Access to the linguistic system: A viable metaphor?

jal (print) issn 1479–7887 jal (online) issn 1743–1743

Editorial

Access to the linguistic system: A viable metaphor? Introduction Elizabeth Platt

1 Background The papers in this special issue were first presented at a colloquium of the same name at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Arlington, VA, in 2003. The colloquium’s purpose was to explore what has been widely accepted as a truism in the field of SLA, namely, that learners have access to some kind of linguistic system.1 The current collection includes the papers of Yates and Kenkel and Larsen-Freeman, with an additional paper by Elizabeth Platt and Frank B. Brooks. The discussant is Leo van Lier, who attended the colloquium and whose comments contributed to the rich and wide-ranging colloquium discussion. Each paper in the present collection presents a unique view of the issues in question, two taking a more internalist view, the other a more externalist view. It seems appropriate to problematize assumptions about the access metaphor because strong philosophical divisions in the SLA field emerged during the 1990s and continue to exist. Representing an internalist, rationalist position Gregg (1993) and Gregg et al. (1997) strongly challenged those who had opposed the then current direction of mainstream SLA research. Long (2006) and Long and Doughty (2003) and many others continue to do so, situating the field squarely in cognitive science (see the Doughty and Long (2003) edited volume). Staking out more externalist approaches, Block (1996, 2003), Kramsch (2000, 2002), Lantolf (1996, 2000), Lantolf and Thorne, 2006), Larsen-Freeman (1997); Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008), van Lier (1994, 2000, 2004) and others have espoused sociolinguistic, ecological, sociocultural or chaos/complexity frameworks. jal vol 3.3 2006 249–258 ©2008, equinox publishing

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Each of these perspectives entails different beliefs about the nature of language, how it develops, and how speakers are able to use (access) it. Thus, this collection of papers addresses the following two questions to allow for an examination of a range of views in the field: • What is being accessed? • What is (the nature of) the linguistic system? The philosophical divide between the more extreme positions taken on these topics revolves essentially around the nature/nurture explanation of human behaviour in general. In linguistics the major poles are associated with the traditional langue/parole argument (de Saussure, 1916), and more recently Chomsky’s competence/performance distinction. However, as van Lier (2004) points out, this generally accepted pairing of the two opposing concepts is misguided. For de Saussure parole was erratic, individual, and difficult to study, whereas langue was the structure of language, a shared social entity, capable of scientific study. For Chomsky competence is part of the posited genetic inheritance of the species, an in-the-head phenomenon amenable to scientific scrutiny. Alternatively, performance is the social aspect of language, too variable for serious scientific consideration. Continental schools of thought (Firth, 1951; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Bakhtin, 1981) are more generally allied with the Saussurean tradition, while North American linguistics has until quite recently been dominated by the competence/performance distinction. Because both the linguistic system and access are associated most closely with Chomsky’s view of language (1959, 1965, 1970, 1981, 1986, 2000), we take this theoretical framework as a starting point, one also implicitly or explicitly assumed by many scholars in the SLA field. Throughout this collection of papers assumptions from the Universal Grammar (UG) approach to language and language learning are modified or challenged.

2 Approaches to the linguistic system and access 2.1 Universal Grammar The access metaphor arises from assumptions introduced by Noam Chomsky beginning with Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and other early writings (Chomsky, 1959, 1965). Since the earliest descriptions of the theory, language and language acquisition have been seen in a symbiotic relationship. Children’s access to their innate syntactic module makes it possible for them to acquire the basic syntactic structures of languages, even before they start school (Chomsky, 1965). This remarkable achievement of childhood suggests the existence of a priori knowledge; language is a part of the biological endowment of the human

