as roles imposed by researchers on the participants for the sake of scientific inquiry. To what extent can SLA research adopt a poststructuralist, ecological stance consonant with an era of shifting perceptions and slippery realities? It would mean not so much broadening or reconceptualizing SLA's fundamental concepts as relativizing these concepts to fit the perspectives of the actors in- volved, including the researcher's perspective.

Opening the Pandora's box of the social dimension of language acquisition has confronted SLA research with the poststructuralist need not only to state explicitly what social context it is in- vestigating, and from what subject positions the participants, including the researcher, are speaking, but also to decide whether or not to use such categories as NS and NNS, learner, and interlanguage. Like any applied field of research, SLA's scientific concepts are vulnerable to being co-opted by practitioners and administrators who distort or politicize their original meaning; they are also vulnerable to a commodification of meaning, which hampers the scientific inquiry of the researchers themselves. Taking the social dimension seriously means interrogating the claim to universality of the fundamental SLA concepts, and adopting a more flexible conception of the field based on an ecological understanding of discursive, social, and historical relativity.9 Ulti- mately, the researcher perceives and interprets the social and educational context of SLA based on his or her own positioning in the field. It is this positioning that needs to be explicitly and system- atically accounted for and placed in its historical, political, and symbolic context.

NOTES

SThe panel was titled "Perspectives on Awareness." Panel presenters were David Birdsong, Richard Schmidt, Rod Ellis, Elsa Auerbach, and Catherine Wallace. Re- spondents were Chris Candlin and Leo van Lier.

2 In particular by Krashen (1987) with his distinction between learning and acquisition, but also Rivers's (1983) skill-getting versus skill-using, and by many others.


Other efforts to reimagine and reframe processes associated with use-and-performance had been proposed before that time (see, e.g., Lantolf, 1994), but within a totally different ontological theory.

4 These five aspects of interlanguage were viewed by Selinker (1972) as potentially leading to fossilization, but Rampton (1987) remarked that sociolinguists would view them as social processes of adaptation and alignment.

5 F. Monlina Ortiz Monasterio (personal communication, September 14, 2006).

6A 2003 report from the U.S. English Foundation, "Many Languages One America," counted 112 different languages spoken in San Francisco, Oakland, and Freemont, three Bay Area cities, based on Census 2000 data.

7 Because of the nonlegal status of many of these immigrants, the respondents had to be identified and con- tacted with great personal tact and political awareness. All names are, needless to say, pseudonyms.

8 Tommy, the Vietnamese storeowner, is in fact eth- nic Chinese. He attributed his trilingualism (Viet- namese, Cantonese, Mandarin) rather ambiguously to "go school." It is unclear what his L1 is, but English is certainly his fourth language.

9 It should be clear from the preceding discussion that by relativity we do not mean here only the linguistic relativity that cognitive scientists like Lakoff (1987) and Slobin (1996) have researched and to which Thorne (2000) and Lantolf (2007) refer in their work. The poststructuralist stance suggested by ecologically oriented approaches to SLA harks back to the critical theoretical writings of Foucault, Weedon, Butler, Giddens, and others.

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APPENDIX A

Transcription Conventions

(0.2) elapsed time in tenths of seconds (.) micropause ? raised intonation

full stop marks falling intonation

(()) double parentheses contain transcriber's comments prolongation of immediately prior sound

yeah underscoring indicates some form of stress, via pitch or amplitude > < faster speech <> slower speech

translations in italics

Documents

Three Fundamental Concepts in Second Language Acquisition