Towards a Sociocognitive Second Language Education

A theoretical framework of reference

Andrea Gobbi, PhD

 To Italian, my first L2,
a language with no empire,
alive and well thanks to those who did, do, and will speak it.
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Ethical and ontological premises
1.1 – Foreword
1.2 – Ethical perspective
1.3 – On the nature of learning
1.4 – On the nature of cognition
1.5 – On the nature of language
1.6 – In summary
Chapter 2: Language teaching, between SLA and cognition: an historical perspective
2.1 – The origins of language teaching as we know it today
2.2 – From behaviorism to cognitivism
2.2.1 – The rise of cognitivism and the role of linguistics
2.3 – A cognitivist frame for language acquisition research
2.3.1 – Cognitivist basis for language acquisition
2.3.2 - Pit Corder and the first studies on SLA
2.3.3 – Krashen and the attention towards input
2.3.4 – SLA's paradigm wars
2.4 – A short history of language teaching, from the origins to the rise of cognitivism
2.5 – Hymes and the communicative method
2.5.1 – Fundamental assumptions of the communicative method
2.5.2 – Intrinsic limits of the communicative method
2.5.3. - The new challenges of language teaching
Chapter 3: Sociocognitive linguistics and the emergent language
3.1 – The origins of cognitive linguistics
3.2 – The commitments of cognitive linguistics
3.3 – Applied cognitive linguistics and implications on language teaching: cognitive grammar
3.3.1 – Basic principles of cognitive grammar for language teaching
3.3.1.1 – The embodied learning principle
3.3.1.2 – The lexical-grammar continuum principle
3.3.1.3 – The conceptualization principle
3.3.1.4 – The usage principle
3.3.2 – Cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar contributions applied to language
teaching: dedicated series and collections
3.3.3 – Beyond grammar
3.4 – Beyond grammar
3.4.1. – From general cognitive abilities to general sociocognitive abilities
3.4.1.1. – Language as a joint action
3.4.1.2. – Coordination
3.4.1.2. – Convention
3.4.2. – From symbolic grammar to the semiotic triangle
3.4.3. – From encyclopedic meaning to shared meaning
3.4.4. – From meaning as construal to construal for communication
Chapter 4: A roadmap for a sociocognitive language teaching
4.1 – A theory of language and of learning to tame complexity
4.2 – Language teaching and New Literacies
4.3 – Language as a complex adaptive system
4.3.1 – Complex systems and chaos theory
4.3.2. – Why language is a complex adaptive system
4.4 – Language learning as ecosystem development
4.4.1 – Legitimate peripheral participation applied to language development
4.4.2 – The change comes from within
4.4.3 – Reconceptualizing the language classroom: power, identity, agency, and
metacognition
4.4.3.1 – The learner identity
4.4.3.2 – The power of the learner
4.4.3.3 – Agency and metacognition for an autonomous learner
4.4.3.4 – The ecolinguistic competence
4.4.4 – Assessment of complex adaptive systems
4.5 – Hacking language learning: an example of developmental model for a sociocognitive
language teaching
4.5.1 – The cathedral and the bazaar
4.5.1.1 – Linux and the origin of the bazaar
4.5.1.2 – The bazaar as a metaphor for the development of a complex adaptive system
4.5.2 – Linux is a(n) (inter)language
4.5.2.1 – Motivation and identity within the bazaar
4.5.2.2 – Participating in the bazaar
Conclusions
Preface and Acknowledgments

This first book of mine is based upon my PhD thesis. For me, my thesis represents an important
milestone along the path of my very own quest as a learner of languages – my ever-favorite instruments
to explore the world and human nature.
I was born in 1984 and grew up in the dialect-speaking countryside of the province of the world-
famous Italian city of Venice. As Venetian dialect was1 the main language spoken at home and in town,
I consider it to be my real mother tongue. At that time, I would hear standard Italian in TV (and later it
would have been the language which teachers would support – juxtaposed to dialect – and insist we
made an effort to speak, at least while in class), but its formal “discovery” - or, better said, the
discovery of the multitude of other Italian accents and dialects - for me is definitely tied to my early
summer vacations. When playing at the beach with other kids who came from all over the country, I
found myself for the first time having to negotiate a linguistic common ground. That’s when and why I
ultimately became fascinated with lingustic diversity. Curiosity got me, and so, little by little, I started
exploring the plethora of points of view I met along my way, as if stargates opened towards as many
different dimensions of living as the number of people I met in my everyday life.
Soon came the turn of foreign languages to enrich my experiences. It came with the first English
words on the boxes of toys and everything else the north-Atlantic cultural hegemony pushed the way of
kids growing up between the 80s and the 90s: comics, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and music. Then
the first English classes started in elementary school, French since middle school, and Spanish since
high school. Meanwhile, globalization was advancing. For me, that meant my first studies abroad in
2001 as an AFS exchange student in the U.S., with my host-family in Wisconsin, meeting friends from
all over the world, the beginning of traveling, love, and the years as an AFS volunteer busy with
intercultural training.
At a certain point, thanks to these opportunities for a first important change of perspective, I
rediscovered my origins: Italy and Italian language. This was enhanced with my years in Perugia and

1 On this regard, given not every reader might be familiar with the linguistic situation in Italy, I point out how in its 2014
report The use of Italian language, dialects and other languages in Italy (ISTAT 2014), the Italian national institute for
statistics noted: “Over the past 18 years, from 1995 to 2012, the share of people using the Italian language as their main
language or in combination with the dialect has steadily increased in every context: in the family, with friends and when
dealing with strangers. From 1995 to 2012 the prevailing use of Italian in the family increased by about 10 percentage
points (from 43.2% in 1995 to 53.1% in 2012), by 10.3 percentage points the proportion of those who use Italian
language with friends (from 46.1% to 56.4%), and by 13.4 percentage points the use with strangers (from 71.4% in 1995
to 84.8% in 2012). The sole use of dialect, especially within the family, declined quite significantly over time: between
1995 and 2012 the percentage of those who spoke dialect only in their families decreased from 23.7% to 9%; from
16.4% to 9% when speaking with friends and from 6.3% to 1.8% when speaking with strangers.”.
my alma mater, the University for Foreigners, a reclamation of the Italian lifestyle and the exploration
of my roots, and my linguistics studies, including the composition of my first thesis while in Japan
while studying Japanese at Kansai Gaidai University.
The realization that languages were actually relationships made me look behind for a glimpse at the
vastness of the language network I had developed up to that point. The effect of that has been to fuel
my passion to support and help others in taking up that very same quest of mine; the path along which
so many people had helped me first and so many times, word by word. By allowing me to connect with
them, they had given me the chance to develop my own skills in languages, and now I try my best to
offer the favor back. My academic history, which includes the study of linguistics, language teaching,
communication, and cognitive sciences are all tiles of this great mosaic that makes up my life. I am a
learner, and as long as I am alive, I will continue to learn and evolve.
My academic path has functioned to put order in my life and studies and to help me make sense of
everything I had the chance of experiencing, developing competences that allow me to keep improving
as I continue to move forward. Gregory Bateson called it Deuterolearning—learning to learn. I
discovered his Steps towards an ecology of the mind at the very beginning of my university studies, and
I was immediately struck by it, even if at the time I didn’t really have the tools to understand it or make
much of it, and I knew it. Today the situation is a little different, and I keep on learning.
I would like to thank my family, my very first community of practice, for teaching me what
belonging and dialogue are, and for giving me so many good memories, which were truly priceless in
helping me to bear with the loneliness of emigration while working abroad and while writing my PhD
dissertation. Mom and dad, who have always allowed me to cultivate my passions, providing me with
lots of support and tools, both material and immaterial. My sister Stefania, for having been my very
first peer interlocutor, for the love and the fights, the help with translations, and the original
proofreading. Steve, for the IT consulting and for making Eternia great again. Damiano, for always
being there. Erica and Juan, for helping me to conceptualize parts of this work over the phone. Aidan,
for being so at ease among languages. My dear friend and comrade Katarina Lazic, for believing in me
and helping me in taking this to the next level. My friend and former colleague Dr. Amanda Dutton, for
proofreading my English and all the support, first from the other side of the hallway, and now from the
other side of the pond.

Perugia, May 4th, 2019

Introduction

This work aims at delineating a new theoretical framework of reference for second language
teaching through the adoption of a sociocognitive perspective of the nature of language and the
processes underneath its development.
The main theoretical basis informing this work comes from a post-cognitivist approach (Gomila &
Calvo 2008) to the nature of cognition, identified as adaptive intelligence (Atkinson 2011c; 2012) and
from the idea of language and its development as that suggested by cognitive linguistics (e.g. Croft &
Cruse 2004; Evans 2006; Dabrowska & Divjak 2015). Also central to this thesis is the increasing
attention given to the discussion of the need to integrate social factors both in defining the language
model (Croft 2009; Harder 2010; Larsen-Freeman 2011; Geeraerts 2016; Schmidt 2016) and the
processes of acquisition/development of L2 (Firth e Wagner 1997; Block 2003; Lafford 2007). Both
are very influential, as we will see, when it comes to language teaching.
Metaphor will also prove to be a fundamental tool in this quest of mine, which is particularly
functional to the goals that will be discussed in the first chapter. Besides already being a key element of
the theoretical arsenal of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), metaphor will demonstrate
all its potential and influence by providing us the opportunity to overcome conceptual limits and avoid
the dead ends connected with perspectives typical of more traditional and formal linguistic approaches.
These approaches have so far informed the theory behind and – consequentially - the practice of
language teaching but are limited by their deterministic view of a process – language learning – which
in order to be appropriately supported needs to be understood as intrinsically emergent.
The first chapter will, first of all, clarify the ethical and ontological positions posed at foundation of
this work. Anna Ciliberti (2012: 16) defined language teaching as “active theory” which she says is
“didactic action […] motivated by theory” and is “practical thought in action” (Ajello 2002; in ibidem).
The relationship between theory and praxis, for Ciliberti, is not hierarchical and consequential; this
means that theory is not applied simply as a consequence of a natural and predetermined scheme, but it
is rather bound by an interactive and ecological relation of mutual influence. While theory provides
“the analytical and conceptual apparatus to inform the didactic action and for the critical reflection over
the results achieved[,] practice, meaning the data obtained from the activity of teaching/learning,
offer[s] the opportunity and the basis to verify and assimilate the theory (Calderhead, 1988, p. 9)”
(ibidem). Since the end of World War II, as we will see, second language teaching has been primarily
informed by one single dominating theoretical model of language, cognitivist at its core. The limits and
the problems that have emerged during these past decades within the research field of the acquisition
and learning of a second language (L22) can, in my opinion, be attributed to the ontological perspective
that has been so far adopted. To overcome this impasse, I will propose an alternative perspective based
upon post-cognitivist approaches to cognitive sciences (Gomila & Calvo 2008; Atkinson 2011b; 2012).
The reasons behind this initiative are functionally motivated both by the nature of language teaching as
a discipline which is characterized by the inescapable and fundamental fact that its end and its means—
language—happen to overlap (that is, language can only be learned through language itself) (Balboni
2002: 25), and by the ethical goals of this work of mine, as outlined at the beginning of the first
chapter.
The second chapter will be devoted to describing and analyzing the historical development of
language teaching as a discipline within the paradigm that has been informing it for more than sixty
years—cognitivism—and to highlighting the functional limits that come with it.
In chapter three, I will move on to discuss cognitive linguistics, suggesting it as an alternative
theoretical basis for language teaching, and will analyze the pedagogical potential that its adoption
offers.
Finally, in chapter four, I will present a theory of language and a theory of teaching which aim at
shifting the dominant paradigm of approach to the discipline. This will allow the aforementioned issues
to be overcome and will present a model of development to use as a roadmap for the next step—the
methodological work necessary to implement this framework.

2 From now on, I will refer to such concepts with the acronyms L2, the second language, juxtaposed to the L1, one's first
language learned as a child, and SLA, for second language acquisition. I would like to point out, however, that I am of
aware of the brutal oversimplification that the L1 and L2 dichotomy entails, and of the existence of the monolingual
bias, object of the research of, among others, André Martinet (1963) and Uriel Weinrich (1968). However, these
categories will be used in this work for the sake of simplicity, given their wide adoption in the literature of reference.
Chapter 1
Ethical and ontological premises

1.1 – Foreword
Before getting started, it is important for me to shed light on the fundamental premises this work is
based upon. In doing this, I will, first of all, accept the invitation of linguist Lourdes Ortega (2005) to
openly declare the ethical perspective that my research and, in the particular case of this book, my
pedagogical proposal adopt: in other words, what its goals are and who it is for. I will then
ontologically analyze the idea of learning, of cognition, and finally, of language, in order to
reconceptualize them in the function of these goals I am about to declare. By doing so, I aim at
widening the playground for language learning research in a way that is coherent and compatible with
its nature and its history, of which I will discuss in chapter two.

1.2 – Ethical perspective

This work aims at being functional to everyone who wants to learn another language or decides to
support someone else embarking in this quest in his or her efforts. Exactly what this means is what I am
about to explore, analyze, and, hopefully clarify. The perspective I choose to adopt in doing so is the
same which has accompanied me since the very beginning of my academic life. In fact, I consider
myself, first of all, a learner. My personal linguistic history (briefly stated in the preface), my academic
path focused on the process of acquisition and learning of L2, and my professional choice to dedicate
my career to the teaching of languages have offered me the chance to gather more direct experience
compared to many who only more recently have started to confront themselves with languages and
their own learning process3. This, however, does not change the basic attitude towards what I do and
who I consider myself to be. At the starting point of my academic and professional path is the curiosity
to widen and deepen the dynamics in which I found myself participating personally while confronting
English, French, Spanish, and Japanese, while learning to interact in these languages and, most
importantly, with and through their speakers. As anticipated in the preface, coming from a dialect-
speaking region and context(the Veneto of the 1980s and 1990s) my later first contacts and experiences
with Italian and the wealth of its varieties spoken along The Boot were perceived by me as different,
and therefore almost as a foreign language. This also contributed to shape my curiosity, motivation, and

3 Personal direct experiences of language learning and teaching are openly recognized by Larry Selinker (1992) as well as
that source of curiosity and primal motivation at the origin of the studies on L2 acquisition, during the 60’s.
perspective. The fact, however, that in the course of my life I have come to occupy the position of
researcher and professor comes with a share of power and therefore responsibility. As I am about to
explain in detail, maintaining the primary perspective of a learner, no matter how expert, that relates to
other learners as peers is functional precisely to the declared pedagogical objectives of supporting
others' learning efforts. Someone who has never learned another language, in fact, no matter how
interactionally and communicatively competent in his or her own L1 4 will not possibly be competent in
surfing and managing the specific dynamics that confronting oneself with a L2 entails. I will begin by
introducing an analogy, which is a tool I will often adopt together with metaphors. Expecting to support
the development of a L2 without (or with very limited) personal experience as a language learner, it
has the same chances of success of a fish trying to teach a human how to swim: having fins and gills is
not like having arms, legs, and lungs, and the natural ease that comes from being born and having
always lived immersed in water does not simplify the task one little bit. It is the process that matters.
For what concerns the managing of the dynamics of power, the adoption of a horizontal perspective of
a learner relating to another learner is functional precisly to the learning process I am trying to support,
as I will explain in detail in chapter four. The more or less experience one has in navigating these
waters will then be relative to the process of participation and interaction in an L2, and to the
management of the uncertainty that language development implicates, as one would expect when
dealing withan emergent process.

1.3 – On the nature of learning

The sociocognitive perspective I choose to adopt for this proposal of a theoretical framework of
reference for language teaching needs to be understood through the metaphor of learning as
participation. This was identified by Anna Sfard (1998) and is based upon the in-depth analysis of
metaphor as a cognitive tool by scholars such as Mark Johnson (1987), George Lakoff (1987; 1993;
Lakoff & Johnson 1980), and Sheldon Sacks (1978). Traditionally considered a mere, although very
effective, rhetorical instrument, the role of metaphor has been greatly expanded as being fundamental
in our understanding and organizing of the world and experiences, deeply contributing to shape our
very systemic conceptual mapping (Sfard 1998). The first intuition of the key role played by metaphors
in our conceptual system can be attributed to the work of Michael Reddy in The Conduit Metaphor
(1978), eventually elaborated by the scholars mentioned above. The implications of these studies will
be further analyzed in chapter three.

4 The concept of L1 here refers to the sense given to it by MacWhinney of a linguistic system learned as a child while also
learning “[...] how the world works.” (MacWhinney 2008: 341).
 The metaphor of learning as participation is considered to be complementary, and not alternative, to
the more traditional metaphor of acquisition. Before I continue, though, I need to clarify that the topic
being language teaching, the use of terms such as “learning” and “acquisition” are not—and will not
be, unless differently specified—intended in the problematic dichotomous sense attributed to them by
the work of Stephen Krashen (1981). Krashen uses these two words to describe, respectively, the
conscious efforts of learners that encounter new forms of the L2, and the effective internalization of
such forms proved by their correct and spontaneous use. His work, however, is to be framed in the
traditional perspective that falls within the metaphor of learning as acquisition, itself framed within
cognitivism, and therefore antithetic to the post-cognitivist approach declaredly adopted here. The
choice of either one or the other metaphorical perspective deeply influences our idea of learning, to the
point of determining at a deep ontological level the very basic approach we have towards language
learning and teaching. The metaphor of acquisition conceptualizes learning as a process of
appropriation and accumulation. It sees the mind as a container and considers the learner in action as
seizing knowledge as something external, that exists independently, to make it his or her own, taking it
within one's mind to maintain it and access it in case of need. Knowledge is reified and considered
property. The teacher, traditionally, is the one in possession of this knowledge, transmitting it to his or
her students or teaching them how to obtain it.
On the other hand, the metaphor of participation insists instead on the process, on the action in the
course of happening, rather than on the determined nature of an entity of which to gain possession and
on which to exercise one's domain. This alternative point of view entails many consequences. If to
learn is to participate, what follows is that it is not possible to learn first and then do, but one learns by
doing and while doing, in a process with which one acquires more and more familiarity as one
confronts him or herself with it. It is not possible to learn how to swim first and only after getting in the
water. A teacher does not transmit things but helps learners to effectively take part in the process.
Learners, on their side, cannot obviously rely completely on the teacher, but by necessity need to
rethink themselves as active agents. No one, in fact, can learn to swim for us except ourselves.
These two metaphors for a theory of learning, continues Sfard (1998), must not be considered and
adopted as “pure” approaches, but rather as starting blocks, points of views, or different angles of
perspective of the learning process. What we are actually dealing with is, as a matter of fact, an
ontological issue: what is learning? The adoption of a metaphorical perspective rather than any
alternative is functional for reaching certain goals which ought to be the declared, as in fact I have done
a few lines above when I declared the ethical premises of this work of mine. In the case of L2 learning,
the metaphor of participation allows, as I will try to demonstrate, to heal problematic dichotomies
which do otherwise emerge when adopting the acquisition metaphor. For years, these dichotomies have
represented substantial obstacles in language teaching, rooted in the very theoretical paradigm which
has traditionally informed this discipline. Besides the already-mentioned distinction operated by
Krashen between learning and acquisition, for example, I refer to the juxtaposition between those
perspectives which consider and analyze L2 acquisition as a primarily individual and mental process,
separating acquisition from use (E.g. Gass 2000), and those which focus instead more on the social
aspects of language learning (E.g. Firth & Wagner 1997; Block 2003). The latter, moreover, lament the
scarce consideration reserved to these approaches and their contribution to the field by the dominant
paradigm. A particularly emblematic anecdote is the one reported by Zuengler and Miller (2006), in
which Michael Sharwood Smith (1991), during his plenary speech at the 1991 Second Language
Research Forum in Los Angeles defined, through a metaphor, the cognitive side of L2 acquisition as
“the cake”, while the social aspects were just “the icing”. Such a statement confirms the bias towards
these approaches and reveals the marginality to which the dominant cognitivist narration tried to
condemn them. .
Within the traditional research paradigm for L2 acquisition, the framework of reference that has
been firmly established (Block 2003) is the one based upon the Input-Interaction-Output (I.I.O.) model,
developed by researchers such as Susan Gass (1988; 1997; Gass & Selinker 1994/2001) and Michael
Long (1996). The basic reasons for its development are well clarified by the words of Gass:

the goal of my work (and the work of others within the input/interaction framework ...) has never
been to understand language use per se ..., but rather to understand what type of interaction might
bring about what types of changes in linguistic knowledge ... Nevertheless, it is true that in order to
examine these changes, one must consider language use in context. But in some sense this is trivial;
the emphasis in input and interaction studies is on the language used and not on the act of
communication. This may appear to be a small difference, but to misunderstand the emphasis and
the research question ... can result ... in fundamental misinterpretations and naive criticism. In fact,
the result is the proverbial (and not very useful) comparison between apples and oranges.
(Gass 1998: 84)

It is evident how the acquisition metaphor is much more apt to research goals oriented towards
“linguistic knowledge” and on “language” (emphasis in the original) in itself, understood as an
autonomous entity, functionally reified for analytical purposes. The differences between the two
perspectives run deep, and manifest both ontologically, as highlighted here, and historically, as we shall
see in chapter two.
1.4 – On the nature of cognition
From a point of view of the theoretical points of reference, language teaching has always roamed in
a very interdisciplinary field, but nevertheless its origins and roots are strictly connected with
linguistics. The role of this discipline came to play in cognitive sciences with particular reference to
the so-called “cognitive revolution” (Atkinson 2011b: 6) started in the United States in the 1950's in
reaction to the behaviorist paradigm. Once again, the ontological approach that was adopted in this case
will prove to play a fundamental role in shaping a point of view rooted so deeply that it has almost been
naturalized and accepted uncritically5. This perspective, which emerged and became dominant since the
second half of the last century, defined the nature, function, and functioning of human cognition and is
known as cognitivism (Haugeland 1998).
In a few words, cognitivism considers the human mind as an information processor that acquires
input from the outside in the form of discrete data packages, elaborates them within the physical limits
of the system (since Miller, 1956), and through innate rules that need to be discovered and analyzed
builds representations of knowledge of symbolic or distributed nature (including socio-culturally
constructed ones). these representations are subsequently accumulated in an integrative manner to the
previous base to finally be applied to the resolution of problem, of mainly logical nature (Boden 2006;
Wallace 2007; Atkinson 2011b; Atkinson 2012).
Coherent with the metaphor of learning as acquisition, within this understanding of human nature
also fall approaches to language and language acquisition that go from Chomsky's Cartesian and
transformational-generative grammar (1957; 1965; 1966) to the previously mentioned I.I.O model
(Gass 1997).
In juxtaposition to cognitivism, in recent years an alternative approach to human cognition has
slowly started to emerge: post-cognitivism (Gomila & Calvo 2008)6. Adaptive intelligence (Atkinson
2011c, 2012) can be inscribed within the post-cognitivist paradigm. This approach to cognition
considers human beings as organisms connected ecologically and adaptively to the environment in
which they live. In other words, they depend on their environment to survive, and in order to do so they
need to constantly adapt to it in a dynamic manner. Not having strength, speed, and agility comparable
to some other species, human beings found in their cognitive capabilities a very powerful resource that
allowed them to survive and thrive by interacting with their environment in intelligent and adaptive
ways. It is not casual, in fact, for human beings to have the most developed nervous system of the
5 Through a mechanism very well described, for example, by Bruno Latour (1987).
6 For a more detailed historical excursus and framing of the different approaches to cognition from a linguistic perspective
please refer to chapters two and three.
animal kingdom. That, together with the millions neural interconnections of the brain, allows us the
most formidable ecological sensitivity and adaptivity. Moreover, the fact that the weight of the human
brain at birth represents only 25% of its full adult development, and that following birth it keeps on
developing at fetal rates, only slowing down after two years (Shore 1996; in Atkinson 2012: 223),
offers further evidence to confirm the deeply ecological nature of the developmental processes of our
brain and of our cognitive competences, a result of our direct interaction with the world around us.
From this ecological perspective, then, cognition is considered “[…] a node in an ecological network
comprising mind-body-world – [it] is part of a relationship” (Atkinson 2011c: 143).
The metaphor of cognition as an ecological relationship is compatible with the one of learning as
participation. Learning is a fundamental aspect of cognition, as it is considered a constant component
of human activity, which continuously informs the adaptive processes during the course of our lives. It
is not anymore an activity relegated only to formal contexts such as the classroom, with well-defined
roles of teachers and students, but something that permeates the totality of our relationships with the
outside world, especially social ones, since the very moment we are born. From this perspective
originated studies and research like those which led to the definition of a natural pedagogy (Csibra e
Gergely 2009; in Atkinson 2012: 223), meaning a evolutionary sensitivity and receptivity to behavioral
signs that allows us both to learn rapidly and effectively and to modify our behaviour so to make it
more easily learnable by others.
Further support and definition of the concept of adaptive intelligence comes from the studies of
Michael Tomasello on the innate human capability for cooperation (2008), considered one of the pillars
of our cognitive abilities. This, in turn, we owe to our species-specific capability to recognize
intentionality and other mental states of our peers (Tomasello 1999) and pairs up with the notion of the
interactive engine developed by Stephen Levinson (2006) to describe the innate human abilities for
interaction. Finally, the discovery of mirror neurons and the research connected to them (E.g. Rizzolati
and Craighero 2004; Rizzolati e Sinigaglia 2006; Corballis 2009) offer to the adaptive intelligence
theory important neural - and therefore physical and biological - basis and support.
Cognitive linguistics is the approach to the study of language and of the linguistic processes based
upon this idea of human cognition; from it also comes the perspective of language development which I
have adopted as starting point for this work of mine, since it is coherent with and functional to my
language teaching goals. In chapter three I will go over it in detail.

