Applied Linguistics 2015: 36/4: 444–453 ß Oxford University Press 2015

doi:10.1093/applin/amv035

Second Language Acquisition in Applied

Linguistics: 1925–2015 and beyond

ELAINE TARONE
Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA), University of
Minnesota

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E-mail: etarone@umn.edu

The content of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistics
Society of America in Minneapolis on 3 January 2014, as part of the 90th Anniversary
Session: The State of the Art, 1924 and 2014: Applied Linguistics.

Taking 1925, the founding year of Language, the journal of the Linguistics
Society of America, as a benchmark for ‘the past’, and 2015 as benchmark for
‘the present’, the author considers what was known then and what is known
now about second language acquisition in applied linguistics. The field has
grown more complex and interdisciplinary over the past 90 years, and developed
in ways the founders could not have predicted. Because the essential mission of
applied linguistics is to cross disciplinary and physical borders in the process of
understanding and resolving language-related problems of all kinds, and be-
cause those problems are often unpredictable, the author concludes it would
be foolhardy to try to predict the future of applied linguistics—particularly if
applied linguists continue to do their jobs as ‘border-crossers’.

INTRODUCTION
In considering the past, present, and (by implication) future of applied linguis-
tics, I will draw heavily upon that area of applied linguistics I know best:
second language acquisition (SLA) research and its implications for second
language education. The Linguistics Society of America (LSA) was founded
in 1924, and its seminal journal Language began publication in 1925, so that
seems as good a date as any to define as ‘the past’ of applied linguistics. I will
make the case that 90 years ago, in 1925, second language education was
considered central not just to applied linguistics, but to the discipline of lin-
guistics in general. Today, in ways the founders could not have predicted,
applied linguistics—and SLA—are no longer considered subsets of the field
of linguistics, but rather interdisciplinary fields that apply knowledge drawn
from many disciplines (including linguistics) to the understanding and reso-
lution of language-related issues, problems in society, and issues in dual lan-
guage learning and bilingualism. I will review what we knew about SLA in
1925, comparing it with what we know today, and comment briefly on the
essential unpredictability of the future of applied linguistics.
 E. TARONE 445

SECOND LANGUAGE STUDIES IN 1925

When Leonard Bloomfield addressed the inaugural meeting of the LSA in
1924, his remarks, published in 1925 in the first issue of the journal
Language, provide a privileged snapshot of the current view of what LSA mem-
bers were to study and how they should study it. His key points, listed below,
make it clear that applied linguistics was then considered to be a central part of
the larger field of linguistics. According to Bloomfield in 1925, this was to be
the field of linguistics:

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 The study of language was to be a science, different from the study of
literature or philology.
 The central object of linguists’ study was to be human speech, with the
study of writing to take a secondary role.
 The methodology was to directly observe and record human speech,
following a set of linguistic field methods.
 Structuralist linguistics would focus on phonetics, phonology, morph-
ology, and syntax in human speech.
 The assumed learning theory was behaviorist; learning was understood
to consist of the formation of new habits.
 Linguists were to serve and provide a scientific basis for work in the
‘public interest’ to address ‘problems’ and ‘issues’ in society. Current
examples of such issues included elementary education, spelling
reform, standard and nonstandard forms of speech, and the description
of indigenous languages.
At that same conference and in a publication in that same inaugural issue of
Language, Joseph Collitz (1925) described three major components of the dis-
cipline of linguistics: general linguistics, historical linguistics, and applied lin-
guistics. These areas of applied linguistic study had educational applications:
first was foreign language study (clearly English speakers studying foreign
languages), the relationship of speech to writing, grammatical nomenclature,
spelling reform, and artificial languages.
So 90 years ago, the assumption of the founders of LSA was clearly that
applied linguistics was a major component of the discipline of linguistics, AND
that within that sub-discipline, a major role would be accorded to such issues
as second language studies, education, and literacy in relation to speech. But
these brilliant scholars could not have predicted the ways in which applied
linguistics—and foreign language learning and study—would develop in the
ensuing decades.

