Coda 2 A bridge half‐built: Toward a holistic theory of Second Language Acquisition and world Englishes

Abstract

AbstractIn the concluding contribution to this special issue, we return to the key issue that motivated our 1986 article on world Englishes (WE) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This coda begins by considering the impact of WE on SLA at a number of levels, with reference to the pluricentricity of English, conceptions of the ‘native speaker’, formalist ontology, functional perspectives, multilingualism, and other dynamic approaches to SLA. We then proceed to consider recent critiques of the WE paradigm, before moving to a discussion of the current synergy between world Englishes and Second Language Acquisition studies, noting that in many contemporary approaches to SLA, ‘the monolingual bias has given way to a multilingual turn.’ Nevertheless, even if there is a far greater appreciation of world Englishes than three decades ago, it is still evidently the case that textbooks in Second Language Acquisition continue to be focused on cognitive and structural dimensions of language acquisition, and often fail to incorporate social, functional and multilingual perspectives.