1.5 – On the nature of language

What, then, is a language? Within the generative tradition, a reductionist and abstract concept of
language has generally been adopted, primarily for analytical goals. This particular model of language
was also informed by cognitivism in its role as an organizational model for cognition made of rules
through which knowledge is structured. These facts, as we will see, deeply influenced the agenda of all
the following language research by providing its ontological basis. The following observation by
Chomsky, reported by Holme (2009), is particularly meaningful and emblematic on the subject:

Why do chemists study H2O and not the stuff you get out of the Charles River? You assume that
anything as complicated as what is in the Charles River will only be understandable, if at all, on the
basis of discovery of the fundamental principles that determine the nature of all matter, and those
you have to learn about by studying pure cases.
(Chomsky circa 1985, personal communication; Cook 2005, in Holme 2009: 4).

Chomsky's choice of reductionism was legitimately and overtly motivated in a functional direction.
Over time, however, the number of studies and research goals multiplied, and so did the approaches
towards language:

[Language is] a genetic inheritance, a mathematical system, a social fact, an expression of

individual identity, an expression of cultural identity, an outcome of dialogic interaction, a social
semiotic, the intuitions of native speakers, a collection of memorized chunks, the sum of attested
data, a rule-based discrete combinatory system, or an electrical activation in a distributed
network ... We do not have to choose. Language can be all of these things at once.
(G. Cook & Seidlhofer 1995; in Atkinson 2011b: 1).

The definition of cognition as adaptive intelligence, a network hub in ecological relationship with
body, mind, and surrounding environment offers a holistic and inclusive alternative to the traditional
cognitivistic approach, featured by reductionism, modularity, and mentalism. In this perspective, it is
worth bringing to memory the previously mentioned metaphor (§1.3) used by Michael Sherwood-
Smith (1991) of language as a cake, of which the social aspects were nothing but icing. From this
modular perspective, depending on the analysis that needs to be conducted, one or more layers of the
cake can be selected (morphology, syntax, phonology, lexicon, etc.). Moreover, language is considered
as a system featured by an innate and determined structure, the main interest being towards its deep and
stable dynamics, and not towards “superficial” ones, such as the social aspects that are described.
Cognitive linguistics, instead, adopts a different perspective. Following its generalization
commitment (Lakoff 1990 - §3.2), while admitting that language can be separated in different layers
that can be analyzed through and as a horizontal slice, operating a dissection of the cake, it would
rather take into consideration a vertical slice, inclusive of all layers, with all their features. It is
certainly much more complex to handle, but that allows a holistic approach and a systemic analysis that
is inaccessible to a modular perspective (Evans et al 2006).
From this point of view, a definition of language as a complex adaptive system has also been
proposed (Larsen-Freeman 2011; Beckner et al 2009). Originating from the observations of Diane
Larsen-Freeman (1997; 2007) on the analogies between dynamics of L2 acquisition and studies in
physics by Gleick (1987) on chaos theory and complex systems, this proposal takes into consideration
linguistic development dynamics both from an ontogenetical and philogenetical point of view and is
coherent with the adaptive and ecological approach suggested by adaptive intelligence. Complexity
theory offers an interesting key for interpretation and approach to the study of the “vertical slice of
cake”, allowing us to handle and tame its organized complexity rather than adopting a reductionistic
approach. In particular, it is functional to linguistics since it allows us to include within the analytical
scope precisely that social component that so many demand but that has traditionally been considered
just a source of instability and useless “noise” by cognitivism. From a language teaching perspective, it
offers that unity of ends and means fundamentally needed by a theory of language functional to
learning, and for this reason it will be suggested as such and analyzed in detail in chapter four. Another
relevant consequence for language in using an approach to cognition as an adaptive tool functional to
survival—in which language is primarily a conventional semiotic system of coordination for
communication, as we will see in chapter three—is that it can be considered as emergent from use and
shaped by it, and not a innate and predetermined mental module of which it is only possible to set some
parameters. This emergent nature of language will prove determinant in influencing the approaches of
support to its development.

1.6 – In summary
According to the perspectives I have just introduced and suggested for adoption, learning and
cognition are connected ecologically in an adaptive relationship based on cooperation for survival. The
metaphorical expression of this concept sees learning as participation, as taking part in a relationship,
which is cognition. The reconceptualization of cognition in terms such as the ones suggested by
adaptive intelligence plays a fundamental role in allowing us to frame both the nature of learning and
of language in a perspective that is functional to supporting L2 development, in which means and ends
overlap.
By doing so, language emerges as a conventional tool of coordination for communication (as
clarified in §3.4.1), representing an expression of our species-specific ability to cooperate. Language
itself can be defined through the metaphor of a relationship, just like it has been done for cognition, of
which it is an expression. Language is a shared construct which emerges from interaction: a model of it
that is functional to language teaching cannot reify it, considering it as a goal to reach, but needs to
understand it as a flux, only accessible through use, in which to take part so as to allow its
development. This is true both ontogenetically and philogenetically, thanks to its intrinsic ecological
features as a complex adaptive system.
Chapter 2
Language teaching, between SLA and cognition: an historical perspective

2.1 – The origins of language teaching as we know it today

Language teaching theory is based upon assumptions that regard the theory of language, the
processes of its acquisition/development, and the processes of guidance and support to learning it. All
of this, starting approximately since the end of the Second World War, can be considered to be part of
the research field of cognitive sciences, established under the bright star of the cognitivist paradigm,
which was for a long time hegemonic. Only recently has there been a gradual emerging of perspectives
alternative to it, gathered together under to common name of post-cognitivism (Gomila & Calvo 2008).
For Ciliberti (2012), the history of language teaching can be divided into three fundamental stages that
go from the end of WWII to the 1990's. The first stage has the primary focus on language. In particular,
on the selection of linguistic elements to teach and learn. The second stage moves the focus on the so-
called communicative competence, meaning on a wider approach to learning, not only based on
language but functional to communication altogether. The third stage, finally, moves the focus of the
discipline again from the object of the study—language, communication, and relative competences—to
a deeper attention to psychological aspects of learners and to their learning processes. In other words,
we assist the rising of the centrality of the learner. We shall now see how the cognitivist paradigm, with
its roots in Cartesian philosophy, contributed to shape both the concept of language and the one of
learning at the base of language teaching theory after having framed its emergence within the scientific
and academic environment of its time. A primary source of reference for this historical excursus that I
am about to present has been the famous work by Block (2003) on the “social turn in SLA.”

2.2 – From behaviorism to cognitivism

The dynamics that led, at first in the United States, to the so-called “cognitive revolution” 7,and to the
framing of linguistics - with a pivotal role - within it, can be traced back to the war effort of the allies
during and immediately after WWII and to the impulse this entailed for technological research and
development. First of all, communication and coordination needs among the allies, for intelligence and
counter-intelligence purposes, greatly raised the interest around teaching and learning of foreign
languages (Allwright 1988). This also contributed to bring theories on language acquisition to the
7 The legitimate use of the word “revolution”, in this case, is source of debate among many, given the substantial
hegemony of the Cartesian philosophical approach at the base of cognitivism - in the western world during the previous
350 years. Chomsky himself defined Descartes’ contribution as “‘the first cognitive revolution’, perhaps the only real
one”, while George Mandler, an important cognitivist psychologist, declared that “The so-called ‘cognitive revolution’
[…] was not much a revolution as a return to an ancient regime” (Atkinson 2011b: 7).
limelight and led to the request for the development of ad-hoc language courses by the government of
the U.S. to prominent linguists of that time, such as Leonard Bloomfield and Charles Fries (Howatt
1984). They were both tied to behaviorism—a psychological approach developed through the studies of
J. B. Watson (1913; 1930), based of the assumption that human behavior was the mere result of
conditioning processes, and that excluded from the equation any form of mental process such as
thoughts, feelings, or intentions. They applied this to studying the dynamics of language development,
together with other colleagues, giving life to the linguistic current known as American Structuralism.
Behaviorism can in turn be framed within the structuralist movement in psychology 8, an approach
developed in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt and brought to the United Stated by his student Edward B.
Titchener, based on the application of the experimental method, typical of natural sciences such as
physics and chemistry, to psychology (Alan 2016).
The interest in language development in this period is confirmed by the publication of the book
Language, by Leonard Bloomfield (1933), which is considered “The most elaborate description of the
behaviorist position with regard to language” (Gass & Selinker 1994: 56). In it, Bloomfield describes
the process of language acquisition in children in terms of reinforcement or change in behavior based
upon positive or negative responses associated to certain statements. Meanwhile, Charles Fries, in his
Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language (1945), offered a behaviorist perspective on
learning another language. In 1948, he also founded the first international scientific periodical on
language acquisition, Language Learning (Block 2003). Robert Lado as well was interested in the
teaching and learning of grammar, and with his Linguistics Across Cultures (1957) he developed
contrastive analysis. Putting together a structuralist approach to language—based upon data collection
in a naturalistic context from which language rules are later inductively extrapolated—and
behavioristic psychology, this is considered the first scientific approach, rather than a philological and
literary one, to understanding dynamics of language learning to support language teaching (Block
2003). Based upon the concept of positive and negative transfer between the mother tongue of a learner
and the target language, and the potential interference between these two linguistic systems 9,
contrastive analysis was supposed to be able to provide predictive schemes of the potential critical
points of the learning process. It proved to be, however, ineffective and inadequate, feeding a feeling of
frustration and dissatisfaction towards behaviorism, which had begun to gradually wane. Brighter and
brighter, instead, the light of cognitivism was starting to shine, supported by the publication in 1956 of

8 Even though distributionalism rejected introspection as a method of research, adopted instead by the psychological
Structuralist movement, as they considered it too prone to the risk of subjectivism and therefore unreliable. (Costal
2006).
9 Both concepts were derived from Weinrich's research on bilingualism (1953).
the famous article The magic number seven, plus or minus two (Miller 1956), in which the human mind
was found to have inescapable physical limits to respect when elaborating information. This reinforced
the metaphor of the mind as a computer, an instrument for logical elaboration, whose processes were
not at all obscure and inscrutable as behaviorism claimed. The work of psychologist Jerome Bruner
(Bruner et al 1956) had started investigating the internal variables applied to the stimulus-response
model, adding quite a bit of complexity to the research scenario painted by behaviorism.
All the pieces were at their place by 1957, which happened to be a crucial year, since both Verbal
Behaviour, by Burrhus F. Skinner, a prominent behaviorist, and Syntactic Structures, work at the base
of the huge contribution to linguistics by Noam Chomsky, were published. With Syntactic Structures,
linguistics becomes one of the pillars of the cognitivistic approach to cognitive sciences (Isac & Reiss
2013; Atkinson 2012; De Rycker & De Knop 2015). In 1959, Chomsky published a critical review of
the work of Skinner, highlighting many flaws and inaccuracies in his approach to linguistic phenomena
(Chomsky 1959), substantially contributing to putting an end to the behaviorist experience in
linguistics.

2.2.1 – The rise of cognitivism and the role of linguistics

The rise of generative linguistics and, more in general, of cognitive sciences and of cognitivism are
to be understood within the historical context of the end of WWII, a time in which the incredible
advancements in fields such as logic and engineering led to the development of the very first computer
in the 1940's, thanks to the contributions of Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and John Von Neumann.
The idea of the human mind as an information processing device was gaining more and more traction
at that time. Scholars such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts conceptualized neurons as logical
processors while Herbert Simon and Alan Newell wrote the first programs to simulate human
information processing, paving the way to fields of studies such as artificial intelligence (Atkinson
2012).
The anti-mentalist approach of behaviorism clashed starkly with these new developments and fields
of research based upon management and processing of information, which instead needed an
organizational model for knowledge and its structural rules. Chomsky's transformational-generative
grammar (1957; 1965) provided what was needed to overcome the limits of the Structuralist approach,
which though it described the structure of languages only in terms of its components and relationships
among them, it could not explain key-aspects such as recursive processes and creativity or the nature of
the highly abstract, non-linear, and hierarchic structure of syntax (Atkinson 2011b). Chomskyan
linguistics, instead, proposed a universal grammar (UG) model in which, at a deep level, all languages
had the same structure, which was describable through formal rules and reflected the fundamental
features of the human mind. Linguistic competence represented for Chomsky an innate human faculty,
and language development was considered a systemic process since its very beginning, and not the
result of external conditioning governed by the exposition to a class of stimuli or another. Mistakes
were considered evidence of such systemic development, and not a bad habit to correct. The primary
role of language was, for Chomsky, to provide a formal structure for thinking, a code to organize
logical processes and representation of knowledge acquired from the outside 10: exactly what
cognitivism needed. The Chomskyan view of language can also be summarized in a series of
dichotomies (Atkinson 2012):

 prevalence of form (syntax) over meaning (semantics);

 prevalence of competence (knowledge) over execution (use);
 prevalence of internal cognitive dynamics over environmental factors;
 prevalence of innatism over experiential learning.

In his Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky openly declares his philosophical affiliation to be the
nativistic and internalistic rationalism of Descartes 11, successor of Plato's tradition, that would also
deeply influence cognitivism. The cornerstones of Descartes's thought, at the basis of cognitivism,
analyzed in detail by Atkinson (2011b; 2012), can be condensed as follows:

 Cartesian and cognitivistic mind/body dualism: for which the mind is radically separated from
the body and the world;
 cogito ergo sum: human essence can be summarized in cognitive activity, governed by logical
laws, connected to the idea of the mind as a computer, with language as primary source of
structure and functional to the resolution of logical problems, and only secondarily to
interactional goals (Andor 2004: 109);
10 In this regard, Chomsky states: “'But the general fact about language, which is not really in doubt, is that primarily we
use it for thought. Secondarily, we use it for interaction with others. And a pretty small part of that interaction with
others is communication in any independent sense of the term. … If by communication you really mean something fairly
definite, and try to specify it—like, say, transfer of information or something like that—a very small amount of even the
external use of language is communication. And of course, the overwhelming mass …. is internal.' (in Andor 2004:
109)” (Atkinson 2012: 216).
11 This self-attributed affiliation to the Cartesian school of thought and the adoption of this label were, however, contested
to Chomsky, since according to his critics they could not be clearly and directly be traced back to the ideas of the French
philosopher (Miel 1969; Lakoff 1969; Aarsleff 1970, 1971; Percival 1972; Gipper and Schmitter 1979; in Behme 2009).
Nevertheless, I hope that my exposition here will help to make transparent Descartes’s conception of language as a
phenomenon primarily mentalistic and deterministic in its evolution, as it has been adopted and claimed to be by
cognitivism.
  cognition as an internal phenomenon: nativism of concepts, predetermination of structures, and
introspection as the main way to knowledge, leading to cognitivistic representationalism and
reductionism, for which the external world is knowable only through internal representations
purged of all external “noise”;
 mathematics as the key to understand reality and a consequential mechanistic view: correlated
with scientism and the decompositionality that characterizes cognitivism (Noe 2009: 237).

Summarizing, in the words of Chris Sinha (2007: 1266):

Classical Cognitive Science emerged as a result of both technological and intellectual

developments after the 2nd World War. The development of computer science, the renewed focus
by psychologists on human, as opposed to animal, behavior, and the formal rigor of early
Generative Linguistics, combined to convince many scientists that the behaviorist injunction to
ignore the inner workings of the ‘black box’ of the mind was no longer either necessary or
desirable. This ‘first’ cognitive revolution led eventually to a coherent set of shared theoretical
propositions (the rejection of general purpose learning mechanisms in favor of innate, domain
specific knowledge; the key role of mental representations in the organization of behavior), and
methodological preferences (the primacy of formalization and algorithmic representations),
deriving from the confluence of Generative Linguistics with Information Processing theory.

Focus was now on the individual—on his internal cognitive processes—and on the influence of these
on the process of language acquisition.

2.3 – A cognitivist frame for language acquisition research

I will now analyze how cognitivism, since the very beginning, influenced the research on language
acquisition for what concerns both L1 and L2. I will take into consideration the main contributions to
the discipline and their influence on its internal developments, together with the critical approaches that
have gradually emerged in opposition to them, up to the present time.

2.3.1 – Cognitivist basis for language acquisition

1960 saw the foundation of the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies by psychologists Jerome
Bruner and George Miller, with whom Chomsky collaborated for elaborating and defining a solid
theoretical framework to interpret human cognitive processes. The theory of syntax of the
transformational-generative approach by Chomsky was demonstrated to be particularly valid for
providing a satisfactory interpretation of structural phenomena of natural languages to which Miller
had previously, but with little luck, tried to apply Claude Shannon's information theory (Miller 2003).
Chomsky claimed, in fact, that the processes of syntactic transformation that lent the name to his theory
of language represented operations of cognitive and logical nature, and that the sum of transformational
operations necessary to the formation of a grammatical sentence was directly proportional to the
quantity of elaboration requested. This approach to linguistic processing was defined as derivational
(Miller and Chomsky 1963) and deeply influenced the references at the basis of studies on language
development on children, in turn adopted as starting point for SLA studies.
In the same period, Roger Brown was conducting a series of studies on first language acquisition,
following the acquisitional process of three children for five years. The longitudinal collection of data,
allowed the observation of morphosyntactic and semantic development in the children's language.
Through the analysis of this data the need for a “latent structure” rose in order to justify the level of
acquired linguistic competence: a behavioristic explanation, merely based on imitation, in fact, was
deemed insufficient to explain such a development (Brown & Bellugi 1964). In the final analysis of the
research, Brown (1973) concluded that the acquisitional order of the linguistic forms developed was
not influenced as much by the frequency of exposure to them, as a behavioristic approach would have
claimed, but rather on their morphosyntactic and semantic complexity. This was coherent with the
derivational approach suggested by Miller and Chomsky and more in general with the vision of
linguistic competence as a set of internal and innate parameters to set through exposure (the only
external contribution to a nevertheless predetermined system). In this way, the path for the following
research on linguistic acquisition was set, firmly framing it within the cognitivistic paradigm.

2.3.2 - Pit Corder and the first studies on SLA

The beginning of the research on the acquisitional processes for L2 is generally linked to the study
on learners' errors conducted by Pit Corder (1967) that, in the words of Larry Selinker, is considered
“the paper that began current interest in SLA and IL (interlanguage) studies” (1992: 149; emphasis
original).
In Corder’s paper, key concepts for the future development of the discipline—such as the built-in
syllabus, idiolect, the difference between input and intake, and the difference between error and
mistake—were elaborated and suggested. The analysis of errors (systemic in nature, juxtaposed to
mistakes, considered as accidental slips of tongue), in particular, was recognized as fundamental since
it pointed out the positioning of the learner with respect to the parameters setting theorized by
Chomsky, now considered in terms of inbuilt syllabus. Moreover, from this perspective, no matter at
what level of development, the L2 spoken by the learner was no longer a crippled version of the
original, but a system altogether coherent, an idiolect, in Corder's words12, in constant evolution.
The foundational article by Corder provided the initial impulse to several studies that followed
(Huang 1970; Raven 1968), among which the most influential are those authored by Heidi Dulay and
Marina Burt, in which a common order of acquisition for all learners of English as an L2 was proposed
(Dulay & Burt 1973). The two researchers hypothesized L2 acquisition not to be simply a transfer of
structures—or interference—from L1 to L2, but an actual process of “active mental organization”
(Dulay & Burt 1972: 236), or “creative construction” (Dulay & Burt 1974a, 1976). Studies to test this
hypothesis were based upon the method elaborated by Brown (1973) and took into consideration the
acquisition of morphemes by a group of Spanish-speaking learners of English as L2 (Dulay & Burt
1973), and afterwards also by Chinese-speaking learners (1974b; 1976)13 . The results, which revealed
similar acquisitional orders regardless of the different language background, were interpreted as
convincing proof of their hypothesis (Dulay & Burt 1982)14. Further longitudinal studies on L2
development in adults followed, and they seemed15 to confirm the theory of an acquisitional order of
the morphemes that acted upon an innate structure, common to both adults and children, and was
substantially independent, at least for what concerned this aspect of language development, from the L1
of the learners. The contested and influential contribution to research of Stephen Krashen, that had
started off collaborating with Dulay and Burt, was based widely, although not exclusively, on these
premises.