SLA IN 2015
Today, the field of SLA research is just as interdisciplinary in its foundations as
applied linguistics is. Research from many disciplines is required to understand
the way the adult human mind internalizes and uses a second(ary) language
(L2). Some of the major disciplines influencing the study of SLA include not
446 SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

just linguistics, but also sociology, psychology, and brain science, among
others. Of course, linguistic field methods should be applied to the speech of
second language learners, but the scope has expanded in order to identify all
the contextual factors that impact the development of an underlying linguistic
system. Beginning with Selinker (1972), we began to document the cognitive
processes, social and contextual influences that also shape SLA: common de-
velopmental sequences; sociolinguistic variables, the learner’s purpose in
acquiring an L2 and more. So what do we know today about what shapes
SLA, that we did not know—and could not have predicted—90 years ago?

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Here are a few findings:
1. Bilingualism benefits human cognition. In 1925, we did not know very
much about the bilingual brain. The findings of Ellen Bialystok (Bialystok
2001; Dreifus 2011) and colleagues on the cognitive benefits of bilingual-
ism, particularly findings with regard to improving the brain’s executive
function, have appeared in a wide range of outlets in the last four to five
years especially. Cognitive psychologists and neuropsychologists regularly
add to the list of benefits of the bilingual brain: for example, bilinguals
have more clarity of thinking in decision-making—that is, less bias
(Keysar et al. 2012); a significant delay of onset of dementia and
Alzheimer’s (Bialystok et al. 2004, 2007; Craik et al. 2010); and increased
creativity (Kharkurin 2012). It is fair to say that we now view adult ac-
quisition of an L2 as a normal process worldwide. Indeed, some have
argued that ‘our brains were neurologically set to be multilingual’
(Petitto and Kovelman 2003). In short, it is the monolingual brain that
is, worldwide, unusual.
2. The object of study has expanded in ways the founders of LSA would not
have predicted. While an essential tool of research in SLA is still the use of
sound linguistic field methods to describe the speech produced by adults
trying to use a second language, the object of study has grown far beyond
just the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax of learner lan-
guage. Now researchers document other levels including lexical expres-
sions, pragmatic and sociolinguistic; indeed, a complete description of SLA
must now include cultural and nonverbal dimensions of the speech event;
the purpose and functions for which the L2 is used; the interlocutors the
learner is speaking to and their scaffolding of learner language; the pres-
tige and power of native language (NL) and target language (TL) in the
wider society; and individual factors such as learner age and identity,
whether the learner is alphabetically literate, knows a third and fourth
language, is schooled, is a risk-taker, and so on. Indeed, what does ‘SLA’
mean in the rapidly changing global context of multilingualism? These
changes have required a deep rethinking of such foundational constructs
as ‘competence’ (see ‘multi-competence’ as framed by Cook 2007, 2012),
‘NL’, and ‘TL’ (see Blommaert 2010; Seidlhofer 2011; Ortega 2013).
 E. TARONE 447

3. Underlying a second language learner’s speech is a variable linguistic

system. In 1925, no one studied learner language in its own right.
Applied linguists considered only NL and TL to be ‘language’, and what-
ever it was that learners produced was a set of bad habits (in the behav-
iorist orthodoxy of the day). Even in 1957, Lado focused on comparing
the structures of NL and TL in order to predict learner error, with no effort
to apply field methods to study the language that learners actually pro-
duced. In 1972, Selinker argued what would have been nonsense in 1925,
that three linguistic systems were involved in SLA: NL, TL, and interlan-

