From Douglas Firs to Giant Cuttlefish: Reimagining language learning
- Publisher:
- Multilingual Matters
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics: Voices, Questions and Alternatives, 2023, pp. 71-89
- Issue Date:
- 2023-06-30
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715IntroductionSince the focus of this book is on decolonizing sociolinguistics, we might ask what a discussion of second language development (psycholin-guistics) is doing here. The fact that such a distinction exists, however, is precisely part of the problem, and one of many aspects of the field that need decolonizing: How did language learning become separated off into something called psycholinguistics as if it has nothing to do with (socio)linguistics?1 Language learning is a sociolinguistic question and the sooner it can be reclaimed from the claws of cognition the better. Just as ideas such as distributed cognition (Hutchins, 2014) have returned pro-cesses of thought to the social and material world – suggesting that the only way to understand cognition is by studying it ethnographically – so language development can be usefully reclaimed from its cognitive con-fines. This is not in itself, of course, an adequate decolonizing project, but it is a starting point for the rewilding (Thorne et al., 2021) of language learning and education. Once we have made this first move, language learning can be reassembled from alternative perspectives.Apart from the problems with each of the three terms – second (enu-merable progression), language (discrete system) and acquisition (gaining possession) – several more general points can be made about studies in second language acquisition (SLA). They developed with a narrow focus on the ‘linguistic–cognitive’ (Ortega, 2014: 33) dimensions of additional language learning, assuming that language was a set of grammatical and lexical items learned in sequential order and that this learning was some-thing that occurred in the head. This cognitive information processing model, with its computer-oriented metaphors – input, output, language data, attention-getting devices and so forth (Johnson, 2004) – has long dominated the field, and has its roots in a set of Euro-American traditions that separated languages and humans in particular and rather peculiar ways.
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