English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: CONCEPTS AND ISSUES 17of knowledge and skills? Or, is it more helpfully understood as a bundle of modules, withdistinctive mechanisms relevant to differcnt types of knowledge (e.g. Fodor 1983)?The modular view has consistently found support from within linguistics, most famouslyin the further debate between Chomsky and the child development psychologist, Jean Piaget.This debate is reported in Piatelli-Palmarini (1 980), and has been re-examined many times;a helpful recent summary is offered by Johnson (1 996, pp. 6-30). Briefly, Piaget argued thatlanguage was simply one manifestation of the more general skill of symbolic representation,acquired as a stage in general cognitive dcvelopment; no special mechanism was thereforerequired to account for first language acquisition. Chomsky’s general view is that not onlyis language too complex to be learned from environmental exposure (his criticism ofSkinner), it is also too distinctivc in its structure to be learnable by general cognitive means.Universal Grammar is thus endowed with its own distinctivc mechanisms for learning.There are many linguists today who support the concept of a distinctive language modulein the mind.There are also those who argue that language competence itselfis modular, withdifferent aspects of language knowledge being stored and accessed in distinctive ways.However, there is no general agreement on the number and nature of such modules, nor onhow they relate to othcr aspects of cognition.Modularity and second language learningThe possible role of an innate, specialist language module in second language learning hasbeen much discussed in reccnt years. If such innate mechanisms indeed exist, there are fourlogical possibilities:1 that they continuc to operate during second language learning, and make key aspectsof second language learning possible, in the same way that they make first languagelearning possible;2 that after the acquisition of the first language in early childhood, these mechanismsccase to be operable, and second languages must be learned by other means;3 that the mechanisms themselves are no longer operable, but that the first languageprovides a model of a natural language and how it works, which can be ‘copied’ insome way when learning a second language;4 that distinctive learning mechanisms for language remain available, but only in part,and must be supplcmented by other mcans.The first position was popularized in the sccond language learning field by Stephen Krashenin the 1970s, in a basic form. While Krashen’s theoretical views have been criticized, this hasby no means led to the disappearancc of modular proposals to account for SLL. Instead, thisparticular perspective has been rcvitalized by the continuing development of Chomsky’sUniversal Grammar proposals (Cook and Ncwson 1996).On the other hand, thinking about those general learning mechanisms which maybe operating at least for adult learners of second languages has also developed further, sincee.g. thc original proposals of McLaughlin (1987, pp. 133-53). Most obviously, the work ofthe cognitive psychologist J. R. Anderson on human learning, from an information processingperspective, has becn applied to various aspects of second language learning by differentresearchers (Johnson 1996; O’Malley and Chamot 199O;Towcll and Hawkins 1994).