English Language Teaching in its Social Context

14 ROSAMOND MITCHELL AND FLORENCE MYLESlearning success more or less likely.These summarize the results of a great variety of empiricallanguage learning research, as Spolsky interprets them.How would we begin to ‘evaluate’ this or any other model, or even more modcstly, todecide that this was a view of the language learning process with which we felt comfortableand within which we wanted to work?This would depend partly on broader philosophicalpositions: e.g. are we satisfied with an account of human learning which sees individualdifferences as both relatively fixed, and also highly influential for learning? It would alsodepend on the particular focus of our own interests, within second language learning; thisparticular model seems well adapted for the study of the individual learner, but has relativelylittle to say about the social relationships in which they engage, for example.But whatever the particular focus of a given theory, we would expect to find thefollowing:1234clear and explicit statements of thc ground the theory is supposed to cover, and theclaims which it is making;systematic procedures for confirming/disconfirming the theory, through datagathering and interpretation;not only descriptions of L2 phenomena, but attempts to explain why they are so, andto propose mechanisms for change;last but not least, engagement with other theories in the field, and serious attempts toaccount for at least some of the phenomena which arc ‘common ground’ in ongoingpublic discussion (Long 1990a). The remaining sections of this chapter offer apreliminary overview of numbers of these.Views on the nature of languageLevels of languageLinguists have traditionally viewed language as a complex communication system, whichmust be analysed on a number of levels: phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics and lexis,pragmatics, discourse.They have differed about the degree of separateness/integration of theselevels; e.g. while Chomsky argued at one time that ‘grammar is autonomous and independentof meaning’ (1 957, p. 17), another tradition initiated by the British linguist Firth claims that‘there is no boundary between lcxis and grammar: lexis and grammar are interdependent’(Stubbs 1996, p. 36). In examining different perspectives on second language learning, wewill first of all be looking at the levels of language which they attempt to take into account,and the relative degree of priority they attribute to the different levels. (Does languagelearning start with words, or with discourse?)We will also examine the degree of integration/separation that they assume, across the various levels. We will find that the control of syntaxis commonly seen as somehow ‘central’ to language learning, and that most general SLLtheories try to account for development in this area. Other levels of language receive muchmore variable attention, and some areas are commonly treated in a semi-autonomous way,as specialist fields; this is often true for SLL-oriented studies of pragmatics and of lexicaldevelopment (see e.g. Kasper 1996 on pragmatics; Meara 1996a, 1996b on vocabulary).Competence and performanceThroughout the twentieth century, linguists have also disagreed in other ways over theirmain focus of interest and of study. Should this be the collection and analysis of actual attestedsamples of language in use, for example by recording and analysing people’s speech? Or