Multi-competence: Black Hole or Wormhole? by Vivian Cook

Language is the central or peripheral concern of many academic disciplines, whether linguistics, psychology, sociology, education or others. Each of them, however, approaches it from a different perspective, affecting their theories, their research methods and their conclusions, just as the same landscape looks different to a geologist, a historian, a landscape painter and a farmer: the observer’s purpose dictates what is seen. Because of their differing concepts of language, researchers from across the different disciplines who think they are arguing about substance are in fact disagreeing about rival views of language. Tomasello (2003: 7) for example states ‘the principles and structures whose existence is difficult to explain without universal grammar … are theory-internal affairs and simply do not exist in usage-based theories of language—full stop’. In reverse the usual linguists' criticisms of connectionism are, not that it is wrong, but that it is not about language as conceived of by linguists (Pinker and Prince 1988).

Now that second language acquisition (SLA) research draws on a wide range of language-related disciplines, it faces the same problem. Is, say, the concept of language used in UG-based SLA research such as White (2003) the same as that in Vygotskyan studies such as Lantolf (2000)? That used in studying bilingual networks (Li Wei 1994) the same as that in psycholinguistics research (Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch 2005)? The language in transfer studies (Odlin, 2005) the same as that used with emotion (Pavlenko 2005)? If SLA research indeed has found a framework within which all these views of language are compatible, it is a major intellectual feat. If, however, they are just accidentally juxtaposed, SLA research needs to clarify the specific concept of language used in each area.

As it is, SLA research hardly bothers to define the ‘second language’ in its own name. Hunting through the 1881 pages of three encyclopaedic books – Second Language Research (Mackey and Gass 2005), Handbook of Bilingualism (Kroll and De Groot 2005), and The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition Research (Doughty and Long 2003) – the only discussion of ‘second language’ to be found occur in two footnotes (Mackey and Gass 2005: 185; Kroll and De Groot 2005: 25), making points about second versus foreign language, supplemented by a remark that SLA includes ‘second (third, etc) languages and dialects’ (Doughty and Long 2003: 3). Perhaps the meaning of ‘second language’ is so obvious and unambiguous that readers can transfer their commonsense everyday use of the term; but this would in effect reduce SLA research from a science to the investigation of naïve folk beliefs. Nothing defines your journey more than your first step: for SLA research this means a straightforward explanation of its basic terms ‘language’ and ‘second language’. ‘Any theory about second language acquisition needs to be clear what it means by language’ (VanPatten and Williams 2007: 7). The intention here is then to discuss the ‘second language’ in second language acquisition research, following in the footsteps of Block (2003) and Stern (1983).

As this paper starts from language, it looks to linguistics as the main source of ideas about language itself, rather than say psychology, sociology or educational research, which have many other concerns. Indeed, given the diverse range of psychological and cognitive models entering SLA research, a parallel psychology-based paper could doubtless be written on the concepts of the human mind in SLA research. This linguistic orientation revisits some fundamental questions about language and community, involving Humboldt, de Saussure and Chomsky. Some of their relationships to SLA research seem obvious even if seldom discussed, say the reliance of SLA research on a standard language. Others are complex and perplexing. The following represents at best a preliminary sketch in pencil rather than a final painting in oils.

While the discussion tries to be even-handed, its bias is towards the multi-competence perspective in which the L2 (second language) user is treated is an independent person in their own right rather than defined in relationship to the native speaker (Cook 2003). It is related to other recent work in this approach, on interlanguage (Cook 2006), the L2 user (Cook 2007) and L2 user groups (Author in prep).

First we need to look at some meanings of the English word ‘language’. One latent danger is indeed that the apparent translation equivalents for ‘language’ in other languages have slightly different implications, particularly troublesome in a field of multilingual researchers largely writing in English. For example, de Saussure’s three-way French distinction between ‘langue’, ‘langage’ and ‘parole’ (de Saussure 1915/1976) has been a stumbling-block for English translators and linguists for almost a century. The meanings of ‘language’ used here have been chosen to illuminate SLA research rather than as watertight definitions. Table 1 gives five thumbnails of ‘language’, for convenience given the labels Lang₁ to Lang₅, which will be used in the discussion.

Lang₁	human representation system
Lang₂	an abstract external entity
Lang₃	a set of actual or potential sentences
Lang₄	the possession of a community
Lang₅	the knowledge in the mind of an individual
Table 1 meanings of ‘language’

- the specifically human system for communicating and representing information (Lang₁),

Many other meanings are of course possible, seen in ‘dolphin language’, ‘the language of flowers’, ‘watch your language’ and so on.

From Cicero in 55BC (De Inventione, I, IV) to Hauser et al. (2002) in 2002AD, people have seen human beings as standing out from other creatures by having language – ‘a species-unique format for cognitive representation’ (Tomasello 2003: 13). This is not to say that there is agreement over what the human aspects of language actually are; any feature claimed to be unique to humans is soon found somewhere in the animal kingdom. Hauser et al. (2002) for instance argued that the sole distinctive element of human language is recursive embedding, that is to say structures embedded within structures of the same type over and over again; soon after, Gentner et al (2006) trained starlings to react to apparently recursive embedding.

