LANGUAGE LEARNING UNRAVELLED

 In pursuit of explanation

Mike Sharwood Smith

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Latest update: 28th January, 2019 

Current length: 38778 words and climbing 

Comments and questions are very welcome HERE (or by email).

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About the author

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

1. INTRODUCTION

Three themes/Disconnecting and reconnecting

2. SO WHAT EXACTLY IS ‘SLA’?

Understanders and helpers/Theory and experimentation/Outside versus inside/signs of growth

3. PATTERNS EMERGING?

Three basic stages

4. NO PLACE TO GO

Disorientation/’And finally the pedagogical implications are..’

5. THE EARLY DAYS

Where shall I begin?/Where did SLA begin?/Onions and bubbles/An encounter with my first grey book/Going North

6. A BAPTISM OF FIRE

The Edinburgh Course, Beer and bonhomie,Sweetening the pill/Self-imposed exile and its compensations

7. ALL ROADS LEAD TO GEORGE SQUARE

Former Inhabitants/My second grey book and a local wizard

8. APPLYING LINGUISTICS

Językoznawstwo stosowany /Getting serious about applied linguistics/The Fisiak Phenomenon/My PhD Gambit

9. BEGINNING FROM THE BEGINNING AGAIN

A major rethink/A Case of Mistaken Identity/ In love with my eyes?/Does applied linguistics really exist?/SLA slips discreetly into the undergraduate programme/Two basic standpoints on the essential nature of L2 acquisition/Murder narrowly avoided/A Zhivago experience/Intimations of a Chomskyan SLA

10. THE GENERATIVIST ERA BEGINS

The Two Basic Standpoints on language learning recast/My official arrival on the SLA stage/Reconceptualising ‘language transfer’/ISBu and  the LARS series/A European fishing expedition/The flowering of European SLA/The Accidental Hero of Zagreb and how I got the ‘CBE // Finally, fully-fledged SLA Journals

11. THE ‘UG’ CONTROVERSY

Is UG really dead?

12. WIDENING THE CIRCLE

The Cognitive Viewpoint/No Mutual Attraction: another Case of Mistaken Identity

13 BACK TO BASE CAMP

A Belated Fresh Start/Interpreting and translation…and SLA/MOGUL awakes

14. LIFE AFTER DEATH

Moray House/A Polish Interlude

15. HUMAN COGNITION: THE ULTIMATE TARGET

Modular Cognition

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PREFACE

This account started as a blog and has grown considerably longer originally I will explain in more detail what it is about in the introductory chapter. Anyway, the basic plan still is to explore a history of ideas about language and particular the acquisition (‘learning’) of languages from a personal perspective. The blog is growing organically and I have had many reasons to change, refine and even sometimes to remove what I have written so that a returning visitor is advised to refresh the page in order to get the latest and hopefully better version.

I have been involved in this research area for some time and especially the area of non-native language acquisition and bilingualism. As a founding editor for 40 years of one of the two longstanding research journals in second language acquisition, , I have had the wonderful opportunity of an intimate and detailed view of this field almost from the very beginning. This continuing experience has been accompanied me alongside the development of my own thinking about language and how languages they develop and change inside an individual mind and brain. This means essentially that I am asking the reader to accompany me through a series of real life events simultaneously at two levels. The first one is based on personal real life experience and the second one is the development of a new ideas about language and how that has manifested itself in the form of new approaches to how this should be investigated. I can do this because coincidentally my own career runs parallel, almost from the beginning,  to the development of a new field of research. I am thankful for this and very happy with the expanding network of people who unknowingly have contributed to this account.

If this ever forms the basis of a book, some of the personal material in this blog may well be removed in the book version (and transferred to my private autobiographical blog).  

Mike Sharwood Smith, Edinburgh, December, 2018

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1. INTRODUCTION

Language learning has always fascinated me. It seems I have been ‘in pursuit’ all my life, curious about how language learning can seem easy or difficult depending on who you happen to be, where you are, how old you are. For example, little two-year-olds already manage to acquire a complex grammatical system from exposure, alone. They do not need to be corrected, and they grasp complex principles in advance of convincing robust evidence provided by those around them. Grammar, although a crucial aspects of language, is of course not everything that has to be learned and there is still much that is not necessarily acquired the same way and may need separate explanations, like vocabulary (lexical) and usage characteristics. At any rate, now I have understood that this amazing feat accomplished by infants is only made possible by our special inborn ability to work out without analysis or reflection of any kind exactly how the underlying system of any language we are exposed to works. This, of course, is only the beginning of an explanation, especially when it comes to acquiring more than one language.

For learners who are old enough to appreciate what language is and why it is so useful in many ways, the question arises as to whether this growing awareness of language and the language learning experience can help or hinder the process of acquiring a new language serves any purpose. Some say ‘no’ which is the more unexpected response, and others say ‘yes.’ The same goes for the effect on our learning progress of the value we happen to place upon various aspects of language, what we regard as import or trivial, attractive or frightening. A host of questions arise and keep on coming back as research finds different answers for them. These include what is the influence of what I already know, e.g. another language on what I am now trying to learn. Am I being helped or hindered?Is it always better to start learning when you are young, and if so, how young should you start? Why do I go on making errors even though I know perfectly well what the correct thing to say or write – when I pause for thought – is?  Are there people who are better at learning new languages than I am? And so on and so forth.

Although the basic enterprise in this particular account is unravelling what lies behind the mind’s learning of languages, there are subthemes making this blog somewhat unusual as a history of ideas. I will explain more about this shortly but one aspects of the account will certainly be the story of a particular area of research that deals with one aspect of this, namely a field that was started up in the nineteen seventies by researchers who were much less less interested in working out ways of making learning easier and much more interested in working out how it all works. This theoretical field came to be known as  called ‘second’ language acquisition (SLA).

There were already researchers looking into the acquisition of first languages in early childhood. SLA researchers set out to shed light on subsequent language learning across the lifespan, by older children and adults who have already become native speakers of one or more language. Before the arrival of SLA on the academic stage, learning a language later in life was (and indeed still is by most people) considered an entirely different matter, seen as more of a practical question faced by teachers and learners than something mysterious that required fundamental research; second language learning it was generally considered to be difficult especially when learned in classrooms, necessarily incomplete and hence much less of a miracle. Moreover, it was accomplished in a manner no different from learning any other skill or academic subject at school, absolutely requiring conscious effort and concentration and the deliberate application learning of grammatical rules, or so we all suspected. 

How wrong we were!

Now, many years on, and separate from the practice and principles of language teaching, second language learning is understood by most people to be much more related to what happens in the acquisition of first languages even though the circumstances and outcomes are often different.  Accordingly, SLA takes its place alongside more general field of bilingualism (or, more properly, ‘multi’-lingualism) studies without any sharp divides between the different learning situations. Even the persevering foreign language learner in a traditional classroom, studying a target language far from anywhere where it is actually spoken, can be seen as a ‘developing bilingual’ since the notion of bilingualism is a relative one and no longer entails perfect native-like mastery of more than one language.

 

Some time ago, when I was already interested in the development of ideas in this largely experimental field of research, I wrote a book on the theoretical foundations of SLA which was published in 1994. The present account might well have been a straightforward update on this book since I am still more interested in the changes in thinking anout language and language learning has evolved and less in recounting a history of experimentation. However, I have instead chosen a different approach for the of ideas, serious but at the same time light-hearted. Interwoven into it are not only various reflections, ideas about languages, how they grow inside an individual mind and brain but also an autobiographical element although I only dwell on events in my life that are in some way related to my professional interests.

 

The basic idea, then is, rather than serve up ready-made a series of stages in the history of SLA, to use my own experience as way of guiding the reader gradually though changes in mindset about what really explains the whole business of language learning, or, as I would prefer to put it, ‘growing’ a new language in one’s head. As will soon become clear, this story is also told from a European perspective rather than an American one. It is a matter of opinion where SLA began but this is a matter that is of historical interest only. My claim is that it started in a small square somewhere on Northern Europe. However, in the early years, the United States and Canada certainly provided the stage for most of research activity surrounding SLA and European researchers had to trek across the Atlantic to participate. However, the significant European role in the history of the field also needs to be appreciated now that SLA activity spans many other continents as well. For the moment this is simply meant to be a declaration of interest, or, if you well, of bias. In fact all the opinions expressed in this book have a certain bias. For example, my definitions of applied linguistics, and of SLA may be more restrictive than other people’s definitions as well as, of course, my views on how best to explain and describe the processes underlying language acquisition.

To be precise, there are actually three parallel themes in this blog. In the first place, it will be about developments in our thinking about language. Secondly, it will tell the story of a new academic field of research and how it emerged and fought for recognition alongside older more established ones. And thirdly it will be about my own frightening, funny and otherwise unexpected experiences which have some bearing on the other two themes. The interweaving of these three themes should allow me to mingle serious reflections with colourful anecdotes, adventures and humorous illustrations. Multitasking will inevitably cause me to occasionally jump forwards and backwards in time as I switch between the three themes; nevertheless, there will still be, for the most part, a chronologically ordered march, sometimes  a casual stroll, sometimes a sprint through the decades that have elapsed since the end of the nineteen sixties. Each section will focus on one or other of the three themes and I apologise in advance if readers find this too disruptive.

My voyage in pursuit of the language learner has certainly led me led me into some unusual places but one effect of this has been that my field of inquiry has got ever broader: whatever questions I have been asking myself have not always been immediately answerable without me looking elsewhere for solutions. Though always focused on the individual my interests have has grown in scope to take in all types of language acquisition and language attrition (‘loss’). And it now includes language processing in both mind and brain, bi- and multilingualism. This to some extent reflects a similar process within SLA as a whole. In the end, as far as I am concerned, investigating how language and languages operate within the mind as a whole has ended up in an interest in how the mind works in general.

Disconnecting and reconnecting

Shared patterns

Autobiographical blogs like autobiographies in general always run the risk of making the author look, or at the very least feel self-obsessed. Nevertheless, combining this account with an account of the way a new field of research has evolved has allowed me not just to evade that feeling but also to discover shared patterns in what seemed at the time to be a rather haphazard sequence of events in my life. I can see now, for example, that a deliberate process of disconnection as happened when second language researchers distanced themselves from the practical world of language teaching was not a drive for complete isolation. Rather it was balanced, as will be discussed shortly, by a reaching out to other disciplines, at first cautiously and mostly in the direction of theoretical linguistics, and more recently to other disciplines as well. And, when considering my colleagues and where they stand as regards their research interests, I can generally place them on a spectrum as to how much and how far they have been willing to trade complete isolation for a willingness to expand into other areas. Don’t get me wrong, isolation has clear advantages. It delimits the scope of your activity and allows you to concentrate on realisable goals, develop your own conceptual framework for your more restricted area and establish the appropriate set of research tools. However, exploring other, related fields, though potentially disruptive and time-consuming in the shorter term can bring tangible benefits in the long run. Isolation proves to be the best course of action in the initial stages of a field’s history but bad if it persists once the field has established its autonomy and hence matured a bit.

 

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2. SO WHAT EXACTLY IS ‘SLA’?

‘Understanders’ and ‘Helpers’ 

The research I shall be mostly dealing with is generally referred to as second language acquisition (SLA) or L2 (‘language two’) research with ‘second’ and ‘two’ conventionally standing for ‘anything more than one’. Since the majority of the world’s population speak more than one language well and even more with less fluency and many speak three or more languages, finding out how people accomplish this feat is important. However, SLA should not be confused with the theory and practice of language teaching. SLA is not about teaching: that’s a mistake many make. It is not even an ‘applied’ area in the normal sense of that word. By ‘applied’ I mean ‘devoted to applying theoretically-driven research in order to devise solutions to socially relevant problems’. Medicine and engineering would be other examples of applied research. Whether SLA research can be applied to improving language teaching becomes hot topic that I will return to later. It’s all about marriage and divorce and what comes afterwards.

The handiest way I find of talking about the theoretical/applied distinction it is that non-applied research is focused on understanding whereas applied research is about helping. It is true that helping can be accomplished long before any real understanding is achieved: lacking full understanding, trial and error and intuition are what you have to rely on and this can certainly get you positive results. After all, both teaching, healing and bridge-building have gone on for centuries without the benefit of the enhanced understanding that modern science provides. However, with increases in understanding, help can become infinitely more efficient. New techniques can be devised more quickly and old ones discarded if they turn out to have no scientific backing although one should of course never underestimate the placebo effect: a healer or a language teacher who inspires confidence can often get results despite any lack of understanding. Suitable teachers and healers are, however, far too thin on the ground for us to dismiss the promised that level of insight that a more rigorous scientific approach can bring and, anyway, understanding should surely be goal in its own right. 

Theory and experimentation

SLA is, in short, not an applied field but a theoretical one. In other words, it is for Understanders rather than Helpers. It is also, as it had turned out after an initial period of theorising, predominantly experimental in character with the experiments designed to further understanding and to not test the efficacy of some proposed solution to a practical problem such as a teaching technique. 

Understanding more and more about how second languages are acquired and used is a long drawn-out and piecemeal process: to have any hope of producing answers, controlled experiments must focus on very precise and limited questions in order to gain a reliable understanding of a precise and limited area. The overall balance between theoretical issues and experimental research in published papers is very uneven with the emphasis lying heavily of the side of experimentation. At the outset there was more theoretical debate as the field tried to locate itself as a non-applied area of research. Two separate strands of theorising gave the field two important insights to begin with. Three linguists, Pit Corder in Edinburgh, William Nemser in Washington and on his various contrastive linguistic project visits in Eastern Europe, and Larry Selinker in Michigan each made proposals that contributed to rethinking how we view second or foreign  language learning idea . These amounted to claiming second language was a complex mental and largely subconscious process with learners developing their own successive versions of the target language. This challenged established idea of how much second language learning could be controlled by external agents, i.e. the teachers and textbook writer and forced a reassessment of how deviations form the language norms should be treated. Then, on the West Coast of the USA, in California, Marina Burt, Heidi Dulay and Stephen Krashen pioneered an approach which challenged the idea that there was a fundamental difference between learning a native language between the ages of 2 to 5, and learning a second language subsequent to that, at an older age. This challenged the well-established notion that first and second language learning were totally different processes due to a loss of instinctive ability to acquire without guidance and numerous other factors. Indeed Selinker had claimed just that central to his argument that an entirely new psychological underpinning was needed justifying the founding and entirely new field of research. Krashen, by contrast, drew a distinction between the subconscious process of acquiring the target system triggered by focusing on communication alone and the conscious process of learning facts about the target language system and especially grammatical rules as described in grammar books and taught in traditional, formal classroom. He both shocked and excited traditional language teachers – the helpers – by asserting that the conscious process gave you a different kind of language knowledge, one that would help you very little when trying to perform in the language. Teachers with limited time would be better advised not to focus on formal learning of rules but on communication alone. This withdrew support from the conscious teaching of grammar, still popular in the world at large, and instead gave new support to older traditions like the Direct Method and methods like it. These approaches seek as much as possible to approximate the condition of the second language classroom to the conditions of first language learning. Rather the plead for an entirely new psychological take on the process of second language learning, the different conceptualisation of what drives second language learning led these West Coast researchers to adopt and adapt the experimental approach currently in use by psychologists studying child language development.

Once, experimentation got under way in SLA, however, theory quickly took second place and many researchers focused on refining their experimental techniques proceeding with cautious hypotheses and thus putting off the time when a bigger picture of how and why learning proceeded as it did could be re-examined and debated. Theory was never off the agenda completely, of course, and from time to time, as we shall see, debates about bigger theoretical issues flared up and new basic approaches were proposed and set in motion.

Since SLA is now roughly half a century old and truly separated from its language teaching roots, what about the ‘helping’ side of things then?  The downside for the Helpers, the applied linguists and language teaching methodologists,  is that, since understanding can take a long time to unfold , they tend to be impatient for quick solutions and especially those who are in business and can see an opportunity to make money out of the latest scrap of insight that merges from research claiming new ‘scientifically-based’ solutions for the learning new languages. I will return to such expressions of  impatience later when recounting some anecdotes of how I and others have experienced the wrath of those requiring SLA to be obviously  ‘useful’ or else be damned. Still, it is safe to say that the accumulation of SLA findings can now yield benefits for the Helpers and there are several SLA researchers now trying to bridge the gap between SLA and the world of language teaching. In this sense, then, part of applied linguistic research activity could well be thought of as  ‘applied SLA (ASLA). At the same time, it needs also to be said that the spins-offs from SLA research are not confined to practical areas of life as will also become clearer later.

Outside versus inside

Looking at any type of language learning, whether it is the two-year old in the early stages of acquiring a first language or an adolescent acquiring a new language in a classroom or someone picking up a foreign language abroad means confronting how little we really know about what goes on in the learner’s head. This observation isn’t as silly as it might sound if you consider the unsettling fact that most of what goes on in our heads happens beyond the reach of our conscious minds. We simply can’t ‘see’ or ‘feel’ what is happening there, only the result, or lack of results together with various responses such as satisfaction, a sense of progress or otherwise frustration and a feeling of effort having been expended.

Acknowledging this basic fact about the limits of our conscious minds has led to the ambition to investigate as rigorously and scientifically as possible how linguistic ability arises in an individual’s head on exposure to language in a multitude of circumstances. This has meant analysing many different aspects of what goes on outside the individual during exposure to language as part of the project to establish the processes by which what is heard and seen feeds or fails to feed the development of a new linguistic system inside. That is only part of the story but it should be enough to give an idea about what SLA is about.

Signs of growth

Initially, SLA came into being as an area of interest amongst people mainly involved in applied linguistic research and especially language teaching, in other words people who were themselves Helpers. It was inspired by new developments in linguistics and psychology although these first influenced the study of how very young children first acquire a language, in other words L1 (‘first’ language) acquisition. The effect of these new trend was to engender a growing  appreciation of our ignorance about how languages are learned at any age, to say nothing of our bland assumptions about how they should be taught.

Most people had assumed languages should be learned the way school subject are learned, finding out the rules, learning the word meanings and above all relying on others to correct us when we say something wrong: it all made sense. The new feeling of humility in turn came with a challenge it suggested we attempt a new way of treating language learning in order to reduce this state of ignorance. After all, what could one now say to language teachers and textbook writers about a process that turned out to be much more complex and mysterious than generally assumed?  I recall Pit Corder once asking how we can be so sure that language learners are learning successfully because of, and not despite the teacher. Corder even in the late 1960’s was not only laying the ground for the first ‘learner system’ approach but also pointed in the direction of the second one, foreshadowing the claim that, despite appearances, child and adult language acquisition of grammar were both driven by the same subconscious mechanisms.  In this way, his views foreshadowed both of the two basic and opposing views about the nature of second language acquisition, particularly the acquisition of new grammatical systems , that can be identified as Selinker’s ‘interlanguage’ approach on the one hand and the Dulay, Burt and Krashen ‘L1-based’ approach on the other. 

Many early SLA researchers, especially in the early history of the field,  were also language teachers or at least had some second language teaching experience. Only later, in the 1980s, did the field see a notable influx of people with a major specialisation in linguistics and little experience or interest in language teaching. This may have been to some degree due to an oversupply of linguistics graduates at the time and a decline of available academic positions that would allow them to continue as they had begun. Whatever the reason, SLA would greatly profit from their new expertise in analysing the linguistic properties of learner language even at very advanced stages of development.

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3. PATTERNS EMERGING

Three basic stages

All life forms seek patterns in their environment, guided by the particular form in which they have evolved. Reflecting further on different strands of this account and the whole idea of evolution, it struck me that both my own life and the history of SLA could perhaps be captured as having evolved in three basic stages: disorientation, isolation and integration. To begin with my own life, the first stage, disorientation, had much to do with having been born in a time of war and in a distant, foreign country, South Africa, and with my father working far further north, in Nigeria. Although I have no memory of it, for 6 months, I was left with a black South African nurse for reasons I describe elsewhere. She was certainly Afrikaans-speaking  but what was I speaking exactly? If I spoke at all then, it would have been only Afrikaans, that is, on the day my mother returned to reclaim me and the nurse very reluctantly handed me back. My birth certificate (geboortecertifikaat) is  bilingual at least.

                   

This early experience I can choose to treat as symbolic of what was to come: from that time on throughout most of my childhood, I was to keep travelling back and forth to different places never staying long enough to establish long-term, close relationships with people around me but, on the credit side, getting exposed to different cultures and to different languages. To cope with this flux and confusion, at about the age of seven, I turned from what understand was a loud, highly energetic and extrovert child into a shy, silent loner: the disorientation I obviously felt about the outside world led naturally to my own self-imposed isolation phase. Finally, in adulthood, I began gradually reconnecting up with my outside world in numerous ways – my integration phase – and now count myself in the lucky possession of a wide network of friends and acquaintances in different walks of life as well as a variety of interests. As life became more settled and predictable, however, I still had a severe case of the travelling bug but, the difference was that this time I would travel where I chose to go. As it turned out, this obsessive reluctance to stay put determined my future career and set me on my life project: exploring the mind of the language learner in different ways and in different places.

