An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

7.1 Second-language acquisition research
Research into second-language acquisition began in a very traditional applied
linguistics way by investigating the problem of learners’ errors. All language teachers
(and probably all language learners) are aware of the fact of error: an error is a gap
(filled or unfilled) in a learner’s knowledge of the target language. So much is obvious
and always has been to language teachers who have sought explanations for error: is
it linguistic, to be accounted for by contrastive analysis so that an error is a confusion
of some kind between one or more component of the L1 and the L2 (the target
language); or is it psychological, to be accounted for by learning theory of some kind?
The applied linguistics contribution has been (1) to put these two kinds of
explanation together and (2) to look at the system of error without seeking causes
(note that this is as we suggested in Chapter 3 the normal applied linguistic
approach, looking at states and not at change over time and space). These together
yield a synchronic explanation of second-language learning stages.
Starting then from a problem, what error means, SLA research has developed its
study of the learner’s language (or ‘interlanguage’) into the most abstract of applied-
linguistic projects (Birdsong 2004). So much so that applied linguists (not just
language teachers) have begun to query what the current paradigm has to offer to the
understanding and improvement of communication, which we have suggested is the
overall aim of applied linguistics.
It may be that indeed SLA research has shifted from being an applied linguistic
activity to being more of a linguistic one and that would explain the increasing
research time given to investigating cognitive models based on L1 universal grammar
theory. If this is the case then SLA research is no longer part of applied linguistics,
and it may be that this is a natural process whereby language problems when studied
can become formalised, a kind of colonisation by linguistics, a widening of its
empire. Similar progression could be attributed to discourse and to stylistics: both
concerned with problems of analysis of texts longer than the sentence and now in
some measure both subsumed within a greater linguistics where they are on the
applied side or at least in the no man’s land between linguistics and applied
linguistics. And more recently corpus linguistics seems to have taken the same route,
since it is in some sense a linguistic formalisation of ideas about genre and different
kinds of language text, as we see below in the discussion of the teaching of LSP.