2.3.3 – Krashen and the attention towards input

In the SLA field of research, the figure of Stephen Krashen plays a controversial yet important role.
In fact, to him is attributed, the merit to have provided SLA with a first, wide, and complete model of

12 Although the expression that would gain the most popularity is interlanguage, coined by Larry Selinker (1972). Similar
concepts - but each one has its own slightly different focus - were proposed by other scholars, among whom Corder
himself, such as transitional competence (Corder 1967), idiosyncratic dialect (Corder 1971), approximative system
(Nemser 1971), and learner language (Faerch et al 1984); (Selinker 1992).
13 For a critique of the superficiality of characterizing a learner primarily upon his or her L1, see Block (2003: 21, 32-58).
14 Although harshly criticized later on for their scarce reliability due to the transversal – and not longitudinal – nature of
the data gathered (Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991; R. Ellis 2008; in Atkinson 2011b) and for methodological flaws
(McLaughlin 1978), these studies are nevertheless recognized for having inspired acquisitional research and the
understanding of the psycholinguistic – and not simply linguistic – nature of these processes (Larsen-Freeman 2011).
For further critical perspective see Block (2003: 19).
15 As highlighted by Larsen-Freeman upon a reinterpretation of her own studies on the order of morphological acquisition
(1976) from a sociocognitive perspective (2011), the correlation between order of morphemic accuracy in the
interlanguage of a learner and the frequency of those morphemes within the input at the base of that research are
explainable through features such as frequency of exposure, salience, and understandability of the provided input; this
would allow to explain the emergence of a given interlanguage in terms of exposition and usage in a kind of “adaptive
imitation” (Macqueen 2009), rather than calling into cause an innate order. Chapter four will deal with these dynamics
more in detail.
reference (Lightbrown 1984; Long 1985). Besides having set the focus of research on the input, from
which the Input-Interaction-Output model (I.I.O., Gass 1988, 1997; Gass & Selinker 1994/2001; Long
1996; already mentioned in §1.3) would have later been developed, it can be, as a matter of fact,
rightfully considered a heritage of his contribution (Atkinson 2011b). At the same time, his work has
also been harshly criticized by many, as well detailed by Block (2003: 19-23). Krashen's model (1976;
later updated in 1977, 1981, 1982, 1985) is made of five main hypotheses:

 the natural order hypothesis: the acquisition of morphemes as a process fixed in its
predetermined order and independent from the perceived difficulty and from the
teaching/exposition order;
 the acquisition/learning dichotomy: acquisition as an unconscious process that leads to a tacit
competence, manifested through a correct use of language, and learning, a conscious and
intentional process that leads to a declarative linguistic competence that does not eventually
transform into acquisition;
 the monitor hypothesis: the aforementioned declarative competence, derived from learning, can
only be used for monitoring the sentences formulated thanks to the acquired competence;
 the input hypothesis: the exposition to abundant comprehensible input is fundamental; in order
for input to become intake – meaning to be acquired – it must be just above the threshold of
competence of the learner;
 the affective filter hypothesis: factors such as anxiety, scarce motivation, and low self-esteem
are potentially influential in activating the filter, which in turns blocks the understandability of
the input.

Among the most known and quoted examples, Berry McLaughlin (1978) criticized Krashen's model
as inaccurate in defining concepts and not in line with state of the art of scientific knowledge on the
subject. The elements contested by McLaughlin were many. For example, the notorious
acquisition/learning dichotomy, the boundaries of which were not sufficiently clear, besides going
against the cognitivist axiom that saw language as developing from conscious and focused activity
towards a gradual automation. Methodological flaws were also brought up, which by extension also
regarded Dulay and Burt, being that the one under accusation was the very same method - the bilingual
syntax measure - and often also the same data used by Krashen. Finally, the non-falsifiable nature of
the monitor, the input, and the affective filter were contested as they did not offer possibilities for
observation and measurement. Further critiques have been presented over the years by Takala (1984),
Gregg (1984, 1986), and Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991), to which, though, Krashen never bothered
to respond, as observed by Beretta (1991: 508). His influence on the field has been widely attributed to
his ability as a communicator and to the strong resonance his theories had since the very beginning
among teachers16,who found his theories to be more attractive than others which were definitely more
sophisticated and accurate but less immediate for them to understand and implement. He is also
acknowledged for having set the focus of SLA research on the input factor, already an important aspect
of the language acquisition device (LAD) theorized by Chomsky (1965), and that is by now at the base
of the elaborate cognitivistic construction for SLA that by the beginning of the 1990’s was starting to
suffer for lack of a general theory, which some felt necessary (Long 1990; 1993).
Krashen had indeed indicated in the comprehensible input a direction for further research, but his
concept was still too raw to be implemented. The studies that originated from it first introduced the
concept of interaction (Long 1981), then that of output (Swain 1985), contributing to gradually
delineating the features integrated in the model that finally took form, the I.I.O. model (Gass 1988,
1997; Long 1996; Gass & Selinker 1994/2001). Perfectly representative of the cognitivistic approach of
the Cartesian matrix that had generated it, the I.I.O. model adopts, first of all, a sharp separation
between the external world and cognitive activity; then, concentrating on the latter (mentalism and
reductionism), it proceeds in integrating the concept of linguistic transfer (the influence of the L1 on
the L2), the sequentiality of the morphosyntactic development, the innate systemic nature of the
interlanguage, and the variability due to age combined within the general framework of the Chomskyan
universal grammar theory and cognitive sciences altogether (Block 2003). Elements such as affective
factors, attention, previous knowledge, and frequency of the input are relegated to the margins of the
model—as a matter of fact, as external factors—and therefore not included in the analysis. Following
the direction indicated by Krashen through the emphasis on the input, moving along a well-defined
path towards a solid model of reference, many cognitivist researchers were feeling ready to take a step
considered crucial: the development of a general theory of SLA.

2.3.4 – SLA's paradigm wars

The first statement adopting the expression “paradigm wars” appears to be in a paper by Larsen-
Freeman (2002b) on acquisition and language use considered through the lens of chaos and complexity
theory. In it, the author expressed her worries for the “state of turmoil” 17 in which the field of second
16 Among his strictest and probably most vicious critics, Gregg accused Krashen of leveraging on a certain anti-
intellectualism common in the United States, attributing his popularity among teachers to the fact that “[…] the
fundamental message for Krashen’s theory is that you do not have to know very much to be a good teacher” (Gregg
1986: 121, in Block 2003: 23).
17 The paper opens with the exact expression: “The field of second language acquisition is in a state of turmoil.” (Larsen-
language acquisition happened to be, divided by internal feuds which had their roots in different
schools of thought over the importance of social aspects in SLA, and suggested chaos and complexity
theory as a potential solution to the conflict.
The responsibility for the first blood in these paradigm wars is generally attributed to a contested
paper18 by Firth and Wagner (1997) in which the authors stated the need for a reconceptualization of
the discipline, asking for an ontological widening so to rebalance the two main currents, predominately
the mentalist and cognitivist one and then the social and contextual one, which, they claimed, was not
taken in due consideration. The roots of the contention, actually, can be traced a little farther back in
time to the desire for a unified theory, mentioned at the end of the last paragraph, cohesive on the
inside and coherent with what, at least by one of the two factions, was considered the core of the
discipline, and at that feeling of frustration towards a theoretic scenario considered to be pointlessly
vast and dispersive (Beretta 1991, 1993; Beretta & Crookes 1993; Crookes 1992; Eubank & Gregg
1995; Gregg 1993; Klein 1990, 1991; Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991; Long 1985, 1990, 1993; Spolsky
1985; 1988; 1989, 1990). To fix this proliferation of “oppositional theories” (Long 1993: 225), one of
the suggestions was to establish criteria of admissibility to SLA (Long 1990) upon which to operate
some(I personally find the word choice here particularly evoking, and not in a positive way)- “theory
culling” (Long 1993), which is considered to be inevitable towards the end of scientific normalization.
Those suggesting and supporting this approach belonged to the predominant cognitivist faction; a
rebuke of their arguments described them as in a pointless competition with natural sciences, suffering
from “science envy” and “paradigm desire” (Block 1996: 64) - the lack of it being considered a
weakness - while using the straw man of relativism to warn against an alleged risk of intellectual
anarchy. In another famous critical analysis, overtly postmodernist, which contained an invitation to
“letting all flowers bloom” (Lantolf 1996), the presumption of a modernist and rationalist supremacy in
matters of SLA was exposed and its groundlessness stated. The fact that all of this was nothing but an
ontological matter of chickens finally coming home to roost is demonstrated by the fact that Long
(1990), the prominent cognitivist who had contributed to the development of the I.I.O. model and
author of the request for criteria of admissibility upon which to operate the aforementioned theory
culling, lamented how—besides some important initial studies, directly linkable to Chomsky's
theoretical core—a great deal of research conducted after the 1960's in SLA, besides theoretical
linguistics, referenced also theories, developments, and methodologies of fields such as education,

Freeman 2002b: 33).

18 This particular paper, in fact, was followed by many replies and comments, some supportive and some against, which
fueled an intense debate that culminated ten years later with the publication of a dedicated focus issue of The Modern
Language Journal where the original piece had first appeared.
psychology, anthropology, foreign language teaching, and applied linguistics. Another problem, in
Long's view, was that only three of the periodical publications of the field were primarily dedicated to
SLA (as conceived in his point of view, at least), and the majority of the conferences in the field were
“originally designed for something else”, specifically making reference to the ones organized by
TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), AILA (Association Internationale de la
Linguistique Appliquée), and AERA (American Educational Research Association) (Long 1990: 59).
These paradigm wars, besides the rigidities on the two extreme poles, evolved into several attempts
for synthesis that seem to have found common ground in the sociocognitive approach, analyzed in
detail in the following chapter. For now, I will conclude this short digression of mine along the
milestones of the history of SLA studies to remind the readers of the ethical question raised and tackled
at the very beginning of this work: What are the goals of the research being conducted? Who are its
beneficiaries? In other words, to quote Block (1996: 77):

“'I propose [...] that we follow Ellis’s" (1994) advice that we 'evaluate theories in relation to the
context in which they were developed and the purpose(s) for which they are intended to serve'
(Ellis 1994, 685)”

Let's now move on to analyze how SLA and its cognitivistic agenda setting have, along the years,
influenced foreign and second language teaching, though, which in turn had its own operative goals
and beneficiaries to answer to.

2.4 – A short history of language teaching, from the origins to the rise of cognitivism
The birth of language teaching as a formal discipline can be traced back to the attempts of the late
nineteenth century to systematize the efforts to teach foreign languages through a scientific approach
by linguists such as Henry Sweet, Wilhelm Vietor, and Paul Passy (Richards & Rodgers 1986).
Language teaching has always been a multidisciplinary field in continuous evolution, that over time
received contributions from many different sources: linguistics, communication sciences, psychology,
sociology, anthropology, and education and pedagogy, just to mention some. Moreover, it is made
unique by the fact – already anticipated – that, in it, means and ends happen to overlap, since language
can only be learned through language (Balboni 2002: 25).
These different contributions that inform language teaching are generally organized within three
hierarchical levels, elaborated by Edward Anthony (1963): approach, method, and technique. The
approach is based upon one or more theories on the nature of language and learning, it defines the
objectives, and it is axiomatic19. The method is the ensemble of procedures through which the approach
is implemented, bringing it to life and translating it into practice, and is—of course—coherent with it.
The technique is what allows the actual implementation of the method in everyday life, it is consistent
with it and therefore in harmony with the approach.
Briefly summarizing the history of language teaching up to the rise of cognitivism, the first method
generally remembered is the grammar-translation method, primarily adopted until the end of the 1800's,
which was strongly criticized afterwards and somehow survived in some forms until these days. It was
the method adopted for the teaching of classical languages, and because of this it had mostly
philological, literary, and educational goals; it represents a formal and deductive approach to language
teaching since it concentrates of the development of linguistic competence through the analysis and
study of grammar (Chiapedi 2009).
Next to it, around the second half of the 1800's, the so-called natural methods started to take form.
Among these, the direct method is by far the most renowned. Developed to prepare learners for oral
interaction, following the growing number of communicative opportunities rising among European
countries (Richard & Rodgers 1986), the direct method was based upon the exclusive use of the target
language and on the systematic avoidance of translation, sometimes resulting in complex and
extenuating periphrasis. The development of natural methods marks the beginning of a scientific
approach to language teaching and was based on the assumption that the effectiveness of learning
would rise through the emulation of the learning dynamics of the L1. The direct method was primarily
oriented to develop speaking competences and therefore reserved a great deal of attention to
pronunciation.
Starting around the 1930's and up to WWII, on the basis of the Coleman Report (A. Coleman 1929),
which was commissioned by the US government. The United States implemented the so-called reading
method, aimed at optimizing the few hours of foreign language instruction in school programs toward
the development of reading skills in other languages. With the war, needs had changed, and the interest
towards language teaching had risen. In 1942 the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was
created, with the goal of developing fluency in conversation in a series of languages functional to the
war effort. Bloomfield and Fries, as already mentioned (§2.2), were asked to develop ad-hoc language
courses. Through the mediation of mother tongue mediators that provided sentences and vocabulary
under the supervision of a linguist, the students of the so-called “Army Method” would practice for ten
hours a day, six days a week. Not particularly refined from a methodological point of view, this method

19 As a matter of fact, the definition of a new theory, through the adoption of a sociocognitive perspective, is the goal of
this work.
invested mainly on the intensity of exposition to the target language, coherently with behavioristic
approach it was based upon (Richards and Rodgers 1986).
Once the war was over, the mutated geopolitical and economic situation saw the request for English
teachers grow very rapidly at a global level; Charles Fries, meanwhile, had founded the English
Language Institute at the University of Michigan, which specialized in teaching English as a foreign
and second language and in teacher training—a kind of course offering that soon expanded to other
institution as well. During the 1950's, thanks to the partnership between American structuralism – that
provided the theory of language – and a theory of learning based on a behavioristic approach (Skinner
1957), Audiolingualism came to life. Developed upon Fries's work (1945), in which the issues of
learning another language were framed within the structural differences between them (considered as
determined at the langue level, and therefore comparable), Audiolingualism applied the theories of
contrastive analysis (Lado 1957) to predict interferences between the L1 and the L2 of the learners.
This was followed by a great development of teaching material, such as the Lado English Series and
English 900 (Lado 1977; English Language Services 1964; in Richards & Rodgers 1986) widely
adopted to teach English in North America. The luck of Audiolingualism lasted until the sixties, when
it was gradually abandoned, criticized both for its theory of language and of learning 20 following the
advent of Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar in linguistics and of cognitivism in
psychology that had rapidly gained ground as reference points in their disciplines of reference, at least
in the US.

2.5 – Hymes and the communicative method

Chomsky's transformational-generative theory, as already said, contested structuralism—in
particular to the version that Bloomfield had elaborated of it: distributionalism—to only describe the
linguistic elements that determined the structure of a language without being able to explain properties
such as creativity and recursion. Language was indeed a system of structures, but Chomsky also
wanted to take into consideration its fundamental properties, as intrinsically connected with the innate
processes of the mind, and how these allowed the elaboration and mental representation of the
experience precisely through the linguistic tool. Hence, for Chomsky, language was not a mere
symbolic system functional to communication, but first of all the very code in which the mind-
computer was programmed.
In the Chomskyan vision of language, competence – the mental and innate knowledge of the

20 “Language is not a habit structure. Ordinary linguistic behavior characteristically involves innovation, formation of new
sentences and patterns in accordance with rules of great abstractness and intricacy" (Chomsky 1966: 153).
linguistic system – was naturally superior to any performance, the use made of that competence for
communicative goals, defined as “fairly degenerate in quality” (Chomsky 1965: 31, in Hymes 1972:
55). This idea of language was famously and fiercely opposed by Dell Hymes (1972) who, claiming the
functional primacy of language as an instrument of communication, subordinated the ability to build
grammatical sentences simply as one of the facets of a wider communicative competence, together with
the ability to distinguish what is appropriate and made sense according to context and discourse, and
functional to the goals of the speaker. From Hymes's point of view—a sociolinguistic one, necessarily
based on use—Chomsky's approach was sterile; however, for Chomsky, this sterilization process was
intended and functional precisely to the analysis of those abstract and innate abilities upon which his
research was focused.
Following the gradual fall from grace of Audiolingualism, language teaching had found itself
without both a theory of language and a theory of learning. Chomskyan linguistics, in fact, could not
easily be(come) “applied”, and it was not apt at either providing theoretical bases of reference for
language teaching, nor had it been developed for such a task 21. Some attempts were actually made to
extrapolate a theory of language learning out of generative linguistics, developing the so-called
cognitive code, but enthusiasm around it died rather quickly (Carrol 1966; Jakobovits 1970; Lugton
1971; in Richards & Rodgers 1986). This need for a theoretical reference was becoming more and
more pressing, especially in the old continent where economic, political, and social changes deriving
from the new project of European integration started after the end of WWII were presenting new
linguistic and pedagogic challenges. The mutated characteristics and needs of the new learners—less
academic and more oriented towards an immediate use of the language studied—and also and
especially of the teachers, who were asked to manage such phenomena (Mitchell 1994) required a
concrete answer.
In this context, Hymes's proposal for a theory of language based upon communication was
welcomed with great enthusiasm by language teaching, which quickly adopted the development of
communicative competence as ultimate goal of its newly-born communicative method (Brumfit &
Johnson 1979; Canale & Swain 1980; Savignon 1983). Besides Hymes's contribution, soon also
research and studies by John L. Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969) in pragmatics, and by Henry
Widdowson (1978) on the importance of the communicative dimension to orient language use came to
integrate the theoretical references of the new methodology in course of development (Richards &
Rodgers 1986; Chiapedi 2009). The following efforts of the language teaching academic community
21 When asked what kind of influence he thought linguistics could have on language teaching, Chomsky answered: “My
feeling is that linguistics or psychology more generally have little of value to offer with regard to educational practice”
(Halliday 1984: 57).
went towards attempts of implementing these theoretical contributions, gradually shaping that set of
principles regarding language learning and teaching that nowadays goes under the name of
communicative method. The work of Canale and Swain (1980), for example, contributed in defining
the goal of language teaching as development of communicative, and no longer only linguistic,
competence. Linguistic competence, in fact, understood as attention towards grammar correctness, was
now spoiled of its primary importance and no longer framed as the ultimate objective of language
teaching activities. It was now part of the broader communicative competence, to develop together and
harmoniously with sociolinguistic competence, meaning attention towards contextual appropriateness;
discursive competence, as in managing communicative efforts in terms of coherence and cohesion; and
finally, strategic competence, concentrated on the pragmatic aspects of communication. The focus of
language teaching was moving from the correctness of grammar to the wider managing of the
communicative process. A speaker was not only to form structurally correct sentences, but he was also
expected now to be able to use language effectively in practical communicative situation, even if this
meant to sacrifice formal perfection, to be developed over time, through practice. Richards (2006)
highlights how the enthusiasm of the language teaching community for this communicative “new deal”
blossomed very soon in a multitude of efforts for the definition of new syllabi which, besides
specifying linguistic aspects like grammar structures and vocabulary, were now busy in defining also:

 “As detailed a consideration as possible of the purposes for which the learner
wishes to acquire the target language; for example, using English for business purposes,
in the hotel industry, or for travel.

 Some idea of the setting in which they will want to use the target language; for
example, in an office, on an airplane, or in a store.

 The socially defined role the learners will assume in the target language, as well
as the role of their interlocutors; for example, as a traveler, as a salesperson talking to
clients, or as a student in a school.

 The communicative events in which the learners will participate: everyday

situations, vocational or professional situations, academic situations, and so on; for
example, making telephone calls, engaging in casual conversation, or taking part in a
meeting.
  The language functions involved in those events, or what the learner will be able
to do with or through the language; for example, making introductions, giving
explanations, or describing plans.

 The notions or concepts involved, or what the learner will need to be able to talk
about; for example, leisure, finance, history, religion.

 The skills involved in the “knitting together” of discourse: discourse and

rhetorical skills; for example, storytelling, giving an effective business presentation.

 The variety or varieties of the target language that will be needed, such as
American, Australian, or British English, and the levels in the spoken and written
language which the learners will need to reach.

 The grammatical content that will be needed.

 The lexical content, or vocabulary, that will be needed.”,

as Van Ek and Alexander (1980) explained in detail in their Threshold Level English, defining the
minimum competences needed by a learner in order to be able to effectively take part in a conversation.

2.5.1 – Fundamental assumptions of the communicative method

Besides the definition of new syllabi, other fundamental aspects of the passage from a vastly
traditional grammatical approach to a communicative one regarded both the teaching and – in particular
- the learning activity. To abandon the pivotal role of grammar and the vision of a language learning
based upon the development of automatisms obtained through mechanical repetition and memorization
exercises, it was claimed necessary to move the focus from language in itself and from formal accuracy
to take in consideration language learning as a process of constant evolution instead, based upon what a
learner can actually do to communicate (fluency), and not upon its formal flaws. The concept of
“interlanguage” coined by Selinker (1972) to define whatsoever level of development of a language
system in a L2 learner, independently from its accuracy or extension, became archetypal of the
communicative approach. Moreover, in order to achieve all this, it was also deemed necessary to move
the attention away from the teacher—up to that point considered the center of the didactic activity,
responsible for the accuracy of the language production of the class—and onto the learner, the true
center of that process of language development to support. From a mechanistic and decontextualized
approach, which stressed the importance of a correct production of forms, taught in order of
grammatical complexity, the focus was shifted over, at least in theory, to the learner as a whole, rich in
his or her diversity in motivation, goals, and social and linguistic objectives, all of these going way
beyond the classroom performance.
The defining of and then the attempts to apply a theory and practice of language teaching which
respected and fulfilled the founding principles of the communicative approach has occupied teachers
and researchers since the 1970's. The taking into consideration of the vastness and complexity of the
human factors elicited during the development of a linguistic system led to the blossoming of a variety
of developments on the methodological and technical front, truly unprecedented in the history of the
discipline. Over time, these efforts became that wide set of practices that became known as
“communicative method”, all tracing back to a series of core assumptions, summarized by Richards
(2006: 22):

“1. Second language learning is facilitated when learners are engaged in interaction and
meaningful communication.

2. Effective classroom learning tasks and exercises provide opportunities for students to
negotiate meaning, expand their language resources, notice how language is used, and take
part in meaningful interpersonal exchange.

3. Meaningful communication results from students processing content that is relevant,

purposeful, interesting, and engaging.

4. Communication is a holistic process that often calls upon the use of several language
skills or modalities.

5. Language learning is facilitated both by activities that involve inductive or discovery

learning of underlying rules of language use and organization, as well as by those
involving language analysis and reflection.

6. Language learning is a gradual process that involves creative use of language, and trial
and error. Although errors are a normal product of learning, the ultimate goal of learning is
 to be able to use the new language both accurately and fluently.