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guage (IL). IL underlies the speech of L2 learners, is systematic, and can
be studied by application of sound linguistic field methods to study that
speech. Careful fieldwork supported the view that IL was systematic, and
it was hypothesized that if IL was a natural language, it should be sys-
tematically variable in response to interlocutor and task (Tarone 1979).
More than 40 years of research since 1972 has now accumulated on the
structure of IL (Han and Tarone 2014), and sound sociolinguistic research,
including that using VARBRUL (Bayley and Preston 1996; Geeslin 2014),
has verified that learner language is indeed systematically variable in re-
sponse to such standard sociolinguistic variables in the social context as
interlocutor, task, and topic (e.g. Bayley and Preston 1996; Geeslin 2014).
4. A learner’s explicit knowledge about second language (L2) grammar rules
has little relationship to proficiency, or the ability to use the L2 to com-
municate. A clear finding over decades of research (e.g. VanPatten 2014)
is that providing learners with explicit descriptions of L2 rules—the peda-
gogical method used in 1925—does not in and of itself result in acquisi-
tion of the ability to use those rules when one is focused on meaning-
making through the medium of L2. Though the researcher’s description of
the learner’s rule system (IL) must be explicit, the knowledge the learner
uses to generate utterances in speech is usually implicit (Ellis 2008). The
central problem for classroom learners of course is that foreign language
textbooks and online programs have continued since 1925 to present ex-
plicit rules for TL derived from linguistic research, in spite of research
showing that the learner’s study of those rules does not result in uncon-
scious internalization and ability to use those rules in oral communication.
5. Successful SLA is inherently social. An essential driver of SLA is the lear-
ner’s exposure to, and attempts to use, the L2 used in social contexts to
transmit meaning in oral interaction with others. In ways the founders
could not have predicted, behaviorism has been replaced by sociocultural
learning theory, and researchers can demonstrate how interlocutors’ scaf-
folding and co-construction of learners’ speech in social interaction sup-
ports and enables their acquisition of the language (Lantolf and Thorne
2006). SLA is now understood to be a social process involving learning by
doing with social support. Of course, in this process, it critically matters to
L2 learners WHO their interlocutors are (Tarone and Swain 1995). For
example, French immersion students in Canada, and immersion students
448 SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

of many languages in the USA, have been found to produce L2 with

excellent pronunciation and syntax through Grade 3, but beginning in
Grade 4, start using English and their L2 speech begins to show substan-
tially more English NL influence. Why? Tarone and Swain (1995) argue
that as students become preadolescents, they no longer want to sound like
their adult teacher interlocutor; they need ‘to be cool’ and need a ver-
nacular L2 variety produced by teen interlocutors and role models. Since
immersion classrooms only provide a teacher’s formal adult academic
register as L2 input, immersion students begin switching to English

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when they need a teen vernacular register, rather than sound uncool
by staying in academic register in L2. So the identities and roles of the
interlocutors who provide scaffolding and input really matter. Using
Bakhtin’s sociocultural framework: L2 learners internalize the ‘voices’ of
others, where ‘voice’ includes prosodics, nonverbals, register, and attitude,
all of which substantially express speaker identity (Bakhtin 1981).
6. The learner’s purpose for adding a second language affects the process and
outcome of SLA in predictable ways (Widdowson 1984). Learner agency is
important here, in ways it clearly was not in behaviorist days; the learner
as active, not a passive cipher, has a purpose for learning L2, and that
purpose entails and shapes the ability to perform certain functions and not
others. For example, typical L2 learning purposes might include:
 To pass a standardized proficiency test. If that test is an untimed one,
then explicit knowledge about L2 grammar rules may be enough, since
the learner will have enough time to ‘look up’ memorized rules. For
this purpose, the learner may never need to actually speak in L2, so
will never need to do more than memorize grammar rules.
 To exchange basic information, in which case one primarily needs
nouns and verbs; a lot of morphology may be unneeded. If the purpose
of L2 learning is to express such a limited set of communicative func-
tions, then there will be limited forms of SLA, with pidginized language
often the result.
 To become part of the cultural community that uses the L2. For this
purpose, a pragmatic or form-function pedagogy and learning approach
is needed because a much richer set of culturally appropriate commu-
nicative functions must be expressed, with a consequent variety of
contextually appropriate L2 forms to realize those functions.
 To earn an academic degree in an institution where L2 is the medium
of instruction. To acquire a disciplinary register, one must be able to
express complex cognitive processes and abstract ideas in L2 in ways
agreed upon by the disciplinary discourse community (Swales 1990),
and for that purpose, more complex syntax, academic linguistic expres-
sions, and abstract lexicon will be needed.