In second language acquisition, the second language is a human language, with the minor exception of artificial languages, whether Klingon or Prolog. Perhaps a second language is not the same as a natural human language: ‘the L2 learners are not only creating a rule system which is far more complicated than the native system, but which is not definable in linguistic theory’ (Clahsen and Muysken 1986: 116). For White (2003: xi), a central question of SLA research is ‘the extent to which the underlying linguistic competence of learners or speakers of a second language (L2) is governed by the same universal properties that govern natural language in general’. The most fundamental question that SLA research can ask is indeed whether a second language is language at all. The consequence of second languages not being Lang₁ languages would be that SLA research could be investigated in the same way as the learning of any human cognitive abilities like chess-playing and presumably be handled by psychologists within general human learning rather than by SLA research, as indeed happens in psychology books such as Anderson (1983).

The proof of its peculiar un-language-like status would, however, depend upon primary research into the nature of human language itself: we need to know for certain what Lang₁ is before we can say what it’s not. But this remains as controversial as ever. The syntactic model within which Clahsen and Muysken (1986) made their claims for instance is far from the Minimalist Program version used today (Cook and Newson 2007). Profound as this issue may be, it needs to be tested through research based on sound contemporary theories of language before it can begin to be assessed, not single pieces of evidence based on one evanescent theory.

‘Language’ also refers to an abstract entity – objective knowledge in Popper’s world 3 of abstract ideas (Popper 1972: 159), as in ‘the English language’ or ‘the Chinese language’. Lang₂ is something out there in the world of abstractions, like the rules of football, a creation of the human mind that stands outside any individual and that can be captured in codified rules in a dictionary and a grammar book, Le Petit Robert (2006) for French words, A Grammar Of Contemporary English (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik 1972) for English grammar, sometimes legislated for by institutions such as the French Academy. The Lang₂ sense of ‘language’ captures the idea of this abstract entity somewhere out there, a Platonic ideal of language.

Like other objective knowledge, Lang₂is not the same as the subjective knowledge in the native speaker’s mind (Lang₅ below): Lang₂ is a product of human thinking, not part of the mind itself, an abstract entity outside human beings altogether, as football is an abstract idea separate from an actual game. No single person knows a Lang₂ language – no speaker of English knows more than a fraction of the 616,500 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1994). Lang₂ entities can be listed and counted – English, Chinese and so on. A Lang₂often becomes a symbol of a particular culture or country and hence one language gets lauded over others: ‘Most books on English imply in one way or another that our language is superior to all others’ (Bryson 1991: 3). The popular clamour about the decline of language, exemplified in the best-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Truss 2002), shows the gap between codified language and people’s actual language. People are proud of their Lang₂ and loyal to it, even if they see their own knowledge of it as imperfect.

L2 learners and teachers say that they are learning the Chinese language or the Italian language; it is an aspirational goal. While what L2 users are doing must relate in some way to the abstract Lang₂ entity, the connection between language as Lang₂ objective knowledge and as Lang₅ subjective knowledge is that between an artefact of human minds and the contents of an actual mind. The L2 user does not know a complete Lang₂ language any more or less than the monolingual.

SLA research cannot then expect the L2 user to conform to a Lang₂language rather than to what a speaker actually knows or says (Cook 1979). Any comparison between natives and non-natives on some aspect of language has to be based on equivalent meanings of language rather than on deviance from an abstract Lang₂.

A complementary version of Lang₂ is ‘language’ as a socio-political construct. Defining a language has always been difficult. The attempt to see it as mutually comprehensible dialects was doomed to failure by the many dialect speakers of English who cannot understand each other, say a Southern Received Pronunciation (RP) speaker encountering a Newcastle Geordie, and by the groups which can understand each other readily but claim allegiance to different languages, say Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, and by villages in a dialect chain between languages as on the north-west Italian/French border. Some languages are defined by writing system; Chinese is a single language because its eight or so mutually incomprehensible spoken ‘dialects’ share the same written form (or almost do since Taiwan uses a traditional script, mainland China a simplified script).

Countries or nations are often linked to Lang₂, as in the aphorism attributed to Weinreich, ‘A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy’. The division of Scandinavia into separate countries created different languages for purposes of national identity. Lang₂ can also be identified with religion; Urdu and Hindi are virtually the same language spoken by different religious groups, distinguished by their written scripts. Lang₂ has been used to justify wars of territoriality, as in Hitler’s claims to German-speaking areas of Europe, fostered as part of the independence movement for minority groups such as Catalans, imposed upon conquered territories like Japanese names imposed on Koreans in 1939, and used as a unifying lingua franca to fight against its native speakers, as in the Black People’s Convention in South Africa (Biko 1978).

This issue goes way outwith the remit of SLA research. Leaders of nations and religions will continue to use Lang₂as a political tool when it suits their ends. Nevertheless SLA researchers need to remember that defending the existence of a second Lang₂ in a situation, say Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland, or introducing a second Lang₂into a situation, say English into Singapore, can have immense consequences, as can suppressing the L1 in the L2 user, say by making signing children sit on their hands in class (Conrad 1979). Advocating the normalcy of bilingualism like Grosjean (1989) or L2 users’ rights like Gomes da Matos (2002) is making a political statement, not just taking an academic position. The choice of which Lang₂ to teach as a second language in an educational system is seldom politically neutral, whether English as the ‘first language’ of Singapore or Mandarin and Arabic as ‘first foreign languages’ for the UK secondary school.