7. Learners develop their own routes to language learning, progress at different rates, and
have different needs and motivations for language learning.

8. Successful language learning involves the use of effective learning and communication
strategies.

9. The role of the teacher in the language classroom is that of a facilitator, who creates a
classroom climate conducive to language learning and provides opportunities for students
to use and practice the language and to reflect on language use and language learning.

10. The classroom is a community where learners learn through collaboration and
sharing”.

2.5.2 – Intrinsic limits of the communicative method

A quick reading of the ten points that were just listed by anyone with even a minimal experience in a
language classroom, regardless of which side of the barricades one was on, will reveal how, even if
presented as “assumptions” by the promoters of the communicative method, these remain mostly a
mere list of good intentions, ideals towards which tending indications follow at the most. The issue at
the bottom is as enormous as it is simple in its (relative) gravity: regardless of the efforts to implement
it, the communicative method still cannot count on a solid and well-structured theory of learning,
coherent with the adopted theory of language. The origin of the problem is to be found in the dynamics
analyzed earlier. Since the capitulation of Audiolingualism, by now approximately half a century ago,
language teaching, lacking an internal theoretical point of reference, fought tooth and nail to find a new
direction. While transformational-generative linguistics, regardless of the attempt made with the
cognitive code (in fact rapidly set aside, being unproductive), had not been developed with the
ambition of becoming a point of reference for applied linguistics, as Chomsky always openly declared,
Hymes's linguistic theory was always unclear in this regard. As a matter of fact, though, being
developed as a reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, it has, more or less consciously but necessarily, also
accepted and adopted the basic dichotomies. If the first was declared formal, abstract, mental, and
innate, the second had responded by placing itself in opposition, as functional, concrete, social, and
based on use and experience. Both theoretical approaches, though, had been developed for analytical
and research goals and were not to be applied on learning and development. Certainly, the
sociolinguistic approach contributed to set the agenda on aspects also relevant for language teaching,
but it ultimately had a very different objective. If the Cartesian approach had at its base a set of
dichotomies upon which it was taking a position, one could say that Hymes represented nothing but
Chomsky's flip side. The dichotomies at the base of these approaches are precisely the origin of the
problems of the communicative method. As I have by now more than once repeated, language teaching
is a discipline made unique by the fact that in it means and ends overlap since language is learned
through language itself (Balboni 2002: 25). This unity between means and ends requires an adequate
approach, meaning a solid theory of learning, that the communicative method has at length and
desperately tried to put together. All of these attempts, unfortunately, were always deemed to fail,
because they were sabotaged at the roots by the adopted vision of the nature of language, conceived as
determined and reified. These two features are fundamental—analysis being the ultimate goal—since
there is a need for something to analyze but end up being misleading and counterproductive when
aiming for language development. Behaviorism (that, in its defense, was a product of its time; that is,
of the historical and social context in which it was developed) had considered language essentially as a
habit to get into and had neglected essential elements for language learning such as, for example,
motivation. With its end, language teaching— an applied discipline that the linguistic theory elaborated
by Chomsky rightfully took or kept in no consideration whatsoever—immediately caught the
opportunity offered by Hymes's theory of a language as a social construct, without fully analyzing the
internal contradictions that partnership entailed. As Holme (2009: 4-6) dutifully pointed out, language
as “social semiotics” as conceived by Halliday (1978, 1993) provided that solid bridging between
linguistic form and social and meaning objectives. However, at the same time, it also reified language
into an external entity, separated from cognitive processes, reducing it to a mere set of expression to
learn and assemble in order to partake in social life. This had devastating effects on the teaching of
grammar, stripped of its role of instrument for the categorization and interpretation of experience. By
doing so, learners did gain a much wider repertoire of useful and functional ready-to-use expressions,
but due to the taboo that developed around grammar (to which one must also add the awful heritage left
by the grammar-translation method, by which so many of the previous generations were left
traumatized), they also risked and often ended up missing out on a systemic perspective, “[finding]
themselves stranded on phrasal islands of incongruous correctness by the error-infested nature of their
larger sentence” (Holme 2009: 6).

2.5.3. - The new challenges of language teaching

 Besides these fundamental considerations over language, there are more troublesome aspects,
connected to the learning process and to the adopted methodologies that have emerged over time, that
were dutifully taken into consideration by the communicative method. Unfortunately, no concrete
solution to address them systemically has been suggested so far besides the aforementioned set of
“good practices”. In particular, I refer to the key role that motivation holds in the process of second
language development, relevant when speaking of involvement of learners in “interaction and
meaningful communication” and again of “content that is relevant, purposeful, interesting, and
engaging” (point 1, 2, 3, 7, §2.5.1). As already pointed out in previous work:

The importance of interaction towards input negotiation (Long 1996) has been proved by
experiments (Makey 1999; in Rastelli 2009) that demonstrate how “students learn better if they
have the chance to ask for explanation to a partner (or the teacher) from whom to receive an
implicit negative feedback, meaning an error signaling that almost doesn't interrupt the flux of
conversation and that […] is very useful because it provides the learner with linguistic information
precisely in the quantity and in the moment in which it is needed” (Rastelli 2009; 15). The
importance of negative feedback is therefore crucial towards acquisition,but is “effective only if in
a meaningful interactional context, meaning a conversation […] in which the attention of students
is diverted on the wrong linguistic form only incidentally and only for the time strictly necessary to
the correct reformulation” (Long 2007; in Rastelli 2009: 57).
(Gobbi 2012a: 51 – Translation by the author).

The difficulty in recreating situations within the classroom which allow a teacher to elicit such
dynamics—considered fundamental towards a progression of the learning path—are evident, especially
when multiplied by the number of students per class. Not less troublesome is the issue of the selection
of contents: besides being functional to the learning objectives, in fact, they should also theoretically be
relevant, purposeful, interesting, and engaging for every single student. Within a discipline based upon
methodology such as language teaching, these issues are not at all secondary. However, the lack of a
solid learning theory doesn't allow us many instruments to face these issues, besides the consciousness
of their existence and a theoretical, dutiful attention towards their influence.
Moreover, it is necessary to point out how the role of facilitator is not particularly well-fitting in a
formally hierarchic context such as the classroom that instead often induces in students a passive
attitude in which they expect the teacher—or facilitator—to lead. On top of this, the “artificial society”
that arises from classroom contexts does not always end up fostering sharing and collaboration with
very relevant consequences for the very basic dynamics necessary to support learning objectives.
Finally, for what concerns assumptions on the “creative” use of language and of “effective learning and
communication strategies” (my emphasis), in analogy with the critique that McLaughlin (1978) made
towards Krashen's distinction between acquisition and learning (§2.3.3), I would point out that the
vagueness of the concept expressed makes them hard to hold accountable.
In their conclusions of a critical analysis over the effective implementation state of the
“communicative paradigm”, Jacobs and Farrel (2003: 24) note that “[…] the effects of the paradigm
shift are still only partly being felt” and they exort “[…] our fellow second language educators to take a
big-picture approach to the changes in our profession”.
In the next two chapters, I will suggest a roadmap which, in my opinion, would allow us to move
precisely in that direction, thanks to a theory of language partially anticipated in the first chapter, and a
theory of learning designed by me upon the basis provided by sociocognitive linguistics. This will pave
the road to a method of language pedagogy which will finally fit the peculiar nature of language
learning and acquisition, and will recognize language teaching as a discipline that manages an
emergent process.
Chapter 3
Sociocognitive linguistics and the emergent language

3.1 – The origins of cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics started off in the 1970's, during a phase of reaction to the limits, perceived by
many22, presented by those formal approaches to linguistics which had dominated the scene since the
second half of the 1950's. It first developed on the west coast of the United States 23 (Fillmore 1975;
Lakoff & Thompson 1975; Rosch 1975), to eventually land in continental Europe in the 1980's and
finally reach a certain maturity in international diffusion during the 1990's (Evans et al 2006). The
foundation of the scientific publication Cognitive Linguistics in 1990, following the formation of the
International Cognitive Linguistics Association during its first conference held in Duisburg, Germany,
in 1989, is considered “[…] the birth of cognitive linguistics as a broadly grounded, self conscious
intellectual movement” (Langacker 1991: xv; in Evans et al 2006).
Regardless of its recent formal organization, cognitive linguistics is part of a very rich research
tradition of cognitive sciences that roots back to the 1800's, represented by contributions coming, for
example, from German language psychology, ranging from Wilhelm Wundt with Gestalt psychology,
to Karl Bühler; from genetic epistemology with James M. Baldwin and Jean Piaget; from the
sociocognitive theory of memory by Frederic Bartlett; from the studies on the social origins of
language and cognition development by Lev Vygotskij and George H. Mead; from the socially and
psychologically oriented linguistics of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin L. Whorf in the
United States and with Antoine Meillet, Michael M. Bakhtin, and Valentin N. Vološinov on the
European front, and from the functionalist approach of the linguistic Circle of Prague (Sinha 2007). At
a broader level of analysis, the philosophical referents of this school of thought within the cognitive
sciences trace back – juxtaposed to the dualism held by Kant, Descartes, and Plato, upon which
cognitivism would be based – to the ecological unity that had its roots in the thought of Aristotle -
“nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses” - uptaken and developed by Spinoza
precisely to oppose Descartes, and in Leibniz's monad (Atkinson 2012: 219).
This vast approach to human cognition represented an alternative to behaviorism up to WWII, being
then obscured by the so-called “cognitive revolution” 24 after the war. The reconstitution of this

22 The aforementioned reaction of Hymes (1972), even if framed in a very different perspective, can nevertheless be
assimilated in this phenomenon.
23 For what concerns the US-based cognitive linguistics. In the same period, in fact, similar theories were being developed
independently within the Soviet academic world, for example by Bartminsky (1993; in Evans et al 2006).
24 For a critique to defining as “revolution” the advent of cognitivism within cognitive sciences please refer to note #6.
common front in response to the limits perceived within cognitivism has then been defined as “the
second cognitive revolution of the 20th century” (Harrè and Gillet 1994, in Sinha 2007) and cognitive
linguistics recognized as one of the main branches of the “second generation cognitive sciences”. In
particular, they distinguish themselves for refuting the cognitivistic assumption of the modular mind,
preferring a general-purpose learning mechanism, and the key-role reserved to mental representation in
the organization of behavior (Sinha 2007).
In particular, the developments of the chomskyan approach to language research were a source of
dissatisfaction for several reasons – well summarized by Holme (2009) in four basic problems –
starting with the fact that the original mission of discovering universal linguistic principles and
parameters had produced just very generic statements on the nature of language (Lakoff & Johnson
1999).
There was then the primary role played by syntax within the generative paradigm, considered the
key to the basic and universal structure underlying all languages. From this perspective, language-
specific lexicon was needed, then, to complement the syntactic system (Chomsky 1995). Problems
arose because of the influence on the syntactic structure caused by the grammarized nature of lexicon:
many idiomatic expressions, in fact, would often violate those very basic and structural syntactic rules,
de facto giving origin to a parallel structural system constituted of semi-fix expressions called
constructions (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005; in Holme 2009), which would occur with such frequency
to represent a threat to the primary role of syntax.
Moreover, the transformational mechanism – in theory responsible for generating syntactic
structures elaborated from basic elements – would have to reach such levels of complexity to end up
being cognitively inefficient, at least according to the original conception for which it had been
theorized, based upon the limits of elaboration of the human brain (Miller 1956), that had meanwhile
also been overcome by new cerebral models (Ramachandran 2005).
Finally, there was the issue of the formal approach to semantics, vero-conditional semantics, for
which a conceptual category was defined by a series of objectively identifying features. A tree would
be characterized by having a trunk, roots, branches, leaves, etc. The problem was that often some of the
entities assigned to a certain category didn’t share all features, just like in the famous example made by
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1957; in Holme 2009) with chess and soccer, both considered games but with
very little in common. Undoubtedly, the primal role played by semantics in the development of
cognitive linguistics – besides the already-mentioned important contributions by Fillmore (1975) and
Rosch (1975) – can be traced back to the interest that developed around metaphors (Leezenberg 2009)
and metonymy following the research by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who developed a brilliant
intuition of Michael Reddy (1978) on the key role of these figures of speech in structuring discourse
and in organizing our perception of the outside world. The pervasiveness of metaphoric discourse in
everyday language – if we’re sad, or down, we’re told to cheer up; affection is perceived as warmth
while emotional distance as coldness, and so on – couldn’t just be a coincidence, but instead a
manifestation of a much more widespread process that involves the way in which we conceive and
construct our world.
Holme (2009) pinpoints then three fundamental ways in which these initial studies on metaphor and
metonymy influenced, fed, and supported the evolution of cognitive linguistics. First, meaning was not
to be considered anymore as a mere process of direct symbolization from the outside world, but
mediated by a process defined as conceptualization. Second, conceptualization comes from experience.
Third, experience feeding the process of conceptualization is influenced by the fact that our interaction
with the world is mediated by the corporeality of our experience, therefore by the very nature of human
anatomy. Direct consequence of all this is that the study of how categorization – or the process of
assignment of meaning – is conceptualized could become a tool to understand our conception of the
world. Grammar as well, as an expression of a process of categorization, could not any longer be
considerd as innate, predetermined and abstract, but the result of a process of development based on the
physical experience of the world. The very nature of language would now be characterized as emergent
from the experience that shaped it; its role, once again, returned to be a primarily semiotic one, of
representation of meaning25, and as such based on conventionality and on the social consensus
necessary for its acceptation and functionality.

3.2 – The commitments of cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics as a research initiative binds itself to the respect of two key commitments: the
generalization commitment and the cognitive commitment, defined by Lakoff (1990) and summarized
by Evans et al (2006).
Through the generalization commitment, cognitive linguistics commits to openly investigate how
linguistic competence emerge from general cognitive abilities, through and upon which it develops,
rather than assuming the existence of a dedicated mental module (Evans et al 2006). This entails a
holistic view of language as a phenomenon and a focus of research on shared dynamics, common to all
level of analysis. Moreover, this presents analogies with the biological mechanism of reuse of

25 Precisely for the pivotal role of the symbol “not as an ornament but as a structuring element of the speaking of the
people of the origins”, as Matteo Damiani points out (Damiani: 25 – Translaton by the author), cognitive linguistics has
also been defined as vichian linguistics (Danesi 2001, 2004; in Damiani 2016) for the importance attributed to the
symbol by GianBattista Vico, Italian philosopher author of the influential book Scienza Nuova, The New Science.
preexisting structures towards the reaching of new goals, both at an ontogenetic and philogenetic level.
The second one, instead, is the cognitive commitment, which aims at providing an explanation for
the basic principles of language in accordance with the state of the art of cognitive sciences over the
knowledge and understanding of the brain and human mind, with particular regard towards psychology,
artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. While this obviously means there can be no
internal contradictions among processes, it also means that more developed fields of research within
these disciplines may offer useful approaches and explanations to others.
Both commitments are therefore based upon a systemic and convergent view of both language and
cognition, at all levels of elaboration and development, as they are considered coherent expressions of a
wider systems of interrelations.
Finally, given the nature and content of the following paragraph, it is meaningful to point out how a
proposal for the integration of a third commitment, defined as sociosemiotic (Geeraerts 2016), was
recently advanced. The goal is to finally obtain within the field the acknowledgment of language as a
social semiotic, meaning an intersubjective tool exposed to historical and social change, and a
methodology coherent both with this status and the very essence of cognitive linguistics.

3.3 – Applied cognitive linguistics and implications on language teaching: cognitive grammar
The main repercussion of cognitive linguistics on language teaching comes from its approach
towards grammar. Based upon the centrality of usage, cognitive grammar considers form as dependent
on function – in other words, structure depends on meaning – naturally suiting pedagogical applications
such as the managing of language development considered as an emergent phenomenon. Most of the
work of formulation and organization of the principles of cognitive grammar is due to Ronald W.
Langacker, who started delineating it at the end of the 1970’s with the name “space grammar”
(Langacker 1982; 1986). The definitive denomination would appear in his comprehensive and detailed
work published a few years later, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (1987; 1991), which from that
moment on became a benchmark for the whole field. Langacker, while acknowledging the scarce
popularity of his own grammar passion, partially blames this on the traditional approach, mechanical
and disconnected from reality, with which the great majority of people clashes. Langacker claims that
this has no reason to happen, and instead defends and sheds light on the creative features and deep
connection with the real world that in his view characterize grammar. For him, grammar is primarily a
fundamental aspect of cognition and a key to discover and understand the mechanisms behind it.
Everything revolves around meaning, understood as the conceptualizations associated with our
linguistic expressions, anchored to the outside world both physically, through the mediation of the
body, and socially, as a shared result of negotiations with other speakers. From this perspective,
Langacker offers his personal definition of grammar in terms of that conglomerate of functional
regularities that we all adopt, together with other speakers of the linguistic communities in which we
participate. What is considered by many as nothing but a boring collection of rigid rules, for Langacker
is instead a tool through which exploring the depth and extension of the shared network of meanings
underneath it, which extends well beyond the immediate context of reference in which a certain
expression is used. Moreover, through the process of construal26, we witness the imagination and
creativity of a speaker who, maybe through the selection of a certain metaphor, chooses one of the
countless linguistic combinations available to put one’s thoughts, perspective, goals, into words
(Langacker 2008). The pedagogical applicability and advantage offered by this vision and approach
manifest mainly in its motivational value as a tool for cultural exploration, through which one can
develop, over time and collaterally, an adequate linguistic competence, in support of the other
components of communicative competence.

3.3.1 – Basic principles of cognitive grammar for language teaching

Following the model suggested by Randal Holme (2012), a cognitive grammar approach for the
language classroom would be based upon four basic principles, in correlation with one another:
 embodied learning;
 lexical-grammar continuum;
 conceptualization;
 usage.

3.3.1.1 – The embodied learning principle

The embodied learning principle is based on the unity of mind, body, and the surrounding world;
our body, since the very moment we are born, represents the connection between the other two
elements and, at the same time, the common denominator that allows us to understand the variety of
experiences others express. The theorization of this physical link between mind and body was
elaborated by the french philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1945) as a response to the so-called Meno
paradox on how something external like knowledge can be internalized, or if instead it’s innate.
The consequences of this for the theory of cognition are that meaning is neither innate nor a mere

26 The process of construal is defined by the linguistic choices that are made to express a given concept, and in the
conceptual implications these choices comport. So, for example, the sentence “I love pizza” and “Pizza drives me
crazy”, while conveying a similar meaning, “build the scene” in different ways. While, in the first sentence, pizza is the
passive object of my love, in the second one it is framed as an active subject leading me to an hyperbolic craziness.
reflection of the outside world, but it is conceptualized through the experience of mind and body in a
relation of mutual support. From the point of view of linguistic development, this allowed and entailed
the theorization, supported by experimental empirical data, of image schema (Gibbs et al 1994; Gibbs
2005). Image schema are a series of patterns developed during infancy through our first experiences
with our surroundings, that become primal references for meanings later assigned to linguistic units.
For example, the positive and negative meaning assigned in English and in many other languages to
vertical spacial positioning - “Cheer up!”, “Something wrong? You look down...”, “That was
uplifting!”, etc. - can be traced back to our first motor experiences 27, made of our attempts to gain a
stable vertical balance: managing, in other words, to stay up and not falling down. This association
between positive feeling and vertical balance would later become a conceptual metaphor – up is
positive – and a base for the development of further conceptualizations (Grady 1997) and constructions
(Goldberg 1995). Also, the discovery of mirror neurons has provided neuroscientific evidence in
support of the role played by the sensory-motor system in the development of conceptual knowledge
(Gallese & Lakoff 2005). The role of metonymy – the association or contiguity between two elements
– derives as well from embodied experience, in which physical contiguity is transferred through
generalization also at the semantic level (Lakoff 1987; Radden & Kovecses 1999). Nevertheless,
regardless of this embodied common base, more abstract meanings require more effort and a shift
towards more elaborated levels of conceptualization, as we will see in a bit, diminishing the
possibilities of direct interlegibility between different perspectives.
The direct implications on language teaching of this principle are currently object of study, spacing
from the use of mimesis (E.g. Donald 1997; Boers & Lindstromberg 2005; Lindstromberg & Boers
2005) to supporting the retention of graphemes through writing practice in languages such as Chinese
(Guan et al 2001), besides spawning renewed interest for teaching methods such as the Total Physical
Response of James Asher (1969), which is undergoing a reinterpretation in the light of a cognitive
approach (Holme 2009).

3.3.1.2 – The lexical-grammar continuum principle

For cognitive grammar, aspects of grammar traditionally treated as distinct categories such as
lexicon, syntax, and morphology, belong instead to the same continuum in the form of constructions,
conglomerates of symbolic structures – correspondences of form and meaning, resulting from the
conceptualization process – characterized by higher or lower levels of compositionality or idiomaticity,

27 The original name of cognitive grammar, “space grammar” is due precisely to this connection between grammar and the
first motor activities of infancy (Holme 2012: 9)
which defines its position along the continuum.
Following corpora-based studies that shed light on the high level of idiomaticity of language used in
everyday interactions (Sinclair 1991), interest for elements such as idiomatic expressions, syntagmatic
words, and for collocations in general, rose significantly in language teaching (E.g. Lewis 1993, 1997,
2000; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992; Gobbi & Spina 2014). As already observed, an idiomatic and
strongly lexical-oriented approach to language teaching – with the additional support of the strong
communicative push which has characterized teaching approaches in the last decades – has not always
been careful in providing learners with tools to develop a corresponding compositional ability, often
condemning their interlanguages to a dramatic lack of cohesion.
A lexical-grammar approach to language teaching could represent an effective tool for introducing
the principle of compositionality since the very first steps in a L2 in a gradual and approachable
manner, without having to renounce to more idiomatic constructions, especially useful in terms of
communicative and interactive bootstrapping. Moreover, as Holme (2012) suggests, idiomatic
elements, closer to the lexical pole, could be analyzed and organized by students according to the
conceptual metaphors they derive from (E.g. Dirven 1985; Danesi 1986; Low 1988; Lindstromberg
1991; Cameron & Low 1999; Littlemore 2001, 2003; Holme 2004; Richardt 2005; Littlemore & Low
2006), allowing them to explore their productivity. From a grammar pole perspective, instead, a
potential strategy could be providing learners with prototypes of constructions to break up and analyze
at first; over time, and provided with the necessary competences, students could then productively
generalize those structural features previously analyzed into novel constructions of their own (Holme
2010).

