Introduction to a Colloquium: The Scope and Form of a Theory of Second Language Learning

Abstract

This paper introduces a colloquium on the scope and form of a theory of second language learning. It argues for the value of a general theory, considers the relation of theory to practice, and argues that the papers that follow-by McLaughlin; Bialystok; Long; Schumann; Sokolik; and Hatch, Shirai, and Fantuzzi;-point to a field where new and competing paradigms are being explored. The history of language teaching is sometimes written as though it follows a simple progression: Every few years, a new theory appears to drive out the old one and furnish a new method. Analysis shows that this view is flawed. First, new theories do not generally succeed in replacing their predecessors but continue to coexist with them uncomfortably; second, theories have not usually been realized in new methods but have more mundanely provided ideological underpinnings, intellectual backing, or advertising slogans for some newly discovered teaching panacea; and finally, teaching practice in the foreign language classroom has not usually been derived from the new methods but continued as a loosely eclectic amalgam of old habits with new garnishes. Recent study of the reality of language teaching has in fact shown that it is often economic or political factors rather than theoretical ones that have determined school policy and classroom practice (Phillipson, 1990; Richards, 1984). Nor do the theories offer a firm and unchanging basis. For a short time in the 1950s and early 1960s the harmony of the pact between structural linguists and Skinnerian psychologists provided justification for the Audiolingual Method. By the 1970s the hegemony of transformational grammar and cognitive psychology empowered much of second language acquisition research. More recently we