For many languages, the Lang₂ concept is based on a standard language spoken by a particular social class or group in a particular country – a status dialect. English in this sense refers to the usage of RP speakers, a small minority of people in England, or Standard American English (SAE) speakers, also a small proportion of those in the United States.

SLA research has not usually taken anything but the standard language into consideration; variation and acceptability of non-status dialects are ignored. A speaker at a TEFL conference in Birmingham, England, explained the desirability of teaching the third person ‘s’ verb inflection because of its frequent omission by L2 users; a member of the audience asked why, since speakers of Norfolk dialect omitted this inflection, British Indian speakers could not do so too. Jenkins (2006) gives the parallel example of the invariable tag ‘innit?’ being acceptable from a native speaker but the invariable tag ‘isn’t it?’ being unacceptable from an non-native speaker. Nor does SLA research usually extend its brief to dialects used in countries other than the original home country, say speakers of Australian or Singaporean English or of Cameroonian or Quebec French.

SLA research needs to accommodate the differences between the idealised Lang₂ standard form of the language and other dialects (Li Wei 2000) in its research designs and to control for the dialects involved as L1 or L2. Claiming that a form is inappropriate in an L2 user’s speech means knowing the dialect they have encountered rather than assuming the only source is a standard language. Without such information, misleading claims may be made about the L2 user’s differences from the native speaker; are Chinese students in Newcastle wrong if they distinguish singular ‘you’ from plural ‘yous’ as does Geordie? SLA research has to take on the dialect issue, not simply assume that the language that the L2 users hear and aim at is a standard Lang₂.

Multiple languages may also be covered by the same umbrella Lang₂ name – Australian English, Standard Indian English, Hinglish, Aboriginal English, Singlish, Spanglish and all the others. ‘English’ is now a countable noun with a plural ‘Englishes’. Indeed English has now become Global English, English as Lingua Franca (ELF) or English as the only hypercentral language (De Swaan 2001). If English as a Lang₂ entity is founded on a nation of native speakers, taken literally, the other Englishes are not English at all, as defenders of English have insisted. New Lang₂ languages need new names – French and Italian, or Serbian and Croatian. The approach of christening new Englishes Hinglish and Spanglish seems to be taking this route.

A higher level abstract entity is needed, say hypercentral language (De Swaan 2001), defined without reference to a specific community of native speakers – ‘SupraEnglish’ – having both local varieties defined by geographical communities such as Aboriginal English or RP and non-local varieties spoken by international communities such as businessmen. The countable Lang₂ sense is no longer adequate for languages with international roles. Above the Lang₂ languages lie the hypercentral language English and supercentral languages such as Arabic and Chinese. SLA research needs also to accommodate a country-internal differences between an elite standard and dialects, recognising both the L1 and L2 speakers as members of particular groups of speakers rather than the all-encompassing faceless group of native speakers (Author in prep).

An overall issue is whether languages like English can be handled in the same way as languages like Japanese. Recent years have seen an explosion in the investigation of Global English as a non-national community. Claims are made about the whole of second language acquisition based on this, for instance the alleged neglect of ELF within SLA research (Jenkins 2006). Here we can raise rather than settle the issue of whether the second language acquisition of English is now different from that of local languages. Researchers need to be cautious in extending ideas based on the peculiar status of English to second language acquisition as a whole.

In the Lang₃sense, a language is a set of sentences: all the sentences that have been said or could be said. This corresponds to de Saussure’s use of ‘parole’ for the actual language product (de Saussure 1915/1976) and the processes that produce it, one sense of Chomsky’s ‘performance’ (Chomsky 1965) in all but name. English is the name for one such set of sentences, Chinese for another. The Lang₃sense recurred throughout twentieth century linguistics, even if it has not made it into the OED: ‘a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements’ (Chomsky 1957: 13). Early generative grammar aimed to account for all the sentences of the language, corpus linguistics for the properties in selected texts, leading to generalisations about patterns and frequencies, as in say the British National Corpus (1994) and Pattern Grammar (Hunston and Francis 2000). Lang₃ seems to be the sense in which language is internalised in usage-based learning (Tomasello 2003): language emerges from the array of data that the learner encounters, distilled from a corpus.

The second language has been considered a Lang₃ set, for example calling interlanguage ‘the utterances which are produced when the learner attempts to say sentences of a TL [target language]’ (Selinker 1972). Hence the study of corpora of L2 users’ sentences has become popular in recent years, as in the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (Granger 2003), or the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) (Seidlhofer 2002), and in L2 spelling research (van Berkel 2005; Okada 2005). SLA research too can treat language as a Lang₂set and investigate it through techniques of corpus investigation.

For some researchers a description of a Lang₃set is an account of patterns, regularities and frequencies in concrete data. In the Lang₃ sense, language is not an abstraction but a concrete object, made up of physical sounds, gestures or written symbols. Patterns can be extracted from these primary data, both by the linguist and the learner. But they remain patterns of data rather than systems of knowledge or behaviour. In other words they are hard to link to the Lang₅ mental representations to be discussed below.