My intellectual life, as I now look back on it thus far, also displays patterns that were not evident earlier. Writing this blog, I am now fully immersed in the broader field of cognitive science, attempting to understand human knowledge and ability in general and not just the possession of a new language. In other words, my current interests go beyond teaching, beyond a particular strand or particular strands of linguist research to the infinitely more challenging task of making sense of the mind as a whole, especially how we process the raw data from our senses and construct our reality. This now seems all along to have been an ambition of which I was not at first fully aware. Even in the early days in Utrecht, I started writing short pieces about processing and how to formally capture mental processes even though it seemed to me like idle speculation at the time. This link takes you to one very modest example. It is a damaged fragment that deals with a particular aspect of language processing but with an angle quite different from what people in my field were writing about it at the time.

SLA, as I will explain further in the next section, also struggled in the beginning to find its true identity before moving, defensively, on to its isolation phase. This at least allowed it, as a ‘loner’ area of research, to develop freely until such time as it was ready to connect up again with its outside world. This it did eventually but first and foremost it looked to different fields of fundamental research and not to the practical field from which it had originated. The general desire seemed to have SLA become more integrated with and profit from theories and experimental findings originating in a wider, non-applied community of researchers: this is the interdisciplinary stage into which SLA has now entered.

A first serious foray into a crossdisciplinary arena came in the 1980s when theoretical linguistics was able to provide the appropriate tools for analysing the abstract structure of the utterances that even intermediate and advanced language learners produce and understand. This was a major step forward since the first period of experimentation focused in early stage of acquisition and dealt with relatively simply categories of linguistic structure, in particular so-called ‘functional morphemes’ like tense suffixes (for example -past –ed as in ‘walked’), plural endings (like -s in ‘cats’) and determiners like ‘the’ and ‘a’ which express no intrinsic meaning until they are coupled with nouns.  The fields of psychology and sociology, and more recently neuroscience, have also provided inspiration for ways of studying the behaviour of individual language learners, alone or in groups, as well as the social contexts in which they use their languages.  It should be added that this was not a period when much cooperation from researchers in different fields took place. For the most part, SLA was too new as an autonomous area of research to attract people from outside in any numbers so it has long been a question of SLA researchers, by themselves, delving into areas like theoretical linguistics outside their field and into sociolinguistics, in each case in order to refine their research questions and techniques: some looked primarily at the linguistic properties of learners’ language systems, others attended more to the properties of the social context in which learners are exposed to language. . Only recently has real interdisciplinary cooperation become a feature of published research reflecting SLA’s true coming of age. Prior to this however, the growth of SLA has been marked much more by new subfields developing their own special interest groups and meetings with syntax and morphology ceasing to be the dominant focus of interest. Obvious examples includes L2 ‘input’ studies ( focusing on the different aspects of immediate external context affecting development), L2 lexical acquisition, phonology and pragmatics and later language attrition, L3 acquisition and L2 processing.

This way of characterising the chronological stage-by-stage pattern of events in the history of SLA is of course only a rough approximation as will soon become clear but it seems a useful way of introducing this particular account and I can faithfully say that I have been carried along with SLA in all three phases of its existence.

Disorientation

SLA did not burst on the scene dramatically: it had extremely humble beginnings. Most people had no idea what it was and were blinded by old assumptions: the study of language learning after childhood must surely be about language teaching. Indeed, to buttress this misconception, it so happened that many early L2 researchers themselves had a language teaching background. I was no exception but I did realise that I needed two acquired to modes of thinking about language learning. Since it is possible to be in two modes at the same time, it would eventually lead me into paradoxical situations. For example, I would find myself in Mode 1 teaching formal grammar and correcting and explaining grammatical errors as required by the educational system institution I was working with but with my parallel Mode 2 giving me a quite different view, i.e. not only 1) believing that it would not be of much help in my student’s grammatical development in the target language but 2) also giving theory classes in second language acquisition to the very same students and telling them so despite the risk if undermining their confidence in the efficacy of error correction. As it turned out, the desire to be corrected is often too ingrained to be threatened by such theoretical pronouncements: they never complained.

It is a mistake to think that research in the classroom necessarily has to be labelled ‘applied’. The circumstances in which research takes place are not nearly as important as the mode in which the researcher observing and collecting data from classroom learners happens to be in. Papers and articles that can properly be called SLA studies were focused on understanding the internal, mental development that learners go through whatever the situational context of learning might be. This might be formal instruction of some type or it might mean picking up languages without instruction, by reading and following courses on the media or simply by spending time in a community where that language is spoken, for example and trying to communicate as best you can.  The researcher in Mode 2 may be sitting in the classroom collecting data on learners who are being taught by someone else who is clearly in Mode 1. This researcher will have no interest in immediately improving the performance of the learners whereas the teacher or an applied linguistics researcher will be hoping to do just that. The teacher has a standard, the target ‘native’ norms of the language or something close to the target and therefore a notion of what is wrong or incorrect. The researcher in question makes no judgements like this but looks for what can lead to explanations of the question he or she is currently engaged in. Moreover, these SLA studies often focus on some very limited and manageable aspect of language, investigations that might reveal insights for researchers but not necessarily interesting or useful from a teacher’s point of view. 

Developing a new line or research is one thing, making it known to others is another. Looking for places to present at and publish , early SLA researchers might have turned to other more established theoretical and experimental areas dealing with language. However, for some time, it was difficult to get L2 research accepted in the wider academic community as a new field in the making. Such general acceptance was necessary for the more specific type of acceptance required to get something published in a well regarded journal.  There simply wasn’t even one specialist journal devoted to this subject.  Would-be L2 researchers looking for sympathetic outlets for their scholarship found themselves in a confusing and disorienting situation. Whichever way they turned, they were bound to stumble against a wall of preconceived ideas. Their aims and their chosen topic were regarded with suspicion and, depending on which side was doing the judging, appearing to be either academically unsound or, in the eyes of the ‘helpers’, useless to man or beast. Where would they find a sympathetic ear?  As far as the most obvious understanders in related fields within linguistics as a whole were concerned, the particular linguistics meetings they attended and the non-applied scientific journals they happen to publish in were proving to be unlikely candidates for aspiring SLA researchers: anything to do with ‘second’ (i.e. second, third, fourth etc.)  languages was immediately associated with language teaching and therefore dismissed as being something for practitioners and not for rigorous scientific inquiry.

“And finally the pedagogical implications are…”

There were of course language teaching and applied linguistics journals and conferences. On the face of it, since SLA papers were about language learning, they were seen as admissible as contributions to applied linguistics. However, the problem here was that meetings and journals devoted to language teaching methodology and general applied linguistics (of which more later) would be likely to give a rough ride to second language research papers if they did not also have obvious implications for teaching. In reality, SLA contributions in the eyes of this group of people often turned out to be abstruse, impractical in any sense of the word and not to be regarded as a useful or enlightening to people faced with a class of language learners. To obtain acceptance, speakers at such conferences and contributors to journals were therefore forced to devise ingenious arguments at the end of their presentation or article as to how what they had just discussed, despite its focus on abstract questions, was actually relevant to language teachers. You quickly got to appreciate that the last section of your presentation would have to mention potential pedagogical applications.  This was at least easier than persuading linguists that second language topics had anything to do with linguistics but searching for possible practical implications was sometimes very difficult except in vague, general terms and always an unwelcome distraction. Without persistent attempts to force entry into the world of respectable peer-reviewed journals and scientific meetings that placed SLA centre stage, SLA would have never gained its place in the world of serious science or scholarship: until that day happened, their subject was regularly represented as belonging to applied linguistics or pycholinguistics. This second area would not have been a bad home for SLA, being as the name suggest a marriage between the study of human behaviour and the study of language and languages. However, psycholinguistics became established as a very particular type of psychology/linguistics combination: it was and is still almost exclusively involved with understanding (human) online language processing. This means it deals exclusively in periods lasting milliseconds and not the month and years required for the study of linguistic development. In Chomskyan terms, this is a field that focuses on performance phenomena and not on what he called competence. i.e. the investigation of how languages are represented in the mind (‘competence’ in this technical sense) and, in this case, what would be the study of how language knowledge and ability develop in the mind of individual learners on exposure to a new language. There is a better term for the latter nowadays, namely ‘developmental linguistics’ but it might as well have been called ‘developmental psycholinguistics’. These terminological issues are not so interesting in themselves but they do reflect the sometimes odd ways in which intellectual territory seems to be divided up creating academic boundaries and tribal instincts that that can often make interdisciplinary collaboration difficult.

5. THE EARLY DAYS

Where should I begin?

I will, in my quasi-historian mode, pass over many pearls of wisdom and insights about intuitive processes in the human mind expressed over the centuries and in different parts of the globe. Those belongs in a standard history of the field which this is not intended to be. There are many people that could be treated as forbears, expressing ideas that foreshadowed the growth of SLA. However, I will, instead, cut to the chase and begin at the beginning of the modern era, i.e. a good decade after World War II.

And where did SLA begin?

It is hard for a historian looking for a dramatic starting point to find an uncontroversial place and single person to pick out as the First Pioneer or the First Home of SLA. One could point to Ann Arbor, Michigan where Robert Lado was promoting his approach to language teaching in the 1960s backed up by contemporary psychological and linguistic theory. This was at least a move to treat language learning in a scientific manner albeit for form the standpoint of ‘mode 1.’ One could also point to a later development on the West Coast of the United States and specifically to two universities in Los Angeles, USC and UCLA, or you could track north to Canada and pick out Toronto’s Ontario Institute of Education that, in the 1970s, distributed far and wide its free copies of Working Papers in Bilingualism where articles on what later become ‘SLA’ probably made their first public appearance in something like the right context. However, as we shall, see I am going to fly back across the Atlantic and single out one city, the capital of Scotland. I will return to talk about the role of Edinburgh more fully later but I would personally mark the start of SLA as an independent non-applied field as the appearance in 1967 of Pit Corder’s article, ‘The significance of learner’s errors‘ published in the International Review of  Applied Linguistics. Which appeared before the Los Angeles universities had established that city as the prime focus for SLA researcher’s studies in the seventies. I do this because for the first time a paper appeared in a journal expressing the idea that we really did not know what was going on in the language learner’s and hence needed a totally different approach to thinking, and doing research on what really drives the learner to acquire a new language.

Now, as this is still a very personal history, I shall turn, immodestly of course, to my own story for a short while. Bear with me.

Onions and bubbles

Development over the lifetime can be seen in different ways, as an uninterrupted flow of experience or more analytically as a transition through a series of different stages. I sometimes think of my own mental growth in this second way rather like an onion with successive skins being gradually added one by one. I am writing as an already largish onion (see image below)

                   

Looking now beyond my university days as an undergraduate in Scotland , the growth of the first adult layer began with my becoming, against all expectations,  a Humble-but-Happy English Language  Teacher.  More surprises were in stall for me which, in time would bring me into close contact with many distinguished scholars in different fields and often in convivial circumstances, including Charles Fillmore, his marvellous wife Lily-Wong, Jerome Bruner, Steve Pinker, Ray Jackendoff and many more. More importantly, my successive  skins each reflect stages where I would again be brought face to face with my own ignorance. Ignorance about what I was teaching, ignorance about how it could be made more effective, ignorance about what exactly went on in your head when learning a language that made you better at it or worse. Ignorance about how more than one language can cohabit in one individual mind and ignorance about how language fits in with the mind as a whole and finally ignorance about how the mind works in general. The only consolation I could have gleaned from all this was knowing, which I didn’t, that I was not alone: my ignorance was shared by many other professionals and academics working with language, and when I did come to suspect this, my worry was then that I was always lagging far behind everyone else.

An encounter with my first grey book

The egg is hatched

                   

Still staying me and my career ‘ego’, I suppose, from a professional point of view, it really all began in Montpellier, in the South of France, in the language laboratory of the Centre Régional Pédagogique (CRP) de Montpellier, located a short distance away from the oval shaped Place de la  Comédie known to locals as ‘The Egg’,  when my relaxed, young and very ignorant self casually picked up a book in a grey cover apparently devoted to what was for me an obscure and apparently new subject called “applied linguistics”. Language labs were themselves still a fairly new phenomenon in the sixties but because they seemed hi-tech they had attracted funding and appeared in many places before suitable teaching materials had become available. Hi-tech teaching aids were however not uppermost in mind when I arrived in the South of France.  I was passing the time pleasantly in Montpellier with a deep tan, a very small salary and free half-board lodging all in all a welcome break after the rigours of finals exams at St Andrews University where I had just graduated in French and German. I stayed close by at the Lycée Joffre in a room probabaly once occupied by the British prisoner of war during the Napoleonic wars. Over at the CRP, sitting in a language lab and teaching people who were already quite proficient in English seemed a bit too much like hard work. Such were the  times in those gentler days when future employment prospects were never a real worry the the paltry twelve hours stretched out in my mid to a much longer chunk of the week because they  kept me from more serious business, hanging out in cafés, chatting in French, lying on the beach at Palavas or strumming a guitar to gain free entry to local boîtes de nuit. The immediate attraction of this rather forbidding grey volume by Halliday, Mackintosh and Strevens was that it seemed to invest the business in which I was involved with a rather flattering scientific aura. Future employment was still never totally absent form my mind and the title of the book coupled  with the impressive technology that surrounded me had me indulging in a foolish fantasy. Viewing the language lab in front of me, the large console festooned with blinking lights and levers, I felt like a casual amateur or more like the controller of a NASA space centre? Boys with toys. Roll on applied linguistics. I thought, because perhaps, just perhaps, this might lead to something exciting.

As the year developed, I began, in more contemplative moments, to realise that I could prolong this 12-month happy interlude in my search for longer-term employment by combining the best of both worlds. Teaching foreign languages at a UK school had not been an attractive option for me by any stretch of the imagination but perhaps this business of language teaching abroad with its extra attractions might qualify as my  future profession, I mused. I could couple together travelling and earning my living in a way I hadn’t seriously considered before. And only now, amazingly as it it now seems to me, did I actually begin to realise fully that people all round the globe not only wanted to learn English from a native speaker but were prepared to pay a living wage for it. To adapt the old British army recruiting slogan, I could ‘Teach English and See the World‘. I could also learn more languages.

The language bug

Being interested in languages is of course quite different from making it your means of living. Nevertheless, the ground had been prepared. Even as a very young child, I had been surrounded by sounds of English, Afrikaans and later Hausa. The latter language I spoke, according to my mother, quite fluently by the age of 4. On returning from an appendicitis operation to the remote spot in Northern Nigeria where my father worked at the time, she had found me chatting away with him not in English but in Hausa (which he spoke fluently as well as Fulani). The local Hausa people were amused and interested in this small European child speaking their language. They were used to European adults in the colonial administration doing this but their children talking Hausa to them seemed to touch them in a special way. One of them would sit patiently next to me getting me to repeat a word again and again until it sounded right: “ita-a-chi” (rising intonation on the ‘chi’) he would chant, teaching me the word for tree. “itachi”, I would repeat as best I could. Soon my father was to receive an angry letter from the only other European there, an American missionary who demanded that I cease forthwith talking to his son in the local language. How otherwise could his young son possibly learn his mother tongue? I was of course too young at the time to recognise this classic negative response to the very idea of child bilingualism

My early mastery of Hausa was interesting but also frustrating to hear about second-hand. It would however direct my attention to why it should have happened in so short a time and why it should now have deserted me so definitively. This definitely foreshadowed my academic interest in language loss, or as it is now called, language ‘attrition’. At any rate, at the time I was appalled to note that, on my return to Nigeria a year later, I had lost my Hausa completely. Once happily roosting in my 4-year old head, it had now flown the coop seemingly for good. Later I would learn that children forget languages as fast as they acquire them: their minds are perfectly pragmatic in this regard. They don’t keep what they don’t need.  

Like other colonial children from the UK, I was eventually sent off to boarding school in far off England there being no other option at the time: successive Christmas holidays in dry season Northern Nigeria were spent assiduously trying to pick Hausa up again. These repeated attempts would continue until my father retired when he was 58, two year later than his official retirement age – jobs in the tropics were considered worth bring the retirement age forward 10 years – and I was 15 years old. Although I succeeded in the short periods of time allotted to me to acquire a reasonably impressive repertoire of useful words and phrases, many of which I remember to this day (see here for a list), I could not, to my great frustration, miraculously restore my fluent command of the language. In this way I acquired a lifelong fascination with languages, both how they are acquired and how they slip away. It also foreshadowed my encounter much later with the ideas of Stephen Krashen that would include an interesting explanation for my infuriating failure to relearn the language. Perhaps now is the time to put on record the first Big Question:

 

Going North

Given these childhood experiences, teaching English as a foreign language, although I had never planned to do it, was perhaps not as unpredictable an about-turn in my life as I thought at the time. Moreover, earning money teaching foreign students during the university vacations  didn’t just put some money in my pocket. It had already given me a glimmering of how being a native speaker did not equip you with what it really takes to teach foreigners the mother tongue you speak so effortlessly. Some casual remarks by some Swedish friends in Montpellier about the possibility of teaching English in Sweden for a serious organisation that also provided teacher training attracted my attention. Professional training was just what I wanted. It was also true that by then Sweden held other attractions as well. In this way, by the end of 1967, I had finally decided to take this this revised career plan seriously. No more daily trips to the beach and nights playing folk music at nightclubs with friends: time to move on. I would work in Sweden for two years and hopefully learn Swedish in the process. This would be as a British Centre lektor, between 1967 and 1979, and I would be based first in a town called Trollhättan and then the following year in the city of Gothenburg (Göteborg). In both years, part of my job was also to teach at a smaller place which required travelling by train every week and staying overnight. In each palce where I worked teaching day and evening classes, there would be a local Swdish family designated to make sure I had somewhere to stay and invite me over from time to time for a meal and a chat.

The British Centre was allied to the Folksuniversitet, a partly state-subsidised but nonetheless independent Swedish adult education association. B.C. lektors did in fact teach mainly adults although in the first year I also had classes at a secondary school in Amål (known better to the wider world by the blunt title of a film Fucking Åmål, unkindly called the most boring place on earth according to one of its teenage protagonists). This was my weekly trip away from town then. In Amål, I stayed at the house of a local Lutheran priest or ‘minister’ in a room with a small organ on which I could’t resist surreptitiously playing a hymn tune or two; Apart from the usual adult group, I taught a class of 11-years old that were delightful and for the last hour on Friday, a class of 15-year-olds that were distinctly undelightful and either talked amongst themselves all the time or tried to make me amuse them playing the guitar. I forgave them, of course and after the class both they and I left thankfully to start our weekend.

Metamorphosis 1.

Arriving in Sweden in the autumn of 1977, I was certainly not prepared for basic communication in the local language even though I had picked up a few expressions from my Swedish friends in Montpellier. In fact, the only thing I could remember as I went through the customs check at the airport and was asked if I had anything to declare was “Jag älskar friluftslivet” ( ‘I love outdoor life’). Not knowing anything about the Swedish sense of humour, I didn’t risk that particular sentence. Besides, my impression was, from teaching English at summer schools in England and from my Montpellier experience, that most Swedes could get by with English anyway.  Whether there were prepared to do so I was soon to find out.

I suppose this first metamorphosis from ostensibly happy-go-lucky me into something else, so the growth of first skin of my professional onion, really began with the initial British Centre training course: the casual teacher in me was getting some serious, intensive training although my main interest then was not so much how to learn languages but how to teach them.  

The month’s course took place at the British Centre headquarters in Stockholm. Here we were instructed in the techniques of their audio-lingual method as well as how to survive as English Language teachers in a Swedish village or town without treading on too many cultural toes and especially how to recruit participants for our courses and keep them happy enough to want to carry on the following year. This could be a challenge. People seemed reluctant to speak at all and might avoid you in the street when they saw you approaching. It turned out that this was  only because they were afraid to utter one single English sentence to you and not because they were being hostile as it first seemed to me.

I have some good memories of the Stockholm course which was well structured and imaginatively designed. The participants were housed with Swedish families for the duration of the course. I found myself sharing with a Richard and a Kim who I now remember as Kim Loughran, and fun-loving Aussie who would go on to work for the English language broadcast on Swedish television announcing himself as ‘Kangaroo Kim, the Diabolical Wonder from Down Under’. The course was largely devoted to teaching us the principles and practice of their version of the audio-lingual approach – plenty of repetition and all activities to be in English – but it also included information about living in various parts of Sweden as the local English lektor, sometimes in very remote places. They did give us a very short course in Swedish using a language laboratory and I learned such practical things as asking whether, in the train, I had to change at Motala. They had neither the time nor, perhaps the intention, to have us especially  fluent in basic Swedish since an enormous emphasis was placed on only speaking English in class. This applied even to classes with complete beginners which at first seemed to me like an impossibility.

Time now for another Big Question: it relates to my earlier frustration at not relearning Hausa easily.

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BIG QUESTION 2

In principle, growing older means growing wiser.