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species. During the 1960s and through much of the 1970s knowledge of language was considered to be rule-based and modular with the sentence as the unit of analysis, functioning more or less without conscious attention and largely in the absence of cognitive development of other kinds. Given an adequate description of the nature of the contents and operation of the language module one would be able to explain language acquisition (Chomsky, 1965). The specification of the language acquisition device, then, followed from the description of the syntactic system, but was also assumed to be equipped with the requisite mechanisms to make language learning possible. But language studies during the 1960s challenged the Standard Theory (see especially Ross, 1967), augmented by an increasingly unmanageable collection of ad hoc rules, filters and other unwieldy mechanisms. The existing rules were unconstrained, overgenerating grammars that do not exist in natural languages. Above all, the theory had become too complicated to pass the test of parsimony; language in the mind must be organized in some way as to make it learnable by the very young (Chomsky, 1970). The earlier-introduced concept of Universal Grammar, operating according to a limited number of relatively simple principles with parameterized values, achieved explanatory status; access was to UG (Chomsky, 1981, 1986). Because a theory of competence invokes in-the-head knowledge, a strict interpretation of a principles and parameters approach should preclude the use of performance data. But, in fact, performance has also been investigated, some L2 studies following the lead of longitudinal L1 acquisition research undertaken with Roger Brown (1973) at Harvard (Bloom, 1973; Klima and Bellugi, 1973). Early adult SLA studies of UG used judgement data and developmental patterns were extrapolated from cross-sectional studies of learners at different developmental levels (Liceras, 1985; White, 1985; Flynn, 1987). During the late 1980s descriptions of various parameters were attempted for a wide array of languages, combined output of these studies providing rich descriptions of acquisition sequences to determine whether parameter resetting is possible in SLA (see Eubank (1991) for an extensive review of several of these studies). Taking a UG view, Schwartz (1986) argued the default assumption to be that adult SLA was constrained by the same principles and parameters as L1 learning. However, more recently UG theorists are disinclined to accept a parameterresetting explanation for adult second language acquisition, there being limited evidence of the putative relationship among parametrically related features (Meisel, 1998). During the 1998 Second Language Research forum on the then current status of the ‘access metaphor’, Gregg (1998) asserted that the property theory, in other words the nature of language itself, is uncontested, and that adult learners have at least partial access to the universal constraints on possible languages. Larsen-Freeman (this issue) argues that such an explanation cannot

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account for L2 development, and rejects the notion of partial or complete access as incompatible with the realities of contextual and learner-directed situations where the system does not operate in a rule-ordered or parameterized manner, but in complex, interactive, and unpredictable ways. In his more recent work on Minimalism, Chomsky (2000) highlights the contribution of other components of mind with respect to the nature of language, asserting that the linguistic module interacts with other cognitive principles related to thought as they pertain to information ordering. He has appealed to the notion of modular interaction to explain the seeming imperfections resulting from displacement of syntactic constituents from local dependencies (e.g., clefting). Because information ordering constraints have now been acknowledged theoretically, UG-compatible analyses of units beyond the level of the sentence are now possible, as Yates and Kenkel (this issue) suggest. These introductory remarks about the UG approach having been made, we now briefly introduce the conceptual and methodological frameworks associated with the authors whose papers appear in this collection. 2.2 Pragmatic principles It is clear that within the frameworks underlying the work of Yates and Kenkel whatever universal aspects of language learners have access to is more than the linguistic system as that proposed by adherents of a UG view. Although Yates and Kenkel accept Chomskian assumptions of UG, modularity, and innateness, they also find agreement with Chomsky’s recent ideas about modular interaction and argue for an underlying set of pragmatic principles that learners access when they assemble utterances in speaking and writing. These principles entail learners’ recognition and expression of communicative intentions. Yates and Kenkel’s analysis of texts created by lower level writers assumes learners also access principles of relevance (Foster-Cohen, 1994; Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Wilson and Sperber, 2004), as well as principles of information ordering and management, what Bachman calls Organizational Competence (Bachman, 1990). The Basic Variety (Klein and Perdue, 1992) is the means speakers have of manifesting this Organizational Competence, and although native speakers may opt to use it under specific conditions such as in headlines or diary entries, L2 speakers have only the Basic Variety to express their ideas in connected discourse when the target system has not been acquired. Because L2 learners do have access to Organizational Competence and principles of relevance, even in the absence of a well-developed linguistic system, they are capable of effective communication. Yates and Kenkel focus on how the speaker’s meaning is communicated in the essay of a Vietnamese-speaking Generation 1.5 writer, demonstrating the persistence of Basic Variety structures in his writing.

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Clearly, Yates and Kenkel accept the ‘access to the linguistic system’ metaphor. Their view is generally an internalist one, with no discussion of how the linguistic system changes (a transition theory), nor of how TL input becomes intake. This is their acknowledged challenge for the next phase of their study of struggling ESL writers. In the next section we shall see how the work of LarsenFreeman and of Platt and Brooks challenges some fundamental assumptions about ‘access to the linguistic system’ as well as offering important insights and claims about language development.

