Current Trends in SLA Rresearch and Directions for Future Development

Abstract

SLA is a broad interdisciplinary field. Its theories and research findings have potential relevance for a number of significant social issues. They include first language acquisition, theoretical linguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition in abnormal populations, language teaching, and language in education. Work in the field is motivated by the need to solve practical problems in those areas, but also by sheer intellectual curiosity. Second language learning, the object of study, is an internal, individual, in part, innately specified, cognitive process. SLA’s natural home, it follows, lies within cognitive science. There, it can make substantial contributions over and above understanding how second, including foreign, languages are learned, why adults often fail when children are so successful, the role of metalinguistic knowledge and of explicit and implicit learning, the role of the linguistic environment, and more. The fact that not only natural experiments, but also real ones, are possible (and legal) with adults means that SLA research can throw light on such matters as the dissociation of language and cognition, maturational constraints on learning, relationships among affective and cognitive variables, and other factors typically confounded in simultaneous language and cognitive development in children. The potential SLA contribution is well illustrated by work on the so-called Critical Period Hypothesis. SLA is also a young science, most work having been conducted since the 1980s. The field shows its youth in a number of ways, disagreements as to the proper scope of inquiry and, not unrelated, an intemperate rush to theory being just two of them. The American philosopher of science Larry Laudan’s concept of “research tradition” offers a way of seeing the wood from the trees with respect to multiple theories in any field, and his “problem-solving” notion is a useful yardstick when it comes to the comparative evaluation of theories of SLA. Substantive future progress, and arguably, the prospects of future research in the field as a whole, will require greater clarity and maturity in these areas.