Certainly, from the time we arrive at play school, we gradually become more and more aware and informed about life: this includes facts about language and our emerging understanding makes us wiser and better at learning.

Why then does learning another language seem to become MORE difficult and not just easier and easier?

Why when I know more about how the system works and am clearly able to spot and correct many of my own grammatical errors, do I go on MAKING the same errors in the first place? Am I just stupid or what?

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“Now you know what it’s like”

Knowing how to behave in Sweden appropriately was more important since we had to keep them enrolling every year, and paying for the classes. Given the shyness that many Swedes had about speaking English it was felt important for us, especially the dyed in-the-wool monolinguals, to appreciate what it felt like to be in such a class. I remember one session with Michael Meyer, a well-known translator of Ibsen and Strindberg. When he came into the room, none of us had no idea who he was or where he came from. In fact, he even appeared to be a Swede who had wandered into the wrong room because without further ado he began to speak to us agitatedly in Swedish. Or was this some kind of cruel test? It seemed as though this man was asking us questions which none of us could understand and, in a commanding voice, telling selected individuals among us to do actually do something. General panic set in as each of us prayed that he wouldn’t turn his attention to us because our mini-course in Swedish, then not even completed, had still left us completely unable to understand what he was on about. Eventually he switched to English -ah, so he was English and not Swedish –  and the first thing he said to us was “Now you know how it feels when you are a beginner in a language class”. I might have thought this was no surprise as I, unlike some in this room and maybe the majority, had quite extensive language learning experience but actually I was just as panicky as the rest of them.  Art any rate the point was made. We would have to be gentle with our Swedish beginners and maybe even the intermediates as well. Apart from the danger of losing customers, the emotional side of language learning could not be neglected if any learning progress could be achieved in our classes. This was a lesson well learned a long time before I took a more academic interest in the underlying psychological mechanisms that control emotional behaviour in language learning.

Once the Stockholm course was over, we were sent out far and wide across the land, like language missionaries, equipped with basic techniques and a little bag of objects to use in the classes. Our mission? To Spread the Word, not of God but of Shakespeare and Dickens or, more precisely, of Ian Dunlop. Ian ran the British Centre in Sweden and he was generally known all over the country for his popular TV courses. We were to teach everyday English, of course, that is the English as conceived by numerous  language teaching textbook writers such as L.G. Alexander.  Arriving at out designated towns, we had first to enrol the adults for a given course for which they paid a fee. This was passed on to the main office in Stockholm. Ringing each one up in turn to introduce myself, I was to tell say “Good morning, …., I am Michael Sharwood Smith, the new British Centre lektor” and then express the heartfelt wish that they would return to the class this year, I was often met with a short gasp and a long silence before the person at the other end of the phone dared to formulate a reply. Getting my learners to speak in class would prove

 to be difficult too. The local newspaper cutting shows me in the middle flanked by the new German and my French counterparts in the town in Trollhätten. Michelle on my left soon became a close friend and the last I heard of her she became personal private secretary to the famous Josephine Baker and lived near Monaco.

Naturally as someone curious about languages and despite the importance of seeming to be monolingual I did, inevitably, start to pick up some Swedish. However, I always kept to the ‘English Only’ rule when teaching. One evening, as I was standing appropriately dressed in front of class and sorting through my materials ready, I overheard a couple of women chatting away in Swedish and one said ‘look, he is wearing a different shirt today, today, much nicer than the other one’. I looked up, grinned and said “I’m glad you like my shirt”. This produced a collective intake of breath, confusion and two very red faces as they tried to work out exactly what else I might have heard them say. At the same time, I was trying hard  to guess what it was that made them blush.

Our initial training course in Stockholm was supplemented later by in-service refresher courses and also summer courses run in the UK where we could teach and add a little to our very modest income. At one of the refresher courses, I had the good fortune to listen to a talk by one Anthony (Tony) Howatt of the Department of Applied Linguistics in Edinburgh. His explanations of what he thought professional language teachers should know about convinced me to try my best to get into his department and follow the postgraduate diploma course in applied linguistics – at that time not yet changed into a Master’s (M.Sc) by the addition of a dissertation. This was to complete the growth of my second skin which had been set up when I first picked up the grey Halliday, Mackintosh and Strevens book back in Montpellier..

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the very same period when  I was in my second British Centre year in  Gothenburg,  Larry Selinker, whom I was to designate as one of the three pioneers of SLA, was actually spending his sabbatical at the same department in Edinburgh where our guest lecturer, Tony Howatt worked. Two years later, as the local British lecturer, I was to meet and co-teach with Larry at a summer course in Poznan, Poland. This was shortly before he published his seminal interlanguage paper in 1972. Another SLA pioneer, Pit Corder actually ran the Edinburgh department and William Nemser, who as the contributor, around the same time, might also  qualify as a pioneer of a similar idea (approximative systems) that Corder (transitional competence) and Selinker (interlanguage)  both talked about. This was the idea that learners developed a series of learner varieties of the target language to be studied independently exactly as though they were dialects and not just a mish-mash of correct and incorrect structures. This did not imply anything particular for language teachers at the time except, I suppose, not to treat systematic errors as heinous offences against the language but to see them as evidence of the learners’ minds developing rules of their own in some organised way. Corder and Selinker I was to know well but I did also meet Nemser briefly at a Polish contrastive linguistics conference. In any case, all this was before me in September 1969 and two years on from my initial training  in Stockholm when I first stood, now with my language teacher’s skin now firmly in place plus a pretty fluent command of Swedish and three years’ teaching abroad under my belt, on the cobbled street outside the same  Department of Applied Linguistics situated very close to George Square in Edinburgh. The second phase of my training as a language specialist was about to begin but what was my thinking about language at this point? I had had extensive experience of learning language, in both formal and informal settings. I was aware I now knew that learning could take place in the absence of formal grammar learning and that even beginners could learn in classes where only the target language was spoken. The role of the teacher and language method was still extremely important. The British method required a high degree of planning. Learners followed classes that were highly structured. At the same time I had managed to acquire a reasonable amount of Swedish chiefly by listening to TV, being amongst Swedes speaking their own language and not just English and learning Swedish songs. I had even survived a skiing holiday in Southern Lapland where no one spoke English. At the same time, the people I tended to socialise with were predominantly French-speaking and I even ended up taking part in French poetry readings and acting in a French play, staged by the Alliance Francaise and directed by Michelle Barbiero. However, making sense of all this language experience and what it meant was something that needed some guided reflection. That was why I was here standing here  with two years of Sweden behind me, in front of the door at  14, Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh.

 

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6. A BAPTISM OF FIRE

The Edinburgh Course

The year in the city affectionately called Auld Reekie, although the days in which this now most of elegant cities perched on volcanic rock stank to high heaven are buried in the distant past, has come to regarded by me as the ‘base camp’ preceding a long climb from great ignorance to the heights of ‘less ignorance’. Applied linguistics in Edinburgh turned out to be a heady and challenging mix of topics. Some of these were related to language teaching and ones that were highly theoretical and completely unfamiliar. In fact, with all due respect to those who have subsequently taught these topics at Edinburgh University, I am pretty sure that I was lucky enough to arrive there in the department’s golden era, the high point of its place on the international stage as the ultimate passport to a career in applied linguistics. The orange volumes  containing the topics taught there were already well-known.

The Edinburgh course provided me with a distinctly academic training.  That is to say, in no obvious sense was it a standard training or refresher course that language teachers, even relatively experienced ones, might expect. This relative lack of emphasis on the practicalities of language teaching might have disappointed some of the less academically-minded teachers who had arrived from different corners of the globe. We were, however, supposed to qualified teachers and have had at least three years’ experience in the field: admittedly, I barely qualified and had as a result only just managed to squeeze in. The diploma course, despite its air of only partial practicality, did really provide an intellectual foundation for looking at the business of foreign language learning, fraught as it was with money-making fads and unworked-out claims with a suitably critical eye.

One prominent characteristic of the course was the emphasis it gave to theoretical linguistics asking questions like ‘what exactly is language?” and “what is grammar, phonetics, and phonology?” and what different views are there on these subjects. Many of most of us were not very conversant with current thinking on these obviously critical issues for anyone supposed to know what learners were actually learning. My baptism of fire certainly involved introduction to psychology and to statistics by, respectively Elizabeth (‘Bett’) Ingram and Ruth Clark, but especially an induction into the world of generative grammar. Having to tackle, alongside conflicting messages from articles by Michael Halliday, Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax was a tall order for someone who had graduated with thoughts about doing research into the mediaeval French Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, or perhaps the plays of Marivaux or indeed the contested authorship of  Gawain fragment in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal: attracted by the references to language in the Gawain fragment alone, I had,  as an undergraduate, in a very modest way researched the last-mentioned topic from what might even be thought of as a linguistics perspective in  Scotland’s oldest university, St Andrews and consequently nurtured what I took at the time to be probably a fantasy about becoming a university academic. Now, in Edinburgh, it was especially the brilliant lectures by the linguist, John Lyons who, flashing engaging smiles between complex statements on linguistic theory that were not easy to grapple with, helped to prevent enthusiasm for this new and daunting subject from dimming.

Beer and bonhomie

Particularly valuable, as I think most people who graduated from the department will acknowledge, were the lively conversations in the 14 Buccleuch Place Common Room strategically placed to encourage continuous traffic in and out of it. Here staff and students would exchange banter and, at the same time, chatter away on serious topics. I remember Tom(ek) Krzeszowski, on sabbatical from Poland, who, it would seem then, was permanently enthroned in a common room armchair, engaging everyone passing by with witty and challenging thoughts. And, what was then called the Meadows Bar round the corner deserves a mention too since it was a regular lunchtime continuation of the common room exchanges chased down with local beer. This was a bar that had been frequented by many who were or would become well-known including the likes of Gordon Brown, future prime minister, and Hamish Henderson, a renowned Scottish poet, communist intellectual and folksong collector who I remember clearly often sat  perched, with a beatific smile, by the bar. In short there was a unique social and intellectual mix of people we encountered every day, many who moved on to greater glory. For example, Henry Widdowson would move on to London and beyond, becoming a guru for teachers of English as a foreign language worldwide. Gillian (Gill) Brown would become the first professor of applied linguistics at Cambridge University creating a centre which reflected much of the intellectual approach to what applied linguists should be about that defined the Edinburgh school. ‘Applied linguistics’ in this sense has turned to be definitely the marked case making the Edinburgh, and now Cambridge model a very bad guide to what applied linguists are doing in most other places. Her husband, Keith, who was my linguistics tutor would become, before moving on to Cambridge, research professor of linguistics at the University of Essex, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics and the president of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. Pit Corder, apart from being an SLA pioneer, was already the (first) chair of British Association of Applied Linguistics and subsequently became the first president of the re-founded International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) reflecting Edinburgh’s special place in the history of the field of applied linguistics as well as SLA.

Many of their former students and future applied linguists didn’t do so badly either. Some in my own year have gone on to better things and have remain friends for life, notably Ron Mackay (latterly also a creative writer and playwright), Paul Meara (BBC broadcaster and unpredictably, a Swansea town councillor). I should also include the inimitable Rab Shiell (a good friend of Robert Graves and his wife). There was Elspeth (‘Spuff’) Macgregor who I had already known as an undergraduate at St Andrews – she forever thinks of me as ‘Crumpled Trumpet’ because for some reason she and Rab thought my story of how I had partly collapsed the bell of my trumpet while trying to unstick a valve, unreasonably hilarious. I had blown this ancient instrument, purchased when I was barely 14 years old, as part of the ceremony symbolically breaking down the wall between the men and women’s student’s union (the second of which she was the current president) to form one united organisation.  I was to blow my trumpet again, many times and literally speaking. This venerable instrument still rests, decrumpled of course, in my study in Edinburgh and has been used many times since that historic crumpling, most recently at a reunion of Simon Smith and his Amazing Dancing Bear, a group I belonged to in the Netherlands. Then there was also Liz Laird in our group: she is now a prize-winning children’s author and a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh book festival. Paul Meara, already mentioned, was to become widely known as an expert in the learner lexicon; he had won our respect when we found out that he had been mentioned in a book, just appeared and referred to in our lectures, called Operators and Nucleus. This endowed him at the time with special kudos. This had been written by the Dutch linguist, Peter Seuren, someone who I was also to meet many years later in a Dutch pub where I presented a robust defence of David Lightfoot’s approach to (child) language acquisition: this confused him no end at the time because he had already been told that I had recently argued against David’s point of view about the very same topic. Not the first or last time I found myself perversely arguing most effectively against myself. This particular argument with David had unfortunate repercussions for me which I might mention later.

Sweetening the pill.

Wrestling with the technicalities of linguistics at those heady Edinburgh lectures made me hunger for some relief so I decided to explain to myself in as humorous a way as I could manage  what the concepts and terms were all about. This text I illustrated with cartoons. My penchant for expressing myself in cartoon form dates back to my school days. When we had a party in the common room for students and staff and I was asked to hang some large cartoons on the walls. I remember one which pictured Noam Chomsky as a little man sitting on a mushroom which I entitled “All Nodes lead to Gnome” and another one featuring two lions (Lyons). Extracts of the text of my diary account and the cartoons are included below. Doing this at least gave me the illusion that I had grasped the gist of what we were being force-fed with and helped to ward off depression and low self-esteem. In fact, it needed two or three years for most of what we were taught to finally find its way into my beleaguered brain.

CLICKING on the titles below will bring up each of these cartoons:

Note to myself: I’ll have to somehow produce cleaner versions of these pics!

1. The Aftermath of a Linguistics Conference
2. Theoretical Linguistics as a Must for the Creative Burglar
3. Lawyers can be Outfoxed by Misused Performatives.
4. Linguistics sometimes seems like Magic, doesn’t it?
5. Struggling linguistics students can only despair…
6. However, heaven for theoretical linguists has interfaith free entry, for agnostics and atheists as well.

[DIARY EXTRACT FORTHCOMING]

Self imposed exile and its compensations **

Since, on leaving Edinburgh,  the applied linguistics students tended to migrate to other parts of the world sometimes returning to the country where they had been working before, I inevitably lost touch with many of them.  I did, however, remain sporadically in touch with our staff members (‘faculty’), though. Many years later, Henry Widdowson even offered me a job at the London University Institute of Education. This I had to turn down, with a very great deal of deal of regret, especially because of my longstanding ambition for the family to move permanently over to the UK. I had felt I had to give the interview a go even though the London job meant a drop in salary, and rank, and especially because it was temporary with no guarantee of renewal. As it stood, as a bachelor I would have taken it anyway but not with two young children to support and a large amount of negative equity. I still wondered if I could perhaps do some kind of deal if I got an offer.  Now, I was faced with success at the interview but no offer of anything permanent or indeed some obvious way of supplementing my UK income, saddled as I was with a hefty mortgage and massive negative equity thanks to the speculator-induced collapse of the Dutch housing market.  I could not in all honesty have accepted the post and brought the family to London, in debt with such dubious prospects for me and my wife to hang in long enough to make it work. I was especially concerned that I would be unable to secure an education in London for my girls anything like what they were receiving in the Netherlands.  This decision had me anchored in the Netherlands for some time to come with all kinds of consequences.  This collapse of my plan to move back to the UK was not the ned of the road. Life in Utrecht was to progress in unexpected ways. One of them was the arrival in Utrecht of Paul van Buren, my former contrastive linguistics tutor at Buccleuch Place: to this day I benefit, as do others, from his convivial company and great intellectual acuity. Another was to be the earlier and also unexpected arrival in Holland of a good friend from the British Council Polish period, James Pankhurst, with whom a little bit of SLA history would soon be made. I was, however, as a professional native speaker, making slow progress with my Dutch. My colleagues mostly refused to address me in Dutch. I was an English teacher and they were in an English department. Everything at work was in English. Back home my Polish wife’s Dutch was streets ahead of mine and my two daughters were native speakers of Dutch.

Edinburgh contacts

Some of the other fellow students I continued to bump into as well, sporadically and in various places throughout my career, and as far as the academic staff is concerned, Pit Corder would play a significant part in promoting my SLA career in its early stages by inviting me along with Eric Kellerman to talk at summer courses as ‘young upcoming SLA scholars’.  These events gave me a chance to get to know the North American scene on encountering the likes of John Schumann, Elaine Hatch, Merrill Swain and Elaine Tarone. These contacts, also from the Nordic countries, would stand me in very good stead and expand my circle of really good friends across the globe. Also, Larry Selinker was not the only Edinburgh connection I made who was absent during my year there. The Edinburgh applied linguist and language testing specialist expert, Alan Davies I met later, including on one occasion in Melbourne, Australia when I wasn’t expecting him. I had come to lecture there on the concept of the native speaker, a topic he had just actually written a book about. Seeing him in the audience on the other side of the world, given what I was about to talk about, was a bit of a shock although it posed no problem in the end. Henry Widdowson is also due a mention, especially for his encouragement to send a version of the project essay I did for him to the ELT journal: this got me my very first publication  and started me off as a budding author. Its title, “Some thoughts on the place of literature in a practical English syllabus” (English Language Teaching  Journal XXVI:3, 274-278)  seems to reflect my transition from being a literature person, my intended first skin, to being a professional language teacher. It does not however reveal the path I eventually took.

Amateur TV

The project I did in collaboration with Ron Mackay was great fun and very instructive. The idea was to make a video for language teachers familiarising them with what applied linguistics was about – applied linguistics in the Edinburgh mode of course, applying theoretical and experimental scientific findings to language teaching contexts.

We were  in the era before videotape recorders (VCRs) appeared everywhere in private homes so the tape that we made was a very chunky version of what later became much more compact. I had become a founding member of the Edinburgh University Television Society. All or most of the other members were undergraduates. We would make videos with me and a couple of the others both writing scripts and taking part as actors. The videos were mostly comic sketches but documentary content was also included. They were broadcast at lunchtime on TV monitors mounted around a large student café in George Square and one of these video sessions was the applied linguistics project that Ron and I had created.

I do not have the copy of this video alas, only the end of another video or rather a roll of black paper containing credits. Our TV presentation was designed to be a documentary for language teachers reflecting some of what we had been learning on our course. The video included an interview with John Laver from the Department of Phonetics, another one with Mohammed Helliel, a fellow student of ours, on English in Egypt, and a humorous but instructive piece on the way  British English usage reflected social class. For this part of the programme, I designed a social status meter where, if I remember correctly, a wheel spun round to display, for example, a crown whenever a word or expression or accent in the recorded spoken text indicated a privileged social status. Our project was (generously) awarded a ‘B’.

 

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7. ALL ROADS LEAD TO GEORGE SQUARE

Former inhabitants

It is worth spending a couple of paragraphs on the role in played by the city of Edinburgh itself, mostly known these days to book-lovers over the world for its association with the works of J. K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith and Ian Rankin, not to mention former inhabitants like Muriel Spark, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. Here I am not so much interested in all the scientists and philosophers that have paced its cobbled streets or, in the case of the student Charles Darwin, wandered along its beaches searching for marine invertebrates in Newhaven and Leith (for he was not an especially diligent lecture-goer). Mine is of course a very niche interest, already made clear in the preceding paragraphs. I am interested not so much in those who were born here but those who spent some time as adults in the general area of George Square. Only one exception occurs to me, namely a baby girl who was born to the Clarks, a well-known Quaker family actually hailing from distant Somerset but who at one time occupied a house in George Square itself. That girl is better known to the field as Lydia White, the pioneer of generative SLA.

At this point is is appropriate to add another Big Question since what is coming up will shed light on it:

 

 

 

My second grey book and a local goblin

Some years after I left Edinburgh, I was invited back to contribute to a special round table held in honour of Pit Corder. He had in the meantime retired and left the city to go and live in the Lake District with his wife Nancy, giving away all his professional books and starting afresh in a cottage in Keswick. A decisive life change which perhaps reflected his own Quaker background in some way. Certainly, there were visitors that made pilgrimages to Keswick but in any case he was brought back once to Edinburgh and required to temporarily resume his former persona in order to acknowledge this honour. This would eventually take the form of a grey volume (alas no longer grey), called Interlanguage. It was to be edited by Alan Davies as the proceedings of this meeting and as a ‘festschrift’ in Pit’s honour. Pit accepted the invitation, perhaps with well disguised reluctance, and survived the occasion with his usual quiet aplomb refined from his years as a British Council Representative in Greece, chairman of associations and, of course Professor of Applied Linguistics.

It was an odd occasion: many friends attended and there were odd and amusing episodes. I remember the presentations in the morning going quite smoothly for me as well: I had to respond to Paul Meara’s contribution on lexis. At some point we were invited over to Teviot Row House for lunch. This building houses the student union and is just off George Square worthy, as a brief glance will confirm (see above link) of a Harry Potter film. In fact, it can be found just across from a street called Potter Row, which may not be a coincidence. We wined and dined well.  I recall the statement, from a prominent applied linguist seated at the same table as me who declared, I do hope jokingly or otherwise prompted by a mischievous goblin, that statistics and whole idea of probability was nonsense because, as he put it, “when I toss a coin a number of times, sooner or later a pattern begins to emerge biased either towards heads or towards tails: it’s never 50/50.”