Particular learning purposes require particular communicative functions and

not others, along with the L2 linguistic forms that best realize those func-
tions for the learning purpose. For example, learning an L2 for academic
 E. TARONE 449

purposes typically requires the ability to perform the functions of stating a

hypothesis, and citing support for that hypothesis, functions for which par-
ticular linguistic expressions are conventionally used. Functional linguistic
theories were apparently unheard of by the LSA founders. Today, a linguistic
framework that allows a form-function analysis (e.g. pragmatics, discourse
analysis) provides essential insights into learners’ acquisition of the ability to
use L2 for real-world purposes in ways a structuralist linguistic framework
cannot. Particularly in learning and teaching academic L2, a functional
grammar framework (Firth 1973; Halliday 2002) is proving most helpful

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in second language education (e.g. Schleppegrell 2004).
7. Alphabetic print literacy affects cognitive processing of oral L2. Although
in 1925, applied linguists were interested in the relationship between
speech and writing, applied linguists in ensuing decades abandoned that
interest for the most part. But recent findings by cognitive psychologists
have provided startling insights into the nature of this very relationship.
The relevance of these insights for SLA theory are potentially enormous,
although whether future applied linguists will attend to this development
is very hard to predict. Explaining this development requires some back-
ground. Minneapolis is home to the largest community of Somali immi-
grants in the country, people who arrived in the 1990s, after years in
refugee camps that provided no schooling. Many of them were adoles-
cents and adults with no alphabetic print literacy. Though most rapidly
acquired social speaking skills in L2, their acquisition of L2 literacy and
registers for schooling was reported to be constrained. To understand this
problem, applied linguists at the University of Minnesota built upon a
body of research in the disciplines of cognitive psychology and neuro-
psychology, exploring the relationship between alphabetic literacy levels
and linguistic awareness. A group of cognitive psychologists and neuro-
psychologists in Europe and Latin America had compared literate and il-
literate monolingual adults’ oral language processing when performing
linguistic awareness tasks (Morais et al. 1979, 1986; Adrian et al. 1995):
 Phonological fluency and semantic fluency tasks;
 Phoneme deletion and phoneme reversal tasks;
 Syllable deletion and syllable reversal tasks;
 Repetition tasks with real words or with pseudowords.

The instructions for some of the linguistic awareness tasks these researchers
administered were:
1 You have one minute. Say all the words you can think of that begin
with the sound /b/. Say all the animals you can think of. Illiterate
adults did equally well on semantic fluency but significantly worse
on phonological fluency tasks than their literate counterparts did.
450 SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

2 If we subtract /t/ from /tal/, we get /al/. If we subtract /p/ from /pat/
we get. . .? If I say /los/ backwards, I get /sol/. What is /des/ backwards?
Illiterate adults had great difficulty with this phonemic manipulation
task compared to their literate counterparts.
3 If we subtract /ka/ from /kade/, we get /de/. /kade/ backwards is /deka/.
Again, illiterate adults had more difficulty with this syllable manipula-
tion task than their literate counterparts did.
4 Real word list repetition (e.g. say ‘rabbit’) was not at all affected by
literacy level, but pseudoword repetition (e.g. say ‘batrub’) was signifi-

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cantly harder for illiterate adults than their literate counterparts.
These researchers found that illiterate speakers did equally well as literate
speakers on tasks requiring semantic processing, but oral tasks not involving
manipulation of meaningless language forms were significantly more difficult
for illiterate speakers. Exploring whether the decisive factor was the nature of
the script—alphabetic versus characters—Read et al. (1986) replicated these
studies in China with monolingual older adults, some of whom were character
literate in that they could only read Chinese characters but had no alphabetic
literacy and others who were also literate in Pinyin, an alphabetic script of
Chinese. They obtained similar results in that Pinyin readers had an advantage
over character-only readers in their ability to perform tasks requiring manipu-
lation of semantically meaningless linguistic forms. Read et al. concluded that it
is lack of alphabetic literacy, and not literacy in general, that results in diffi-
culty doing linguistic awareness tasks. Among the conclusions of this line of
research were:
 The ability to process one’s oral language in terms of linguistic seg-
ments is an artifact of alphabetic print literacy (Read et al. 1986).
 Alphabetic literacy results in the ability to represent linguistic segments
with visual symbols in working memory; this ability is in turn an im-
portant tool for oral language awareness (Reis and Castro-Caldas
1997).
A group of applied linguists (Bigelow et al. 2006; Tarone et al. 2009) who had
come across this body of research in cognitive psychology studied the extent to
which these findings might extend to second language learners who were
illiterate, hypothesizing that alphabetic illiteracy might reduce their ability to
notice oral corrective feedback given in the midst of meaning-focused com-
munication—an ability that is essential to the way SLA proceeds in meaning-
focused social interaction. They asked adolescent and adult Somali learners of
English L2 to repeat oral corrections to errors they made in their word order in
questions they were asking about visual images presented to them; for
example:
 S: *Why he is here?
 E: Why is he here? Repeat.
 S: *Why he is here?
 E. TARONE 451