3.3.1.3 – The conceptualization principle

Both embodied learning and the lexical-grammar continuum are connected to the conceptualization
principle, as while our embodied cognition provides us with those basic image schema upon which,
eventually, conceptualization will develop, constructions within the continuum acquire their semantic
features precisely through the process of conceptualization.
When, in §3.3, grammar was mentioned in terms of potential tool for the exploration – both in depth
and in extension – of the network of shared meanings underlying a given point of view over the world,
it was precisely in reference of what conceptualization is and represents. It is through this process, in
fact, that we categorize – or assign meaning – to the products of our perception. The nature of this
meaning is network-like and ecological: network-like as it is composed by and refers to multiple
elements; ecological because it is at the same time influenced and determined by the experience at the
origin of those meanings upon which it lays, while actively contributing in influencing and determining
them, new experiential tokens for semantic types in continuous evolution. The multiplicity of the
possible levels of conceptualization characterize it as a complex process, responsible for the
development of abstractions through general cognitive abilities such as generalization and tools like
metaphor and metonymy. The more abstract the meaning, the more intense the conceptual effort behind
it. The consequences of this determine, for example, the distance between different systems (Lakoff
1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1999). This distance may itself manifest on multiple levels, for example as
incomprehension and disagreement on how to interpret a certain situation at a situated level between
two or more speakers, or in a lesser intelligibility between languages distant – precisly – at a
typological level. The fact that grammar is considered “the hard part” of language learning – both to
learn and to explain – has to do exactly with the high level of conceptual abstraction behind its shared
process of evolution and development, proportional to the distance of the conceptual metaphors from
where they origin. The ensemble of the conceptualizations that regulate our worldview can be traced
back to the different cultures – defined by Holme as a “collectivisation of experience” (2012: 65) –
often associated to their relative different languages. This is not, however, to be interpreted as a revival
of the Sapir-Whorf theory which – briefly summarized – claimed that the language we speak
influenced our worldview (Sapir 1949; Whorf 1956). The deterministic formalism behind their theory,
in fact, saw our different cultures influenced and organized through the grammar structures and the
lexicon of the relative languages. In other words, for Sapir and Whorf it was the formal features of a
language to influence the worldview. Cognitive linguistics, instead, claims that a physical and cognitive
architecture common to all human beings interacts with different environmental variables, giving origin
to a variety of perspectives. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that different languages have, over time,
accumulated preferential networks of conceptualizations, and that their exploration may represent an
opportunity to integrate cultural elements within a grammar class, in a quest to discover regularities at
the level of meaning. Exploring the grammar of a language understood as an organization of meaning
is a way to get closer to the culture that expresses it, in order to better understand it. All of this could be
obtained through the development of what Marcel Danesi has named conceptual fluency (Eg. Danesi
1995, 2008, 2016, 2017), which probably represents one of the most advanced and elaborated
suggestions in the research field of cognitive grammar on L2 development dynamics. Conceptual
fluency is the expression of one’s mastery over conceptual metaphors, and it originated precisely from
studies over them (E.g. Danesi 1986, 1993; Low 1988; Lindstromberg 1991; Bowers 1992; Johnson &
Rosano 1993; Irujo 1986, 1993; MacLennan 1994).
3.3.1.4 – The usage principle
The importance of usage for cognitive linguistics is extremely meaningful for language teaching,
setting its roots in a social and functional approach. Holme summarizes the main factors connected to
usage that influence language development in frequency, which holds a primary role (Byebee 2008;
Ellis 2002, 2005; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008) integrated by other key factors such as salience
and cue contingency, both in terms of understandability and reliability 28 (Tomasello 2003), which in
turn are influenced by motivational and identity-related factors, as we will see in chapter 4.
The usage principle, analyzed from a language teaching perspective, is first of all concerned with the
quantity of exposure to a determined set of types and tokens informing the linguistic experience of a
learner. The higher the number of tokens for type of a given construction – better if at first it’s the same
token repeated, so to stabilize it in a prototypical construction that can be later expanded (Manzanares
& Rojo Lopes 2008; Goldberg & Casenhiser 2008) – the higher the chances of retention and,
consequently, of perceived reliability towards its reuse. Within this dynamic, salience certainly
occupies a role of relevance, as it is directly connected with the inescapable and primal motivational
factor, rooted in the original emergence of language as a survival skill: salient is what is relevant and
ultimately interests us. It also results rather intuitive how motivation deeply influences frequency, since
something perceived as pleasant carries along a desire for its repetition, leading us to listen to a song
over and over, re-watch our favorite movie or TV series, re-attend or re-create a given context or
conditions precisely looking for that salient input originally connected with that perceptive episode.
Finally, cue contingency, working at the level of understandability, filters at its basis the access of a
given construction to our process of unambiguous conceptualization: in case of success, this would also
make such a construction reliable for our future reuse, adding it to our potential repertoire. Cue
contingency is also tied to motivation - even if indirectly, through frequency and salience - since once
we reliably conceptualized some primary forms, characterized at an individual level for every learner
by their intrinsic frequency, salience, and understandability, one’s cognitive abilities will be able to
move on and concentrate efforts on secondary forms, and so on.
The unified model for linguistic development elaborated by MacWhinney (2005; 2008), theorizes
the development of L1 and L2 as based upon the same cognitive mechanisms: the process starts with
the chunking of fixed forms (Pine & Lieven 1997) and then continues by following a learner’s
progressive advancement along the lexical-grammar continuum towards the compositional pole. The
main difference lays in the fact that L2 learners already have a categorial system available – developed

28 Understandability and reliability as two sides of the same phenomenon, whether assuming a “passive” understanding
perspective or an “active” one based on usage.
with their L1 – which initially speeds up their L2 learning process, but that in the long run gives rise to
problems due to semantic interference between L1 and L2 and the modification of a learner’s
conceptual fluency in order to integrate the new information (Holme 2012). This is relevant because
frequency, salience, and understandability upon which the principle of usage is based will have to clash
with a pre-established system and its neuromotor automatism (E.g. Haiman 1994), that will need to be
contrasted in order to “make room” for the new L2 routines.

3.3.2 – Cognitive linguistics and cognitive grammar contributions applied to language teaching:
dedicated series and collections
The good health and success of cognitive linguistics – in particular its approach to grammar when
applied to language teaching – are evident whenever one takes into consideration the quantity of
contributions gathered under its label, ranging from pedagogical grammars to articles in journals, and
from books to doctoral thesis.
If providing a complete record of all the available literature on this relatively new discipline would
bring us far from the scope of this work, I will at least attempt to organize an initial account by listing
the main publications in terms of dedicated series and collections of contributions relative to the
didactic applications of cognitive linguistics and grammar. For what concerns dedicated series, I signal
the one published by De Grutyer, Applications of Cognitive Linguistics, started in 2008 and which
counts today 43 publications29, and the one published by John Benjamins, Cognitive Linguistics in
Practice30, with only 3 titles but among which stands out the Cognitive English Grammar by Radden &
Dirven (2007). Besides dedicated series, among the main collections we find Putz et al (2001), Achard
& Niemeier (2004), Tyler et al (2005), Pawlak (2007), LAUD – Linguistic Agency of the University of
Duisburg – (2008), and Bielak & Pawlak (2013). Among individual contributions, besides the already
widely mentioned and quoted Holme (2009), I point out Turewicz (2000), Littlemore (2009) and Tyler
(2012).
Finally, for what concerns original contributions in and for the Italian language -to which this work
is dedicated - worth mentioning is the relatively recent publication of a cognitive-linguistics-based
pedagogical grammar by Andrea Petri, Marina Laneri, and Andrea Bernardoni (2016), based on the
model of its Spanish language equivalent elaborated by Alonso et al (2005).
Given the rapid dynamics that characterize publications, the vastness of publishing opportunities,

29 Consulted on April 2, 2019. For a complete and updated list please consult the dedicated web page of the publisher:
https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/20568.
30 Consulted on April 2, 2019. For a complete and updated list please consult the dedicated web page of the publisher:
https://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/books/clip/volumes.
and the continuous sprouting and flourishing of new research and material, once again, this short
review has no ambition to be in any way complete, but simply intended to present a simple picture of
the major published work in this field at the moment in which I’m writing this.

3.3.3 – Beyond grammar

As I have shown, cognitive linguistics provides to language teaching approaches to grammar
potentially very promising - on top of studies and development of teaching material - coherent with the
principle of unity of goals and means that sees language development as an emergent process. In such
an emergent perspective, the gradual acquisition of linguistic competence by learners is defined by
Larsen-Freeman (2003) as grammaring, to underline the focus on the processual nature, rather than on
grammar itself as a given set of rules. Among the most dynamic and promising research initiatives in
this field, Marcel Danesi’s conceptual fluency (2008; 2016; 2017) shines brightly; in the conclusions of
one his papers, Danesi claims that:

“As a consideration of the relevant research above suggests, the question of the validity and the
teachability of MC [metaphorical competence] is largely an uncontroversial one. It can,
seemingly, be taught as systematically as any other aspect of the L2, and it can be linked to
linguistic and communicative competencies through syllabus design. […] As the work in cognitive
linguistics has been showing, conceptual metaphors continue to be at the heart of language and
thus important for pedagogical purposes (Dirven and Vespoor, 1998, Ellis, 1998, 1999, Pütz,
Niemeier, & Dirven, 2001, Robinson & Ellis, 2006, Hinkel, 2006, Sharifian & Palmer, 2007, Pütz
& Aertselaer, 2008, Holme, 2009). There are problems and issues that need to be resolved, but
then these are part of an ongoing research paradigm that puts figurative language at the core of
the language faculty in both theory and pedagogical practice. ”
(Danesi 2016: 150)

If cognitive approaches to grammar seem so promising, it is also true that, as we will see starting in
the last part of this chapter and in the next one, the true potential of cognitive linguistics applied to
language teaching is much wider, and lays in the possibility of truly organizing its operations following
the developmental principles that characterize linguistic systems. A vision of its contribution only in
terms of a functional approach to grammar, to simply side up to the usual class habits established with
the communicative method31 would just represent the unforgivable waste of a great opportunity. The
31 A scenario with which Danesi himself seems to agree: “The question of where to locate the notion of MC [metaphorical
metaphor of learning as participation, adopted at the beginning of this work, doesn’t aim at replacing
altogether the acquisition metaphor, but at complementing it from a position of functional prevalence.
Of course there are concepts that need to be acquired, but they are only functional to allow a full and
effective participation to the interaction through which a language emerge, a by-product of that
common ground that necessarily forms while interacting. In order to effectively learn a language, in
fact, one needs to understand it as a relationship, and over the next chapter I will analyze this idea in
depth.

3.4 – Beyond grammar

In his 2009 article Towards a social cognitive linguistics, William Croft, a renowned scholar in
cognitive linguistics, alerted his colleagues of the risk of making the same mistakes made by formal
approaches to syntax and semantics, characterized by mentalism and solipsism, and that they were
trying to correct. The suggested linguistic model did have a great potential but was also, in his opinion,
incomplete:

“In order to be successful, cognitive linguistics must go ‘outside the head’ and incorporate a social-
interactional perspective on the nature of language”.
(Croft 2009: 395).

The proposal to finally bridge the historical gap between cognitive and social perspective required
cognitive linguistics to incorporate, in coherence with the commitments formulated by Lakoff (1990)
and just described a few paragraphs ago, founding contributions from disciplines such as pragmatics
and sociolinguistics. Croft’s effort based itself precisely on the intrinsic unity of mind and senses
featured by the philosophical approach adopted by cognitive linguistics, which made it possible,
differently from the inevitable Cartesian dualism that saw Hymes’ functional sociolinguistics
pointlessly juxtaposed to Chomsky’s formal mentalism. Such an olistic, ecological, and unitarian
conception of cognition, language, and learning processes is also pivotal for this work, and the reason
why cognitive linguistics is adopted in it as the new theoretical point of reference for language
teaching.
Croft continues by listing four main principles of cognitive linguistics and re-elaborates and expands
competence] in a syllabus and how to treat it pedagogically raises more questions. Some of these have been tackled
insightfully by Andreou & Galantomos (2008, 2009), who suggest that MC can be included as part of communicative
competence pedagogy, so that its various discursive functions can then be connected to grammatical and lexical cues.
Identifying MC as separate from, though connected to, communicative competence has, at the very least, didactic
value.” (Danesi 2016: 148)
them adopting a socio-interactional key. Let’s examine them in detail, one by one.

3.4.1. – From general cognitive abilities to general sociocognitive abilities

The first principle of cognitive linguistics individuated by Croft claims that: “grammatical structures
and processes in the mind are instances of general cognitive abilities.” (Croft 2009: 396); among these
are listed perception, memory, and categorization. Crofts suggests to reformulate the principle, in the
light of the acknowledgment of the importance of general sociocognitive abilities, in “grammatical
structures and processes in the mind are instances of general social cognitive abilities.” (Croft 2009:
398), including sociocognitive abilities such as joint action, coordination, and convention, which I will
now analyze in detail.

3.4.1.1. – Language as a joint action

Linguistic communication is a joint action which takes place between two interlocutors, and not
simply the sum of the individual actions of the two. While the speaker is trying to convey a message
while keeping in mind who the interlocutor is, the listener is not simply trying to decipher the literal
meaning of the statement he/she is listening to, but he/she is also interpreting it trying to understand the
communicative intentions of the speaker. For Croft, such a dynamic makes it so that linguistic
communication is nothing but an instance of the human sociocognitive ability to take part in a joint
action. A joint action is defined, starting from the definition of Michael Bratman of shared cooperative
activity (1992, 1993, 1997: in Croft 2009), as characterized by the following elements:

 both parts intend to perform the joint action;

 both parts intend to do it in accordance with and because of each of their meshing subplans;
 neither part is coercing the other, and the participation to the joint action must be absolutely
voluntary;
 both parts have a commitment to mutual support in carrying out their relative subplan;
 the intentions described above are common ground between the parts;
 there is mutual responsiveness in action, meaning there is an ongoing effort in coordinating
individual actions to ensure they mesh with each other in order to lead to the accomplishment of
the joint action.

All the features listed above are or depend on general sociocognitive abilities, and the fact to be even
merely able to conceive a joint action represents an example of sociocognitive ability. After all, the fact
that cooperation – the ability to take part in a joint action – is one of the foundations of language as a
typical human ability, is what was already claimed also by Tomasello (2008) as a result of his
experiments and observations on children and non-human primates. Cooperation, in turn, depends on
our ability to recognize an intentional agent just like ourselves in a member of our own species
(Tomasello 1999).

3.4.1.2. – Coordination
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of the execution of a joint action, since its absence would
deem to certain failure all the attempts of meshing the individual subplans. The coordination devices
available to us are many, but among them one of the most powerful is communication, since it allows
the coordination of extremely complex joint actions even over time and space. The fact that, how Croft
reminds us, “we cannot read each other’s minds” (Croft 2000; in Croft 2009: 401), indicates how
communication itself is in fact a joint action, and that as such it also needs a coordination device to
succeed. The most powerful coordination device available for communication is convention, that in this
specific case manifests in regularities and conventionality at a linguistic level.

3.4.1.2. – Convention
The definition of convention adopted by Croft (2009) is a reformulation by Herbert Clark (1999; in
Croft 2009) of the definition originally elaborated by the philosopher David Lewis (1969; in Croft
2009) that aims at highlighting the joint character of its nature. Convention, as a sociocognitive ability
functional to communication, is defined as:

 A regularity in behaviour,
 that is partly arbitrary,
 that is common ground in a community,
 that adopts it as a coordination device for a recurrent coordination problem.

The fact that convention is not necessarily linguistic – as in the example of a handshake as a
greeting – but that language is definitely a form of convention, is fundamental to demonstrate how
language itself, understood as a set of linguistic conventions adopted by a community of speakers,
represents only one among the possible manifestations of human sociocognitive abilities potentially
aimed at this goal, even if, in this case, it is undoubtedly the most effective.
Hence, the language system considered in terms of convention confirms its nature, subordinate to
usage and emergent, as already indicated from studies on metaphor (§3.1). If there weren’t a joint
action to coordinate through communication, in fact, there wouldn’t be the need for the development of
a conventional tool to do so, least of all something as complex as language, which therefore we don’t
owe to some sort of innate mechanism, but to our sociocognitive ability to cooperate with our
counterparts (Tomasello 2008). Once more this represents a confirmation of the fact that such an
approach to the nature of language is functional to the goals of language teaching, and is converging
and coherent with the rest of the theoretical framework so far delineated.

3.4.2. – From symbolic grammar to the semiotic triangle

The second principle of cognitive linguistics claims that “grammar is symbolic, and thus meaning is
an essential part of grammar” (Croft 2009: 403). Croft also claims that this principle is included in the
adopted definition of convention, since at a semiotic level regularities in behavior represent the
signifier, while the recurrent coordination problem represents meaning. Nevertheless, it is pointed out
how what the traditional principle of cognitive linguistics leaves out is that both the regularity in
behavior – the signifier – and the recurrent coordination problem – the meaning – need a community in
which the relationship between the two is recognized and shared. The proposed revision therefore
considers grammar as formed by a “semiotic triangle”, in which the community of speakers among
which signifier and meaning are shared represents the fundamental third element. Anchoring this
relationship to the community among which it is shared entails once again a confirmation of the
functional and situational primary role of language, since “Language cannot be fully understood
outside of that fact” (Croft 2009: 397). Moreover, it reminds whoever has experience in a language
class of the difficulty and often lack of efficacy of working with linguistic material which is too often
decontextualized, especially in context of foreign language learning and teaching. This is also relevant
when considering the aspect of meaningfulness required to interaction – in a wide and asynchronous
scope which includes also, for example, reading - in order to be functional to learning, acknowledged
by cognitivist approaches as well as Long’s interactionist hypothesis (Long 1996), together with
motivational32 and identity-related factors which will be analyzed in detail in chapter four.

3.4.3. – From encyclopedic meaning to shared meaning

According to the third principle of cognitive linguistics, “meaning is encyclopedic” (Croft 2009:
404). Insisting on the importance of meaning – understandable consequence of a discipline such as

32 Cardona reminds us that “It is a foundation of language teaching that there cannot be stable acquisition of a language
without motivation” (Cardona 2010; in Gobbi 2012a: 40) – Originally in Italian, translated by the author.
cognitive linguistics, developed onto primarily semantic foundations – Croft (2009) points out how this
principle is substantially based on a solipsistic view of language, in which the apparent vastness
suggested by the expression ‘encyclopedic’ clashes however with the limits of the single human mind,
yet once again decontextualized and abstracted from the actual conditions in which meaning primarily
manifests itself: interaction. Croft suggests to rewrite this founding principle considering meaning as
‘shared’ (Croft 2009: 405), so for it to provide a more accurate language model to the discipline. The
inclusion in the new definition of the social dimension of language doesn’t erase the primary
encyclopedic element of the older one, but incorporates it in a new perspective in which linguistic
meaning is first of all considered important as a manifestation of that conventionality which is
functional to communication, which in turn is functional to the joint action to coordinate.
Once again, as pointed out a few lines above, the centrality attributed to meaning as something
shared among speakers combines with the importance assigned to the meaningfulness of interaction.
The operative difficulties connected with this meaningfulness, fundamental because of motivational
reasons, is therefore once again emblematic of the need to reconceptualize our approach towards
language learning and teaching. From a sociocognitive point of view, in fact, shared meaning is that
“common ground” (Croft 2009: 405) that allows for communication to happen; its negotiation is (or
should be) the primary activity of a language learner, consequently making the role of language
teaching one of support towards the development of these negotiation competences and strategies.
Moving on exploring the notion of “common ground” proposed by Clark and Carlson (1981, in
Croft 2009), Croft (2009: 405-406) describes its sub-categories: personal common ground and
communal common ground. Particularly meaningful from the point of view of language teaching is the
concept of personal common ground, since its two developmental basis are identified in a perceptual
one, based on direct experience due to sharing the same perceptual field, attributable to the human
sociocognitive ability for joint attention (Tomasello 2001), and in a discursive one, established
conversationally. Extremely significant, especially within the perspective of the propositions that will
be advanced in the next chapter, is the relationship established between personal common ground and
the notion of social network as developed by Granovetter (1973; 1983), and its specifically linguistic
implications advanced by Leslie Milroy in claiming the central role of social networks in the
maintaining and the evolving on a language (1987). A network-like conception of linguistic
development, with particular attention given precisely to the L2 learning context and based on the
pivotal importance of meaningful interaction and intrinsic motivation, recognized as informal dynamics
fundamental for linguistic acquisition, has already been advanced, it’s analysis initialized, and it has
partially been experimentally implemented (Gobbi 2012a; Gobbi 2012b; Gobbi 2013; Gobbi & Spina
2013; Gobbi & Spina 2014). Part of the ideas here elaborated are based on that work.

3.4.4. – From meaning as construal to construal for communication

In order to reformulate the fourth and last basic principle of cognitive linguistics - “Meaning
involves conceptualization (construal)” (Croft 2009: 409) – in sociocognitive terms, Croft (2009)
requires the acknowledgment of how the process of construal of the meaning in question is not just a
self-standing cognitive process, originating and ending within the mind of the single speaker, but it is
always and necessarily tied to a communicative goal: therefore “Meaning involves construal for the
purpose of communication” (Croft 2009: 410). This new definition recalls a reinterpretation of Austin
and Searle’s theory of speech acts (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) by H.H. Clark (1996), sub-divided into
four levels connected to each other in an asymmetrical manner: the utterance act, the propositional act,
the informative act, and the illocutionary act.
The utterance act (Searle 1969: 24-24) – Austin’s phonetic act (Austin 1962: 92, 95) – consists in
the physical production of the sentence, either via an acoustic signal or other means such as writing,
and its reception on the side of the interlocutor. The positive outcome of this first level depends on the
ability for joint attention, since it requires coordinated cooperation by both parts in order to succeed,
basing the communicative process since its very beginning on general sociocognitive abilities.
The second level consists in the propositional act (Searle 1969: 23-24) – originally Phatic and Rhetic
act (Austin 1962: 92, 95-100) – which dictates the formulation of the utterance in a certain language
and through a particular process of construal and lexical choice made by the speaker, all of which must
be understandable by the interlocutor. This is the level at which linguistic convention manifests, and
signifier, meaning, and the linguistic community in question form the semiotic triangle through the
process of construal, when both parts conceptualize meaning through a given choice of vocabulary and
constructions. The asymmetry between levels makes it so that the positive outcome of the propositional
act depends directly from the positive outcome of the previous level, the utterance act (if I can’t hear
you I won’t be able to understand you, but if I can hear you but do not understand your words
communication will fail anyhow33), but not vice versa. Given this is the level at which linguistic
choices morphosyntacticly influence the formal structure of the utterance, this is where the traditional

33 It is important to stress how, even if clearly with an extremely lower incidence, the fact of “not understanding your
words” is not necessarily a problem regarding a L2 learner. The difference between a native speaker and a L2 learner is
obviously real and concrete, both in terms of quantity and quality of their (inter)languages. Ultimately speaking, though,
this difference is determined in a major or minor competence at the level of negotiation of meaning, which not by
chance occupies a relevant role in SLA studies. In other words, it is not as much a matter of “knowing words”, as it is of
being able to negotiate meaning and establish common ground. So, once again, what’s really important is the process,
since the product is really just a consequence of it.
grammar approach to language teaching concentrated its efforts, before being replaced by the
communicative approach.
The third level consists in the informative act (Clark & Carlson 1982), in which the communicative
intention – what we want to achieve through the formulation choices made at the previous level, during
the propositional act - is presented and understood. Again, the asymmetric relationship between levels
forces the propositional act to be successful in order for the informative act to have a positive outcome.
In fact, as Croft (2009: 411) notes:

“The asymmetric relationship between prepositional act and informative act is precisely the one
described between linguistic convention and communication […]: linguistic convention functions as
a coordination device for the joint action of communication.”