The effect of the department’s generous hospitality at Teviot Row House certainly put us in a more relaxed and playful state. As the afternoon’s proceedings continued and attempt was made to avoid the inevitable nodding off, someone surreptitiously picked up the plastic rack on which his name had been assembled by the organisers, using letters, it seemed, taken from the game,  Scrabble’ With these letters, he began to create amusing combinations. Gradually people opposite and next to the rack with rearranged letters, spotted what was going on and, struggling to suppress the laughter that threatened to burst forth as they first caught sight of the outlandish versions of their neighbours’ names, also began to play ‘Anagram’ with their own letters, continuing to go through various permutations. Magical forces unleashed at lunch had obviously accompanied us back to the round table venue. In this way, the event developed two parallel levels of and hence turned out to amuse us more, and inform us less than was the case before lunch. Nevertheless, it was and remains a historic occasion in the story of L2 research. Pit Corder was eventually released to return relieved to the peace and quiet of his lakeside cottage.

Goodness knows how many people passed through the portals of the applied linguistic department in its heyday, either as visitors, invited lecturers from other departments and from further afield as well as. of course, postgraduate students like myself. Larry Selinker spent the year before me there on a Fulbright grant and he certainly values the experience it gave him, recording this in various parts of his book Rediscovering Interlanguage, where he acknowledged Pit Corder as his ‘intellectual father’ as far as the birth of his interlanguage idea was concerned and where he also making much of his rewarding contacts with Paul van Buren. These comments convey a sense of the intellectual cauldron that was Edinburgh.

 

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8. APPLYING LINGUISTICS

The question of whether applied linguistics in its most literal sense even exists is is a challenging question that was posed later. For now it very much did exist and in my mind I knew what it was. Furthermore, I felt confident that I was now a qualified applied linguist myself. Now schooled at an department for applied linguistics, I had had at least a grounding in theoretical and descriptive linguistics. I was ready to apply it. I had also had a basic training in experimental methods, general psychology, language teaching methodology, even literary stylistics so more to apply than just linguistics. There wasn’t too much said about translation and noting about interpreting but I understood that this could also be included in the applied linguistics umbrella. These aspects of the field were uppermost in my mind. I did also have a sense of the learner as an independent creator of the own successive versions of the target language, in each case ‘transitional competence, to use Corder’s term, which could be seen as having its own rule system. If this wasn’t a dominant idea at the time, I at least knew that learner’s systematic errors were to be regarded as something more significant that regrettable deviations form correct usage and that diagnosing them is best carried out with the appropriate expertise in linguistics and presumably psychology. This last aspects of what I had learned only began to surface slowly during the next period so keen was I make the practice of language teaching more scientifically-based and not just a question of teacher intuitions, trial and error and some general educational philosophy.This was me in Montpellier. Now I was eager to apply what I had learned in and around George Square to whatever teaching awaited me in Poland. For me, then, ‘real’ applied linguistics was applying what I had learned in Edinburgh.

 

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My Polish experience between 1970 and 1975, at Jacek Fisiak’s renowned English department in Poznań, was a truly formative one in many ways; it finished off the growth of applied linguistic skin that had been initiated in Edinburgh and also started off a new skin although this one would not come to establish itself properly until my next post in another country. Ideas gleaned in Edinburgh were seething away in the depths of my mind but would take some time to mature. In fact, my Edinburgh training continued to evoke impulses in me to somehow find synergies between the applied and the theoretical.  SLA was itself still far too an immature a field for any applied conclusions to be drawn. Despite this, I note, from an old invitation that turned up recently in my papers, that shortly after I left Poland, as early as 21st June 1976, I was invited to Paderborn to talk about ‘the concept of interlanguage and its implications for the theory and practice of pedagogy.’ I remember that I struggled with that one. This challenged my feeling that my Edinburgh training ought really have  given me some interesting practical and positive suggestions to make to my German audience. In the event most of what I could honestly say was negative. Did I have already an answer already to any of the Big Questions? I had to be honest.

RESPONSES FROM RESEARCH [1976]

1. Learners and teachers have much less control over the learning process than they think
2. Development follows predetermined paths we have yet to fully understand
3. Surprisingly, correcting many types of error is often ineffective. Learners get to recognise, be able to correct and even understand their errors ..but still continue to make them.
4. Further exposure to the language offers the best chance of change
5. Researchers are trying to puzzle out which these errors are.

Thankfully the most demanding question I got was in the Herr Professor’s study before the talk took place. The boss after casting a meaningful glance at his younger colleagues turned to me and asked me the following question “Tell us, Michael, since there is some argument here about it, if, in English, the word ‘skyline’ refers to anything other than Manhattan.” The last word was pronounced with great emphasis: “Men-HETT’n!”. I paused, suspecting that my answer might have serious consequences for the careers of the assembled staff or otherwise cause their boss to lose face, frantically cobbled together as ambiguous an answer as I could manage in which all parties could find some support.  I once applied for a job in the diplomatic service and was rejected out of hand: if only they could have seen me handle this one.

Behind the Iron Curtain

British Council jobs in countries that were regarded as politically hostile usually required a visit to a room in the recesses of the Foreign Office in London. Gloomy characters who had never set foot in Poland kitted out with microphones extracted from Soviet hotels issued dire warnings about honey traps and two-way mirrors suggesting that the fictional world of 007 wasn’t far off the mark. I wondered, as I made my way with some trepidation to Poland in 1970 for the first time, what exactly awaited me beyond the Iron Curtain and, a more relevant concern in the present context, what the attitudes about language and language learning might be behind the ‘Iron Curtain.’ 

In Scotland I had had a rich intellectual diet, including numerous guest lectures, being especially impressed by Roger Brown, already mentioned, and by George Miller who worked with Karl Pribram had been part of my course: this last work would play an important role in my very first truly SLA publication in a major journal, specifically in a 1980 issue of Language Learning. I had drastically scaled down my expectations where Poland was concerned but I was to be surprised. Far from finding myself in an intellectual backwater, my initiation that had begun in Edinburgh would be followed in the next four years by encountering,  personally this time, many well-known scholars visiting the department from abroad. In addition, I found myself in an intellectually and socially stimulating environment in Poznań itself. No backwater this. Much of this was due to Fisiak. No wonder I would later devise what I thought was a cunning plan to stay longer than a British Council sponsored lecturer was really expected to, although I admit I also had more personal reasons for doing so.

Getting serious about applied linguistics

One of the courses I was asked to teach at the English department was ‘descriptive grammar.’ This turned out to mean mainly phonetics and phonology, i.e. little to do with syntax. Still, determined to be an Edinburgh applied linguist worthy of that name, I put my phonetics training gained under the tutelage of Professor David Abercrombie immediately into effect. An even greater effort was put into designing an effective writing programme based on communicative principles, a topic on which I began to publish and which would, four years later, get me my next job in Utrecht. However, alongside this pursuit of applied linguistics à l’écossaise, a new direction was beginning to emerge. I had already had the germ of an idea, planted in my head at Corder’s department, of learners possessing a developing language system in their heads that was not under the total control of outside forces or even their own conscious intentions. For a time, however, this nascent idea battled in my mind with a burning ambition to create new, enlightened ways of developing learners’ language skills where the teacher or textbook writer had some sense of control over the process. The notion of learning a language system as a process guided more from within than without received a  boost when I got to teach on the annual Poznań Summer Course for Polish students of English the first time. This was an obligatory month in the summer for all university students of English in the country and was organised by Fisiak’s English Department in collaboration with the British Council and its approximate equivalent, the USIS. Each year it brought to Poznań, a major city in the west of Poland, a group of lecturers over from the UK and the USA including a troupe of drama students; it exposed the Polish students – recall this was the time when Poland was a Communist Eastern Bloc country – to a rich and intense diet of Anglo-American language and culture. I cannot imagine any other fraternal East Bloc country at the time could even imagine daring to host such a capitalist-friendly annual event, even once.

One of the Americans on the course turned out to be a boisterous bearded character walking excitedly round the course campus with his son in tow: his loudly proclaimed enthusiasm for jazz I well remember. This ball of energy was called Larry Selinker. It was 1971, two years after his Edinburgh visit and a year before the publication of his seminal Interlanguage paper. Larry had a unique, seemingly spontaneous and unstructured way of lecturing, rather like an improvised dramatic monologue with occasional questions to his audience: one wasn’t completely sure whether they were rhetorical ones or not. In one of these, he explained two concepts he was trying to find a name for and asked the audience for suggestions. I don’t know why I did this but I called out “how about ‘strategies of learning’ and ‘strategies of communication?’.” He seemed to approve of the idea and noted it down. In this way I secured an invisible and ever so modest footnote in that epic article. Larry, now in his retirement still as mercurial as ever,  remains a good friend.

The Fisiak Phenomenon

The theme of conferences will play an important part later in my account of how SLA developed worldwide, especially in Europe. In the 1970s and early 1980’s I cut my conference teeth largely on big language teaching conferences, especially the IATEFL (International Association of Teachers as a Foreign Language) meetings. This is where, torn by mental anguish and with a racing pulse, I forced myself to stand up in front of audiences and raise my hand during question time sessions: I always suspected that my imminent interventions would be both stupid and incoherent.  As good as this self-enforced training was, nothing could compare, as many will testify, with experiencing Jacek Fisiak’s Contrastive Linguistics conference series. Jacek Fisiak (pronounced ‘Yaht-sek Feesh-yak’ and not, please, Yach-ek Fizzy-ack) was, as the head of the English department at Adam Mickiewicz University during the supposedly dark and sometimes dramatic days of Communist Poland, a dynamic entrepreneur combining what was, for the most part at least, a benign ‘feudal’ dictatorship with a distinct streak of ruthlessness, boyish charm and an irrepressible sense of humour. He somehow conjured up for his staff an academic environment in which they could not only keep abreast of the very latest trends in linguistics but were able miraculously – I am talking of almost half of his language staff at any one time – to spend time at universities in the Wicked West. His literature staff also benefited but as he was a linguist this was inevitably where the main emphasis lay. He energetically courted both the British Council and the USIS as well as numerous institutions such as (especially) the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington a well as various universities, particularly in (West) Germany and the Nordic countries. This enabled him to organise a Polish-English contrastive studies project, including a series of annual conferences, on the model of similar projects elsewhere in Hungary, and what was then Yugoslavia. These conferences were by no means uniquely devoted to contrastive linguistics, despite the name. They were simply linguistics meetings and Fisiak’s skilful and vigorous PR work plus the attraction of what was then quite exotic for Westerners, conferences centres in an Eastern European winter setting. I observed in admiration the way in which these meetings were conceived and conducted, combining intense, well organised intellectual activities with a Slavic hospitality in which facts and theories were exchanged at about the same rate as vodka was consumed. It usually took about a week to recover from these events and I pitied the staff that had to clear up afterwards until one day, when commiserations were expressed to the lady cleaning the stairs by the entrance. Someone said to her, “you must be really sick of these linguists and their conferences.” She replied immediately “Oh this is nothing. You should see the place after the theologians”.

For his services to English in Poland, Jacek was awarded an honorary MBE. This local communist party chairman delighted in the idea of becoming a member of the ‘British Empire’. He achieved more impressive titles, becoming the Rector (Vice Chancellor/President) of the university first and then Minister of Higher Education in the last communist government. During the visit of the British PM to Warsaw, and to the great chagrin of the British Council Representative who had been held up, on the visiting party’s arrival at the British Council building surprisingly and somewhat provocatively located more or less opposite the enormous Palace of Culture, the mischievous government minister seized the chance to take over and give Margaret Thatcher a guided tour of the Council headquarters himself. He still treasures the photograph of himself shaking her by the hand.  Despite his various other achievements, his heart has always remained in his linguistic and English studies life and he has returned to this in post-communist Poland. I don’t think I would necessarily have liked to be a young subordinate at his beck and call. He was certainly not loved by everyone but he is a unique personality, has contributed enormously to English studies, the reputation of his university and indeed to his country in a period in Polish history where there were plenty of obstacles in his path; he also taught me some very useful lessons about preserving and promoting a worthy academic cause.

My PhD Gambit

To remain in Poland for more than two years was not banned (as it was for American Fulbright scholars) but had been tolerated with distinct reluctance upon by the Council, my sponsors ever since a former Representative (here, roughly equivalent in rank to a consul or consul general I would think) had ‘defected to the East’ and was now living in Warsaw but as persona non grata as far as the Council and the Embassy were concerned. His defection was not political in fact but an affair of the heart: Polish women can have that effect. I should know.

Hitting on the idea of doing a PhD in Poznań allowed me to respond well to the current Representative’s ‘I imagine you’ll be moving on next year, Michael’ (Britspeak for ‘bye bye, pal’). Still honouring my current onion skin, I decided to do a study of future reference in English but as it would be explained in a pedagogical grammar of English. The thrust of the thesis was such grammars should not contain idiosyncratic simplifications of complex structural facts about the language but the selection and presentation should be guided not only by proper linguistic considerations but also by theoretical principles derived from learning (and educational) psychology as well. What was ‘applied linguistics’, if it wasn’t a proper application of contemporary science, and indeed not only of linguistics? I was confident that at the very least this approach would be innovative, it would be seen as useful by my employers and it would be an appropriate thing for an Edinburgh applied linguist to do. I was able to rely on multiple sources for the impressive department library that Fisiak had built up and from the help of Waldemar Marton, more in fact the Leader himself who was generally far too busy to provide me with more than light-touch, albeit well-targeted supervision. Waldek made a major contribution to my knowledge of teaching methodology and educational psychology and my thesis benefited much from his advice. The library contained many interesting books including a good selection of shockingly decadent Western generative linguistics, something that I remember caused a jaw-dropping response from a visiting lecturer from Halle in the German Democratic Republic (‘East Germany’) where such books were banned.

 ‘How do learners really learn grammar?’ was the underlying question that I expected psychologists who specialised in learning research to have some answers to. The Corder/Selinker ideas were still there in my head but still floating a little way below the surface. I thought hard about how they could be implemented in practice but answers were hard to come by. I completed the PhD in about two years. Perhaps I should have spun it out a bit but on what turned out to be my final visit to the Council in Warsaw, the Representative, Claude Whistler, said to me casually ‘Now I imagine you’ll be moving on next year, Michael.’ Time was up.

 

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9. BEGINNING FROM THE BEGINNING AGAIN.

A major rethink

On moving to Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1975, still thinking of myself as an applied linguist of the Edinburgh school, I had already been asking myself whether language teachers, methodologists and textbook writers really bothered to acquire a serious scientific foundation for their subject. Many of them, though surely not all, seemed to be relying far too much on the intuitions that had accrued from experience and entrenched views on what teaching and learning was all about. It seemed right to investigate modern educational psychology and discover ways of applying this to every aspect of teaching activity and make teaching practice responsible to what scientific research was telling us. Medicine after all had a history of folk remedies and magic, working in mysterious ways sometimes but not always. Finally, it had acquired a modern scientific underpinning  sufficient to make qualifying as a doctor a long and demanding process so that practitioners would have a much better idea of what they were doing to patients and why. There may well be an important role for intuition in both doctoring and teaching but teachers were generally ill-served by comparison with the medical counterparts where scientific training was concerned.  This thought was the rationale behind everything I tried to do in Poznań. It led me, prompted by what I had read, directly to the basic question of whether we really knew as much about language learning as we thought. This recognition of ignorance was a prerequisite for the next step: we should go back to the beginning, casting aside all our cherished assumptions and beginning from the beginning again.

The downside of language teaching at a university

Rethinking was all very well but how was I to proceed further? By the time I left Poland, part of me had morphed into a budding SLA researcher although my job, as before, would require me to develop two personas, logically in conflict with one another. The first one explored the intuitive development of language ability and the other was devoted to carefully guided language instruction of the more traditional kind , the latter being the course expected of my employers. This did not change when I moved to Utrecht and continued for many years until I left in 1999. I would find myself dutifully correcting and explaining my students’ grammatical error in one class while in another class suggesting to the same students that this might be a waste of time as far as improving their English was concerned. For most of my career, the heavy language teaching workload posed quite an obstacle for research and serious experimental world difficult and sometimes impossible. For this reason, I have remained more of a full-time theoretician than an experimenter, pretty rare in SLA as it would turn out. Whenever I have done experiments by myself and have engaged directly in statistical analysis I have avoided publishing anything, overtaken as I always was by a numerophobic feeling that I might have got something wrong. I felt happier supervising experiments carried out by others. However, in conferences over the years, I have long been rubbing shoulders with L2 researchers young and old most of whom have little or absolutely no serious language teaching experience or indeed any interest at all in being a language teacher. By the same token I know many linguists who, have little or no proficiency in any language other than their own, treating alien languages in a purely analytic fashion, as though they were dead, like Latin or Ancient Greek. 

My two personas were also reflected in my publications during this period and, as far as the older one was concerned,  I began soon to acquire an international profile as a specialist in writing programmes and in pedagogical grammar. For the second of these two, I would find myself invited to various places especially in Scandinavia. Two amusing incidents arose out of my continuing presence in applied linguistics long after my undivided attention had turned to matters of SLA.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

One afternoon I was sitting in my office in Trans 10, Utrecht, fully absorbed in something on my monitor screen when I was aware of someone coming into the room without knocking. A wave of irritation came over me: standard presumptuous behaviour on the part of many of my Dutch students. A momentary glance confirmed it was indeed a student, obviously with some problem which outweighed any need for politeness, so I invited him gruffly to take a seat while I finished what I was doing. After a few moments, I looked up and saw him looking around at my bookshelf. I frowned trying to identify him. One of my current dissertation students? No, he didn’t look familiar. Maybe a former student, then. He seemed relaxed and self-confident. Did he know me? We exchanged a few pleasantries. I asked him what he was doing… now. He said he was working in the States. Aha, a former student, then. All the time I was racking my brains trying to place him. Eventually he said: ”I like the cover they did for your book.’ He was referring to Second Language Learning: Theoretical Foundations (published by Longman, but now in a less colourful Routledge cover). Surprised, I thanked him for this unexpected turn in this otherwise difficult exchange. “They did a good cover for my book too”, he added. At this, my mind, went through a rapid adjustment process substantially upgrading the status of my visit from ‘annoying Dutch student’ to ‘an author I ought to know’  while at the same time maintaining (I hope) a relaxed exterior. “Oh right”, I murmured expressing interest and implicit agreement. I let him talk on while I tried to work out who he was. He mentioned one of my publications . “Your RELC article was a seminal work on the teaching of writing in a foreign language”, he added. I had no idea of this but it was gratifying to hear. At the same time, it made even more awkward my having treated him in such an offhand manner on his arrival in my office even though he continued to seem perfectly at ease. Finally I got it. Dutch he certainly was but a student? No way. I was talking to the late Leo van Lier, an applied linguist already of some considerable  standing and an author of books and articles on language learning and teaching.

In love with my eyes?

The second incident also involving an awkward moment of an entirely different type was in Cracow (Kraków), Poland. It was during a coffee break at an SLA workshop; an elderly, distinguished looking gentleman, a retired Professor, was advancing towards me radiating old world charm. “Mr Sharwood Smith!”, he exclaimed in a strong Polish accent, grasping by the hand, “I have wanted to meet you for a long time. I wanted to tell you that I am in love with your eyes.” Startled I could not help retreating a fraction. “My eyes?” I stammered. In the ensuing dialogue, it transpired he was referring to the graphic device – two eyes pointing in different directions – I had used in my thesis and articles on pedagogical grammar to express in graphic form the differences in meaning between various types of time reference. Two eyes looking straight at you for example would reflect the complete focus on a present stage or event in the speaker when using the Simple Present whereas both eyes looking left (i.e. complete focus on a past state or event ) would be the Simple Past. In the case of the Perfective, for instance, one eye would be looking left towards the past and the other would be looking straight head (at the present) indicating that the perfective is used when the past has present relevance of some kind, i.e. both past and present time are in focus, and so on.

These graphic symbols would be used in exercises as reminders and prompts for learners deciding which appropriate form of a verb to use.  The use of the two eyes had a theoretical (psychological) justification as ‘advance organisers,’ a notion I got from a valuable book recommended to me by Waldek Marton in Utrecht entitled Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View by David Ausubel, and which I adapted following my acquaintance with Jacques Carpay’s algorithmic technique for teaching Russian aspect to Dutch students in Utrecht and with the creator of pseudo-algorithms, the educational psychologist, Lev Landa, whose colourful story I cannot resist according  a separate mention. Anyway, there I was again in my new skin but with my former research identity was still dogging me. I told myself to accept this as a very minor inconvenience and count myself lucky that I did not have the sort of experience Chuck Fillmore, then of case grammar fame, once told me about. He was invited to lecture in Hungary and felt significantly underused when he found himself spending much of his time having to give his guide, a linguistics student, an elementary explanation of what a morpheme was.

Does applied linguistics really exist?