But how can the Lang₃ set of sentences produced or encountered by a L2 user be categorised as belonging to one language or another? Weinreich (1953: 7) said that ‘A structuralist theory of communication which distinguishes between speech and language ... necessarily assumes that “every speech event belongs to a definite language”’; a recent variant is ‘I define bilingual input as dual‑language input consisting mainly of substantial numbers of utterances that both lexically and structurally belong to one language only’ (De Houwer 2005: 31). These views do not recognise that the L1 sentences a L2 user produces often differ from those of a monolingual native speaker, not just their L2 sentences, let alone sentences with code-switching. The starting point for Lang₃SLA research should be the whole set of sentences; only later can the sentences be assigned to languages according to other criteria. Bilingual speech therapists have indeed long argued that therapy should be based on the child’s first language as well as their second: you can’t tell what’s wrong with either if you don’t look at both (Duncan 1989; Stow and Dodd 2003).

Lang₄, the possession of a language community, is often seen as complementary to Lang₅, the knowledge in the individual’s mind: ‘although languages are thus the work of nations … they still remain the self-creations of individuals ’ (Humboldt 1836/1999: 44) or ‘le langage a un côté individuel et un côté social, et l’on ne peut concevoir l’un sans l’autre’ (language has an individual side and a social side and one cannot imagine one without the other) (de Saussure 1976: 24). Lang₄ is a social phenomenon, a cultural product shared among a group – ‘the English-speaking world’, ‘native speakers of Chinese’ etc. A language confers identity as a member of a particular human group.

It is tempting to equate the community with the nation, like Humboldt – people born in Korea tend to speak Korean. But in many cases it is an invisible community unconstrained by political borders that counts: Kurdish is spoken by 9 million people in Iraq, Turkey and Iran though there is no modern country of Kurdistan (Gordon 2005). At another level comes the micro-community of fellow-workers with a common purpose but no common language, say the world of professional football where players and managers work together in a situation in which a British team such as Chelsea often fields a team with only a single native speaker of English (Kellerman et al, 2005), is managed by a Spaniard, José Mourinho, and owned by a Russian, Roman Abramovitch.

Mostly SLA research has sidestepped the question of community by assuming that there is no such thing as L2 user communities, only monolingual native communities: ‘An individual’s use of two languages supposes the existence of two different language communities; it does not suppose the existence of a bilingual community’ (Mackey 1972: 554). SLA researchers, language teachers, and indeed many L2 users themselves have seen the L2 user as trying to join the monolingual community of native speakers; passing for a native speaker became a shibboleth. How age affects second language acquisition for example is defined as whether younger L2 users achieve a native-like level more easily than older learners: ‘…some learners can achieve very high levels of native-like pronunciation in mostly constrained tasks but have yet to show that later learners can achieve the same level of phonology as native speakers in production’ (DeKeyser and Larson Hall 2005: 96): the only thing that matters is whether they speak like natives.

Taking the monolingual community as the norm parallels the mindset that sees the monolingual as the norm for human beings. As Canagarajah (2005: 17) says of Sri Lanka, ‘One can imagine the difficulty for people in my region to identify themselves as native speakers of “a” language. People may identify themselves as speakers of different languages very fluidly, based on the different contexts of interaction and competing claims on their affiliation.’ Starting from multi-competent communities may be another demonstration that the Lang₂ labels for languages are no longer relevant to SLA research. SLA research has to state explicitly the type of community that its research is dealing with, whether a putative monolingual one or a multilingual one – the multi-competence of the community (Brutt-Griffler 2002), discussed further in Cook (2007) and Author (in prep).

Language is also the mental possession of an individual, Lang₅: ‘a language is a state of the faculty of language, an I‑language, in technical usage’ (Chomsky 2005: 2), complementing Lang₄. An individual has a mental state, consisting of rules, weightings, principles or whatever, which constitutes their language – competence alias ‘the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language’ (Chomsky 1965: 4). When a person knows Lang₅English, they possess something that allows them to connect the world outside to the concepts inside their minds in a particular way.

The difficulty in reconciling the Lang₅ individual psychological sense of language with other senses led to calling what is in the mind, not a ‘language’, but a ‘grammar’: 'The grammar in a person's mind/brain is real; it is one of the real things in the world. The language (whatever that may be) is not' (Chomsky 1982: 5), i.e. in current terms a Lang₅ is not a Lang₂. Language in the mind is an epiphenomenon, a side-effect rather than the real thing; hence linguists talk about Universal Grammar rather than Universal Language. The state of the L2 speaker’s mind does not necessarily correspond to any of the actual Lang₂ languages of the world, only to the possible Lang₁ schemata laid down in Universal Grammar. Hence a child’s two‑year-old competence and an adult speaker’s mature competence are both grammars, alias languages. The connections between the psychological Lang₅ state and an abstract Lang₂entity such as English or Chinese are indirect. The system in a car-driver’s mind in some way corresponds to the legal guide called The Highway Code in England (Driving Standards Agency 2005) – English people tend to drive on the left, as The Highway Code suggests – but the system in their minds is not The Highway Code itself.

Chomsky’s 1965 definition of competence also rejected variation within the same speaker. Individuals, however may change register from one moment to another, say along Biber’s five dimensions (Biber 1988): speech and writing vary inter alia according to who we are speaking to, where we are speaking and what we are speaking about. Within generative grammar theory, Haegeman and Ihsane (2002) showed that English diary writing by Virginia Woolf and the fictional Bridget Jones is pro-drop in that the first person is often a null subject – ‘played gramophone’, ‘was worried that might split’ – unlike most other registers of English. Like the exclusion of performance, the lack of variation in the individual speaker is a matter of idealisation, not fact.