They found that the L2 learners’ ability to incorporate corrective feedback in

meaning-focused interaction was in fact significantly related to their alphabetic
print literacy level: learners with lower literacy produced less accurate repeti-
tions of corrective feedback on word order and also on semantically redundant
morphology used in question formation (e.g. do insertion). Interestingly, the
same learners noticed, repeated, and later used corrections to their vocabulary
with no problem, suggesting that their processing of semantic corrective feed-
back was unaltered by their alphabetic literacy levels. It appears that, consist-
ent with the findings of cognitive psychologists with monolingual participants,

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adult L2 learners who are not alphabetically literate rely more on semantic
processing than on processing of linguistic form. Low-literate L2 learners have
more trouble noticing oral corrective feedback that requires manipulation of
linguistic forms in ways that do not alter meaning.
To sum up, then, what do we know about SLA in 2015 that we did not
know—and could not have predicted—in 1925?
1 Bilingualism benefits human cognition.
2 Sound linguistic field methods are still needed in SLA, but the scope of
relevant data to be collected has grown.
3 Oral learner language is still the central data source for SLA research,
and has been shown to be systematically variable in response to socio-
linguistic variables.
4 Explicit knowledge about L2 has little relationship to L2 proficiency.
5 Successful SLA is inherently social.
6 Learner’s purposes for learning L2 affect the process and outcome of
SLA; a functional approach to L2 learning and teaching relates learning
purpose to language functions to linguistic forms acquired.
7 Alphabetic print literacy affects the cognitive processing of oral L2
input.
Of course, there are many other things we have learned about the human
ability to acquire L2s since 1925 as well. The few presented here are intended
to illustrate how much more multidisciplinary both SLA research and applied
linguistics have become, as we have accumulated a body of knowledge in
trying to address language-related issues in society. This kind of basic research
on SLA has had direct applications to the teaching of second, third, heritage,
and indigenous languages, resulting in improved learning on the part of
many—and done so in ways that the founders of LSA could not have predicted
in 1925.
To solve problems and address puzzles involving the use of language in
society, in any area of applied linguistics and in SLA, we need knowledge
from linguistics but also from several other disciplines. For this reason, we
now know that applied linguistics is not really a subset of the field of linguis-
tics; it is a multidisciplinary field that draws on several different disciplines,
including the discipline of linguistics. It is for this reason that I have
said (Tarone 2013) that an applied linguist must be an explorer and a
452 SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

border-crosser. . . willing to cross disciplinary borders in order to gain insight

into the nature of whatever the language issue at hand may be.
It would be foolhardy, given the history just recounted, to try to predict the
future of SLA research in applied linguistics. That future depends on re-
searchers’ willingness to take risks in exploring currently unknown questions,
problems, and domains of SLA and bilingual language use. If the next gener-
ation of researchers takes those risks, then the future will reveal many unpre-
dictable surprises and intellectual ‘aha’s’. We need more applied linguist
border-crossers who are willing to study dual language acquisition and use

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across disciplinary boundaries and outside the physical spaces of academia—
in refugee camps, truck stops, remote communities, in undereducated and
low-literate populations—as well as in more traditional schools, colleges, and
universities. Applied linguistics has become over the last 90 years a huge,
complex, but immensely interesting area of intellectual effort, and its future
is, as it should be, unpredictable.

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