Antonie (Ton) Cohen, a hard-nosed phonetician who had worked for Phillips in Eindhoven was my first boss at the English department in Utrecht. He once said to me that he ‘didn’t believe there was really such a thing as applied linguistics and what did I think it was.’ What lay behind this opinion was expressed more directly much later by Vivian Cook, himself generally thought of as an applied linguist: he was, as once reported to me indignantly, is supposed to have said in a talk that “applied linguistics was neither linguistics nor applied”. In more colloquial terms it simply did not do what thepromised.  Now, put on the defensive by my professor and being somewhat taken by surprise, I proceeded to detail the international conferences on this very topic that I had attended, my extremely impressive Edinburgh training and so forth. He was not impressed. In retrospect, when understanding better what he was driving at, I would become more sympathetic to his views, at least for many ways in which applied linguistics was actually practised but not for the whole discipline in principle. I was, after all, and in my way of thinking an ‘Edinburgh’ applied linguist.  Prior to the demise of behaviourist thinking, it might have been quite legitimate to treat applied linguistics as a legitimate description. Robert Lado’s seminal work Linguistics across Cultures, following on from Bloomfield and Fries’s  work, was, in part a direct application of structural linguistics, which itself was perfectly compatible with behaviourist psychology.  I might have said all this as well to Ton Cohen but, I was already in the early stages of my third (SLA) skin and his remark disturbed me.

Applied linguists can have interesting lives.

Whatever applied linguists may or may not be, they are certainly not all boring nor do they necessarily have boring lives. In fact some of them lives that are marked by very strange events, some humorous, some very tragic. I have known applied linguists who have perished by being struck by lightning on a mountain or, in another case, impaled on a steel pylon in the passenger of a car. However, seeing aside these grim events, I would far rather dwell on the first type of event, albeit not always entirely devoid of dark elements, with applied linguists whose intellectual approach to their research deserves respect. Although Lev Landa, in his earlier career a Professor of Education in Moscow during the days of the USSR, was not  exclusively interested in  applied linguistics, the applications of his ideas on pseudo-algorithms to instruction could be seen as such. I first came across his ideas when I was in Poland, mainly thanks to Waldek Marton and also to Leopold Engels, a hearty, florid-faced Professor of Applied Linguist in Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. Engels also deserves further mention in the context of interesting lives. As an obvious bon vivant, the good professor had once visited Hamburg where his German host, racking his brains from something entertaining for his eminent and life-loving guest, decided to take him on a tour through the notorious Reeperbahn, the location of city’s red light district. While there, I would like to have said that he felt obliged to indicate to his guest that if he wished to spend some time on his own for a while, he was free to to do so. In fact, I think he simply asked casually after Engels’ marital status. “I couldn’t be married”, responded Engels with a hearty laugh. “You  see, I am a Catholic priest!”- it was not his practice to wear his dog collar – at which point the trip was swiftly diverted by his shocked host to a more respectable part of the city.

Although Lev Landa had, in Moscow, been spending a lot of time applying his ideas to the teaching of mathematics, they were designed to be applicable to many other types of instruction. As mentioned above, Carpay had been applying them to language instruction, teaching Dutch students how to recognise situations in which the perfective form of a verb should be used in Russian and when an imperfective one. This is a choice that every speaker of a Slavic language has to make when using verbs and it is also a choice that is entirely unfamiliar to speakers of other languages like Dutch and English version. Although Russian speakers, for example,  have great problems with a similar forced choice in English, that is with deciding what determiner (article), if any, should precede any noun in a given sentence  ‘a(n)’,’the’ or no article at all -, the choice between perfective and imperfective verbs form might be thought easier than the choice of articles (which most Slavic languages do not have). Nevertheless even relatively Dutch students struggle to use the right form of  a verb in Russian. Carpay produced impressive results by designing an algorithmic procedure whereby the learner is led through a series of simple and straightforward yes/no decisions in order to arrive inevitably at the correct solution. As the learning proceeds, the steps can be progressively withdrawn so that the decision algorithm is only a temporary measure to develop the right way of deciding what way of viewing a state or event should trigger the use of one rather than the other form of the verb, whether a given state or event in the past, for example, was being viewed as complete, over and done with, or whether the focus was rather on it as something that lasted a period of time. Interestingly, the British National Health service and doubtless other healthcare organisations nowadays use rather similar decision trees as  diagnostic procedures in order to decide, for example, whether a patient has Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) or something with a similar symptom profile. Unlike the Landa decision tree, however, it is not used as a temporary learning technique and the decision steps are not gradually withdrawn once the right insights have been established;  if a doctor or nurse always sticks closely to the decision tree, it  can both prevent a dangerous misdiagnosis, as intended,  but it can also encourage rigid thinking and a false sense of security, inhibiting the consideration of other alternatives. I should know since I was a victim of the disadvantage of this procedure. At any rate, I had been intrigued by Landa’s pseudo-algorithmic approach and, for my doctoral thesis in Poland, had already applied it to a way of teaching future time reference in English. How to refer to the future is another learning problem for non-native speakers of English whose languages often require fewer decisions concerning which forms to use. In English there are many forms all with slightly different meaning: including, for example, will arrive , going to arrive , the Simple Present  (‘it arrives‘) and the Progressive form (‘it is arriving‘) and various combinations. The decision tree was designed always to arrive at the correct result. I later applied it to all kinds of time reference but I digress. Back to Lev Landa and how I came to meet him

Lev was a respected senior academic at a Moscow university and an impressive figure with strong features, bearded and with penetrating eyes. He was also Jewish, which is the point of this story. Being Jewish in the Soviet Union was never easy and around this time still fraught with obstacles given the anti-Zionist propaganda of the late sixties. For some time, he had been hoping to emigrate with his wife to the ‘West’. In the seventies due to mounting pressure from outside, the Soviet government started issuing many more emigration visas than before and permission was granted to thousands of Russian Jews to leave the country, the Landas included. There was a heavy price to pay, however. All the money spent by the state, according to their particular way of calculating it, on an individual’s higher education had to be paid back before permission could be granted: the sum could amount to twenty times an annual salary and it was imposed to prevent a ‘brain drain’ of valuable academics out of the country.  Landa and his wife had to leave behind virtually all their possessions including books, manuscripts and sheet music. Thus is how it was that they arrived, in humiliating circumstances with a couple of suitcases, at the clearing centre for Jewish refugees in Vienna. Those not wishing to proceed to Israel were lodged in inexpensive boarding houses in the city. Landa wanted to emigrate to the United State, which he eventually did, However, he had with him an invitation to spend some time in the Netherlands from Professor Parreren at the Psychology department in Utrecht where Carpay worked and which was only a five-minute walk from the English department where I was working. Parreren’s department specialised in promoting awareness of  Soviet psychology which, at the time,  was not very well known this side of the Iron Curtain. When the couple finally turned up at the department reception, however, they were met with blank faces and the unsettling news that Professor Parreren was currently abroad. I am not sure how we got to hear of this this sorry welcome in the English department but myself and a couple of other set about trying to remedy the situation, the university International Neighbour Group organised a place to stay and, as the new arrivals settled in, we had a chance to socialise with them.  When Lev left for the States, one his first jobs was to help the Inland Revenue simplify its system.  I am not sure how much success he had in this particular challenging enterprise.

Lev, who died in 1999, would become an established authority on instructional design and problem solving procedures in education, running his own management and consulting firm. What interested me at the time, as an applied linguist, was the fact that these techniques of his necessarily involved consciousness: how and where might these impact on the crucial subconscious processes in language learning, the existence of which we were already beginning to appreciate and investigate? The way that I (and Carpay before me) had applied his method was not to  facilitate the acquisition of grammar per se: after all, the relevant grammatical properties of Russian or English verb forms had already been mastered,  but rather to teach  the semantic or ‘conceptual’ properties that determined how these forms should be used to convey particular meanings. 

Teachers open fire and SLA becomes an object of hate.

The necessary divorce between L2 research and applied linguists, teachers and textbook writers was not an amicable one. I recall two incidents when open hostility broke out. I can’t remember the dates. The first incident was at a workshop/symposium organised at Lancaster University and sponsored, I seem to remember, by the British Applied Linguistics Association. Three visitors were invited from overseas to talk about their ideas on second language learning: myself from Utrecht, Herb Seliger from New York and Ellen Bialystok from Toronto. At one point, after the three of us had given our presentations, Mike Breen, one of the organisers, had the idea, that while we are all having a lunch or coffee break, he would help things along by drawing on the board a very ingenious diagram illustrating how all three of our views related to one other. When we returned, everyone sat down looking critically at the various crisscrossing circles and arrows that merged everything into some kind of Grand Unified Theory, there was a sudden chill in the room. Then, one person, a respected applied linguist, stuck his hand up and said “but what has all this theory to do with language teaching?” This was a question I would have to get used to. Perhaps this time it was well intended, perhaps not. In any case, the intervention provoked an unexpected growl of hitherto suppressed discontent around the room and the three visitors suddenly felt like 19th century explorers encircled by angry natives. I was less phased by this turn of events than the others but the two North Americans were understandably horrified and upset. It didn’t help that Herb Seliger, who was a sophisticated New York vegetarian on his first trip to the UK, had been, each day, obliged by an uncomprehending kitchen staff to eat translucent cauliflower adorned with congealed cheese for lunch. This was indeed hostile territory.

The second incident, regrettable in a special way, was when I returned to my old stomping ground and gave a talk in what had been Pit Corder’s office. It was also where I had once listened feeling somewhat humiliated as Patrick Allen had informed me at the end of my diploma year that I hadn’t got a high enough average to be admitted in the master’s programme. Here I was now as a visiting guest lecturer. I cannot remember the title of my talk but I think it included the metaphor of divorce and ‘amicable separation. but it was about the state of the art in SLA. That self-same question was fired me when the Q&A session began and this time I was phased, perhaps because of I where I was. Stung, I replied angrily “It has NOTHING to do with language teaching and that is absolutely how it should be!” I then calmed down and continued in a more equable manner.

SLA slips discreetly into the undergraduate programme

My first year of being a full time English language teacher at the English Department in Utrecht gave me the opportunity to create one of the small number of ‘options’- elective courses – available to fourth year students (The Dutch first degree was then a five year one – essentially master’s with a dissertation in the fifth year). That first year it was called ‘contrastive and interlanguage analysis’ which was certain not to raise any suspicion amongst my more traditional colleagues that I was importing anything too exotic into the current array of courses for undergraduates. The second year I dropped the contrastive bit and not before long I had managed to manoeuvre the revised course entitled Second Language Acquisition – still a completely unknown theoretical  topic – into the obligatory programme for all students of English language and literature. James Pankhurst created and taught a companion option on lexical acquisition. In this way the two of us built up a little tradition within the department and further afield. I was quietly proud of this and I do not think there was another university undergraduate programme across the globe that had SLA as an obligatory part of their degree. Is there even now, I wonder. Not long after that our students were learning already in their second year about developmental sequences in both L1 and L2 acquisition and about the strict limitations of conscious grammar learning. This resulted in some creative tension, perhaps more in myself than in the students since conscious grammar learning was an obligatory part of their university training and I was obliged to participate in this. I justified it to myself as a necessary part of their intellectual development, especially as future teachers, but not something that would guarantee mastery of grammatically correct spoken English or something that should be passed on, in full or at all, to younger language learners at secondary school.

This drive to promote SLA in the department by myself and James Pankhurst and tolerated by our colleagues was soon to make SLA a popular area for the final dissertations, especially from 1980 onwards, some examples of which I still possess and a handful of which are listed below. The list displays a very small selection from a total of over forty shorter and longer dissertations, some jointly authored and many of them on aspects of Dutch-English interlanguage. Virtually all of these were experimental studies (the titles in bold are fifth year M.A. theses, the other fourth year project studies, some comparable in standard to Dutch master’s dissertations in those days). In total, they represent a sudden flowering of interest in SLA amongst our students although only those post-1980s students were able to take their interest further and make a career out of it, amongst others Marianne Starren, whose French department study on attrition is included at the end of the list. By the 1990s, student interest already strong in Nijmegen as well, spread to other centres in the country:

• G. Muizebelt. The use of adverbs by Dutch learners of English
• ——  M. van Vlerken Adverbial Placement in English: a study of first language loss: non language-specific explanations
• R. Verploeg. A comparative study of the use of question tags in the light of Krashen’s Monitor theory.
• F. Kerstens & J. Peereboom. Creative construction in a Dutch EFL context: an application of the Bilingual Syntax Measure.
• ——   L. Blaas. Fossilisation in the advanced learner’s lexicon
• ——   S. Redeke. 1982. Memory span and second language learning.
• ——  G. Muizebelt. The acquisition of adverbial morphology by Dutch learners of English
• ——   N. GalbraithA study of transfer in language loss: some problems and considerations
• E. van de Veer. The acquisition of prepositions by Dutch foreign language learners in a formal language setting.
• A. van Berkel and M.van VugtThe transferability of compounds
• 1985. A. van Berkel. Stages in SVO verb placement for Dutch leaners of English
• ——- K. van Helmond & M. van Vugt. On the transferability of nominal compounds.
• P. Boschke-da Silva Gentil Coelho. The production of sentential verb complements by Dutch learners of Portuguese: an investigation of the difficulty order.
• ——- H. van Rijn. Krashen’s acquisition-learning hypothesis in the light of empirical and theoretical evidence to date.
• L. Ras. UG or not UG in second language acquisition
• ——- M. Polomska Preposition stranding and acquisitional strategies.
• ——-  van der Sande.
• ——- F. Communicative strategies: the state of the art.
• ——-van der Sande. Exploiting Dbase III. First steps towards a Dutch-English Interlanguage computer corpus.
• ——- M. Jansen. First language attrition: four theories and studies
• ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
• (1994. M. Starren. [French department] L’attrition d’une language seconde: l’acquisition inverse?)

I will return shortly to a topic that pops up in the list more than once, namely language loss or language attrition as it appears in the title of the Starren study.

Two basic standpoints on the essential nature of L2 acquisition

As detailed in my 1994 book, the isolation phase of L2 research was already well underway in the 1970s as small groups of researchers in a few scattered places began to make their voices heard, initially in North America and then gradually in Europe. Already, out of the initial starting point of learner’s mental systems having some independent status as involving mechanisms that were a) not properly understood and b) merited rigorous scientific investigation two opposing views on what second language acquisition was were being voiced. These are still alive and kicking today  albeit expressed in different terms.

The first one was the ‘interlanguage’ view associated most of all with Larry Selinker that argued as follows: once the basics of mother tongue acquisition was complete, we become unable to acquire languages in quite the same way. In Selinker’s opinion, common sense observation of how adults and adolescents struggle mostly unsuccessfully to achieve native speakers levels of ability in an L2 was buttressed by neurolinguistic evidence that there existed a ‘critical period’ for language acquisition as proposed by Eric Lenneberg in his 1967 book, Biological Foundations of Language.  In other words, a first language had to be acquired within a certain period after which full L1 acquisition would become impossible. Although Lenneberg, interested only in L1 acquisition made only a passing remark about its possible relevance for explaining lack of success observed in L2 acquisition, Selinker formally extended the critical period to cover L2 acquisition as well. In other words, the mechanisms that ensured that L1s were acquired so uniformly and successfully by small children provided they were sufficiently exposed to any human language before a given age (round about the onset of puberty) had a limited lifespan: after that critical period had elapsed, it was, he said, for the vast majority of learners, biologically and psychologically impossible to repeat this success with a new language. This, Selinker, reasoned was why L2 research needed to develop a separate theory of L2 acquisition. He outlined his proposals for such a theory in his seminal 1972 interlanguage paper which appeared in IRAL, an applied linguistics journal.

It did not take long for an alternative approach to appear, sharply differing from Selinker’s views on the Critical Period. From 1973 onwards, Marina Burt and Heidi Dulay began publishing journal articles on child L2 acquisition based on Roger Brown’s research in L1 acquisition and in 1974, Bailey, Madden and Krashen posed the question “is there a ‘natural sequence’ in adult second language learning?” and produced evidence that suggested that there was. The experiments and conclusions associated with this ‘creative construction’ point of view have been fully discussed in the SLA literature. A theoretical model of L2 acquisition that reflected this viewpoint finally appeared in 1982 in the form of Dulay, Burt and Krashen’s book Language Two

The sharp distinction between the two opposing approaches to SLA, ‘interlanguage theory’ and the ‘creative construction theory’ and their supporting arguments and empirical evidence provided more than adequate material for my courses in second language acquisition from about 1976 onwards at Utrecht. Soon a series of final dissertation studies were being produced whose quality, I was gratified to note, impressed Paul Meara when he browsed around our department library. I even sent one of them to Stephen Krashen and he treated it seriously enough to write me an indignant rebuttal of the arguments and evidence it contained. I still have his letter. When I told the student of this, his response was one blank astonishment but of course he was flattered in equal measure. I should add that, in his acknowledgements, he kindly included me, James Pankhurst his co-supervisor and others, his parents and then finally God, in that order. Opting to accept this as the intended order of priority, my response was the same as the student’s.

Sadly for us, what might easily have been a first pioneering generation of 1980s Dutch PhDs in SLA was not to be. The arrival of hard economic times lured almost all these students in to securing safe teaching jobs at secondary schools, and one case (one of the brightest) found employment in the post office. The Dutch nevertheless have maintained a strong profile in SLA conferences to this day.

A foretaste of things to come

In the final months of 1980, I was getting excited about a paper by Steven Pinker in Cognition on learnability. There was already the new school of thought in SLA spearheaded by Burt, Dulay and Krashen, that claimed that intuitive, biologically endowed mechanisms that guided the acquisition of grammar in young children still operated to guide the development of adult grammars in older learners learning second or other languages (“L2s”). Noam Chomsky had triggered the revolution in thinking about language that treated it as a biological and psychological phenomenon; the immediate inspiration for Burt, Dulay and Krashen, however, came more from  child language research in psychology than directly from the linguistic theory that had inspired it. Consequently, these three and their various associates were mainly focused on grammatical morphemes and the fixed, developmental sequence as studied by Roger Brown. Zeroing in on the very early stage of acquisition, they were not occupied at the time with the complex structural properties of more fully developed mental grammars in the mind of the learner. 

Early research findings indicated that both child and adult acquisition of grammar developed in similar if not identical ways, despite the differences in age and maturity and other distinguishing factors learning context. It would not be long before a few interested people in different locations would begin to consider the implications and applicability for SLA studies of the generative linguistic principles that inspired this line of thinking. There was however something that had to change. In these developmental sequence studies, researchers were dealing with what were linguistically speaking very simple morphological phenomena, past and present tense forms, aspect markers and the presence or absence of  the be auxiliary for example. At the time, not much linguistics was needed for the interpretation of the data.  Studying more advanced L2 learners would surely require a greater level of linguistic analysis in order to properly understand the properties of mental grammars at different stages of development.

Murder narrowly avoided

Even if I had not already been exposed to the Chomskyan approach to language, working, as I was at the time, in a department where generative linguistics was dominant and where one of its leading proponents was delivering regular lectures on the topic,  the generative perspective seemed to me to be the obvious one to adopt. Stimulated in particular by the Pinker article,  I decided to talk about its relevance to SLA in an upcoming annual contrastive linguistics conference in Poland – I was still a faithful follower of  Fisiak in this regard. Accordingly, I wrote a conference presentation for the December meeting of that year in Charzykowy, a rather remote and, as it turned out frozen, very snowbound conference venue north of Poznań.  It wasn’t all romantic. The Solidarity movement was already in full swing and the political tension was palpable. One delegate from the German Democratic Republic was particularly outspoken in condemning this new movement in Poland. One evening, after some vodka had flowed, this provoked such rage in one Polish linguist whose village had suffered severely at the hands of the Nazis with random shooting of families,  that he had to be restrained by a Finnish professor and a few others of us from taking violent action.   At the follow-up conference, precisely a year later I spotted a long line of tanks crossing from East Germany into Poland just as I was crossing the companion road bridge over the Oder in the opposite direction. It proved to be a sinister forewarning of martial law, which was imposed on the country three days later to preempt a Soviet invasion.

A Zhivago experience

I was deeply impressed by scenes in David Lean’s film  Dr Zhivago, especially the eerie, wintry landscapes. The atmosphere was a bit like that when I experienced a very different, apolitical, and non- academic type of excitement arose at the end of contrastive linguistic conference in  Charzykowy: as conference delegates began to leave, a (non-generative) linguist from Michigan offered to drive me and two (generative) linguists to the station (Paul van Buren and someone else, George Horn maybe). Our helpful linguist chauffeur boasted, when asked about the risk involved, that since he hailed from Michigan where winters could be severe, snow and ice on roads for him were not a problem. Reassured, the three of us gratefully got into the car and we proceeded out of the conference centre and along a narrow snow-covered road. Suddenly I shouted out a warning as were approaching the main road. I had spotted a bus, bowling along at a steady pace in what would be towards us once we turned the corner. Would we really stop at the intersection in time?