As well as choosing between the variations available to a monolingual native speaker, the L2 user has the choice of which language to use. Code-switching involves at least as many factors as L1 situational variation – topic, role, person addressed, etc (Romaine 1995). L2 users are as changeable as monolingual native speakers. Regarding L2 Lang₅ knowledge as constant and inflexible is even more of an idealisation than in monolingual research as it ignores code-switching.

The competence/performance distinction soon led to difficulties in connecting Lang₃performance data with Lang₅ competence in language acquisition research. To go over familiar ground (Cook 1990), Lang₃performance data are full of mistakes and disfluencies (the degeneracy of the data); many mental rules of grammar are not derivable from the properties of Lang₃ sets of sentence (the poverty-of-the-stimulus). Hence competence is not derivable neatly from sheer Lang₂ data through discovery procedures (Chomsky 1957), as usage-based linguistics would have it (Tomasello 2003). Over the years SLA research methods have found it equally hard to bridge the gap, for example whether grammaticality judgments test competence or performance. Any publishable piece of research connecting Lang₃ with Lang₅ needs to specify the intervening chain of logic.

SLA research has also encountered this in the debate whether acquired knowledge can connect directly to learnt knowledge (Krashen 1985). While acquired knowledge is clearly a mental Lang₅, the learnt knowledge may be parts of a Lang₂. The psychological question of whether learnt knowledge can be transformed into acquired knowledge is a spin-off of the logical question of whether the Lang₂ knowledge of a entity is convertible into a Lang₅; much of the discussion seems a disguised debate about the relationship of Lang₂ to Lang₅

The meanings of ‘language’ discussed so far see it as static. Yet no aspect of language stays still for long. The English of 2000AD is not the English of 1600AD in vocabulary or tense system, as any page of Shakespeare attests; even Lang₁ human language evolves (Hauser et al 2002). Lang₂ grammars and dictionaries have a short shelf-life. Lang₄ communities also change: new ones come into being, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language (Senghas et al 2004), or emerge from suppression, like Ulster Scots, now recognised by the EU, old communities die out, like Dyribal speakers in Australia (Schmidt 1985). In the individual Lang₅ sense, a person’s language knowledge may be growing, as in children acquiring their first language, or declining, as in language attrition through injury or change of circumstance. The classic ‘steady-state’ competence of Chomskyan theory is another convenient fiction.

Change in language is also part of SLA research (Grosjean 1998), beyond the obvious sense in which individual language acquisition involves change. In the social Lang₄ sense, L2 user communities too develop over time, for example the Italian lingua franca community emerging among migrant workers in German-speaking communities (Schmid 1994), or they die out in the eight stages of GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) (Fishman 1991); SLA research relates to an L2 community at a particular moment and to changes in the L2 user communities. The individual’s Lang₅ L2 knowledge is seldom static, whether acquiring or losing the language through attrition (Schmid et al 2004); SLA research has the double burden of taking in possibly changing first language and second languages in the user, discussed further in Cook (2007).

While change is more relevant to some aspects of second language acquisition than others, it surely has to be borne in mind in everything to do with language; time does not stand still for the language, the individual or the community – the philosophy of dynamic systems (De Bot et al 2005).

Let us now try to reunite the ‘second’ with ‘language’, by bringing together some of the uses of ‘second language’. The rare discussion in SLA research itself is normally only about the ‘second/foreign language’ distinction, with the exceptions of Stern (1983) and Block (2003). Talking about languages as ‘first’ and ‘second’ is not just counting ‘one/two’ but ordering languages with ordinal numbers. What kinds of order could these be?

Countries lay down their official languages by constitution or other means – the European Union now has 23 (European Parliament 2007), with the most multilingual institutions in the world (De Swaan 2001: 144). ‘English and French are the official languages of Canada and have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use’ (Official Languages Act 2006: preamble). In Canada official language communities are not the same as mother tongue communities (Churchill 2004); all citizens belong to one or other or both of the two official language communities regardless of mother tongue. The official language of a country has little to do with whether people speak it as their Lang₄ or Lang₅; French is the official language of Senegal though 75% of the population speak Wolof. Officialdom may also lay down which language should be the first foreign language, and indeed second foreign language (European Union, 1995).

Official languages are examples of countable Lang₂ entities: it is taken for granted that the language of England is English. Though the definition of official language and foreign languages may vary from one country to another, nevertheless these concepts have to be allowed for in educationally-oriented SLA research. In Block (2003)’s survey none of the 14 interaction-oriented SLA articles specified the participants’ experience with other languages.

The numbering of languages may also correspond to the chronological sequence of an individual’s development or acquisition: ‘I use the term second language learning to refer to the acquisition of a language once a first language has been learnt, say after the age of two’ (Spolsky 1989: 2). The first language is acquired before the second in the lifetime of the individual; Joseph Conrad learnt Polish before he learnt French, making Polish his L1, French his L2. This applies then both to the individual gaining membership of a second Lang₄ community and to them gaining a second Lang₅ mental system: one language comes before another in their life-history. Simultaneous early bilingualism in which the baby handles two languages from birth is then something else, covered in Swain’s memorable phrase ‘bilingualism as a first language’ (Swain 1972).