In other words, this is the level where “communication” happens, that is the pragmatic realization of
the communicative functions, object of teaching within the communicative approach.
The fourth and last level consists of the joint action in which the sender tries to involve the recipient.
This is the level of the illocutionary act: it is here where the motivation that makes the interaction
meaningful lies. We are at a crucial point. Just like an approach based mostly upon formal (grammar)
correctness was simply recognized as inadequate for successful language learning, leading to the
broadening of the operational horizon of language teaching to a communicative level, it becomes now
manifest how this discipline is in need for yet another reconceptualization. Once again, this takes the
shape of a shift towards a superordinate level, the one of the joint action, where interactional agency
manifests. Coherent with the already mentioned linguistic unity between means and goal in language
teaching, and facing the impossibility to build a taxonomy of illocutionary acts because of their shared
and emergent nature (Croft 2009: 412), it becomes necessary to to reorganize and transform language
teaching altogether in the supporting of the management of an emergent process. This means that a
syllabus that truly wants to be effective will need to keep these factors into consideration, concentrating
not as much on communicative functions and the tasks that help them to develop, but actually and
primarily in providing each learner with guidance and a model to orient one’s own individual process
of development of one’s own and unique linguistic system in L2. Moving towards this direction means
proposing a methodology that really realizes what is already predicated in theory, as an ideal tendency
(Richards 2006; §2.5.1), but that so far could only be partially realized because of the adoption of a
language and a learning theory incoherent with the goals of language teaching. This can be achieved
through actually and finally move the focus from the product (language – be it in form of grammar
structure or communicative function) to the process (both in terms of process of interaction and process
of learner training and education), and from the teacher to the learner. The figure of the learner, in
particular, is now understood in terms of a conscious interactional agent, who adopts strategies
functional to his/her own socialization in the target language, compatibly with the available
opportunities and coherently with his/her goals and motivation, of which fluency and accuracy are by-
products.
Chapter 4
A roadmap for a sociocognitive language teaching

4.1 – A theory of language and of learning to tame complexity

Independently of the historical period its facing, in order to be truly effective language teaching
needs two solid and fundamental reference points: a theory of language and, consequently, a theory of
learning (Richards & Rodgers 1986). The communicative approach, as shown, adopts a theory of
language which is incoherent with the basic principles of language teaching. Direct consequence of this
is that the theory of learning connected to it ends up being substantially inefficient, if not even often
ineffective, providing learners with useful but disconnected and incoherent fragments of language, due
to the substantial abandoning of the teaching of grammar, a more or less recognized taboo of the
communicative method.
Cognitive linguistics offers the chance to overcome this deadlock by offering a language model –
and a consequential grammar approach – that emerges from usage, in which form is subordinate to
content and function, but is nevertheless kept into consideration. The need to participate to language as
a flux – so to develop interactional competences in it and through it – favors then not only the renewed
opportunity to explore the encountered grammar structures (through an ad hoc approach just analyzed
in the previous chapter), but also and above all the need for learners to develop substantial
metacomunicative and deuterolearning (Bateson 1972) competences and skills. Moreover, all of this
happens in a particularly complex context, in which globalization and the advent of the web play a
crucial role. Luckily, as we will see, we now have better tools and strategies to frame and manage
complexity.

4.2 – Language teaching and New Literacies

In analyzing the dynamics that characterized the historical and theoretical evolution of this
discipline, there are two main intertwined lines to keep into consideration 34. The first one has been
widely explored in the two previous chapters, and regards theoretical issues and reasons internal to the
discipline, such as the nature of language. As we have seen, it has been featured by a constant tendency
towards wider and more flexible approaches, functional to framing the complexity of reality against the
limits imposed by the point of view of formal theoretical linguistics.
The second line has occasionally come afloat, and regards phenomenons more strictly social and
historical in nature, and their influence on the educational needs and on the practices that have
34 As also claimed by Ciliberti (2012).
consequentially emerged in response to them. In particular, since the end of world war II, the ever-
growing mobility of goods and people which then evolved into what we call globalization, together
with the rise of the Internet since the last decade of the last century, played a crucial role in presenting
language teaching with always new challenges 35. The European integration project, together with the
extreme mobility required to workers as a consequence of the worldwide spreading of capitalism,
contributed substantially to the development of the communicative method as a response to rising and
increasing interactional needs, both in the old continent and in the rest of the planet. At the same time,
the development and spreading of the web are radically modifying communication dynamics at a global
level; with them, yet once again, the educational needs that language teaching is asked to address are
changing as well.
In the age of information in which the rise of the web has catapulted us all, we find ourselves facing
radical changes comparable, in my view, to the passage from orality to literacy analyzed by Ong
(1982), with consequences on cognition and resource management we haven’t seen since then. The
invention of writing, in fact, brought with the possibility to reallocate cognitive resources previously
used towards memorization and communication management that comported deep consequences on the
evolution of human societies, in particular in terms of power dynamics. In fact, as UNESCO (2012)
reminds us, basic literacy:

“[…] is a transformational process that empowers individuals, broadens their critical thinking and
provides them with the ability to act. A person without basic literacy lacks real opportunities to
effectively engage with democratic institutions, to make choices, exercise his/her citizenship rights
and act for a perceived common good. The consolidation of democracy requires people’s
participation; only then can a nation be brought closer to peace.”.

Basic literacy, though, needs to be followed by the development of more complex skills, that
effectively empower individuals to understand and act upon the society in which they live and operate,
through the deep and critical comprehension of meanings and of the relations between them. It was
precisely based on the rise of issues in this sense that the concept of “functional literacy” has been
developed:

“A person is functionally literate when he has acquired the knowledge and skills in reading and

35 An analysis of the process of the evolution of the Internet and the possibilities offered by it in a perspective of language
development can be found – for those reading Italian – in Gobbi (2012a); for English speakers, instead, some of the
ideas discussed there have been condensed in Gobbi (2012b).
 writing which enable him to engage effectively in all those activities in which literacy is normally
assumed in his culture or group.” (Gray 1956).

The advent of the web and the radical changes happening in the world we live in make it so we are
finding ourselves today putting again into discussion what being literate means, bringing under the
spotlight the need for newer and more complex competences – called New Literacies (Buckingham
1993) – with the goal of effectively functioning in the age of information. The examples provided
range from the ability to effectively use a search engine to look for information and e-mail to
communicate, to more subtle competences such as evaluating the accuracy and utility of information
found online in relation to one’s goals, the effective participation to online conversations in order to
obtain information, or the ability to correctly infer the kind of information potentially available through
an hyperlink (Leu et al 2004).
It is evident how all the operations described above intrinsically connected with linguistic and
communicative competence in a given language; they are not, however, enough, since, for example, the
aforementioned ability to critically evaluate the validity of the information available to us on the web
do not depend on them. The competences necessary to interacting with and through the web are far
broader, and have to do with the awareness of one’s role of information prosumer (Toffler & Toffler
2006: 223-224), a neologism in which the traditionally distinct roles of producer and consumer – in this
case of information – blend. Still according to Leu et al (2004: 1594):

“Literate individuals will be those who can effectively assess their individual purposes for using the
Internet and then seek out, from the Internet's many offerings, the particular tool and form that best
meet their needs.”.

As we will now see, this definition has much in common with what will be argued to be necessary to
forming a language learner, in particular in terms of awareness and agency, as a consequence of the
approach to learning I am about to delineate.

4.3 – Language as a complex adaptive system

During the nineties, Diane Larsen-Freeman, after years of research in the field of L2 acquisition
under the aegis of cognitivism, was growing disillusioned due to the perceived limits that this approach
comported. In particular, while trying to take into account every single factor influencing the
acquisition process at a cognitive level, going deeper and deeper - and consequently and proportionally
complicating the theoretical models - she felt the overall view was getting lost. The progress that was
being made, moreover, was in her opinion too little and not very satisfactory (Larsen-Freeman 1991,
2002a, 2007, 2011).
It was in this period that she casually came across the work of the physic James Gleick (1987) on the
theory of complexity and chaos, getting stunned by many substantial analogies between the dynamics
described by Gleick and the ones – more familiar to her – of language development, feeling she had
finally found an interpretative key that allowed her to frame them in an organic way. This discovery
was followed by the publication of an article later defined as “groundbreaking” (Kramsch 2008: 389),
in which language was defined in terms of a complex adaptive system, or CAS (Larsen-Freeman 1997).
Over the years, from that first pioneering intuition a variety of theoretical studies and practical
applications have emerged. This field of research applies an ecological perspective to linguistic
dynamics (Kramsch 2008), and ranges from the development of competence in an L2 considered as a
non-linear and emergent phenomenon (Leather & Van dam 2002; Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2006;
Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008) to the teaching of English as an L2 (Larsen-Freeman 2003), and
from sociocultural approaches applied to the acquisition of a foreign language (Van Lier 2004) to
ecological approaches to linguistic acquisition and socialization (Kramsch 2002; Larsen-Freeman
2002b; Kramsch and Steffensen 2008). The value of this approach was institutionally acknowledged,
among others, by the University of California, which in 2004 opened a course dedicated to language
ecology at its historical Berkley campus with the collaboration of ten faculty members coming from
disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, education, and humanities
(Berkley Language Center 2004, in Kramsch 2008). Moreover, there is growing awareness around the
need for competences to be able to operate not only in other languages, but also and above all for “[…]
the multilingual ability to operate between languages [...]” (MLA 2007: 3f, in Kramsch 2008), in order
to manage processes such as “[...] cette activité sociale spécifique qui est le produit de la circulation
transfrontalière des valeurs, de la dynamique des identités toujours négociées, des inversions, voire
inventions, de sens, souvent masquées par l'illusion partagée d'une communication efficace.” 36
(Kramsch et al 2008: 15). These dynamics are commonplace in a world in which, according to an
estimate by Jacques Attali (2006; in Kramsch et al 2008), in fifteen years at least fifty million people
will live outside their country of origin or the one of their parents: a world which already today isn’t a
simple place, and in which complexity will inevitably rise.

36 “[…] that specific social activity, product of the transnational circulation of values, of identities constantly in process of
negotiation, of the inversion – or even invention – of meaning, often hidden by the shared illusion of an effective
communication.”. Translation of the Author.
4.3.1 – Complex systems and chaos theory
Complexity theory derives directly from systems theory (Von Bertalanffy 1950), which considers a
system as more than the sum of its parts. A systemic approach concentrates on the relations that
connect parts between them and with the rest of the system in general. Moreover, these relations
undergo continuous change, and so happens to the role – more or less central or even null – assigned
time after time to the different parts. Complexity theory adopts this systemic view and applies it to
complex phenomena, for example by interpreting the auto-organizational dynamics – of formation,
movement, and in case break up – of a flock of birds through the interactive relations between the
single birds that form it. These auto-organizational dynamics – meaning they are not influenced neither
by internal rules nor by external influences (Mitchell 2003) – allow for the stability that is reached to be
defined as emergent, and are applicable both to phenomena within natural and social sciences
(Heylighen 2008). Moreover, thanks to the autopoietic nature (Maturana & Varela 1972) of these
emergent stabilities, they can continuously change structure yet maintaining their identity (Larsen-
Freeman 2011).
Complex adaptive systems are also continuously exposed to external stimuli that lead them to
reorganization and to new states of stability (but never to stasis or balance, a prerogative of closed
systems). Every process of reorganization of a complex system, though, causes a response by the
environment, since it is tied to it through ecological dynamics, hence creating a new stimulus and with
it the premise for a new reorganization, and so on. The changes that characterize these continuous
processes of reorganization can be of two types: linear and non-linear. Linear processes of change are
gradual, while non-linear ones are sudden, deep, and appear as disproportionate with respect to the
causes which, at a first and superficial analysis, seem to have provoked them. The real causes can be
traced back to events – even minimal – distant both in time and space, but that nevertheless
substantially contributed to addressing the following systemic development, even though their
consequences didn’t manifest immediately. This non-linearity between cause and effect is known as
chaos, it has typically been exemplified with the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brasil which
becomes a tornado in Texas, and is precisely the object of research of chaos theory (Lorenz 1972).
The dynamics underlying the functioning of a language, in all its facets, from ontogenetic
developments to phylogenetic ones, both from a micro and a macro perspective, can be interpreted
from a complex system perspective. In particular, this entails important consequences for what
concerns the learning process – that from now on, given the metaphor of participation adopted and the
emergence of phenomena connected to complex systems, I would better define as development37 – and
37 In coherence with Larsen-Freeman (2011), and as already independently – even if just partially – claimed in Gobbi
its support.

4.3.2. – Why language is a complex adaptive system

Language, framed in this perspective, is recognized as “[...] a dynamic set of patterns emerging from
use.” (Larsen-Freeman 2011: 52), both at an individual (ontogenetic) and sociolinguistic (phylogenetic)
level: based on frequency, salience, and understandability/reliability these patterns then stabilize in an
idiolect and, on a social scale38, in the sociolinguistic varieties of a community, be it either linguistic or
of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991)39. In other words, language is nothing but a by-product of
interaction (Hopper 1998), “[…] accessibile solo tramite l’esecuzione e quindi vivo soltanto
nell’interazione in cui questo sistema può svilupparsi [...]”40 (Gobbi 2012a: 37-38). So, let me say this
once again, its grammar, its internal rules – or, better said, its regularities – are not innate and
determined as the formal tradition puts it, but represents a syntheses which is both relatively stable and
yet in constant evolution; this emerges from the needs of creative contextual usage, bound by a relation
of reciprocal causality (Thompson & Varela 2001) with the “historical” restrictions of the linguistic
system of a given individual, assimilated and shaped during all previous expositions and interactions.
Moreover, the occurrence of regularities within the linguistic structure – be them phonological (Milroy
& Milroy 1999) or morphosyntactic (Larsen-Freeman 1976) in nature – depends on “[…] a synchronic
account of […] ‘graded probabilistic contingencies[...]’”(Spivey 2007, in Larsen-Freeman 2011: 53).
These regularities, that can be individuated in constructions, are precisely those conventionalized
associations of form, meaning, and usage41 that enclose elements ranging from single morphemes to
idiomatic expressions, the boundaries of which are graduated and fuzzy, not discrete, and that we find
on the lexical-grammar continuum, object of study of constructions grammar (E.g. Fillmore 1989;
Goldberg 1995, 2006; Croft 2001).
The main dynamics that characterize this developmental process are two: co-adaptation (Larsen-
Freeman & Cameron 2008) and soft-assembly (Thelen & Smith 1994).
Larsen-Freeman (2011) describes co-adaptation as a direct consequence of the mainly interactional
and social nature of the process of language development, characterized by the process of mimesis and
(2012a)
38 Language can be considered as a fractal, meaning it is featured by internal homothety: it can reproduce itself at different
scales yet maintaining the same structure (Larsen-Freeman 1997)
39 On the evolutionary dynamics of language systems also see Croft’s Sociocognitive-evolutionary model (2000; 2009),
that also keeps into account typological/crosslinguistic variations.
40 “[…] accessible only through performance, therefore only alive during that interaction in which this system can develop
[...]” - Translation of the Author.
41 Noteworthy, here, is also the coherence with the definition of semiotic triangle proposed by Croft (2009: 403) and
discussed in §3.4.2, in which the contextual element - here individuated in usage - is represented by the community in
which that usage happens and is conventionalized.
reciprocal adaptation of linguistic – and more in general, communicative – resources which is adopted
between interlocutors, in analogy with the concept of coupling found in dynamical systems theory, that
doesn’t call for neither the acquisition of rules nor for ‘conformity to uniformity’ (Larsen-Freeman
2003). Instead, it is a reiterative process through which development happens based upon the
frequency, salience, and understandability/reliability of the constructions found in one’s path, as
already described in §3.3.1.4.
At every possible occasion of interaction, depending on situated and emergent communicative
needs, learners manage their construal process through the soft-assembly of all the resources available
to them – both in terms of selection of constructions and attempts – for what is possible to them - to
intervene on their composability – allowing for maximum response adaptability to external pressures
at multiple levels: linguistic experience, identity of self and of interlocutors, activity, context, etc. By
doing so, over time, the linguistic system acquires stability, which will be once again compromised by
the rising of new situations to manage, promoting in this way its further development (Larsen-Freeman
2011).

4.4 – Language learning as ecosystem development

Having successfully framed language as a complex adaptive system emerging from interaction, and
the primary developmental dynamics upon which it is based, we now need a coherent theory of
learning, from which then extrapolate a methodology and techniques to implement it. The theoretical
points of reference in defining this proposal derive from ecological perspectives on L2 linguistic
education. In particular, I will refer to the approach delineated by Claire Kramsch (2008; Kramsch &
Whiteside 2008), that in turn find its roots within the influential contribution to the subject by Einar
Haugen (1972). In this perspective, important will be the concept of symbolic competence (Kramsch
2006)42. This is defined as “The ability to manipulate symbolic systems, to interpret signs and their
multiple relations to other signs, to use semiotic practices to make and convey meaning, and to position
oneself to one’s benefit in the symbolic power game.” (Kramsch 2006), and it is inspired and can be
traced back to Bourdieu’s sens pratique (1997), understood as the practicing of a habitus which
structures the field of action through which it is structured itself, in the context of a fight for symbolic
survival (Kramsch 2008: 400). Not directly connected to the definition of symbolic competence – but
in my opinion relevant – is also the concept of “cunning”, adopted from Bakhtin (1981), juxtaposed to

42 Already in 1986, however, Kramsch had expressed critiques towards the enthusiasm of language teaching for
proficiency, already back then judging it as restrictive and incomplete, and suggesting instead to focus research of what
she defined back then as “interactional competence” (Kramsch 1986), ancestor of the aforementioned symbolic
competence, and therefore of the proposal that will now be advanced as well.
a more rigid formal competence, which Kramsch (2008: 406) adopts interpreting it as a dialogic
approach to education for teachers who find themselves stuck between the rigidity of imposed syllabi
and pre-established teaching goals43. In other words, from the point of view of language teaching
symbolic competence – on which I will return in a bit – is the competence, required to whom wishes to
learn a language, to manage contexts and interactions through which supporting and nourish the
development of one’s own linguistic system.
Another correlated and extremely relevant concept is the one of alignment, proposed by Atkinson
(Atkinson et al 2007: 169) and defined as “the complex processes through which human beings effect
coordinated interaction, both with other human beings and (usually human-engineered) environments,
situations, tools, and affordances”. Atkinson adopts a slightly different perspective compared to
Kramsch’s symbolic competence, focusing on the description of processes. Fundamental here is the
concept of affordance, developed by James Gibson (1979) and understood as a systemic quality
emerging from the interaction between parts. To further explain, the fact that an object or a situation,
even if initially not primarily designed and intended to be used or understood in a certain way, could
evoke functional alternative uses thanks to the someone’s creativity, represents a manifestation of
affordance. In the case of a language student, the emergence of affordances would have to do with
being able to find occasions for language development in contexts not originally or traditionally
conceived for that goal, bending them to one’s objectives, just like already explained with the
Bourdieu’s sens pratique or Bakhtin’s cunning.
To bring another example, more elaborated and relative precisely to this work of mine, a precious
affordance was offered to me by the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, theorized by Lave
and Wenger (1991), which I am going to analyze in the next paragraph. Even if already widely adopted
in linguistics and L2 learning contexts, in fact, I will demonstrate how a slightly different perspective
compared to the one traditionally adopted will allow for it, I argue, to better serve language teaching.

4.4.1 – Legitimate peripheral participation applied to language development

The concept of legitimate peripheral participation (from now on LPP) describes that process through
which a “novice” acquires competence through direct practice and support from more expert
practitioners, gradually moving towards a better understanding of the skills necessary to be considered
competent among the community of practice (from now on CoP) of reference (Lave & Wenger 1991).
In everyday language, this is what we’d call apprenticeship.

43 Even though Kramsch originally adopted this concept in reference to teaching dynamics, its relevance to a learning
perspective as well is meaningful when considering what will be eventually said on the evolution of the roles of
“learners” and “teachers”, in line with what has already been anticipated at the beginning of this work.
 Since its formulation, the concept of LPP has been welcomed with great enthusiasm and applied to a
variety of contexts, among which L2 learning (E.g. Toohey 1996, 1998, 2000; Casanave 1998, 2002;
Flowerdew 2000; Leki 2001; Kanno 2003; Canagarajah 2003; Morita 2004; in Haneda 2006), where it
contributed widely in providing a valid practical and analytical tool to social approaches to language
acquisition; it has also, however, stumbled upon critiques due to what have been defined as limits to its
application to the language classroom (Haneda 2006). However, in each of the situations taken into
considerations, both the construct of LPP and the one of CoP had been applied directly to learners and
their attempts to negotiate their participation to the community of speakers of the target L2. So, for
example, Toohey (1998) longitudinally analyzes the socialization path in L2 of a group of children with
a mother tongue different from English in anglophone Canada, from kindergarden to second grade;
same goes for Morita (2004) who examines instead a group of female Japanese university students
during a year of study abroad, once again in Canada. The main problems at the roots of the perceived
limits regard the scarce elaboration of both the concept of CoP – also admitted by Lave and Wenger
themselves (1991: 42) – with particular regard to problems with asymmetric power relations, which
jeopardized chances of effective participation; another source of issues is represented by the concept of
newcomer (the “novice” I referred to earlier), which had not been problematized enough and hadn’t
taken enough into consideration the different personal backgrounds and actual resources of people at
the beginning of learning experience (Haneda 2006). While representing legitimate critiques and rising
concrete issues – as the patchy definition by Lave and Wenger of the concepts into question, and not
having kept into adequate consideration relevant factors such as power, identity, and agency – both the
applications of LLP, object of the examples provided, to the context of L2 learning and the
“reevaluation” made by Haneda do not, in my opinion, quite manage to effectively frame what the
fundamental problem is. Yet once again, in fact, by making the development of L2 as the direct goal of
the LPP, it was language - that is the product – that was put at the center of the didactic action, and not
the learning process. It is of course possible, if one wishes, to do so; what I argue, however, is that an
indirect application of LPP and CoP could turn out to be more effective, once one has properly
understood and framed these constructs from the very particular standpoint of language teaching.