At this point, my wintertime driving experience in the Scottish Highlands spoke to me in the form of a silent scream: ‘Brace, brace, brace!” A bit of the scream must have escaped my lips because our startled, snow-savvy driver promptly stamped on the brakes at which point, not surprisingly, we went into a sickeningly long skid in the direction of the oncoming vehicle (I saw everything in slow motion). There was a loud splintering crash as we hit the bus, narrowly avoiding a headlong collision and wrecking the front of his car. I was in the front passenger seat. The other two linguists had been immersed in a technical discussion and not paid much heed to my warning cry. After a moment of metallic tinkling from disturbed (car) body parts, wheel-spinning and shocked silence, the two scholars in the back calmly resumed their conversation on some thorny point of syntax: I must add that Polish ‘contrastive’ conferences can have that effect. In any case, once outside the crushed vehicle, we were all physically at least, well and truly shaken and amazed at the happy outcome for the passengers if not the car and rueful owner.

We left Charzykowy huddled in a train compartment where ice had formed in the inside of the window as well as outside, the heating not working, and I imagined I could just hear the distant sounds of Lara’s Theme in Dr Zhivago coming across the lonely scenes outside.

Intimations of a Chomskyan SLA

The written up version of the talk for the proceedings I submitted soon afterwards, using the Pinker article as its focus together with a certain pre-publication chapter from Hornstein and Lightfoot’s 1981  Explanations in Linguistics volume. This was written by a certain Lydia White and it was on the properties of L1 developmental grammars. Her PhD supervisor in Montreal and co-editor of this volume, David Lightfoot, was, it so happened, running linguistics at my department in Utrecht and the preview copy of Lydia’s chapter I had read with great interest and at his suggestion.

In the chapter that I submitted, in 1981, for the Polish conference proceedings volume, I concluded as follows:

 “For people in second language acquisition studies it should be interesting to adapt and use Pinker’s six conditions as a framework for comparing first and second language acquisition in the context of (relevant) current work on transformational generative grammar. For theoretical linguists, it should be interesting to see if cross-language observations and claims may have empirical support from second-language acquisition studies”.

[….]

“In other words, it should now be possible to have what has not happened before, that is, a principled dialogue between pure, theoretical linguists and people investigating second language learning: problems of learning difficulty, of cross-language analysis and general typology are provided with a common, unifying framework”.

[excerpt from a chapter in Fisiak (ed.) 1984]

This did not however give me a minor toehold in the history of generative SLA because the written version of my presentation, did not come out until three years later (in 1984) by which time this new development in SLA research was well under way. Consequently my chapter in the proceedings attracted no attention amongst my colleagues. When I broached the idea to David Lightfoot, he expressed to me  a great deal of scepticism about the usefulness of a parameter-setting approach to L2 acquisition and I strongly suspected, he included L1 acquisition as well . He was then very much focused on the logical problem of acquisition and dismissive about the possibility of insights coming from data elicited ‘in the field’ either from children or from adults. A more positive view would develop  amongst generative linguists once it became clear that such data could actually serve to buttress arguments for the existence of universal grammar. At the time, however, I concluded that I might just have to look elsewhere for my ‘principled dialogue’.

Little did I know that Lydia White herself was also entertaining, or soon would entertain the idea of applying her L1-based proposals to L2 grammars as well. These would begin to appear in a long series of seminal publications from 1983 onwards and in 1985, she contributed a paper to the inaugural number of Second Language Research followed by, as it happened, the first of two articles on preposition-stranding that I wrote with Paul van Buren, my former mentor in Edinburgh and a paper by Sascha Felix on competing cognitive systems.  Luckily this wasn’t the last article she contributed to the brand new journal that I was to coedit until January 2015.

Looking back now to 1969, when I was being introduced to generative grammar for the first time in Edinburgh, I was absorbing Pit Corder’s proposals at a more general level as to how systematic behaviour in language learners should and should not be viewed and analysed.  Subconscious processes were at work and learning appeared to be guided more from within than without. At the same time, Larry Selinker was developing his own ideas on this subject, probably trying to work out a non-behaviourist approach to the influence of L1 on L2 (‘language transfer’). Clearly at the end of the 1960’s, bubbles were beginning to break through the surface: something new and exciting was emerging. Also, as the cited text above shows, I was as eager to see SLA associated with theoretical linguistics as I was to have it safely isolated from the world of language teaching and indeed also from any applied linguistics when viewed, as it often was, as an area concerned with practical applications.  

 

10. THE GENERATIVIST ERA BEGINS

Beware Generativists! 

In SLA as in the world of linguistics at large, not everyone was enamoured of generative linguists. Nevertheless, the retirement of Stephen Krashen from the SLA scene at the beginning of the eighties to devote himself to the applied world of language teaching and spread his message across the globe coincided with a sudden influx of newly trained generative linguists at a time when employment was also becoming increasingly difficult in the USA. Lydia White was in the vanguard of these newcomers. SLA seemed to offer opportunities not available to them within theoretical linguistics although some of them might simply have wanted to do something that seemed to have more practical relevance. For me at least, the new trend was a very welcome one.

Not everybody greeted the new trend with unadulterated pleasure. The technicalities and terminology of generative syntax can be as off-putting as they are impressive to the uninitiated. Some resentment was caused with the preponderance of contributions on syntax that flooded the intellectual marketplace, both in journals and at conferences. There was nevertheless a continuing presence of other  linguistic perspectives in SLA and investigations move into areas such as pragmatics, the social interaction between learners and native speakers, lexical studies as well as investigations into L2 phonetics (speech science) and phonology.

The new generation of generative  SLA researchers might have experienced a little of the same alienation from their theoretical linguistic colleagues that was felt by those SLA researchers stranded in teachers’ conferences. After all, for some time most if not all theoretical linguists maintained a haughty disinterest in this extension of their subject. When one SLA meeting was finally organised by Suzanne Flynn with Wayne O’Neill within the hallowed ground of MIT itself, I remember Juana Liceras making a cynical remark about the few visiting theoretical linguists that had bothered to attend, albeit without any active participation in the discussion, to the effect that they would only start to pay attention to SLA research when their own children began to learn foreign languages. This prompted me to think that the world as a whole would only sit up and listen when an alien from outer space landed and wanted to communicate. Curiously many years later, a film, The Arrival came out with that theme. I think for the most part that generative SLA researchers were too absorbed in their newly found field to worry too much about alienation. Still there was something of this syndrome present when I visited OISE in Toronto and Merrill Swain asked me to talk to one student who was doing a PhD there in generative syntax because no one in OISE really felt they fully understood what she was trying to do and could give her adequate supervision. I did see her and she seemed extremely happy and relieved to talk to someone who understood what she was doing. Her name was Juana Liceras.

By the time Bill Rutherford took me to USC’s University Campus in Los Angeles to meet two of his students, a certain Bonnie Schwartz and Antonella Sorace, life had moved on and generative SLA had already secured its place in the field. Now all these students are (Full) Professors and much published, leading researchers in their field;  so are a number of their students as well.

The Two Basic Standpoints Recast

In 1985, Ellen Bialystok and I wrote an article critically evaluating the different ways in which the notion of  interlanguage had come to be understood with  some treating it as a product to be analysed (the actual language that learners produced) while others thought of it as the name for the underlying mental system. The main question really centres on the underlying system and how much of that might differentiate young L1 acquirers and those acquiring the same language later in life. Would generative linguistics help to resolve the issue?  The generative approach to language acquisition, by which was meant primarily L1 acquisition, could have been used as a reinforcement of the Burt, Dulay and Krashen position. Burt was herself a generative linguist by training. If older children and adults acquired new languages using the same intuitive ability that little children use to shape the grammar of their first language, then the nature of that shape the grammars will take should conform to just those principles that generative linguists were proposing. Also, the application of generative analyses to learner language would bring much needed linguistic sophistication to the field which up to then had focused on only the very early stages and the ‘natural’ fixed order in which grammatical morphemes like Regular Past Tense ‘-ed’, Perfective ‘have’ , Definite Article ‘the’, and Third Person Singular singular ‘s’ were acquired.  However, it was still possible for researchers to take other positions on the two basic standpoints. After all Lenneberg’s  Critical Period Hypothesis could still be interpreted in the way Selinker had interpreted it. Once the child passed a certain stage (originally thought of as ending with the onset of adolescence)  not only was full acquisition of native language rendered impossible but also the acquistion of any subsequent language as well. Some generative researchers followed this same line of thinking, notably Jacqueline (Jacky) Schachter and Robert Bley-Vroman, an ex-student of Selinker’s. For these researchers, L2 acquisition after the L1(s) had been acquired, would manifest the properties that young children use only as instantiated by their native language. In other words, the ‘natural language’ properties of the L1 would show up when the learner had ‘transferred’ these on to the developing grammar of the new language. If the new language had grammatical properties that were not shared by the learner’s L1, the L2 learner would not be able to acquire them intuitively relying on the subconsciously available guidance they had when building the grammar of their L1.  L2 interlanguage would then show a mix of intuitively acquired L1 properties along with some other ones the acquisition of which would require the learner to resort to what the researchers considered general learning strategies. In order to acquires a native command of the L2, these strategies would require corrective feedback (so-called ‘negative evidence’). The learner would need to know on a regular basis when they were generalising incorrectly, making up rules (consciously or subconsciously) that would produce errors and go on doing so until the learners had the errors regularly pointed out to them. Since such intensive correction was rarely if ever encountered, as far as the ‘natural’, i.e. intuitive development of L2 grammar was concerned, it would always be incomplete. L2 grammars following this ‘incompleteness hypothesis’ would always be ‘nonconformist’ as I put it at that MIT conference or ‘wild’ as it later came to be termed, an amalgam of a) grammatical properties than conformed to the principles that drive and constrain language acquisition in young children and properties that might include features not encountered or sanctioned in any naturally acquired language and certainly non-native features which were the result of creative invention of the part of learner and which had never been corrected or at least not corrected regularly enough to make any difference.

What the generative approach supplied was a sophisticated tool for analysing grammatical properties manifested in learner production and at the same time addressing the basic questions addressed by SLA researchers. It did not by itself supply the answer in advance as to whether L1 and L2 grammatical acquisition were driven by essentially the same mechanisms. Variations of the two approaches to validity of an L2 critical period became subject to repeated debates at SLA meetings in the eighties and nineties. Some took up intermediate positions claiming that older learners retained only certain aspects of the innate ‘template’ for building grammars from exposure to L2 input (subconsciously and without the need for correction)  and would therefore not be able to completely avoid interference regarding other aspects from the presence in their heads of an earlier, fully developed L1 grammar with that template filled out in a different way. This template notion is an oversimplified way of putting it but interested readers can always pursue the matter in books like, for example, Lydia White’s Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar.

It is important to note that, whichever of these approaches you take to L2 acquisition, generative linguistic theory or any comparable theoretical approach can still be applied to analyse the relevant syntactic and phonological data from learner’s performance. There was as a result of this new trend in SLA a dramatic improvement in the quality of such analyses and explanations and, as more sophisticated statistical analyses were applied to experimental data, this aspect of L2 research also improved. This still left large areas of language outside the scope of generative linguistics to be explored in other ways.  

My official, modest arrival on the SLA stage.

Rewind please: so going back a few years now, my first published SLA was not, as it might appear, in 1976, when I used the term ‘interlanguage’ in the title (Interlanguage and intralanguage paraphrase). This was an applied paper appearing in Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics (IV, 297 302) and had to do with language teaching techniques. A similar comment could be made for my 1979 article, Optimalising interlanguage feedback to the foreign language learner, that appeared in Studies in Second Language Acquisition  (2:2, 17 – 28). It was actually an article that made no discernible impact at all to my continuing disappointment. It had appeared first in our home journal (ISBu:Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, Utrecht and was republished in 1980 in Language Learning with the same title during a spell when Larry Selinker was acting editor. Its title was Strategies, language transfer and the simulation of the language learner`s mental operations and it capitalised on the eye-opening experience I had  been reading Miller, Galanter and Pribram’s 1980 classic: Plans and the Structure of Behavior during my postgraduate year in Edinburgh. Apart from an intriguing and original attempt by Paul Meara to simulate early L2 learning in a program written in BASIC, published in ISBu, I know of no work in this area, at least in L2 acquisition. Early attempts to model early L1 acquisition had been made by Kelley (1967) and Klein and Kupin (1970) and these were discussed by Steven Pinker in his 1979 paper, ‘Formal models of language learning’ which was shortly to have an impact on my ideas for the future of SLA.

By contrast my second foray into the world of SLA literature had a very great impact, a fact I attribute. to a large degree to an intense desire on the part of the applied linguistic community , especially this side of the ocean, not to promote Krashen and his fundamental distinction between the nature and effectiveness of intuitive versus conscious learning. The article was entitled Consciousness-raising and the second language learner. If I were to sum it up now, I would say it was about premature claims and not about the inherent value of the hypothesis itself and therefore also about the need for further research. At the time, however, it was taken, also by Krashen himself whom I was to meet years later in a bizarre public encounter in Taiwan, as a contribution to the heated controversy that he, Krashen, had sparked off, in other words as another serious public undermining of his hypothesis along with other critical articles by Barry McLaughlin and Herb Seliger. I learned later that Krashen had submitted a response but it had been turned down, so the rumour went, because the journal judged he had had too much publicity already. I hope for the journal’s sake that this was not true. I was however very disappointed that they had not published the response for the selfish reason that it would have considerably upped my public profile at an early stage in my SLA career and made my new onion skin particularly glossy.

One point I made still interests me very much and that was I called the possibility of ‘acquisition by the back door’. I would now put it as follows: even if conscious learning made no direct impact on how the learner acquired the L2 grammar, might the careful and sporadic, conscious construction of correct output while communicating, as it were, fool the mind into treating learner output as if it were input from others, in other words as part of the input that fed back into the learners intuitive processing of input.  It was simply an empirical question. Krashen did respond in his refused submission to this point and to others I made this article in his refused submission and these were repeated in his 1985 Input Hypothesis book.

The backdoor idea of self-created input was also taken up by others later, particularly Rod Ellis. In a later paper, in 1996 (The Garden of Eden and Beyond: on Second Language Processing. Centre for Language and  Communication Studies Occasional Paper No 42 . Dublin: Trinity College Dublin) I continued the discussion by suggesting that the very act of successfully  using this consciously amended output during natural communicative exchanges might ‘validate’ the input. Nowadays I would say, using the Modular Cognition Framework (or ‘MOGUL’), that it involved, in ways not worth going to here, a boost in activation levels coming from the affective system. In any case, this still remain an empirical question to be resolved. Whatever the outcome, the result would contribute to our understanding of the effect of processing on L2 acquisition.

Reconceptualising ‘language transfer’.

In the 1960s, particularly in North America, the new science of applied linguistics saw a golden era where trends in psychology, linguistics and language teaching were in complete harmony. The leading figure here was Robert Lado who was able to apply Skinnerian behaviourist principles together with the structural linguistics of Bloomfield and Fries to explain language learning as acquiring a new set of habits. The US army experience of training  troops due to parachute into occupied Europe to be able to master basic language skills had led to the creation of the audio-lingual method so that language teachers could dispense with teaching grammar and spend their time more efficiently. Learners learnt  conversational routines and did exercises involving simple substitution and repetition drills in carefully orchestrated steps: this created new language habits and minimised the chance of making errors (which would become unwanted bad habits). Conscious knowledge of rules was not necessary and  best avoided or only introduced once the correct habits had already been acquired.

One of key issues for learners of a second language, taught Lado, was language transfer., in other words what I have preferred to call a particular type of ‘crosslinguistic influence’, where two language systems in one head influence each other in learning and online performance.Where the L1 and the L2 were similar, he said, the automatic transfer of L1 habits would have a positive effect but when they differed, interference, i.e. negative transfer’ could safely be predicted. This meant a contrastive analysis of the L1 and L2 systems could predict in advance what errors would be made. This predictability of outcomes before the event made teaching scientifically based. Linguist, psychologist and language teacher were singing from the same song sheet and each had a role to play. This led to a hypothesis that could be empirically tested, namely the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), which claimed the differences between the two languages ( the learner’s native language and the ‘target’ language being learned) could be interpreted a signalling where learning difficulties would be experienced and, vice versa, namely that similarities would predict the facilitation of learning. The hypotheses was also extended to included cultural habits associated with the two language communities involved. It all sounded quite plausible but science requires hypotheses to be tested. Researchers promptly took up the challenge. 

Unfortunately, counter-evidence against the CAH soon appeared in studies such as those conducted by Dušková in what was then Czechoslovakia and by Arabski in Poland. Looking at regular (written) errors made by learners showed that actually less than half the errors could reasonably be attributed to language transfer. Many appeared to be overgeneralisations or overextensions of rules that did exist in the target language. These errors were reminiscent of patterns produced by children learning L1,  classic example being past time forms  runned  and goed (on analogy with the regular verb forms  jumped and rowed) instead of the irregular and correct forms  ran and went  The findings laid the ground for a shift to  Larry Selinker’s post-behaviourist ‘interlanguage’ approach’ it also sowed the seeds of a separation between the way many teachers thought language learning  was about and how this was viewed by researchers in the new field of SLA.  If the CAH had been supported by these studies it would have not confirmed that we understood what was going on in language learning but it also gave the teachers, (Helpers) a sense that they could actively and efficiently control the learning process. Now,  language transfer came to be seen as one of a number of subconscious  ‘strategies’ which made arriving at efficient teaching solutions less straightforward. For the SLA researcher  it showed that the observed regularities in learner performance that diverged form native norms could be attributed to a number of causes and not just one and  that an approach was needed that acknowledged the learner’s mind as creative, inventing rules ahead of the evidence and building their own versions of the target grammar as they went along. 

The response from the Burt, Dulay and Krashen camp was more robust. For them language transfer was strongly associated with behaviourism, which they roundly rejected. Their claim was that L1 interference was what generativists would call purely a performance phenomenon not reflecting underlying L2 competence. In other words, it did not reflect the developing L2 grammar but rather the learner’s attempt to compensate for what they had not already acquired. Ambitious second language learners, having so much more to talk about than little children,  were likely to make unreasonable demands on their as yet immature  L2 system: where they couldn’t rely on that fledgling system they would ‘borrow’ from the L1 to, as it were, fill in the gaps created by their ignorance. In other words, language transfer from L1 did not reflect any underlying ‘interlanguage system’ (the developing L2 grammar). This developing L2 system was, in the opinion, completely free of any L1 influence. 

The generativist approach to language transfer was more positive and actually  came closer to the Selinker position albeit with a very different style of explanation being centred on presumed properties of universal grammar, the established name for the principles that constrain the shape of developing grammars making them learnable without any form of corrective feedback.

…….

11. SPREADING THE WORD

ISBu and  the LARS series

---

A European fishing expedition

What the ISBu did do at the time was to set me and James on a course to continually try to stimulate local interest in SLA in every way we could. The next thing we did organise our own series of annual meetings, again on a modest scale called the Language Acquisition Research Symposium (LARS) series. We were able in time to bring in prominent linguistics and first language acquisition researchers such as Melissa Bowerman, Mary-Louise Keane, Teun van Dijk, Deirdre Wilson, Ray Jackendoff and Steve Pinker to name a few. It wasn’t long before we managed to lure some well-known or soon to be well-known SLA and bilingualism names from across the water to attend these meetings including Ellen Bialystok, Suzanne Flynn, Juana Liceras, Bill Rutherford, Bonnie Schwartz and Lydia White, many of whom came more than once. By inviting first language researchers and theoretical linguists we were of course signalling the proper requirement for natural sister disciplines. The only problem had been to persuade such researchers to come when they were bound to associate SLA with language teaching. My personal contacts with the Max Plank group via Eric Kellerman came in very handy and were a key to making this happen. As my role model in these matters, Jacek Fisiak doubtless knew well, if you can manage to bring in one big fish, the rest may follow.  Nevertheless, if your first fish have an experience that confirms their worst fears, the word will spread so there was a definite risk involved. Luckily for us we managed to avoid the danger with LARS. Rather the opposite in fact,  as a list of past speakers below will show.

 Since 1983, regular, annual international symposia on language acquisition were held in Utrecht.  These typical meetings lasted for three days and although they varied greatly in size, the default was about 15 to 20, a small number that was always greatly appreciated and allowed for returning speakers such as Ellen Bialystok, Suzanne Flynn Juana Liceras and Lydia White almost a sense of family to develop. Three meetings were considerably larger than this and they took place in 1986, 1989 and 1995. The aim of the meetings (and especially the larger ones) was to assemble an interdisciplinary group of established scholars doing research in all areas deemed by us to be relevant to the development of theoretical and empirical work in second language acquisition. Interdsiciplinary might already have been a term creeping into official university discourse but at the time, in L2 research certainly in in theoretical linguistics as well, the focus was in establishing territorial integrity rather than looking over fences to look for opportunities of collaborating so getting people togteher from different strands of language research and take each other seriously was not that easy.