The use of ‘second’ should not be taken too literally. Many sources maintain that it subsumes later languages, as in Doughty and Long (2003) or ‘second language: … may actually refer to the third or fourth language’ (Lightbown and Spada 2006: 204). In this sense English was Conrad’s L2, although he learnt it third. The implication that learning of languages beyond the second is no different from learning a second language is denied by those working with trilingualism or multilingualism, say Leung (2005: 39): ‘Third language acquisition … is very often dismissed as simply another case of “second” language acquisition (L2A)’.

Sequence of acquisition could involve several meanings of ‘language’. One is the official standard language that the person encounters first, a Lang₂, English before French say. A second is the Lang₄ community the person belongs to first compared to a community they join later, say the Chinese community in Singapore before the English-speaking bilingual community. A third is the Lang₅ mental system that the person acquires after their first Lang₅. In this sense it is open to the objections detailed above: the mind does not contain one object, L1, to which it later adds a second, L2, a glass of whisky followed by a glass of water, but, as the L2 develops, it builds up a complex system relating L1 and L2 together, whisky increasingly mixed with water, as documented in Pavlenko & Jarvis (2007). The wholistic multi-competence argument is that the mind is a single linguistic system at some level (Cook 2003), shared by the dynamic systems approach (De Bot et al 2005); dividing this complex system into bits labelled ‘first’ and ‘second’ is arbitrary.

However first and second can also be a matter of value judgement: something which comes first is better than something which comes second. Your first language is the language you command best, your second is therefore worse: ‘ “second language” indicates a lower level of actual or perceived proficiency’ (Stern 1983: 13).

A much-explored topic over the years has been language ‘dominance’: ‘We use the terms "first language" and "second language" to referto relative language dominance’ (Chee et al 2004: 15270). This could be the dominance of one Lang₄ community over another: ‘A language used by a socio-economically dominant group in society or which has received a political or cultural status superior to that of other languages in the community’ (Hamers and Blanc 2000: 373). French was the dominant language in England from 1066 to 1385, yet undoubtedly most people spoke English, just as most people in India spoke Indian languages during the British Raj. Nor is the mother tongue necessarily closest to one’s identity; Myhill (2003: 84) points to ‘Hebrew in Israel and Yiddish in Ultra-Orthodox communities, in both of which cases native language is a distant second in terms of centrality to identity’.

More often dominance has meant psychological dominance of one Lang₅ language in the individual mind – ‘the second, and less dominant, language’ (van Hell and Dijkstra 2002: 780). Considerable effort was expended to establish the dominant language, reviewed in Flege et al (2002), for example the test batteries by Lambert (1955) and Macnamara (1969), leading to the concept of balanced bilinguals as ‘those equally fluent in two languages’ (Grosjean 1982: 233). However the L2 repertoire of an L2 user may be wider than their L1; they cannot be judged just on how well they can carry out L1 functions in the L2: Greek students in England for example say that they can only write essays in English since essay-writing did not feature in their L1 education.

These senses of dominance give priority to the first language. The dominance of one community over another is not relevant to multilingual communities where several languages are in balance. As Canagarajah (2005: 16) points out, ‘Although the now discredited notions such as native speaker or mother tongue speaker require us to identify ourselves according to our parental language or language of infancy, even the alternatives such as L1 and L2 force us to identify a single language as receiving primacy in terms of our time of acquisition or level of competence’. Nor does the dominance of one Lang₅ language in the individual’s mind square with the idea that the two languages form an interrelated system. Additionally it is probably only in these senses that your first language may change into your second if it becomes dominant in your external or internal life; otherwise a second language will remain second for evermore.

We can now come back to the second versus foreign language distinction, introduced into EFL teaching in the 1950s (Howatt 1984). A typical definition can be found in Klein (1986: 19): ‘… “foreign language’ is used to denote a language acquired in a milieu where it is normally not in use ….A “second language” on the other hand, is one that becomes another tool of communication alongside the first language; it is typically acquired in a social environment in which it is actually spoken.’

This incorporates two contrasts. One is function: a second language meets a real-life need of the L2 user, say to communicate with the majority community – a Chinese speaker using English in Newcastle upon Tyne; a foreign language fulfils no current need for the speaker – a Newcastle schoolchild learning French. The other contrast is location: a second language is learnt in a milieu where it is used by native speakers – German in Berlin; a foreign language is learnt in a place where it nor widely used – German in Japan. Block (2003) also draws out the further contrast that a second language is acquired naturalistically, a foreign language is learnt in a classroom.

Much SLA discussion does not take the second/foreign distinction on board, either rejecting it explicitly (Ellis 1985: 2); Mitchell & Myles 1998: 2), or playing safe by referring to ‘the learner of a second or foreign language’ (Council of Europe 1997: 12) or by using alternative formulations such as ‘first’ versus ‘foreign (Johnson 2001). The second/foreign distinction is then far from transparent. I used to teach English as a Foreign Language in London to students intending to return shortly to their own countries despite currently using it as a second language; students at English-medium universities may effectively be using it as a second language whether in Saudi Arabia or the Netherlands. De Groot & Hell (2005) perceive a difference between North American usage, where a language not native to a country can be either ‘foreign’ or ‘second’, and British usage, where ‘foreign’ means not spoken in a country and ‘second’ means not ‘native’ but used widely as medium of communication, such as English in Nigeria. There is the additional confusion that what is referred to as ‘foreign language teaching’ in North America is often called ‘modern language teaching’ in Europe. Stern (1983: 10) sums up: ‘ “foreign language” can be subjectively “a language which is not my L1” or objectively “a language which has no legal status within the national boundaries” ’.

