SLA Across Disciplinary Borders: Introduction to the Special Issue

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN considerable interest in transdisciplinary, multiperspectival accounts of second language acquisition (SLA) that attend to multilingual development and use across multiple scales: from macro-societal and ideological ones to micro-interactional ones, and across different temporal and spatial scales. Scholars have shared insights from their own and others’ diverse sub-specializations and theoretical orientations with the goal of constructing a more holistic, complex, ecological understanding of language learning and use in the 21st century—with a growing focus on minority students and their languages and well-being and issues of social justice. The Douglas Fir Group (DFG, 2016) article, which appeared in the centenary issue of this journal and served as the impetus for the current special issue, was one such collaborative intellectual effort. Authors of the six main articles here, and special issue co-editor Heidi Byrnes, were among the original group of 15 DFG scholars who, over a number of meetings held at the Pennsylvania State University and in conjunction with the American Association for Applied Linguistics 2014 conference in Portland, Oregon (in a meeting room, not coincidentally, named the Douglas Fir room), co-authored the DFG (2016) article, “A Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World.” (DFG and this current collection of essays had a much longer social and intellectual history, partly traced in a lengthy footnote in the original article, which we won't elaborate on here.) Although the title of our special issue does not include the term transdisciplinary to signal that orientation and history (“across disciplines” is equivalent), the contributors to this volume for the most part do reference DFG (2016). They also embrace our shared aspirations to find common ground across our respective approaches to SLA that will move the field forward and also make SLA more responsive to the troubling political times we face and to the realities of multilingualism in many people's lives/minds/practices. Together, we sought in DFG (2016) to respond to the need to cross epistemic boundaries in order to address the complex issues of language learning, use, policy, and education in our contemporary world, in which the learning, maintenance, and use of multiple languages—especially beyond lingua franca English—is often discouraged, disregarded, or worse, demonized. DFG stated as its explicit goals “to expand the perspectives of researchers and teachers of [second language] L2 learners with regard to learners’ diverse multilingual repertoires of meaning-making resources and identities” and “to foster in learners a profound awareness not only of the cultural, historical, and institutional meanings that their language-mediated social actions have, but also (…) of the dynamic and evolving role their actions play in shaping their own and others’ worlds” (p. 25). DFG shaped these goals by discussing such constructs as community, norm, choice, ideology, identity, and agency, among others, and we distilled 10 fundamental theoretical themes arising from our joint project. These themes emphasized the continuous and reciprocal interactions at three levels of interconnectedness—the micro, meso, and macro levels inspired by Bronfenbrenner's (1979; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007) ecological model. We are certainly not alone in our attempts to take up the ambitious transdisciplinary and multiscalar challenge to SLA scholars and educators set forth in DFG (2016). Hawkins and Mori (2018), for example, in the introduction to their special issue of Applied Linguistics devoted to the theme of cross-cutting or “trans-” perspectives of language, learning, and education, also highlighted the extent to which the notion of “trans-” itself has gained momentum in our profession. Although transdisciplinarity was not one of their original themes (they foregrounded transnational, transcultural, translocal, transpatial, transmodal, translanguaging, and translingual dimensions), it was a concept they also noted, particularly in the wake of DFG (2016). Canagarajah (2018), too, engaged with our graphic model (Figure 1 in DFG, 2016), providing constructive critique and exemplification of some of the key concepts and how and why they might need to be reconceptualized in light of recent poststructural theoretical developments outside of SLA and insights he gleaned by undertaking research on communication in a mathematics class taught by an international teaching assistant in the United States. Indeed, SLA researchers, applied linguists, and teacher educators of various persuasions are increasingly considering strengths and shortcomings of our framework in their own innovative and synergistic ways. Others have applied the transdisciplinary model and theoretical concepts to related topics beyond SLA, such as language teacher identity. (See, for example, De Costa & Norton's, 2017, introduction to their special issue on that theme, which also appeared in the Modern Language Journal.) Although DFG (2016) showed that big, bold new ideas can, and indeed should, be more than the sum of their parts, there remained a desire to further flesh out some of those “parts.” We therefore invited the original contributors to participate in subsequent conference colloquia in late 2017 and early 2018. The main articles included here were (mostly) part of a colloquium presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference in March 2018 by those able to take part in it. Others who were willing to do so simply could not meet the extraordinarily short timelines that were established to assure January 2019 publication of the entire set of contributions. The six main articles and the eight invited commentaries contained in the following pages foreground the authors’ respective scholarly interests and commitments, both in relation to, and as an extension to, DFG (2016). With the exception of the empirical study by LaScotte and Tarone, the articles are primarily theoretical or conceptual. The first two articles, by Patricia Duff and Lourdes Ortega, set