Work hard, play hard

Based on long experience of successful Polish contrastive linguistics conferences, we tried to achieve a similar mix of the social and the intellectual and, over the years, participants have come to insist on the traditional visit to the Cafe Jan Primus with its bewildering assortment of Belgian beers but not forgetting the other more modest watering hole near the lofty spires of Utrecht’s  Domkerk and a stone’s throw from the symposium venue near then called De Gasterij.  In September 1986, for example, more than sixty participants from all over the world came to the Academiegebouw in Utrecht listen to papers on the most recent research in first and second language acquisition. LARS 86, which was funded by the Faculty of Arts was opened by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Van Ginkel and included four plenary presentations by world-renowned scholars from theoretical linguistics, child language studies and pragmatics and two parallel sessions, one on experimental second language research and the other on contrastive linguistics. This fourth LARS meeting, which coincided with the 350th anniversary celebrations of the University of Utrecht, was the most important international meeting in the area of second language acquisition that year. Many of the papers from this and other LARS conferences have appeared in international journals. Some of the LARS 86 papers have been included in the book of readings entitled “Learnability and Second Languages” (Foris, 1988). Others have appeared in international journals. Here are two lists of LARS speakers to give an impression of the wide scope of LARS and quality of its contributors, the second list shows speakers at the largest symposium in 1986) – I cannot help reflecting “how on earth did we actually manage this?”:

(plenary speakers in italics; not all LARS had plenaries)

[1983-1995]

Mike Barlow (Rice,USA)

Ellen Bialystok [York, Canada]

David Birdsong Gainsville, USA]

Melissa Bowerman [MPI, Netherlands]

Ellen Broselow [SUNY, USA]

Vivian Cook [Essex, UK]

Nick Ellis (Bangor, UK)

Lynn Eubank [Denton, USA]

Sascha Felix [Passau, Germany]

Dan Finer [SUNY, USA]

Suzanne Flynn, [MIT, USA]

Susan Gass [Lansing, USA]

Kevin Gregg [St Andrews, Japan/

Liliane Haegeman [Geneva]

Birgit Harley (OISE, Canada)

Jan Hulstijn [VU, Amsterdam]

Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis)

Allan James [Amsterdam]

Peter Jordens [VU, Amsterdam]

Annette Karmiloff- Smith (London)

Mary-Louise Kean [Irvine, USA]

Eric Kellerman [KUN, Netherlands]

Juana Liceras [Ottawa]

Brian McWhinney [Carnegie Mellon]

Frederick Newmeyer [Washington]

Colette Noyau[Paris, France]

Wayne O’Neil[MIT, USA]

Steven Pinker[MIT, USA]

William Rutherford [USC, USA]

Jaqueline Schachter [USC, USA]

Bonnie Schwartz [Durham, UK]

Antonella Sorace [Edinburgh, UK]

Eva Stefanides [Budapest, Hungary]

Daniel Véronique [Aix-en-Provence]

Lydia White [Montreal, Canada]

Deirdre Wilson[London, UK]

Tadeusz Zabrocki [UAM Poznań, Poland]

Helmut Zobl [Carleton, Canada]

LARS ’86                                                                                                                                                                                             1.            Christian Adjemian (Ottawa). 2.            Ellen Bialystok (York,Toronto) 3.            Elzbieta Dancygier (Warsaw) 4.           Jadwiga Fisiak (Poznań) 5.           Suzanne Flynn (MIT, Cambridge) 6.           Susan Gass (Michigan) 7.           Taco [now Justus] Homburg (Utrecht/Michigan) 8.           Zbigniew Kanski (Silesia) 9.           Mary-Louise Kean (UC Irvine) 10.       Ewa Modiuszewska (Warsaw) 11.       Pieter Muysken (Amsterdam) 12.      Wayne O’Neil (MIT Cambridge) 13.      Fritz Newmeyer (Washington) 14.      Stephen Pinker (MIT Cambridge. MA) 15.      Hakan Ringbom (Åbo) 16.      Kari Sajavaara (Jyväskylä)  17.      Eta Schneiderman (Ottawa)  18.      John Schuman (UCLA)   19.     Deirdre Wilson (London) 20.     Lydia White (McGill)    21.     Tadeusz Zabrocki (Poznań)     22.     Helmut Zobl (Moncton)

LARS ’92                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             1.            Riikka Alanen (Finland) 2.            Maria Beck (USA) 3.            Paul van Buren (Utrecht) 4.           Thierry Chanier (France) 5.            Collete Colmerauer (France) 6.            Vivian Cook (Essex) 7.            Lynn Eubank (USA) 8.            Christophe Fouquère (France) 9.            Nina Garrett (USA) 10.        Esther Glahn (Copenhagen)    11.        Peter Groot (Utrecht)  12.        Allan James (Amsterdam)    13.        Juana Liceras (Ottawa) 14.        Peter Peterson (Australia) 15.        Clive Perdue (Paris/Max Planck, Nijmegen) 16.        Vera Regan (Dublin)     17.        Bonnie Schwartz (Durham) 18.        Martha Young Scholten (Durham) 19.        Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh)    20.        Gladys Tang (Hong Kong) 21.        Janet Tucker (Israel) 22.        Bill VanPatten (Illinois) 23.        Helmut Zobl (Canada)  24.        Michael Zock (USA)

[section incomplete]

The flowering of European SLA.

Along with LARS, I should also mention other small European-based SLA meetings that sprang up, notably Vivian Cook’s COLESLAW workshops in Colchester (University of Essex) and a sister series that began its life in Amsterdam, for phonological SLA, called New Sounds, the brain child of Allan James and Jonathan Leather. This series of meetings  has gone from strength to strength now even taking place outside the Netherlands.  

Colchester was also the birth of place of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA).  This was the next significant step in the history of SLA. With the growth of EUROSLA and its much larger annual meetings, the scholarly need for LARS meetings in Europe was no longer so great. We were no longer alone.

 And EUROSLA is born

At the home of COLESAW and initiated by Vivian Cook, effectively the father of EUROSLA  and its first president, a meeting was organised in November 1989, to create the new association. This was to be the first international association for L2 researchers and, although we didn’t know it at the time still, so many years later,  the only major international association worldwide.

A short history of EUROSLA can be found here. The Colchester meeting was an exciting one. Clive Purdue was a notable participant helping behind the scenes like a regular kingmaker in the formation of the first provisional committee. With Vivian as president and David Singleton as the secretary of the association, I found myself elected as one of two vice-presidents and my post was given a description which I thoroughly relish to this day having since never achieved anything quite so grand as ‘Vice President, Western Europe’. I was to serve a long time on that committee under two more presidents (Esther Glahn and Kara Sajavaara both sadly passed away)  as secretary, editor of the first EUROSLA Bulletin, published by Foris, in the Netherlands which was eventually superseded by the Clarion when Eric Kellerman took it over and now by the web page version begun by David Singleton. I finally ending my time on the committee as Ordinary Member. I  probably also hold the record for returning EUROSLA plenary speaker having filled that role three times, one of which, the Dubrovnik conference, merits an anecdote which is recounted below in the ‘Accidental Hero of Zagreb’ section.

Vivian

Vivian Cook, an SLA researcher and applied linguist with many publications in the area of language teaching, deserves a separate mention in the history of SLA especially for his contribution over the years to the growth of SLA across Europe but also to SLA in general. He is someone with an amazingly diverse set of interests and expertise ranging from the histories of scifi, detective novels, various aspects of orthography to jazz drumming, Japanese animation and no doubt more he hasn’t mentioned. He has played an important role popularising Chomsky’s views to audiences not naturally ready to receive them, notably applied linguists and language teachers, and more recently in promoting his; multicompetence approach which stresses that using more than one language (for any purpose) makes us, as the name suggests, ‘multicompetent’, linguistically speaking: this means that the notion of a monolingual native speaker having some special privileged psychological status in language research research and language teaching should be viewed with extreme scepticism and furthermore that the neutral term,  ‘language user’ should be the preferred term covering monolinguals and multilinguals alike

 

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The Accidental Hero of Zagreb or ‘how I got the CBE’

There was a conference held at the English department at the University of Zagreb. I think it was in honour of Rudi Filipovic, who had played the key role in the founding and running of (then) the Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project l. I was invited to present a paper which I imagine was on a SLA topic.  Since I had never been to Croatia,  I was very keen to go. The only thing that worried me about the local situation was that, although open hostilities between Croatia and Serbia were a thing of the past, I was not quite sure exactly how safe it was. What is now called the Croatian War of Independence was already history but there were still dying embers of the conflict within Croatia, in the secessionist self-styled Republic of Serbian Krajina.

At one point Jelena Mihaljević contacted me to check if I was really coming. This was because some foreign participants, she said, had expressed concern and had cancelled. I told her that I knew by now that people ‘on the ground’ were the most reliable sources and not dramatic international press reports. Unless she contacted me to say it wasn’t safe, I would proceed on the basis that it was. Getting no such warning, I booked my flight.

I could not fly direct to Zagreb, it turned out. At that time, due to the special circumstances,  passengers had to via Prague and then switch to a Czech airlines flight: they were the only ones that had resumed flights to Croatia. This suited me fine. I had plenty of time to take a quick first look at the famous city. On arriving at the airport, I booked a short day trip round the city centre and was duly picked up by a friendly guide. I turned out to be the only one on the minibus so I got a personal guided tour. Very pleased with myself for the way things had turned out so far, I boarded the Czech aircraft brimming with confidence and proceeded in the direction of Zagreb. I only experienced a change of mood when, on approaching Zagreb, the captain announced that he had the good news for us: we had been given permission to land. I froze. Was this ever in question? Why was this even news? Doubts suddenly flooded through my head.

It got worse. Just as we had touched down and the plane was slowing to taxi speed, there was an immense roar and a couple of fighter planes sped over us at very low altitude. Everyone ducked. I peered nervously through the window as they disappeared over the airport buildings where I was presented with another alarming sight, one that I could only relate to dramatic news flashes: military vehicles, red cross trucks, armed soldiers milling around. I seemed to have arrived in the middle of a warzone. The captain’s voice came on again reassuring us that the fighters that had flown over us were Croatian air force planes and that it was just to let anyone know they were there defending the airport. Somehow his reassurances were not having a calming effect on me.

Somewhat weak at the knees I disembarked and was met by Jelena, my host, who immediately said she was so very glad I had come adding “especially since all the other foreign guest have cancelled”. “Well”, I said, “since you hadn’t told me otherwise I assumed everything was OK”. Her response was immediate “so you DIDN’T get my email?!” “What email?” I stammered. “The one” she said, “where we told you that the British Foreign Office had warned all UK citizens to stay away”. This was because two weeks ago the secessionists had fired two rockets that had exploded in the centre of the city. “No”, I said weakly, “That email didn’t reach me.” From then on, I resigned myself to whatever awaited me. Even the circular symbol at the entrance of the university with a crossed-out handgun didn’t phase me.

In actual fact, the conference turned out to be extremely enjoyable. My status as the only Westerner who had dared to come took a slight dip when on British speaker turned up from Slovenia accompanied by someone from the British Council. She only stayed for her talk, however, and then sped back over the border to Ljubljana and my intrepid lone visitor image was duly restored. I also got another personal guided tour round a capital city, this time entirely emptied of tourists and much more hospitality on top of that as well. Night life was restricted and I was taken to an underground 10-pin bowling alley where I got what I now call the CBE (Croatian Bowling Elbow) from careless handling of the heavy bowling bowls. Altogether an unforgettable experience. 

What has all this got to do with EUROSLA, you may ask. Well, much later while attending the EUROSLA committee meeting where would-be organisers presented their bid for the next annual conference, I watched a delegate from Croatia present her bid to host the next meeting in Dubrovnik. It didn’t take more than one slide of glorious sunny Dubrovnik to create a mood of dreamy acceptance in the room. Who were they thinking of inviting as keynote speakers, she was asked.  She first named a local linguist and then added “we were thinking of Mike Sharwood Smith!” I knew why of course. However and to my horror, Eric Kellerman, on hearing my name spontaneously exclaimed: “Oh, he can’t possibly do it. He’s already given a plenary.” He might even have said ‘two’ and he would have been right. My vision of the beautiful Dalmatian coast began swiftly to evaporate and despite our years of friendship and collaboration, at that point I could cheerfully have throttled him on the spot.  The somewhat startled delegate from Zagreb, after a moment’s thought, tactfully responded by saying that they would discuss possible speakers at their next committee meeting.

Not long after that I received my invitation to Dubrovnik.

Why no worldwide SLA association?

You might have thought that founding EUROSLA would spark even more ambitious initiatives. Strangely this did not happen. Researchers in Canada and the USA have consistently preferred to stay low key, with conference series like the long-running Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) and special interest meetings such as the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA) meetings and the International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism series. There was one initiative in LA spearheaded by Mike Long, I seem to remember, himself a European based in the States. At an organisational meeting of SLRF, he proposed the founding of a permanent  association to replace. or rather support the SLRF series. However, it was not supported by the delegates at the time. They were happy with things the way they were.

                   

I did try to encourage the creation a worldwide international association by creating a web-based would-be precursor. This had the rather grandiose name of ICoSLA, the International Commission on Second Language Acquisition where the nature and scope of SLA was explained to the general public and a glossary of SLA terms and useful links were provided for researchers plus a regularly updated list of forthcoming conferences and appropriate journals. A group of prominent SLA researchers agreed to be member of the forum of specialists and the fledgling commission was formally linked to EUROSLA an each successive SLRF. Sadly, nothing  exciting came of this idea, apart from UNESCO asking me register it with them. The conference agenda page was certainly popular.  When I asked  for a volunteer from the forum to take over, they each assured me that  ICoSLA was very worthwhile but alas were too busy at the time to commit to taking over. Finally, realising the folly of my ambition, I closed it down.

Developments in the Asian-Pacific region

There have also  been moves to form international associations elsewhere outside Europe. In 1992, the Pacific Second Language Research Forum (PACSLRF) series started up a conference in Sydney, Australia. It was organised, again by a European – this time it was  Manfred Pienemann – with the aim of developing it into a fully fledged association for the Asia-Pacific region with a constitution. This initiative apparently foundered there as well although it does at least maintain a steering committee for the selection of sites for its meetings (see here). The region would have to wait until 2001, when the Japan Second Language Acquisition Association (J-SLA) was set up with its own journal and regular meetings. Shigenori Wakabayashi is its founding president.

More conferences but these are not enough

SLA as a subject area, now fully recognised by non-applied sister disciplines, also features regularly in other types of conference, for example, first language acquisition annual meetings, notably the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BULCD) series, and in international bilingualism conferences such as the biennial International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) meetings. It also figures in workshops and special sections of the larger applied linguistics conferences. EUROSLA itself has proved to be a success story with expanding levels of participation, a regular publication series, supported workshops and funding to help graduate students to attend its meetings. From 1991 onwards there have been international conferences in different parts of Europe (for example Salzburg, Jyväskylä, Sofia, Aix-en -Provence, Dublin, Nijmegen, Barcelona, Paris, Lund, Krakow, Paderborn, Basel, Edinburgh, San Sebastian, Dubrovnik, Antalya, Newcastle, Aix-en-Provence again, Cork and Reading).

 

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SLA journals finally take the stage

Returning now to the 1980s, this idea of engaging in research that sought to promote understanding of the phenomena in question, that is to say, irrespective of any possible application that such research might have was still a new one. The field badly needed its own specialist journals and specialist conferences to promote research and to develop a sizeable research literature. Hence, the arrival of specialist journals on the scene marked a significant set forward for the field.  Second Language Research (SLR)and Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA) both began their life as low budget journals produced by the editors’ university. In the case of SSLA, it was Albert Valdman who set it up at Indiana University. It began its life as a soft-backed A4 publication in 1978, publishing the proceedings of, respectively, the fourth and sixth sessions of the Neuchâtel Colloquia on ‘Theoretical Issues in Applied Linguistics’. The meetings were run by Pit Corder and Eddy Roulet with Albert Valdman and Harry Gradman associate editors. Unlike ISBu it also had an editorial board. The stated aims of the journal were also ambitious: they were to produce a specialised journal on second language acquisition where the central concern was not pedagogical but theoretical. Like ISBu they were focused on at SLA but circumstances made it inadvisable to completely exclude pedagogical content. It would not be too long before Cambridge University Press took over the production of this journal from the Indiana University Club, but in their case retaining the original name and still admitting teaching-related submissions as long as they could be seen as having some relationship with L2 research.

SLR was a continuation of ISBu. In 1984, a surprise development caused the editors to make the eighth the very last one: it was fittingly dedicated to Pit Corder.  Paul Meara, one of the contributors to ISBu, had been approached by the London publishers, Edward Arnold, a long established family firm based at the time in Russell Square. They were looking for an editor to start up a new journal in the area of second language learning. Paul’s response was to decline the offer but suggest they approach the two editors of ISBu, James and myself instead. The result was the rebirth of ISB as SLR. Reflecting on the stages of my journal founding and editing career, I am struck by the similarities in my uncle’s career (John Sharwood Smith) whose original journal Didaskalos morphed though (more) stages into the current journal of the Joint Association of Classic Teaching, of which he was a co-founder.

Thanks to Paul’s recommendation, the rebranding of ISB and the switch to peer-reviewed journal status gave its editors the opportunity to reformulate their aims more ambitiously and abandon any pretence of being applied. We were of the opinion that were many outlets available for applied linguists focused on socially relevant practical goals but none exclusively for researchers wishing to wholeheartedly pursue the ‘understanding’ route. Also, those researchers with a foot in both camps needed appropriate homes for both types of submission and not just one. These original aims have been maintained up to the present day. This cannot be said of some SLA conferences especially in North America where local funders have obviously required some teaching-oriented presentations to be included to justify their support. This demonstrates the advantages of an association like EUROSLA with a constitution over the loosely organised conference series that has always been favoured in North Americans who have resisted attempts to follow the European example.  It has always struck me as anomalous that there is no American version of EUROSLA.

In the past, mixing pedagogical content into SLA conference programmes was felt by some to be a threat but now SLA research is so well established and past its adolescence, perhaps it is not a real issue any more and there is a real case for ‘applied SLA’ to feature in SLA meetings and journals, a development that is foreshadowed in SSLA’s original description of its scope.

The decision by the first editors of SLR, James and myself, to be purist about submissions was a big gamble since it was not at clear that enough quality material could be regularly amassed to fit the strict copy deadlines imposed by the publisher. The early years saw regular agonised moments with the repeated threat of not producing enough copy for the next issue. Another longer term problem was a danger of typecasting. In the 1970s and 1980s, in a field still very young, the major thrust on the theoretical front was driven by researchers working within a generative linguistic framework and indeed SLR published some landmark contributions in this particular area. Nevertheless, it had never been the intention to become viewed as the journal that ‘will only publish papers on generative grammar’ – a complaint that came to us via the grapevine from time to time.

Flowers further afield

It wasn’t too long before other centres in Europe saw initiatives that led to a decisive SLA presence to emerge indifferent parts of the continent. I will not detail the many centres that exist today but only the early ones. There have been a few European meetings that were repeated a few times or became a regular series not mentioned so far. Juergen Meisel organised some meetings by a lake in Germany, for example and a Polish series the International Conference on Foreign and Second Language Acquisition (ICFSLA) started up and has been meeting regularly to this day, usually in a mountain resort called Szczyrk (a challenge for many non-Poles to pronounce from the spelling but roughly sounds like: Sh+ ch +i[as in chin] +rk).The ICFSLA series was started up by an ex-colleague of mine from the Poznań days, Janusz Arabski, a veteran of the Fisiak contrastive conferences) and very early writer on SLA topics and has a group of international participants who regularly return- David Singleton springs easily to mind but Vivian Cook, Rod Ellis and Aneta Pavlenko have also figured amongst these returnees and I have spoken there more than once). The effect of such conferences has always been to generate more interest in SLA in the local region if not the country as a whole. It clearly worked for Poland but it has worked very well for EUROSLA, one of the aims of the organisation being to do just this. As a result, Europe is the scene of much L2 research and the early days when Europeans had to cross the water of the States to get their SLA fix are well into the past.  EUROSLA conferences by default is now the world association of SLA since there is no similar organisation of this size. SLA meeting in North American sometimes struggle to keep free of their applied linguistic cousins and have to supplement their conference experience by participating in special sessions of first language, bilingualism and applied linguistics conferences. The topic of bilingualism and its relationship to SLA deserves a separate section as also the French story.