The distinction was useful for EFL teachers in capturing two broad perspectives on their work. It applies most easily to languages that are confined to one locale: Finnish is either a foreign language outside Finland or a second language for people acquiring it within Finland. It is more problematic when it concerns languages that are widely spoken by non-native speakers to other non-native speakers across the globe (Berns 1990). A second language is presumably a Lang₄; acquiring a second language allows you to join another community. A foreign language, however, in one sense is the Lang₂ abstract entity laid down as a goal by education, in another the individual’s Lang₄ or Lang₅ potential stored up for future use.

A wide variety of people are learning second languages in diverse situations for many functions. The second/foreign language distinction oversimplifies the myriad dimensions of second language learning, as the papers in VanPatten and Lee (1990) bear out. To show its over-riding relevance would mean a substantial research programme, particularly when so many researchers manage perfectly well without it. Ellis (1994: 12) claims ‘it is possible there will be radical differences in both what is learnt and how it is learnt’ in second/foreign situations. True as this may be, without more evidence, we cannot tell if these factors are more crucial than any others.

To conclude, let us try to bring together some of the threads we have been following:

- our view of language is crucial to SLA research. The sheer complexity of human language has not been reflected in SLA research, which has taken refuge in standard languages and monolingual communities Not only is it necessary to allow for alternative concepts of language in different areas of research but it is also vital to observe proper caution when going from one meaning to another.

- time and again we have seen that it is hard to divide up the first and second language whether in the community, in the mind or in a set of sentences. The division between the two is arbitrary and possibly unnecessary. The domain of SLA research seems far wider than previously conceived.

- the distinctions between first, second and foreign language seem questionable, perhaps being rescued by the use of ‘additional’ (Block 2003). Speaking of first language acquisition in monolingual children is as meaningful as talking of first wives for people who may never have a second. There is little point in SLA research trotting out its mantra of second and foreign language.

The conclusion must be that language acquisition is language acquisition: human beings have a general language learning ability which they can apply to their native language and to other languages. If the environment is restricted to one language, people become monolinguals; otherwise they will be bilinguals or multilinguals. First or second language are historical terms inadequate to cover the complexity of language in our societies and in our minds.

Anderson, J. 1983. The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Baker, P. and J. Eversley 2000. Multilingual Capital. London: Battlebridge.

Berns, M. 1990, ‘“Second” and “foreign” in second language acquisition/foreign language learning: a sociolinguistic perspective’, in VanPatten and Lee (eds.), 3-12

Biber, D. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biko, S. 1978. I Write what I Like. The Bowerdan Press. Reprinted by Penguin, London. 1998.

Block, D. 2003. The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Brutt-Griffler, J. 2002. World English: a Study of its Development. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Canagarajah, A.S. 2005. ‘Reconstructing local knowledge, reconfiguring language studies’, in Canagarajah, A.S. (ed.): Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 3-24.

Cenoz, J. 2003. ‘The additive effect of bilingualism on third language acquisition: a review.’ International Journal of Bilingualism 7: 71-87.

Chee, M.W.L., C.S. Soon, H.L Lee and C. Pallier. 2004. ‘Left insula activation: a marker for language attainment in bilinguals.’ PNAS 101/42: 15265-15270.

Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Boston, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. 1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Boston, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York: Praeger.

Chomsky, N. 2005. ‘Three factors in language design.’ Linguistic Inquiry 36/1: 1-22.

Churchill, S. 2004. Official Languages in Canada: Changing the Language Landscape. Canadian Heritage: Official Languages Support Program Branch.

Cicero 55BC. De Inventione, I, IV. http://scrineum.unipv.it/wight/invs1.htm. Translation by C. D. Yonge in The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. London: George Bell & Sons.

Clahsen, H. and P. Muysken 1989. 'The UG paradox in L2 acquisition.' Second Language Research 5: 1‑29.

Cook, V.J. 1979. 'The English are only human.' English Language Teaching Journal XXXIII/3: 163-167.

Cook, V.J. 1990. 'Observational evidence and the UG theory of language acquisition', in I. Roca (ed.): Logical Issues in Language Acquisition. Dordrecht: Foris, 33-46.

Cook, V.J. (ed.) 2002. Portraits of the L2 User. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Cook, V.J. (ed.) 2003. Effects of the Second Language on the First. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Cook, V.J. 2006. ‘Interlanguage, multi-competence and the problem of the “second” language.’ Rivista di Psicolinguistica Applicata VI/3: 000-000

Cook, V.J. 2007. ‘The nature of the L2 user’, in Roberts, L. & A. Gurel (eds.): EUROSLA Yearbook. Vol. 7, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 000-000.

