Moving Beyond “Lingualism”: Multilingual Embodiment and Multimodality in SLA

Abstract

A decade ago, I wrote about the monolingual bias in second language acquisition (SLA) research as follows:There is a monolingual bias inherent in use of the word “second” in SLA, as “second” implies a unitary and singular “fi rst” as a predecessor. However, as has often been pointed out by sociolinguists such as Edwards (1994) and Romaine (1995), monolingualism is certainly not the norm in the world-bi and multilingualism are-and in countries which traditionally have “monolingualised” immigrants (e.g. the US and Britain), recent changes in the nature of immigration (e.g. communities which retain a large proportion of their home culture such as Mexican Americans and British Sikhs) have meant that in schools in many urban areas, a high proportion of students are multilingual, often having variable competence in two, three or four languages, as they take up the formal study of secondary school French or Japanese. In addition, even in contexts that are identifi ed as monolingual, either without or before any exposure to another language via formal education or migration, it is quite likely that these individuals are, in any case, multi-dialectal. By multi-dialectal, I mean that they will have a command of two or more variants of the language of which they are said to be monolingual speakers. Thus . . . in my early years, I would have been classifi ed as a monolingual speaker of Standard American English, despite the fact that I had at least one other code as part of my repertoire, African American Vernacular English. (Block, 2003, pp. 34-35)I went on from this opening comment to argue that the monolingual fi rstlanguage (L1) speaker posited in much SLA research is assumed to be on adevelopmental path that ends with an interlanguage in the second language (L2) that is separate from the L1, and in some cases this individual will achieve the status of a dual monolingual (i.e., with a command of two languages held separately in the mind). By contrast, I examined Vivian Cook’s (1996) notion of “multicompetence,” which, instead of focusing on how most adult L2 learners never reach what might be considered complete L2 competence, emphasizes the fact that adult L2 learners nonetheless develop “the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind” (Cook, 1996, p. 65; cf. Ortega, this volume). However, this knowledge is not divided up neatly into separate packages corresponding to each language with which the individual has had contact. Thus, at any given point in time during the L2 learning process, the entirety of an L2 learner’s linguistic competence “is not just the sum of her/his complete linguistic competence in the L1 and her/his incomplete competence in the L2; rather it is a system that contains both the L1 and the L2” (Block, 2003, pp. 36-37). And, of course, what goes for L1 and L2 goes for L1 and L2 and L3 and so on. Over the years, Cook has shown how grammatical knowledgesyntax, morphology, and lexis-is stored as a unifi ed though ever-evolving linguistic resource rather than as separate languages. However, he has not limited himself to these areas, as he has also shown that pragmatic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and pronunciation may be held as multicompetence (Cook, 2007). He has thus developed a theory of competence, which while language based, encompasses far more than language. I will come back to this notion later in this chapter.