The Nordic spring

An account, particularly a Eurocentric one, of the development of SLA as a research field would not be complete with a mention of developments in the Nordic countries, i.e. Norway, Sweden Denmark and Finland. Sweden in particular has had a strong of applied linguistic tradition within English language studies of, notably in Lund where Jan Svartvik was part of the team that gave us the renowned corpus-base Contemporary Grammar of English and its various offshoots. The Nordic countries were fertile ground for adding a second language acquisition branch to their work on English and contrastive linguists and soon scholars were making themselves know, as scholars and patrons of SLA in Sweden with the likes of Björn Hammarberg and Kenneth Hyltstenstam in Sweden, in Finland with Kari Sajavaara (a future president of EUROSLA ) and in Denmark with Esther Glahn and Johannes Wagner (also a future president of EUROSLA) not to mention others from the early days who would certainly deserve mention in a fuller account. Norway would catch in due course. EUROSLA conferences in these countries certainly played a role in supporting the further development of non-applied research but the early days were particular marked by two interlanguage workshops organised over several days with the collaboration and encouragement of Pit Corder: one was in Denmark at Helsingör (the Elsinore of Hamlet fame), in a deluxe trade union centre where I was told that my particular bedroom had been occupied by non-other that Willi Brandt, and the second one was in Hanasaari, Finland on an island in the Helsinki archipelago. Eric Kellerman and I were invited along to the otherwise fully Nordic conference, probably and the instigation of Pit Corder, as ‘young researchers from the Netherlands’ (neither of us of course Dutch) and we found ourselves in a kind of intermediate position between the distinguished invited lecturers, and the people who had come purely in the role of workshop ‘students’. It was at these workshops that I met for the first time, apart from all my Nordic friends, Merrill Swain, John Schumann, Elaine Tarone, Evelyn Hatch and the irrepressible New Zealander, Jack Richards. Apart from learning a lot from them at the workshops, more useful contacts were made and soon Eric and I were invited to venues across the Atlantic. This certainly began my intellectual career on the other side of pond and probably Eric’s as well, so much so, in fact, that a rumour caught my ear emanating from UK applied linguistics circles that I was considered rather too ‘American’ in my approach to language acquisition by which I am certain that they meant ‘too theoretical’. I took this as a great compliment.

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Vive la France (1970s-1990s)

In the hotbed of revolution

One of the contributions of the European Second Language Association has been to stimulate the interest in SLA in places where it has not yet taken root or barely so. Another has been to bring isolated SLA groups into contact with one another. In France there were in the seventies centres of applied linguists in places like Paris and Nantes that were also exhibiting an interest in SLA.  Before EUROSLA had been founded, there was a second language acquisition  meeting at the controversial left-wing University of Paris VIII, then still at Vincennes before it was exiled to the suburbs in St Denis. Several academics from outside France were invited including myself, Eric Kellerman and a number of others from the Netherlands such as Kees de Bot and Theo Bongaerts some of whom I met there for the first time. French was, with some exceptions, the language of the conference. Two things that surprised me stand out in my memory. One was the, for me unusual and fascinating way, in which issues were debated. I took this to be typically French. It seemed to me at least  that everyone was voicing their own opinions about a topic, one after the other, but despite the fact that the expressed opinions were not always in agreement with one another, they were presented them without any overt criticism as if it was ‘just’ the speaker’s opinion that could live peacefully alongside all the others. I expected overt, direct expressions of disagreement but this was perhaps left for  listeners to infer. There was never any direct confrontation.. Had my obtuse foreign perception of the event blinded me from a subtle but furious battle being played out in front of me? The other thing that surprised me was Larry Selinker intervening in French. In any case, the meeting has very positive long term consequences for everyone concerned. It brought the French group, people like Monique Lambert,  Anne Trévise, Daniel Véronique,  Collette Noyau, Jo Arditty, Bernard Py and Michelle Mittner into regular contact with like-minded SLA people in other parts of Europe. Michelle was to translate my 1980 consciousness-raising paper into French and Daniel was to host two EUROSLA conferences in Aix-en-Provence, the first one at which I was a plenary speaker. Strangest of all things that were going to happen as an indirect result of the Vincennes meeting in the late seventies was to happen as late as the nineteen nineties when I was invited by Clive Perdue to teach SLA at Paris VIII for 6 months, an enjoyable but exhausting experience which nearly did me in (see below). The meeting of minds that took place at Vincennes was further bolstered by a number of publications culminating in LIA  (Language, Interaction and Acquisition)  published by John Benjamins.

Linguistic Challenges

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 SLA develops yet more branches

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Is UG really dead? 

The generative school within SLA has been a prominent force, especially in the nineteen-eighties and nineties and though it is still very active. It brought to the new research field a sense of direction and autonomy. During those to decades field was in a stage of adolescence, in other words and researchers were only really clear about one thing: moving away from its applied, teaching-oriented origins. Whereas earlier, both research methods and the focus of research had been on the structurally simpler aspects of language making it at least potentially attractive and also fairly accessible to those interested in application, generative SLA was marked by a rapid growth of studies that were much less attractive and accessible tor those who  might still regarded SLA as the handmaid of, and hence responsible to language pedagogy. At the same time it also brought an increased level of rigour and sophistication  to L2 research. The arrival of researchers on the scene equipped with generative linguistic tools to analyse learner language at all levels of proficiency and a desire to engage in rigorous thinking and rigorous experimentation gave the field a marked independent character. It also sent out the desired message to its followers but also to  wider audiences that SLA was not about language teaching. At the same time its domination in peer reviewed journals inevitably created a feeling amongst may that there were other equally valuable areas of SLA that were being excluded and other ways of analysing language that were somehow being cast in the shade. Many may also have resented the technical language employed  which seemed abstruse and far removed from what really interested people about non-native language learners, including those who accepted that SLA was about understanding and not helping.  This was an unfortunate trend in thinking because in actual fact, even if generative linguistics provided the only way to analyse grammatical development, which it doesn’t,  its particular scope of investigation does actually leave open many areas of language about which it is nothing to say. For generativists, explaining language acquisition really meant explaining key aspects of grammatical (morphosyntactic and phonological acquisition): it certainly did not mean explaining everything interesting about language acquisition in general. The precise nature and scope of explanation was not generally understood however and this misunderstanding together with a general lack of knowledge about what various technical concepts like ideal native speaker, competence, and universal grammar actually mean has contributed a lot to resentment amongst those who have not wanted to identify themselves with the perceived aims of this approach, often labelled (pejoratively) as ”UG” as in “UG is dead”‘. In fact I was tempted to name this section by mimicking an earlier title in this blog and call it: “Applied linguists open fire and UG becomes an object of hate”.

Some of the blame certainly rests with those who have not bothered to acquaint themselves sufficiently with the particular aims, scope and strategies of ‘UG’ research. Blameless, of course, are those who do appreciate all these aspects of generative linguistics and its application to explaining acquisition  but who nevertheless choose to differ and are perfectly able to engage cogently in the value of ‘UG’ and its applicability to the acquisition of grammar. One could also argue, I suppose, that generative linguists themselves are also not  blameless for their negative image outside their immediate circle in that they have been so focused on the technicalities of their research, excited by the theoretical insights they are getting from their research  and profiting so much from the success in cornering  a large share of the publishing space over quite a number of years they have neglected the negative impact of their ‘UG theory bubble’ has had on the SLA community at large, especially those pursuing  different aims and other aspect of acquisition. But this is still only a question of image. No one has ever claimed that generative linguistic theory is anything but one of many windows from which to shed light on language acquisition. Luckily there is an increased interest within many working in this particular neck of the L2 woods to engage with semantic/pragmatic concerns and to broaden the scope of their enquiry further to tackle psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic issues as well. I say ‘their’ but in fact I count myself, in the final analysis, as a committed supporter, knowing that the generative approach is alive and kicking and hence needing no obituary. Despite all this, it wasn’t too long before SLA started to develop new strands of research in the areas of lexis, phonology and pragmatics and publications began appearing in all the appropriate journals, the number of which had begun to increase as the filed developed. But more of that later.

 

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12. WIDENING THE CIRCLE.

The Cognitive Viewpoint

I return now to my personal development and to an unusually significant trip to Ghent at a time when SLA as an independent research field was scarcely out of the block. Conference money was still plentiful in 1976 when I was scouting around for conferences that would educate me in areas as yet undeveloped since Edinburgh. I discovered what seemed to me at the time a rather obscure conference in Ghent called “the cognitive viewpoint” and promptly acquired funding to attend it. I was to be surprised first at what I found but even more so in later years date when I gradually realised I had been rubbing shoulders with some very significant scholars. On arrival at the conference opening I found myself among a large group of people none of whom I knew, all except one lone linguist from Sweden, Stig Eliasson. Neither theoretical linguistics nor SLA were to figure in any of the presentations although applied linguistics, especially  language pedagogy turned out to be a strength in Ghent and with a distinctive psychological bent. I listened attentively to many of the talks I attended. This is where I was introduced by Leo Apostel to the idea of heterarchy (shifting centres of control), a way of characterising the overall organisation of the mind as opposed to hierarchy which presumes a single master supervisor. This principle has been adopted in the Modular Cognition Framework that I have been developing together since 2000 with John Truscott, about which more in the next section.

As the months passed after my visit to Ghent, I learned that a fair number of people who I had sat at lunch with and chatted to with little notion of their status on their respective fields were in fact pretty significant figures. They included Seymour Papert,

 and Yorick Wilks, artificial intelligence pioneers, and Jerome Bruner a pioneer in cognitive psychology to name but a few, also Margaret Boden, a Piaget specialist and numerous others. I did know of Bruner and I asked him, again at lunch, to suggest a toy for my three-year old daughter’s birthday. I was intrigued and a little taken aback when he suggested a tin (can) and a piece of string: I clearly wasn’t going to get a selection from the Fisher-Price catalogue. I smiled to myself when I imagined the reaction of my daughter, and indeed of my Dutch neighbours and made a mental note to ignore this otherwise sound piece of advice. By the time I attended Bruner’s address at the opening of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in 1980 I was more fully aware of the significance of my Ghent experience and the new cognitive science skin began slowly to form as I began read avidly outside my immediate field of interest, focusing eventually on the new study of consciousness and spending a lot of time lurking on an email list where the likes of Bernard Baars exchanged views on the philosophical, neural, psychological aspects of an area now made respectable by Nobel prize-winner Francis Crick. This took me back to the Edinburgh days when my mind, in similar fashion, grappled wildly with a flow of concepts and terms that were unfamiliar to me and yet demanded to be understood. I adopted the same optimistic approach I had chosen to the acquisition of Polish, namely, rather than trying doggedly to understand everything as it came along, to rather immerse myself in it until eventually patterns and insights might begin to emerge in my beleaguered mind.  The assimilation of all the ideas associated with the people that had met in Ghent would eventually culminate in a new and unexpected development in my intellectual life but  to get where that ended up there requires a leap though the intervening years into the next century.

No Mutual Attraction: another Case of Mistaken Identity

After labouring through scores of exchanges between philosophers and neuroscientists on the consciousness mail list, I became increasingly aware of my role as a ‘lurker’, not intervening in the discussions. Should I not risk a comment at an opportune moment? The only excuse for doing this would be as a linguist. I had noticed that no linguists were taking part while at the same time there were very occasional references to language by people who spoke authoritatively on their own subject while obviously having little or no knowledge of modern linguistics. and contemporary views of what language was. Finally I spotted an opportunity. A professor in New Zealand made some reference that had a bearing on my own interests. I risked all and responded pointing out some aspect of language acquisition that was relevant to her comment. To my delight the researcher in question made contact me personally and said she had a question she could find no answer to. When I read on, my mood turned sour and had to be converted into amusement. My expertise was being sought for the following problem. I paraphrase, the exact details affected by my defective memory of the actual email: “Dear Mike, I am following a course in Zen Buddhism and the teacher happens to be Japanese. However, he gives his classes in Japanese and employs a helper to translate for him. I am not confident that this helper is doing his job properly. How do I get the teacher to  talk directly to us?” Not much neuroscience in that request. I thought about it, controlling my irritation and disappointment (“So linguists are all people who can automatically advise on such lowly matters? Would I ask her how to cure my sinus headache?”). OK. so she had a problem and needed a bit of applied linguistic wisdom. All I could come up with was to tell her that it was probably a matter of face: “He feels his English is not good enough and that his errors will cause him to appear less of a guru and consequently lose the respect of the class. You have somehow to persuade him to improve his English  or simply reassure him that speaking directly to the class without an intermediary will be highly valued whatever his command of English”. This I said or words to that effect feeling that this didn’t really offer a perfect solution. I do not remember getting a reply. It did however give me another example of lack of interdisciplinary understanding and especially the isolation of linguistics from other branches of cognitive science. Ray Jackendoff suggested once that this isolation was partly the fault of (generative) linguists themselves, pointing out that, initially, Chomsky and generative linguistics used to be hot topics in psychology and beyond. This all sounded familiar.

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13. BACK TO BASE CAMP

A Belated Fresh Start.

In 1999, my life in the Netherlands came to an unexpected halt and I  found myself back in Edinburgh, this time not as a fearful language teacher hoping for applied linguistic enlightenment but as the newly appointed Professor of Languages at Heriot-Watt University. The School of Languages actually  specialised in interpreting and translation so not academic fields I was not too familiar with, especially interpreting studies. They were interested in me, it seemed, particularly because a new 4 -year Joint Honours degree was planned that would combine interpreting and translation in a language of choice together with a training in TESOL (Teaching English as a Second or Other Language). So in one sense this was a new beginning for my or rather an extension of my experience with different forms of multilingual acquisition and performance. It was to a fresh start in quite another way but I will get to that later. The underlying theme of this section is ‘just when you thought it was all drawing to an end (I was already 57 so only eight years to go before my official retirement date) it is actually only just starting for you!’ Not only that, I would, in the new century about to begin, complete the growth of two new skins, retire and immediately ‘de-retire’ . This has led me into a phase of my life where to my surprise,  it is almost as though my research has only just begun. Now at last I have only started to do something worthwhile. Of course this could be a reassuring illusion.

Interpreting and translation…and SLA

My first year at Heriot-Watt was a learning experience. As a new member of the School of Languages, I was soon feeling happy to be in a friendly community of academics where I could see that disputes between colleagues, which there inevitably were, were resolved in what I judged be to be a civilised manner and this despite the somewhat eccentric and brusque style of leadership displayed by the talented Head of School to whom I probably owed my job. It is all relative of course but I cannot say the same of my former department. Then again that department was severely tested over a long period although it seemed to me at the time that the Dutch generally seemed to be less imaginative and flexible in handling recalcitrant and unhappy humans than they were in dealing with obstructive things. Now back in Scotland, at Heriot-Watt University I was however surprised at how my understanding during much of the discussion at meetings was marred not only by a plethora  of mysterious acronyms but also by management-speak which I did not associate with academe. The culture had changed in my absence. I really did not know what terms like ‘drivers’ were, or ‘ ring-fencing’ or ‘blue sky thinking’ and I didn’t understand why there were never any problems but only issues and concerns. And this was my native language. As a result, I struggled at times to understand the arguments that were being put forward. Suddenly aware of the disadvantage of not being a foreigner who people were quick to help, I began to compile a list of words and phrases and the meanings that were not immediately clear to me on my electronic organiser, a Palm, what a Russian colleague like to call an ‘agoniser’.  I felt, in other words, like a foreigner in my own country. I was a foreigner in another much more agreeable sense in that most of my colleagues were in fact not from Scotland or indeed from England or any other part of the UK but from other countries in Europe Still, even given this familiar multicultural, multilingual environment, I was, in another, academic, sense, once again a bit of square peg in a round hole and one with a language problem.

The ‘school’ as it was then (now part of the larger School of Management and Languages) was not only oriented towards applied linguistics, an old skin of mine, but to a form of applied linguistics with which I was less acquainted. While I was no stranger to translation as a classroom activity, I was not up to date on translation studies as an academic subject and was especially unfamiliar with the study and practice of interpreting at which the School happened to excel.

Before a fitting place was found for me in the teaching programme, I was given a role in the second year interpreting classes playing the role of the monolingual in deployed in semi-prepared scenarios requiring the help of a student interpreter chosen on the spot to mediate between two monolinguals from different countries. I watched intrigued by the linguistic and emotional challenge imposed upon the poor students who very occasionally even burst into tears under the strain of performing this difficult   task in front of their peers. Two years later, these selfsame students, having completed their obligatory year abroad with newfound self-confidence and vastly improved language proficiency, would shine at the annual public multilingual debate organised by the School to showcase their activities. How much their improved skill were affected by their increased self-confidence and how much by their gains in proficiency was an interesting, unanswered question.

MOGUL awakes

This blog happens to be a page attached to a website devoted to a theoretical framework intended initially for people working on SLA, bilingualism and other branches of linguistics where the focus is psychological, that is to say on language cognition. Those interested to know more about it can return to the top of the web page and click on the uppermost part marked ‘Modular Cognition Framework’. This, the ‘MCF’,  is now the  current name of the framework although it is known more generally by its first official name ‘MOGUL’ (Modular Online Growth and Use of Language). MOGUL remains as the name of the project that applies the MCF to all aspects of language cognition. The MCF as a guide to the mind as whole should be applicable in many other areas as well. It is not hard to find a pattern of development in my own thinking  that led to this point since it can be seen as the long term consequence of my encounter in the seventies with the Cognitive Viewpoint in Ghent. There had to be some steps on the way though plus a lucky encounter with a like-minded individual who would become the co-founder of the MOGUL project. In fact, I have generally been lucky enough to find partners who share and also complement my own areas of expertise, either in editing books and journals or contributing to them. These lucky breaks have been behind any success I have had and none of my failures.

 Once John had arrived as a Visiting Scholar at Heriot-Watt University and we soon began elaborating on our ideas about the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). LAD was a construct used in child language research. It was directly influenced by Chomsky’s ideas on how languages are acquired by children, especially his famous (and for some people notorious) demolition of the behaviourist explanation in Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour. For a psychologist like Roger Brown who studied language development in real time, the idea of an innate language ‘acquisition device’ that drives linguistic development in a particular, apparently pre-programmed direction so that all children go through the same basic stages in the acquisition of grammar could be regarded as an attractive instantiation of Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar (UG). However, it should be clear that UG itself is not a proto-grammar, a kind of starter system on which basis grammars of particular languages could be developed in the child’s mind. Nor is it supposed to dictate sequences in which particular constructions are acquired by the child. Rather, it is a theoretical linguistic construct, a set of ‘design principles’ stipulating constraints on the way any type of LAD could build a grammar out of the language to which a child happens to be exposed. It was conceived by Chomsky to explain, where there are other logically possible ways of making sense of the language spoken to them, the particular limited ways in which grammars develop in an individual’s mind. It was not to explain the order in which that process takes place; rather, it was an argument about why the kind of learning mechanisms used to acquire other kinds of abstract knowledge just cannot explain the acquisition of grammar(s) by naive untutored children. Originally thought of as quite complex, UG in the current Minimalist Program is reduced to something very simple. UG in any form was and remains an explanation of why exactly it is necessary to asssume the existence of a special human ‘language faculty.’ Since the early days of generative grammar there have been repeated attempts to dismiss the UG hypothesis but it has not led to a general rejection of this explanatory ‘dilemma:’ how do little children perform this feat?

‘MOGUL’ actually began in a multiplex cinema in Edinburgh, in Fountainbridge then run by the UGC (Union Générale Cinématographique).  John Truscott, who had already figured as a contributor to SLR,  has come to spend a sabbatical in Edinburgh. This visit was at his own suggestion after I had contacted him having noticed that I shared many of his intellectual preferences, interests and sources. We sat in a balcony café at the UGC waiting to be admitted to the theatre that was screening our film and discussing how we imagined a LAD might work and using one of the coasters scattered on our table. We duly dubbed the fledgling model ‘UGC’ and for a time mysteriously refused to explain to people what UGC meant or, in my case at least, made up something on the spot like, for example, ‘Universal Grammar Comparator’ (I just made that up).

John and I speculated on how LAD could be formally described and particularly with reference to second language acquisition since we accepted the SLA basic standpoint that claimed that L1 and L2 grammatical acquisition were not substantially different processes (contra Steven Pinker, by the way ) even though the ultimate outcomes of development could be vary greatly, notably the failure to achieve a fully-fledged language ability in a new language typical of many older L2 learners, especially when not exposed to a language without which they would be completely unable to operate fully and effectively in the environment in which they they find themselves in, in other words unlike children who start out having no language at all.

We duly gave our first talk at Edinburgh university in 2000, to the Linguistics Circle. It was entitled “Detection failure in second language acquisition”in which we introduced a model that was our first attempt to explain exactly how exactly, in the course of being exposed to a (new) language, our LAD reacts when a discrepancy is detected between the grammatical structure of a given message (phrase, sentence, etc) and what our current mental grammar of that language would have generated in order to produce the selfsame message, and how LAD then adapts the current mental grammar accordingly. 

It was not long before both the UGC model and, a little later, its name as well were dropped. We decided that the LAD construct was unnecessary in the first place in the general story about how language grows in a mind as a complex interaction between the language we are exposed to and the mental mechanisms that are part of our biological endowment, some of which are only there to build the core structures of any language system and others that are not.   The challenge was how to make some sense of all that. The model was then renamed the Modular Online Growth and Use of Language: I will not elaborate too much on the way in which this approach has developed since is described in the other pages of the MCF website as well as in a wiki and a Facebook page, not to mention the various publications listed there. In a nutshell, we found that to explain language acquisition is was necessary to locate it in a more general explanation of the mind it itself and that had led to an explanatory framework that is now applicable to any kind of cognitive activity.

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14. LIFE AFTER DEATH