4.4.2 – The change comes from within

While not framing the problem properly – due to the expectation to control a process which is
intrinsically emergent in its nature – in her conclusions Haneda (2006) makes a number of relevant
observations. First of all, she notices how the CoPs Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to are local
communities characterized by grassroot (Haneda 2006: 813) and therefore informal dynamics; there are
dynamics, in fact, such language development itself, that do not fare at their best in formal context such
as a classroom. Haneda then indicates how, in her opinion, a more fruitful research approach to the
application of these concepts could be individuated in “[…] designing a new CoP that challenges the
norms and practices of an existing community.” and continues by making reference to an experimental
project of the University of California Los Angeles in which senior high school students coming from
rural contexts and with a background of immigration from a Spanish-speaking country were invited to
an intensive four-week summer course during which they were exposed to “[…]“a social environment
of development in which these students begin to re-conceive who they are and what they might be able
to accomplish academically and beyond” (Gutierrez, 2005, p. 2).”. This program adopted critical
approaches to pedagogy such as those proposed by Freire (1970) and Anzaldua (1999), besides asking
students to write their own autobiography with the goal of developing “[...]“and historicized view of
the educational and sociopolitical reality of migrant and immigrant communities [that] helps to incite a
reframing of education, of the self, and one’s future actions” (Gutierrez, 2005, p. 16)” (Haneda 2006:
814).
Finally, Haneda concludes by claiming how change does not need to come necessarily from the
outside, but how teachers and students can be its agent themselves. It is precisely by gathering this last
observation that I will continue to illustrate my theory of learning, aimed at facing the complexity of
the development of language systems.

4.4.3 – Reconceptualizing the language classroom: power, identity, agency, and metacognition
One of the first things that has been clarified at the beginning of this work of mine was how with the
role of the teacher comes an intrinsic power, and how with it also comes the responsibility of its
management. A few lines after that, I added that whoever wishes to teach a language needs to have
learned – properly, which means being abundantly competent both from a communicative and a
symbolic44 point of view – at least one of them, clearly referring to a second language. The primary
perspective of a learner which has been adopted, in fact, besides being a personal value of the author, is
strictly functional to the teaching approach proposed here.
The application of the concept of LPP, in order for it to reveal its true potential, needs in fact to be
aimed not at the language that the students are trying to learn, but at the learning process. The CoP in
question needs to be set onto the community of new learners of L2 – no matter which – and not onto
the community of speakers of the target language. The key point is first of all the development of

44 To adopt, for now, the terminology proposed by Kramsch (2006), but for which I will however propose a functional
revision in §4.4.3.4.
competences regarding the learning process, and not as much directly the language which, as I have
already highlighted many times, is nothing but a by-product of the emerging process of interaction with
other speakers. The learner needs, first of all, to be instructed on the dynamics underlying the language
development process, so to allow him proper awareness and an overall point of view on the quest, and
then guided in facing the initial difficulties of interaction and integration with and in that network of
resources with which he or she will set up relations according to his or her own prerogatives and
interests, developing over time competences of participation and management of the developmental
process.

4.4.3.1 – The learner identity

The primary community of reference – repetita iuvant – in not the target language community, but
the community of L2 learners. The legitimacy to participate and the issues raised by Haneda (2006)
regarding the asymmetry in power relationships can be tackled and solved through the intervention of
the teacher/expert learner who initializes new apprentices to the learning path, along which they’ll be
socialized as such. The legitimate assumption of the learner identity is a cornerstone for all the rest of
the path, and as such it needs to be scrupulously taken care of since the very beginning. The importance
of the concept of identity for the development of an L2 has been outlined in detail by Bonny Norton,
who defines it in these terms:

“[…] how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is
constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the
future.”
(Norton 2000: 5).

4.4.3.2 – The power of the learner

Tied to identity is another key concept, the one of power, represented in the aforementioned
definition by those “relationships to the world” and “possibilities for the future”. Acknowledging how
power dynamics govern whatsoever interaction means understanding power as “[…] the socially
constructed relations among individuals, institutions and communities through which symbolic and
material resources in a society are produced, distributed, and validated.”, and again as “[…] power is
neither monolithic nor invariant; it is not simply something that can be physically possessed, but a
relation which always implies social exchange on a particular set of terms. By extension, it is a relation
that is constantly being renegotiated as symbolic and material resources in a society change their
value.” (Norton 2000: 7). What this means is that it is the power entailed by my teaching role that
allows me to functionally abdicate from it, in order for me to uptake and give relevance to the role of
learner, and it is the role of expert and competent learner – coming from my real competences and not
from hierarchy – that allows me to legitimize my students in their roles of new apprentices, modifying
our relations with the world and connecting us all as participants to the wider community of practice of
learners of L2. Also, to the role of learner as well is assigned some power, which needs to be pointed
out, discovered, and explored: a learner has the power to modify its relations with the world by asking,
making mistakes, investigating, listening, observing, trying to understand. Legitimated as learners, in
fact, students will be able to aim their attention – finally – outside their primary community of practice,
towards the community of speakers of the target language with whom to exercise their new “powers”,
starting to get exposed to their L2 of choice. The identity factor, I repeat, is fundamental in managing
power dynamics and, once legitimized as learners, this identity can be transposed to secondary
communities45 as well. The community of linguistic practice of reference, in this case, represents a
secondary community since it is not from it that comes the power which allows learners to participate
in it with a “privileged” status: no speaker, in fact, will ever be able to deny the status of learner to
anyone; in the worst of the cases, he or she could refuse to talk to the learner, but this is a risk
regardless of the power deriving from the awareness of what it means to be a learner, since exposing
oneself to a community of speakers to initiate the process of developing a language as a complex
adaptive system (this needs to be anticipated and often reminded to new learners) means to be exposed
to the non-linearity of an emerging process, in itself unpredictable. As a matter of fact, the “powers”
that the new learners discover to have are precisely functional to help them mediate and manage this
process at their advantage.

4.4.3.3 – Agency and metacognition for an autonomous learner

Behind the use of power lays yet another key concept: another way of talking about it, in fact, is in
terms of exercise of agency, understood as “[…] a defining quality of being human and revealed within
a continuous flow of human conduct involving the use of power or the will and capacity to act
otherwise” (Giddens 1984). In a context of development of learning strategies, it needs to be pointed
out how already Tseng et al (2006) had suggested a focus shift from the product – the strategy in itself
– to the process of self-regulation and to the competences necessary to manage it (Gao & Zang 2001),
while Gao (2007) had highlighted the emergent nature of agency itself. The concept of agency became

45 The concept of participation to multiple communities has been developed by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1999),
elaborating the original construct by Lave and Wenger (1991).
popular as a construct tied to sociological perspectives during the debate internal to the field of SLA,
taken into consideration in the second chapter and known with the expression of “paradigm wars”
(paragrafo 2.3.4), juxtaposed and initially in competition (Palfreyman 2003) with the cognitivist
construct of metacognition, that is the mechanism through which a learner monitors, regulates, and
orients his or her own learning process (Wenden 1998, 2002; Zimmerman 2001; Azvedo et al 2004;
Zhang 2008). To put it another way, metacognition can be defined as awareness of the dynamics
underlying one’s own language development, that therefore need to be made explicit and shared with
the learners.
Agency and metacognition are two concepts which are clearly interrelated and both contribute, from
different points of view, to a more complex common frame, as observed by Gao and Zhang (2011)
who, in fact, have proposed the assumption of both as prerequisites for autonomous learning, a goal
shared by the approach to learning delineated in this work as well. As Phil Benson (2007) explained
well, the attention for autonomy in language education can be traced back to the final report of the
Modern Language Project of the Council of Europe, in which autonomy was defined as “[...] the ability
to take charge of one’s own learning” (Holec 1981: 3). The interest in autonomous learning roots back
to a time of pedagogical experimentation, at the end of the 1960’s, consequences of that era’s political
climate (Holec 1981; Gremmo & Riley 1995; in Benson 2007), and originally thought for working
adults who didn’t have time to attend structured language courses (Benson 2007). Gradually, the
concept of autonomy has been turned towards classroom dynamics, in order to describe cognitively
independent behaviors that emerged from learners during classes, interfering with the pre-established
course of the lesson (Allwright 1988; Dickinson 1992; in Benson 2007). A renovated interest
manifested during the 1990’s, when studies conducted by David Little (1991; 1995) highlighted how
learners’ autonomy was not to be interpreted as independence and a solitary approach to learning, but
exactly as the opposite: an autonomous learner could be defined as such since not dependent on
someone for managing his or her own learning process, but autonomous in his relational
interdependance with the teacher and other learners. A key aspect of autonomy is that it needs to be
cultivated in learners, which is precisely why we have followed this long path, that can be summarized
as such: the teacher/expert learner acknowledges and legitimizes new learners as a manifestation of his
or her own agency, exemplifying it like this to the “newcomers” and teaching them how to manage it
themselves. Through dedicated activities, students are stimulated and encouraged to put it into practice
to discover it, as an emergent phenomenon; this happens through the functional development of an
ecosystem of interrelations and affordances in the target language carried out by learners themselves,
supported in this task by the teacher/expert learner.
4.4.3.4 – The ecolinguistic competence
Strictly speaking, the selection of contents, I argue, can now be primarily entrusted with the learner,
so to maximally capitalize his or her intrinsic motivation, allowing it to concur in and support the
emergence of the exercise of agency; from this, in turn, the structure of his or her interlanguage starts
taking shape, as connections of meaning between previous knowledge and the new contents that are
being explored. The selection of content made “upstream” - that is by the teacher or, in some cases,
dictated by the syllabus itself – was in fact functional to an approach to language teaching traditionally
focused on the language product: on it were consequentially based the evaluation and assessment
processes, as indicative expression of the acquired competence, be it linguistic or communicative.
Moreover, this pre-selection process belonged to times, still not too far, in which that linguistic content
was indeed scarce and hard to find, at least in the great majority of the foreign language contexts. The
pervasiveness of the access to information of the world we live in now, together with the dynamics of
cultural participation which characterize it46, is radically changing this scenario, allowing us to free
resources that can now be aimed towards goals previously out of range (and, once again, this is also
coherent with those adaptive and evolutionary mechanisms the theory of cognition adopted here refers
to). The “language classroom” can in this way now truly afford to become a meeting point for a
community of practice that can now concentrate not as much on the linguistic content – which is
nevertheless explored during the cognitive grammar classes – as on the cultivation, development,
management and maintenance of that ecosystem of resources and potential affordances which allows to
everyone an individually personalized access to chances of linguistic development47.
However, in order to define this competence, that much owes to Kramsch’s symbolic one, I formally
suggest a riformulation in terms of ecolinguistic competence, for a number of reasons that I will now
discuss. First of all, there is in my opinion a problem of “opacity” in the construction chosen by
Kramsch; for reasons of clarity, functional to convey the actual meaning and its implications to learners
themselves (who, as in part already mentioned, need to be explicitly formed in this), I prefer the
adjective “ecolinguistic”, more immediate in evoking an idea of relation with the surrounding
environment, rather than “symbolic”48. Symbolic competence, moreover, seems to be mainly

46 For further readings on this topic please refer to, for example, Jenkins (2006). For a direct approach to changes in
educational and academic institutions, reconceptualized in mobilizing networks, consult instead Davidson and Goldberg
(2009), freely available on the web site of the publisher, MIT press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-learning-
institutions-digital-age.
47 Experiences in this direction, in which language development is framed as a complex adaptive system, are for example
found in the work of MacQueen (2009; 2013).
48 Far be it from me to sound excessively critical towards Kramsch and her word choice: the opacity I attribute to an
adjective like “symbolic” needs to be interpreted from the perspective of the functional approach adopted here, which
characterized as a competence in managing power games and roles at a discursive level (“Discourse as
symbolic representation, action and power” Kramsch 2015: 13), often focused more on native speakers,
target towards whom a learner should aim, rather than on learners themselves (Kramsch 2015: 19-23).
Ecolinguistic competence, instead, aims at being a “native” competence of the non-native speaker in
quality of learner, focusing on operating between languages rather than only in or through languages; it
also crucially aspires, for reasons I am about to analyze, at influencing the learner at the level of
identity. Finally, differently from symbolic competence, which Kramsch explicitly claims not to be a
competence for a learner to develop49, ecolinguistic competence is conceived to go in the exact
opposite direction, that is making it precisely the new goal of language teaching. It incorporates
communicative competence as a function of it, and can be defined as the competence to manage
emergent linguistic processes which develops through self-determined and repeated exposition to those
processes themselves.
Hence, an ecolinguistic syllabus will describe the goals to reach in terms of establishing and
managing the learning ecosystem in a more descriptive than prescriptive manner, allowing for its
flexibility in emerging based upon situated contingencies such as learners’ needs and resources actually
available. The teacher/expert learner will initially be responsible for supporting the handling and
management of this emergent process, through the preparation of learners in terms of their awareness
and understanding of the dynamics they take part into, helping them to aim their initial efforts through
his or her very own experience as a learner in continuous evolution. The learning architecture here
theorized, moreover, presents the advantage of systemically laying very solid foundations for a
formative path which could potentially evolve in new experts in the management of this process, ready
to support new learners, and so on.

4.4.4 – Assessment of complex adaptive systems

The assessment of emergent phenomena such as linguistic development (understood through its
wider communicative frame) and - now – ecolinguistic competence, its function, have generally
struggled to fit into the rigid categories provided by the traditional evaluation method, defined as “static
assessment” (Sternberg & Grigorenko 2002: vii). Based upon psychometric and statistical approaches,
its most common and widespread examples are formative assessment – which takes place during the
course of study and is functional to inform the continuation of teaching (d’Anglejan et al 1990) – and
considers it not within a context of research and academic analysis on dynamics of power through symbolic interaction,
as conceived by Kramsch, but so to be more immediately understandable and usable by learners with the most different
backgrounds, with the goal of allowing their empowerment and to orient their very own language development.
49 “Symbolic competence is not yet another skill that language learners need to master, nor is it yet another theory of
language acquisition. It is a variationist frame of mind adopted to our post-modern times.” Kramsch (2008: 403).
summative assessment – done at the beginning or at the end of a studying unit or of a program and
focused on admission, promotion, and selection goals (d’Anglejan et al 1990; Torrance & Pryor 1998).
Juxtaposed to these static methods stands dynamic evaluation (DE), with its roots in Lev Vygotskij’s
theory of zones of proximal development (1978); DE’s founding principles had been originally
theorized by Aleksandr Lurija (1961) and were then further developed by Reuven Feuerstein
(Feuerstein et al 1979; 1980; 1988; 2003) precisely to overcome the limits of static methods, following
the development of Vygostkij’s learning theories. The main accusation made against traditional
methods was – yet once again – to be excessively mentalist and individualistic, and not to be able to
fully grasp the whole development of cognitive competences in an individual, considered not as
something individual and determined, but emergent from the relation established with the environment
and shared with other potential interlocutors. For Vygotskij, Lurija, and Feuerstein, performance made
sense only when assisted – ideally by someone more competent – and in relation to how well it
demonstrated to be transferable to other contexts, towards the resolution of new problems.
During the last years, DE has been widely applied to contexts of acquisition and learning of a L2
(E.g. Nassaji & Swain 2000; Anton 2003; Lantolf & Poehner 2004; Poehner & Lantolf 2003, 2005;
Poehner 2008) and it also seems to adequate for complementing the theory of learning just theorized a
few paragraphs ago. While the theories of language and of learning previously adopted by language
teaching all focused on language and communication understood as a product, determinable and
measurable, considered as the sum of past experiences which manifest in the present 50 (Valsiner 2001:
86), the emergent cognition of adaptive intelligence sets itself in a perspective in which the present
tends to the future (Valsiner 2001: 86) and concentrates on possibilities for development – the famous
affordances – which can be anticipated and supported in their non-linear emergence through the
support of an expert learner. This is true for the development of both ecolinguistic competence – that is
the management of one’s own learning process - and for communicative and linguistic competence,
coherently with the homothetic properties of complex adaptive systems, structured as a fractal (Larsen-
Freeman 1997). DE, then, proves to be well suited for mapping the process of alignment with the
affordances – understood in a wide and inclusive way – constantly provided to the learner by the
context: occasions of informal interaction with the girl sharing our compartment during a train trip or
with the cashier at the supermarket, a new expression we notice on an advertisement billboard or on the
label on a shampoo bottle, a magazine in a waiting room or our grammar homework. On the other
hand, from a linguistic and communicative perspective, the mapping operation could potentially

50 Well exemplified, for example, by the morphemic order hypothesized by Krashen (1981, 1982) or by the processability
hypothesis of Pienemann (1998) (Poehner & Lantolf 2005).
involve a learner’s growing interlanguage itself, based upon concrete and mediated activities 51, as part
of a wider approach oriented towards the development of metacognition. As noticed by Lidz and
Gindis (2003), in fact, while the traditional assessment methods follow a learner in isolation until
failure occurs, DE concentrates on the shared success and on its potential of development, while
supporting at the same time a gradual path towards autonomy.
Finally, while fulfilling the pedagogic function of providing a feedback to the learner (Rea-Dickins
& Gardner 2000: 215), DE is in itself an actual pedagogic approach based upon the emergence of
cognitive abilities; in order to be adequately implemented it requires systematicity (Poehner & Lantolf
2005), which in this specific case of adoption is guaranteed by the coherence of its founding principles
with the ones upon which this proposal is based upon. For Feuerstein as well, in fact, the human being
is an open cognitive system, and in order to obtain the best results in supporting someone’s
development it is necessary to overcome the learner/teacher dichotomy in favor of a unity functional to
the success of the student (Feuerstein et al 1979; 1980; 1988). His mediated learning experience
(Feuerstein et al 1988), in fact, is based upon the initial intervention of an expert figure who helps in
selecting, framing, modifying, and organizing the stimuli and resources that emerge from the
exploration of the learning context, the access to which can itself be initially supported and mediated, a
dynamic that fits perfectly the approach to learning of the theory that was just delineated.

4.5 – Hacking language learning: an example of developmental model for a sociocognitive

language teaching
The last part of this work will be oriented to presenting, exploring, and analyzing an already-
implemented and successful developmental model, coherent with everything that has so far been
claimed: the bazaar model for software development. After a brief introduction, we will move on to
analyze its features and the dynamics which characterize it, so to highlight its analogies with the
development of competences functional to language learning.

4.5.1 – The cathedral and the bazaar

The cathedral and the bazaar is the title of a short essay elaborated by software developer and
hacker52 Eric Raymond (1997), in which he acknowledges, compares, and analyzes two different

51 A very interesting approach that goes precisely in this direction, for example, is the one developed by the Spr åkskap
project to support L2 learning “in the wild” (Clark et al 2011).
52 Regardless of the negative meaning often associated with the word “hacker” because of the improper use made of it by
media and in mass culture, its conscious adoption roots back to an MIT club, the Tech Model Railroad Club (Levy
1984), which discusses the matter directly in these terms: “This original benevolent meaning stands in stark contrast to
the later and more commonly used meaning of a "hacker", typically as a person who breaks into computer networks in
concepts and models of developmental processes for software. Adapting a summarized explanation
from a previous analysis of Raymond’s work, the cathedral and the bazaar can be defined as ”[…] two
metaphors for two radically opposite models for developing a project: the cathedral is the result of a
well-defined and precise project, carried on with attention and reverence by a small group of
professionals who, through strict centralization, coordinate the activities, monitor every single instance
of the development, and only when everything has been polished present their marvel to the world; the
bazaar, on the other hand, is a complex environment, messy to the point of bordering promiscuity and
chaos, in which different ideas, projects, and approaches continuously crossbreed in a pulse which has
neither well-defined borders nor a clear beginning and end.” (Gobbi 2012a: 53) For Raymond, big
software companies generally operate by following the traditional cathedral model, while the world of
free and open-source software, commonly grouped together in the acronym FLOSS (Free/Libre and
Open Source Software)53, seems to have found in the bazaar a developmental model more akin to its
goals and characteristics.

4.5.1.1 – Linux and the origin of the bazaar

Among the most well-renowned works of open-source software that got developed through the
bazaar model, the Linux operating system (OS) is the undisputed standard bearer. It is not casual, in
fact, that the coining by Raymond of the bazaar metaphor was due precisely to the analysis of the
process that lead to the development of this particular OS. A detailed summary of the first steps of the
history of Linux was put together by Ko Kuwabara (2000): I will make abundant reference to his work
in the following pages54.

order to steal or vandalize. Here at TMRC, where the words "hack" and "hacker" originated and have been used proudly
since the late 1950s, we resent the misapplication of the word to mean the committing of illegal acts. People who do
those things are better described by expressions such as "thieves", "password crackers". or "computer vandals". They are
certainly not true hackers, as they do not understand the hacker ethic.” (TMRC web page, retrieved via the internet
archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060503072049/http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html, last accessed April 27,
2019). This source, in turn, refers to The New Hacker's Dictionary (Raymond 1993) for further details, where the
primary definition reads: “1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch
their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet
Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal
workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” and then points out how the label commonly
adopted within the hacker community for the negative connotation is “cracker”: “One who breaks security on a system.
Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to
establish 'worm' in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was largely a failure.”
53 The distinction between free software and open-source software is subtle and controversial, and has to do mainly with
legal aspects, as explained by Kelty (2008). This, however, is not relevant to the analysis being made here, since the
focus is oriented onto the dynamics of development of FLOSS, which are recognized by both sides as being largely in
common and shared (Crowston et al 2012), and generally characterized by a bazaar approach. This, moreover, does not
mean there are no FLOSS projects developed following a cathedral approach, as Raymond himself reminds us of (1997).
54 For further material on the first steps of Linux see also, for example, Moody (1997, 2001), Gruman and Orenstein
(1998), Torvalds (1999).
 Linux was born in 1991 (Torvalds 1999) – not casually, the same year of birth of the World Wide
Web (Connolly 2000) – as the little personal project of the back-then twenty-one-year-old Finnish
computer engineering student Linus Torvalds. Torvalds, tired to have to wait for his turn to access the
UNIX OS he was studying - at the time only available on sixteen computers at the University of
Helsinky – and having a certain knack for programming, decided to try to write a small emulator, based
upon a simplified version on UNIX – Minix – made available by Andrew Tanenbaum, a US professor
of computer science. Minix was copyrighted, but simply adopting its architecture as inspiration and by
rewriting every single line of code – therefore creating an original product over which he had all the
rights – Torvalds developed the first functioning embryo of an OS, just for hobby. He also decided to
offer access to its source code free of charge to whoever was interested by sharing it on one of the first
discussion groups dedicated to Minix of the back-then newborn Internet, asking users for feedback.
Finding itself in front of a free OS, over which to have total control and modifiable, no matter how raw
and limited at the beginning, the response of the hacker community was immediate. The original
message by Torvalds read:

“Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be
big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is
starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS
resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to
practical reasons) among other things) [...] I'd like to know what features most people would want.
Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386
task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-hard disks, as that's
all I have :-(”
(Linus Torvald, comp.os.minix, August 25, 1991, in Kuwabara 2000)

In this way, Torvalds started a dialogue with the community of interested developers, whose number
grew day after day and, with it, the contributions to the code in terms of improvements, vulnerability
patches, and new functionalities. Linux was born, and gradually more and more developers were taking
care of it.
In the span of a few years, thanks to a coordination tool such as the Internet, Linux went from being
the small personal project of a university student – with no declared ambition to reach the results it
would have, as Torvalds himself confirmed55 – to a first-class OS, by many considered way superior in
reliability and security compared to its commercial alternatives. It is now adopted by millions of users
worldwide, among whom it’s worth mentioning the USA Department of Defense (Weathersby 2007) –
which uses it for example to manage its fleet of nuclear submarines (Richmond 2010) – the Industrial
and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), one of China’s most important banks (Lemon 2005), and the
government and other public institution of Iceland (Adhikari 2012). Regardless of the global
dimensions of the phenomenon, the processes at the base of the development and maintenance of Linux
are still the same of the beginning, characterized by a substantial lack of formal organizational
centrality, no predetermined direction for development, nor top-down tasks assignment, so to allow the
comparison between the developmental dynamics of Linux – and generally speaking of the open-
source approach – to the ones of a complex adaptive system (Kuwabara 2000).

