Karim Sadeghi - Talking About Second Language Acquisition

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A new academic discipline needs to establish itself. One way it can do this is through state-of-the-art surveys of the field that announce its arrival and serve as a record of achievement. The state-of-the-art surveys of second language acquisition (SLA) began in 1985 with the publication of my own Understanding Second Language Acquisition followed by Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991), Cook (1993), Ellis (1994), Gass and Selinker (2001), Ortega (2009), and others, several of which have gone through more than one editionin one case, as many as five! These single- or dual-authored books were subsequently supplemented by edited handbooks involving multiauthor contributions (e.g., Doughty & Long, 2003), reflecting, perhaps, the growing complexity of the field and the inability of single or dual authors to address adequately all its subfields. Increasingly, single authors have elected to focus on the specific subfield of their particular expertise (e.g., input and interaction or individual differences ), surveying theory and research within that field.

As a new academic discipline, SLA has manifested uncertainty about itself by asking such questions as Is SLA a discipline?, If it is a discipline, what are its boundaries?, and What kind of discipline is it? The editor of the current volume (Karim Sadeghi) reflects this uncertainty in his introductory chapter. I did likewise in an article I wrote in Language Teaching in 2021. There are different positions. One is that SLA is really not a discipline but just a subfield of cognitive psychology (Doughty & Long, 2003). But this was challenged by the growing interest among researchers in the social turn (Block, 2003) and, later, the bi/multilingual turn (May, 2013), where the emphasis is placed on the role of social context and social identity in L2 acquisition . In the opinion of some (myself being one), SLA is both a pure and an applied discipline. As a pure discipline, it informs our understanding about the fundamental nature of the human capacity for language. As an applied discipline, it offers theories and research that can address social and, in particular, pedagogic problems. The boundaries of SLA are now clearly porous, with very different positions adopted by different researchers. SLA is difficult to tie down, although Karim Sadeghi makes a valiant effort to do so in his Introduction to the book. In practice, however, its porous nature does not seem to matter much as individual scholars simply lock into their particular specialty and get on with their research.

An alternative approach to staking out the territory of a new discipline is to interview key scholars in the field. This is the approach adopted in Talking About Second Language Acquisition. It is not the first to use this approach. De Bot (2015) used interviews and questionnaires to collect data from 106 applied linguists and then analyzed the data to provide a picture of how the informants became affiliated to applied linguistics and how they defined their discipline. Sadeghi opted for a somewhat different approach. Drawing on Kunnans (2015)