Cook, V.J. and B. Bassetti (eds.) 2005. Second Language Writing Systems. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Cook, V.J. and M. Newson 2007. Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Third edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Council of Europe 1997. Language policies for a multilingual and multicultural Europe. Strasburg: Council for Cultural Cooperation Committee CC-LANG (98) 1.

De Bot, K., W. Lowie and M. Verspoor 2005. second language acquisition: an Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge.

De Groot, A.M.B. and J.G. van Hell 2005. ‘The learning of foreign language vocabulary’, in Kroll and De Groot (eds.), 9-29.

De Houwer, A. 2005. ‘Early bilingual acquisition: focus on morphosyntax and the Separate Development Hypothesis’, in Kroll and De Groot (eds.), 30-48.

DeKeyser, R. and J. Larson Hall 2005. ‘What does the critical period really mean?’, in Kroll & De Groot (eds.), 88-108.

de Saussure, F. 1976. Cours de Linguistique Générale. Ed. Bally, C. and A. Sechehaye (1915). Critical edition by T. de Maurio. Paris: Payothèque, Payot .

de Swaan, A. 2001. Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Doughty, C. and M. Long 2003. Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Driving Standards Agency 2005. The Highway Code. London: The Stationery Office.

Duncan, D.M. 1989. Working with Bilingual Language Disability. London: Chapman and Hall.

Ellis, R. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

European Parliament 2007. http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/languages/index_en.html.

Fishman, J.A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Flege, J.E., I.R.A. Mackay and T. Piske 2002. ‘Assessing bilingual dominance.’ Applied Psycholinguistics 23: 567-598

Genesee, F. 2002. ‘Portrait of the bilingual child’, in Cook (ed.), 161-179.

Gentner, T.Q., K.M. Fenn, D. Margoliash and H.C Nusbaum 2006. ‘Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds’, Nature 440: 1204-1207.

Gomes da Matos, F. 2002. ‘Second language learners’ rights’, in Cook (ed.), 303-324

Gordon, R.G., Jr. (ed.) 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.

Granger, S. 2003. ‘The international corpus of learner English: a new resource for foreign language learning and teaching and second language acquisition research.’ TESOL Quarterly 37/3: 538-545.

Grosjean, F. 1982. Life with Two Languages. An Introduction to Bilingualism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Grosjean, F. 1989. 'Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person.' Brain and Language 36: 3-15

Grosjean, F. 1998. ‘Transfer and language mode.’ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1/ 3: 175-176.

Haegeman, L. and T. Ihsane 2002. ‘Adult null subjects in the non-pro drop languages: two diary dialects.’ Language Acquisition 9/4: 329-346.

Hamers, J. and M. Blanc 2000. Bilinguality and Bilingualism. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hauser, M.D., N. Chomsky and T.M. Fitch 2002. ‘The faculty of language: what is it, who has it and how did it evolve.’ Science 298: 1569-157.

Howatt, A. 1984. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Humboldt, W. von 1836/1999. On Language. Translated by P. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hunston, S. and G. Francis 2000. Pattern Grammar: a Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Jenkins, J. 2006. ‘Points of view and blind spots: ELF and SLA.’ International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16/2: 137-162.

Johnson, K. 2001. An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching. Harlow: Longman.

Kellerman, E., H. Koonen and M. van der Haagen 2005. ‘ “Feet speak louder than words”: a preliminary analysis of language provisions for professional footballers in the Netherlands’, in M.H. Long (ed.): Second Language Needs Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200-224.

Kerswill, P. 1994. Dialects converging: Rural speech in urban Norway. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klein, W. 1986. Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krashen, S. 1985. The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. New York: Longman.

Kroll, J. and A.M.B. de Groot (eds.) (2005). Handbook of Bilingualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lambert, W.E. 1955. ‘Measurement of the linguistic dominance of bilinguals.’ Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 50: 197-200.

Lantolf, J. (ed.) 2000. Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leung, Y-K. I. 2005. ‘L1 vs. L3 initial state: a comparative study of the acquisition of French DPs by Vietnamese monolinguals and Cantonese-English bilinguals.’ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 8/1: 39-61.

Li Wei 1994. Three generations, two languages, one family: language choice and language shift in a Chinese community in Britain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Li Wei 2000. ‘Dimensions of bilingualism’, in Li Wei (ed.): The Bilingualism Reader. London: Routledge, 1-25.

Lightbown, P. and N. Spada 2006. How Languages are Learned. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mackey, A. and S. Gass 2005. Second Language Research: Methodology and Design. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Mackey, W.F. 1972. ‘The description of bilingualism’, in Fishman, J.A. (ed.): Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 554-584.

Macnamara, J. 1969. ‘How can one measure the extent of a person's bilingual proficiency?’, in Kelly, L. (ed.): Description and Measurement of Bilingualism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 80-119

Myhill, J. 2003. ‘The native speaker, identity and the authenticity hierarchy.’ Language Sciences 25/1: 77-97.

Myles, F. and R. Mitchell 1998. Second Language Learning Theories. London: Edward Arnold.

Odlin, T. 2003. ‘Crosslinguistic influence’, in Doughty & Long (eds.), 436-486.

Official Languages Act 1985 2006. Department of Justice, Canada 2007 (updated to 2006).

Okada, T. 2005. ‘A corpus-based study of spelling errors of Japanese EFL writers with reference to errors occurring in word-initial and word-final positions’, in Cook et al (eds.), 164-183.