the stage for the remaining articles by re-presenting the DFG model and then focusing on two key elements, respectively: ways of theorizing and operationalizing social aspects of SLA in multiscalar research starting with macro-sociological considerations that are instantiated and produced at the micro level as well (Duff); and critically engaging with the notion of multilingualism, in terms of contemporary sociopolitical exigencies affecting the lives of multilingual individuals and communities, on the one hand, and then considering the implications of multilingualism for both theory and practice in SLA, on the other (Ortega). Nick Ellis, in the third article, elaborates on usage-based approaches to SLA (discussed in DFG, 2016, and by Ortega in her article). Drawing on current developments in cognitive science and emergentist linguistics, he outlines how a theory of language cognition for SLA views learning/use in terms of such processes as embodiment, embeddedness, enactivism, enculturation, and the extended mind (i.e., distributed cognition). Next in sequence, and very much in alignment with Ellis's usage-based approach to language as a complex adaptive system, is the article by Diane Larsen–Freeman, who extends and exemplifies Complex Dynamic Systems Theory by exploring in particular the construct of agency in SLA. Agency was highlighted but discussed relatively briefly in DFG from other (e.g., sociocultural) perspectives. The fourth article, by Joan Kelly Hall, illustrates a micro-analytic approach to a “usage-based” SLA in terms of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. She suggests that the joint construction of talk and knowledge, through interaction and mutual adaptation, represents not simply aspects of sociality providing multiple encounters with particular linguistic forms (i.e., input frequencies), but that these interactions fundamentally help learners expand their L2 grammatical sensitivities and thus their repertoires, semiotic resources, and registers. The final article, framed as an SLA analysis at both meso- and micro-levels, is a study by Darren LaScotte and Elaine Tarone that examines SLA in relation to the heteroglossic development of voice(s) in complex, dynamic ways. Experimentation with voice through sociocultural narrative activity, they argue, is instrumental in the development of L2 proficiency (using conventional cognitivist-SLA indices of complexity, accuracy, and fluency). The six articles, therefore, examine different layers and dimensions of SLA from a number of theoretical and analytical perspectives yet all in the transdisciplinary spirit of DFG (2016). To open the discussion of these ideas to a wider and more diverse and international group of scholars representing different subfields of SLA (or educational/applied linguistics) and contexts, we invited short commentaries from a number of applied linguists. These colleagues were asked to comment on any or all of the main articles with reference to their own theoretical and empirical areas of SLA expertise and interest, and also with reference to DFG (2016). To our delight, we received eight commentary essays from the following authors: Dwight Atkinson (United States), Stephen May (New Zealand), Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter (Spain), Francis Hult (Sweden), Roumyana Slabakova (United Kingdom), Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa (United States), Xuesong Gao (Australia), and Karen Johnson (United States). These commentaries begin with a critical view of the possibility of transdisciplinary and translingual theorizing across the field of SLA as sought in the contributions to this special issue (Atkinson), continue with a discussion of sociolinguistic issues of multilingualism in society at a broader theoretical level (May) and ‘on the ground’ in a particular context (Cenoz & Gorter), then feature particular SLA analytical approaches, drawing for example on Nexus Analysis (Hult), Generativist SLA (Slabakova), and raciolinguistics (i.e., the destructive roles of racism, social exclusion, and marginalization in SLA, as a field, and in learners’ experiences; Flores & Rosa). The final two commentaries (by Gao and Johnson) make important theoretical connections with teacher education and pedagogy, which DFG (2016) was unable to explore sufficiently due to the already large scope of our project. Most of the contributors to this issue, like our readers, are involved not only in SLA but in professional development activities and research as well. Therefore, it was important to include perspectives pertaining to teacher education. Naturally, a much larger number of articles and commentaries representing even greater epistemological, geographical, and linguistic diversity could have been (and in some cases were) solicited. Missing from this set, for example, but referenced in DFG (2016) as a critically important dimension of 21st century SLA and life in general, is an extended discussion of how contemporary digital information and learning technologies and social networks shape learners’ exposure to language and new literacies, their identities and communities (real, imagined, and aspirational), as well as their developmental trajectories and practices as multilinguals. Or how users (“prosumers”) of such tools and virtual spaces in turn transform these learning and communication spaces in innovative, sometimes syncretic, ways, by drawing on their vast cultural and linguistic repertoires and creative talents. However, the very practical constraints of time and space for the production of this special issue precluded a larger set of perspectives. We fully anticipate that the discussion of the themes in DFG (2016) and in the featured thematic articles and commentaries here will provoke further reflection, discussion, understandings, and possibly collaborative research spanning some of the “parts” of the larger project described here. We therefore invite readers to submit response pieces or full articles to this and other journals that will amplify our larger collective aims as we reimagine SLA in the 21st century and aim to mobilize this knowledge for the common good.

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