3 Chaos/complexity Larsen-Freeman (1997) turns to a theory in the hard sciences to explain the nature of language and learning, specifically to Chaos/Complexity Theory. From this theory she has suggested concepts that might provide new ways of thinking about L2 learning/acquisition. Language shares many features with other complex systems including dynamism, non-linearity, chaos, emergence, and self-organization, features quite distinct from the UG view described earlier. Thus, Larsen-Freeman rejects Gregg’s notion of an uncontested ‘property theory’, believing the UG approach to be insufficiently flexible to accommodate the facts of development, the gradual, non-discrete, nonlinear nature of language learning, and the ontological development of language within a community of speakers. Her central argument is that continued allegiance to a dualist account of language and development/access results in a failure to appreciate the situated, dynamic nature of language and language development and impedes both our science and our pedagogy. Although Larsen-Freeman’s paper is largely theoretical, she does provide evidence from studies conducted within the chaos/complexity perspective, in particular her own study of five Chinese learners and that of Cameron’s study analysing the contributions of child-directed speech to learned development. Both studies affirm the dynamic nature of language development, a core concept of Chaos/Complexity theory, and illustrate the reciprocal influence of the learners’ own resources with the context. Thus, different paths are taken across learners. In problematizing the notion of ‘knowledge of language’ as an exclusively grammatical phenomenon, LarsenFreeman claims that learning is the ‘constant adaptation of one’s language resources to the communicative situation’ (this issue). Here she and the other authors in the collection find a point of convergence. Larsen-Freeman finds support for a dynamic view of language in several other theoretical orientations that also challenge the property theory. In the latter part of her paper she draws connections between her theory and corpus linguistics, connectionism, probabilistic linguistics, Hopper’s emergent grammar, and sociocultural

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theory. Finally, she reiterates the problems associated with continuing to conceptualize the system apart from its development, and development from use. 3.1 Sociocultural perspective According to those that espouse a view of language in context, linguistic knowledge, like other forms of knowledge, arises in discourse (Wertsch, 1985; Harré and Gillette, 1994; Lantolf and Appel, 1994; Schegloff et al., 1996; Lantolf, 2000). In the field of second language learning (SLL),2 Sociocultural Theory (SCT)framed studies have accumulated rapidly (i.e., Donato, 1994; Lantolf and Appel, 1994, 2000; Swain, 2000, 2005; Ohta, 2001). Following Vygotsky (1978, 1986), these scholars have established the centrality of dialogic processes, mediational tools, and social contexts to second language learning. Above all, SCT addresses the issue of access in new ways, by demonstrating how the external becomes internal (Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf and Thorne, 2006). Richard Donato’s (1994) study was the first to establish a link between interaction and L2 learning, not in enumerating forms and functions of input utterances, but in documenting ‘collective scaffolding’ processes during interaction. Although Donato did not account for changes in the linguistic system, more recently Thorne (2003) outlined how several current theories are compatible with a cultural historical view of language development such as emergent grammar (Hopper, 1998) and nativist grammar (O’Grady, 1999). Differing from Yates and Kenkel’s reliance largely on internalist mechanisms,3 Thorne posited an externalist starting point and then speculated on how certain internal mechanisms interact with one another and with the external.4 In the collection’s third paper Platt and Brooks’ analysis of a pair of early stage L2 Swahili learners engaged in a problem-solving task provides evidence that access is to more than language. The authors propose that a process of internalization relates external participation in discourse, such as the problem-solving task, to the activation of higher mental processes and accounts for learning (see Chapters 6 and 7 in Lantolf and Thorne (2006) for both a theoretical rationale for, and empirical evidence of, this process). Using a microgenetic analytic approach to the videotaped task performance produced by the participants, the authors demonstrate how the learners use both external affordances (the task materials, writing implements) and internal resources (i.e., the L1, knowledge of task content, prior experience with L2 learning, pointing at and touching the task materials, and the development of intersubjectivity). For the learners the task was sufficiently challenging so that their struggle to command as many resources as possible was apparent.

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As we shall see in the following three papers, all the collection’s contributors challenge the autonomous system as sole explanation for the nature of, and access to, language, whether actually, or only apparently, a system. As we shall see, however, rather than rejecting the idea of a predisposition for language, each author argues that other mechanisms also contribute to the process of learning/acquisition/development, whether largely internal or in interaction with external circumstances.

About the author Elizabeth Platt is Professor Emerita at Florida State University where she has recently come out of retirement to teach ESL courses to pre-service elementary teachers and teacher in-service courses. She is also preparing FSU students to teach English to Rwandan teachers later this year. With colleagues at the University of Florida she has continued to publish articles and make presentations on policy regarding English Language Learners in Florida’s schools. E-mail: ejplatt@ embarqmail.com

Notes 1 Papers presented in the colloquium were from Laura Collins, Robert Yates and James Kenkel, Diane Larsen-Freeman, and Steven Thorne. Elizabeth Platt organized the colloquium and Rod Ellis was the discussant. Collins (2005) is a revised version of the 2003 conference presentation and Thorne’s (2003) arguments have been worked into other publications. 2 For many sociocultural theorists the term acquisition suggests an allegiance to beliefs about unconscious processes and modularity, and a backgrounding of context. The term second language learning is more theory neutral. 3 Relevance Theory takes into account communication, and is more situationcontigent than Grice’s maxims, but Sperber and Wilson’s account seems less socially grounded than the theories discussed by Thorne. 4 This point was echoed by Leo van Lier during the colloquium, as he positioned himself at the extreme externalist end of the continuum: ‘Everything that has come to be in mind has a history.’

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