Ontologies of language, Second Language Acquisition, and world Englishes

Abstract

What has strained the relations between the fields of world Englishes and Second Language Acquisition (SLA), denounced by Sridhar and Sridhar (1986;Sridhar, 1994) and felt by many others during these past 30 years? I first characterize a number of the differences in disciplinary goals and orientations that have contributed to the tensions. I then argue that it is ultimately differences in the ontologies of language that are the largest hurdle to establishing synergies between the two fields. I weigh what has been gained and lost in SLA by the unquestioned adoption of essentialist ontologies and argue that it has locked SLA research into a monolingual worldview that the field can no longer afford. I also call for the continuation of research that illuminates multilingual success but also addresses the phenomenological and emic reality of the 'native' and 'nonnative' dichotomy, as many multilinguals experience their 'nonnativeness' as oppression that they must constantly manage and negotiate under the hegemony of monolingual ideologies. I close with four recommendations for changes in SLA that might help a new future where WE and SLA mutually benefit from their disciplinary achievements.

SLA and the Study of Equitable Multilingualism

“…Important voices in SLA have long denounced the situation, most prominently Cook (; Cook & Li Wei, ), but change has been remarkably slow. Upon more reflection (Ortega, , ), dismantling the monolingual bias and nativespeakerism may have proven to be so difficult in SLA because rejecting them would encroach on disciplinary identity. May () also linked SLA's disciplinary identity to the entrenched construction of deficit.…”

“…The idea of a finish line in itself also instills linguistic insecurity in language learners. Understandings of language as an object that is bounded and fixed, and which can be learned to completeness (the finish line) reflect essentialist ontologies of language, including Chomskyan and structuralist ones, both explicitly or implicitly espoused by much linguistic–cognitive SLA (Ortega, ).…”

Developing, Analyzing and Sharing Multivariate Datasets: Individual Differences in L2 Learning Revisited

“…Importantly, much of the late L2 speech literature has been exclusively concerned with the relationship between learners’ extrinsic and intrinsic individual differences, and the degree of L2 phonological nativelikeness . In the field of SLA, however, there has been a consensus that the linguistic behaviors of bilinguals and monolinguals are essentially different and that L2 speakers’ linguistic performance should be compared within themselves instead of in comparison with an idealized monolingual native speaker model (e.g., Ortega, 2018). In line with this paradigm shift, a growing number of scholars have emphasized the importance of examining L2 speech from the perspective of comprehensibility rather than nativelikeness (Derwing & Munro, 2013; Saito et al, 2017).…”

Mixing, multilingualism, and intelligibility

“…Multilinguals, and language mixers, constitute an enormous part of humanity, but are such a small presence in theory – both linguistic theory and communication theory. But, as Lourdes Ortega () insightfully notes, ‘Who we study determines what we know.’ Just as the concept of world Englishes calls for, in the words of Kingsley Bolton, ‘decentering and re‐centering’ English language studies, the discovery of the significance of language mixing calls for a decentering of linguistic theory from its monolingual bias and re‐centering it on multilingual communication, of which language mixing constitutes such a dynamic part. As Georges Lüdi (2003, p. 186) noted ‘the idea of a monolithic culture has been replaced by a more dynamic and constructivist model of the way in which “culture” operates.…”