4.5.1.2 – The bazaar as a metaphor for the development of a complex adaptive system
For Kuwabara (2000), Linux – and therefore, as the OS is one of its expressions, the bazaar model –
qualifies as a complex adaptive system since it possesses a series of features. First of all, it is provided
with an internal systemic structure that can be defined as vectorial, or made of coherent levels built into
one another, each one determined by complex systemic dynamics, that create a scalar structure. Linux
is constituted, for example, both by its own code – millions of lines of commands constantly interacting
with one another and forming an extremely intricate network structure of functions answering to the
arbitrary emergence of any user’s needs – and its network of developers, in turn involved in a constant
interaction aimed at adapting the OS to the new necessities that happen to manifest within the
community. There certainly are personal preferences, inclinations and specializations, but nothing
forbids a developer that so far worked on certain issues to switch and direct his or her attention to
completely different problems, maybe because of a sudden personal problem with a Linux machine: on
the contrary, in the world of Linux, development works precisely like this.
The very same developmental dynamics that had characterized the first steps of a still very simple
system – the publishing on the internet of fragments of code, their analysis by other developers
interested in that particular issue, the proposals for solutions coordinated towards a higher systemic
efficiency and effectiveness, the integration of the patches in the code, in an iterative developmental

55 Besides the reference to the amateur approach and the limited resources available to the project made on the
aforementioned comp.os.minix post, during a later interview Torvalds in fact addedd: “Being completely ignorant about
the size of the project, I didn't have any inhibitions about doing something stupid. I could say that if I had known, I
wouldn't have started.” (Gruman e Orenstein 1998).
process – had simply exponentially augmented in parallel through the adoption of the internet as a tool
for coordination. The complexity of the system was not an innate quality of it – as a matter of fact it
never is – but a property which emerged from the interaction between the actors of the process and the
environment, that is the needs expressed by users themselves. The internal hierarchic structure –
understood not in a formal way but in a functional one – manifested over time as a modular approach to
the development and maintenance of the OS; it developed spontaneously, however, as an initiative of
the users/developers themselves since Linus Torvalds – even if he always maintained the final vetoing
right over modifications to make, and is considered without a doubt the founding father not only of the
software but of the whole movement – is intrinsically reluctant to assume a directive role of command.
In the words of a Linux developer, Daniel Egger:

“In developing Linux, you have complete freedom to do whatever you feel like doing. There's no
specification anywhere of what the Linux kernel has to end up doing, and as such there is no
requirement for anyone to do anything they are not interested in.”
(Personal interview, in Kuwabara 2000)

This total lack of centralized decision-making mechanism is also coherent with the absence of precise
directions for development in the middle-long run. As Torvalds himself puts it:

“That way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up without having pre-conceptions
of how I should deal with it. My only long-range plan has been and still is just the very general plan
of making Linux better.”
(Personal interview, in Kuwabara 2000)

If there is a vision, it consist simply in a will to maintain an attitude of adaptability to emergence. In

this regard, in fact, Torvalds says:

“I don't want to set goals, because goals change, and I've been happier being more fluid.”
(Personal interview, in Kuwabara 2000)

From this perspective, radically different from the software development dynamics that may arise
inside big firms such as Apple or Microsoft, which need to anticipate - if not even tout-court make up -
the functions that the final user will want and for which he or she will be willing to pay, the
development within the Linux movement is precisely a function of the needs, the interests, and the
wishes of its users/developers. Nobody, as Kuwabara observes (2000), knows precisely what the next
Linux update will contain; Torvalds limits himself, at the end of the process, to a qualitative selection
of the code to integrate, something very different from a cathedral approach to development. There is
no top-down design, and the “creative power” isn’t expressed by a formal authority but by the
decentralized self-determination of the development process; this ensures the high level of quality and
performance, together with the control over every single line of code, which in turns ensures a high
level of security, allowing it adoption, for example, on board of those aforementioned nuclear
submarines. A quote by Glenn Moody, journalist for Wired magazine, summarizes what I have just
described and allows us a glimpse of a first analogy with the process of linguistic development that this
work aims at supporting:

“Linux, it turns out, was no intentional masterstroke, but an incremental process, a combination of
experiments, ideas, and tiny scraps of code that gradually coalesced into an organic whole.”
(Moody 1997)

These words bring back to mind, for example, the dynamics of linguistic development
described by MacWhinney (2005; 2008) in his unified model, which considers learners of both
L1 and L2 engaged in a process based upon usage, moving gradually along the lexical-grammar
continuum from an initial prevalence of lexical chunking - “the tiny scraps of code” - towards a
more and more fluid handling of the compositional features of those chunks or scraps, tending to
that “organic whole” from the quote above.

4.5.2 – Linux is a(n) (inter)language

Here we are, then, facing the analogy between the dynamics which characterize the process of
development of Linux and those faced by any language learner. As already claimed, and as
demonstrated by Torvalds in his reluctance to decide and determine fix development goals, the aspect
which requires focus and attention is not much the product itself, but rather the intrinsic dynamics and
quality level of the development processes. When properly managed, they will ensure a high-quality
final result – be it software or language skills. This, however, does not mean at all that we can or
should just “let things be”.
Just like for the development of Linux, in our case as well the rise of the Internet makes a big
difference. Linux could have never developed as it did without that powerful coordination tool
represented by the web; in the same way, the approach to language teaching here suggested and
presented is widely based upon the advantages the Internet has to offer – for example, and among many
other opportunities56 – in terms of the huge amount of authentic linguistic material now available like it
never was before in history. Today, finally, not only is it possible to leave the selection of most
linguistic material to learners themselves, according to their preferences and needs, but this is precisely
part of that process of development of ecolinguistic competence which is now proposed as the new
fulcrum and goal of language teaching.

4.5.2.1 – Motivation and identity within the bazaar

Motivation and identity are fundamental aspects both of the theory of learning elaborated and
described in the previous pages and of the bazaar model, as Raymond himself highlighted. His The
cathedral and the bazaar (1997), in fact, was written precisely as an attempt to systematize the bazaar
approach to software development; as such, it seems to have much to offer to language teaching as
well, in terms of good practices to keep in mind during the elaboration of a methodology 57. Organized
around a number of “maxims”, Raymond’s essay begins by highlighting the motivational aspect as a
fundamental starting point for a successful approach to the bazaar model: for Raymond, in fact, the first
lesson to keep in mind is that

 “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”,

which, along the essay, also gets reformulated in

 “To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.”.

If the identity-making aspect, expressed in terms of agency, is already evident in this very first
approach, it becomes even more so when Raymond reminds us how

 “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.”,

56 See for example Gobbi (2013) for an ongoing experiment and experience of use of the web – in this particular case, of
Twitter – in coordinating L2 developmental processes.
57 And not only to language teaching, as proven by the experiment by Cathy Davidson at Duke University in her class 21st
Century Literacies: Digital Knowledge, Digital Humanities (in particular, refer to Peddycord III and Pitts 2013, who
decline in a manner similar to the one adopted here Raymond’s maxims:
https://www.hastac.org/blogs/barrypeddycordiiiandelizabethapitts/2013/08/01/chapter-two-open-programming-open-
learning), part of the wider HASTAC project (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory:
www.hastac.com).
  “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent
successor.”,

and finally how

 “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and
effective debugging58.”.

Personal interest is always a pivotal point, as one would expect for a hacker whose ethic of reference
(Raymond 1996) defines the world as a place “full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved”; these,
however, “should [n]ever have to be solved twice” since “boredom and drudgery are not just
unpleasant but actually evil”, while “freedom is good”; also, in order to succeed in this, Raymond
reminds his readers how “attitude is no substitute for competence”, in a strong call in favor of humility
and hard work59. The attitude with which one approaches development – be it software or language,
and I won’t repeat it anymore – is fundamental, and is inextricably tied to the social aspect of this
process, that sees precious allies in other co-developers/learners. It is through cooperation with others,
in fact, that it’s possible to move forward and more and more experience and abilities are acquired. In
language development this is true both for interaction with native speakers - endless source of new
linguistic resources and feedback - and with other learners, especially within a classroom context - for
the same reasons – in order to speed up the developmental process. Hence, the right approach and
attitude are aspects of that learner identity profile that needs to be cultivated since the very beginning;
the responsibility for doing so falls precisely upon the expert learner, who needs to be able to guide his
or her peer and novice learners without appealing to arrogance or bad attitude. Those that before could
seem like common sense advice, now acquire a founding meaning for language teaching in particular,
and over time they will – hopefully – influence processes of selection and training of teachers.
The identity-making and motivational aspects as well are taken into exam also by Kuwabara (2000),
who elaborates it – and not by chance – from a perspective of self-support, very similar to the relation
established between expert and novice learners delineated in §4.4.3.1-4 and just recalled. Analyzing the
range of motivations that pushes developers to contribute to Linux, supported also by ethnographic data
gathered through interviews, Kuwabara takes initially into consideration factors such as fun and

58 As many probably already know, in the world of software development with expression debugging is used to define the
process of resolution of problems within the code that came up during the phase of testing.
59 For further readings on hacker ethics, besides Raymond (1996), see also, for example, Coleman (2013), and Levy
(1984).
reputation, often invoked as founding in a hacker approach to software development; in the end,
however, he adopts the idea of collective efficacy as developed by sociologist Michael Macy (1993).
For Macy, it is not individual efficacy to feed collective action but, on the contrary, it is collective
efficacy to support motivation for individual contributions, giving life to an evolutionary model of
stochastic learning (Kuwabara 2000), in which motivation is fueled by collective efficacy through
identity and belonging. In other words, in the case of Linux, collective efficacy manifests through the
success of the project, attracting new developers and motivating old ones to continue contributing. As
hackers, they contribute both because they are interested in the software itself, and because through
belonging to the project they get to affirm their identity values of intellectual freedom and importance
of sharing; at an individual level, these values are reinforced through the respect earned for the
contributions and the support provided to the project, gradually establishing a self-alimented pattern of
positive feedback and reinforcement, the trickle-down effect of which determines in turn the non-
linearity and emergence of these dynamics (Kuwabara 2000). The process theorized earlier in which it
is the expert learner, through the functional authority recognized to him or her, to first acknowledge
other peer learners as such, instilling in them the identity of language learners by socializing them to
and through learning practices, follows precisely the same pattern. At this point, what is needed is a
“founding myth” of language development, comparable to hacker ethics, which could realistically
represent a point of reference for the identity of language learners. In the globalized context in which
we live, exposition to and need for foreign languages are not any longer something reserved to elites,
but a common reality and an everyday need in contexts that are more and more multilingual and
multicultural. What needs to be cultivated – starting precisely by forming teachers and developing ad
hoc methodologies and material - is precisely that ecological linguistic identity mentioned by Kramsch
(2008), typical of whom not only speaks foreign languages, but also feels comfortable when immersed
in those he or she doesn’t speak yet, managing communicative uncertainty, and making mistakes in
order to learn. Mistakes that need no more to be hidden or repudiated, but which can be pinned on
one’s chest, as recognition for the first step made towards competence. Part of that founding myth is
already among us, and can be found in the respect and admiration for those who already speak several
languages. Adopting this as a starting point, it would be possible to integrate elements of the hacker
ethic, shifting the focus from speaking languages to knowing how to learn them – hacking the process
to optimize it. Raymond (1996) reminds us, in fact, that “The hacker mind-set is not confined to this
software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics
or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers
recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the
hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. [...] If you are part of
this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker,
you're a hacker.”.

4.5.2.2 – Participating in the bazaar

The last indications Raymond provides us with on the typical dynamics of the bazaar model, finally,
can be traced back to the usage-based approach which characterizes cognitive linguistics. The main
factors that characterize the principle of usage are - let’s recall them - frequency, salience, and
understandability/reliability of the linguistic material available to us (§3.3.1.4 and §4.3.2). In this case
as well, the social aspect is primal. Raymond, first of all, underlines how

 “Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)”.

The main source that feeds our evolving system is found in the world around us, and in the affordances
we are able to get out of it60. Basically, the process of developing a language can be summarized in
learning to reuse the linguistic material we have been exposed to before, that through frequency,
salience, and understandability pushed through our own interlanguage. Initially, this will happen
through lexical chunks organized following pragmatic (topic-comment) or syntactic (agent-action-
agent) criteria (Andorno 2003), which will eventually develop, through exposition to more tokens –
better if distributed along a variety of context of use, according to Holme (2009) – towards the
grammar pole of the continuum, in a compositional direction. To adopt Raymond’s terminology, the
shift is from a reuse in the most narrow sense of the term, almost a pure copy-and-paste, to a rewriting
of that original code, depending of the compostional competence developed up to that point, functional
to a more competent and expert reuse, which corresponds more to a copy-modify/adapt-and-paste.
Raymond insists on the importance of practice, which needs to be plenty and managed in the most
flexible way:

 “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month,
Chapter 11)”.

In other words, sometimes, in order to effectively frame a problem, it is necessary to try to solve it first.
The first attempt at this, if ineffective, needs not to be considered a failure, but part of the process
60 For an elaboration of this aspect in terms of access to shared resources in education refer to Wang et al (2008).
which will lead us to the solution. If what we are trying to say is not understood, we shouldn’t become
disheartened, but rather consider that communicative obstacle as an opportunity for personal growth (or
a zone of proximal development, in Vygotskji’s words) and a chance to cultivate precisely those
competences for negotiating meaning which qualify us as effective learners/developers. The language
hacker is not who knows how to do and say everything, and never has a problem, but instead he or she
who faces no matter what issue – linguistic and communicative – rises, augmenting his or her
competences and becoming more and more expert, problem after problem, and in order to do so knows
how to leverage on the surrounding environment in an interculturally appropriate manner. His or her
linguistic toolbox is equipped since the very beginning with metacommunicative expressions such as:
“Excuse me?”, “I didn’t catch/understand that” “what does it mean?”, “More slowly, please”, “Could
you repeat that/come again?”, “Please be patient, I’m learning”, and so on. The more experience on the
field, the quicker, generally speaking, the process of development. Which leads us to two more very
important maxims by Raymond:

 “Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”

 “'Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be
characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.' Or, less formally, 'Given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.' I dub this: 'Linus's Law'''.

The importance of these directions encloses, according to Raymond (1997), the main difference
between the bazaar and the cathedral models; in fact, the second one is dubbed nothing less than
“Linus’s Law”. Differently from big software houses/cathedrals – which traditionally work very hard
for months, gather improvements and patches, develop new functionalities, and finally present the
product update to the public (E.g. Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, ME, Xp, Vista, 7, 8, 10…) - the
development of Linux, since the very beginning, was characterized by the high frequency with which
the updates of the source code were released, even if potentially still not completely stable 61. This, for
instance, was and still is functional to a developmental model in which co-developers keep themselves

61 About this, Kuwabara (2000) recalls: “Of the first ten people to download Linux, five sent back bug fixes, code
improvements, and new features. It was the beginning of what became a global hack, involving millions of lines of code
contributed by thousands of programmers. By the end of the year, when Linux finally became a stand-alone system in
version 0.11, more than a hundred people worldwide had joined the Linux newsgroup and mailing list. The development
of Linux continued at an accelerated pace even after the release of verion 1.0, the first official Linux, in 1994. Updates
occurred on a daily and weekly basis throughout its development.” As the project grew, the internal self-organization
brought to divide the experimental versions of the kernel, featured by an odd enumeration (1.3, 2.7, etc), while the stable
ones were assigned an even number. Regardless of their classification, functional to internal management, Linux kernel
updates are today made available for download practically on a daily basis.
motivated and busy through an incessant voluntary work of improvement, polishing, and optimization
of the system – of their own system, which at the same time is everyone’s system. Even if not
representing a fundamental precondition, it has been pointed out how the bazaar model works
optimally precisely because of the critical mass of participants (E.g. Raymond 1997; Shirky 1998;
Cavelier III 1998), which allows the emergence of one of the main features which mark the difference
with the cathedral model: the parallelization of the debugging process. It is not by chance if “Linus’s
Law”, formulated by Raymond (1997), reads: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. Rather
than assigning the code review to a restricted group of computer engineers hired for this purpose, in the
bazaar model everyone tests, can report bugs, and – if capable – can provide solutions and patches
which, if qualitatively adequate, will be extended to everyone in a matter of days if not even hours.
At the same time, the massive self-exposition – even if proportionate and adequate to one’s level –
to communicative interaction in the target language of a learner, since the very first phases of his or her
interlanguage - “release early and release often” - makes it so the “code” ends up under the scrutiny of
a multitude of different interlocutors – the users/clients of a learner’s interlanguage – each of whom
could provide a different feedback. However, just like not everyone of Linux’s users can go beyond
reporting a bug, in the same way not all interlocutors are able to or want to support the process of
development of a learner. It is up to the learner, through the collaboration with other more expert
peers62 - and, initially, in a classroom context, through the support of the teacher – to get and develop
the competences to first of all understand the problem in order to eventually solve it, while leading
meanwhile to the mastering of the developmental dynamics. Moreover it remains undisputed how the
frequency of the input is a primal factor of the usage principle of cognitive linguistics and grammar.

4.5.2.3 – Data structure and conceptual fluency as support to development

Finally, a last maxim which reconnects to linguistic development through an approach based on
cognitive grammar, in which structure emerges for meaning. Raymond, in one of his most technical
maxims, that I will now analyze and explain, claims that

 “'Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.' Brooks,
Chapter 9: “Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be
mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be

62 It needs to be pointed out how the “expert” qualification can not be applied in absolute terms, but it is rather relative to
certain specific scopes. There will probably be a certain kind of situation or issue for which learner A gets help from
learner B, more expert in that case, simply to switch roles a moment after, at the rise of a problematic situation for
learner B for which learner A can this time provide support.
 obvious.” Actually, he said “flowcharts” and “tables”. But allowing for thirty years of
terminological/cultural shift, it’s almost the same point.

In computer science, data structures are nothing but - as it can be imagined, given the rather transparent
name – a method to organize and categorize data; the choice upon which kind of data structure to pick
generally depends on what kind of algorithm will be adopted; an algorithm can be defined as a series of
steps processable by an interpreter, and is designed upon the kind of problem it needs to solve. The
code, instead, is the concrete and contextualized manifestation – the parole, to adopt a Saussurian
perspective – of the chosen programming language – the langue – in the moment in which a software
gets written. To make a linguistic analogy, while “the code” is the result of the lexical-grammar choices
made during the operation of construal, data structures are nothing but the conceptualizations which lay
behind those choices, influence by our communicative goals. The analogy between Raymond’s
observation and cognitive linguistics is therefore explainable through the importance of
conceptualization as the process which determines the linguistic structure starting from the concrete
experience, and consequently of the importance that conceptual fluency (Danesi 2008; 2015; 2017) is
acquiring in the cognitive grammar scenario 63: it is through its development, in fact, that it becomes
possible for a learner to “demystify” constructions not always immediately transparent. In other words,
the awareness of the existence of a conceptual structure, together with methods and techniques for its
analysis will help a learner not only to better understand what’s being said in any immediate instance,
but also to learn more effectively in the long run.
Summarizing, the bazaar model, already widely implemented and successful in the software world,
seems to be able to provide a feasible model of development for the theory of learning that has been
elaborated and described earlier in this chapter, in turn based upon a theory of language understood as a
complex adaptive system. Many challenges remain, as the work that still needs to be done, but it seems
finally arguable that a credible and concrete roadmap to allow language learning and teaching to head
confidently towards a bright future has been drawn.

63 As explained in §3.3.1.3.
Conclusions

This work aimed at proposing a theoretical framework of reference for a sociocognitive approach to
language teaching.
In the first chapter I clarified which perspective I would adopt for this quest, and I established the
rest of the foundations upon which all that followed would be based. First of all, I defined the ethical
approach I would adopt, acknowledging the role of power of the teacher, and functionally orienting it
towards the declared goal of supporting others’ language development. I then continued by
ontologically defining the fundamental concepts upon which all the rest would be based: learning,
defined through the metaphor of participation; cognition, defined as adaptive intelligence; language,
understood and defined as a complex adaptive system.
In the second chapter I took in exam the historical context in which cognitive sciences evolved, from
the end of world war II up to these days, paying particular attention to linguistics and research in
second language acquisition, and the repercussions it had on language teaching.
The third chapter analyzed the rise of cognitive linguistics as a perspective on language alternative
to the traditional Chomskyan formal approach, and its founding principles. I analyzed the implications
for language teaching that this approach entails, in particular in terms of a cognitive approach to
grammar. I then took in exam the advantages which the suggested perspective has to offer in terms of
the opportunity to include within the frame of analysis the wider social context from which language
emerges – opportunity so far rather restricted if not completely denied by formal approaches – and the
potential effects of this for language teaching.
In the fourth chapter, I delineated a concrete proposal for language teaching, both suggesting the
adoption of language as a complex adaptive system as a theory of language, and then elaborating a
theory of learning coherent with it and with the principles initially declared and adopted in terms of
approaches to learning and cognition. Finally, I presented the bazaar model, borrowed from the world
of software development, as an example of model of development coherent with all that had so far been
claimed, therefore adoptable as a starting point for the later development of a methodological strategy.
At last, I’d like to conclude this work of mine with an homage to Italian language, to which this
book is dedicated, as described by language historian Francesco Bruni in the first lines of a report on
the diffusion Dante’s language outside of Italy. Professor Bruni, I believe, fully catches the intrinsic
complex nature of Italian, decentralized, open, non-linear, always wonderfully in balance of the edge of
chaos:
 “When telling the story, in many points not well known, of the diffusion of Italian outside of Italy,
it is necessary to make a distinction. On one side, the mutations due to the ever-changing play of
circumstances, different because of the peculiarity of the situations determined by the play of forces
(in its wider sense), unique in terms of quality, intensity, and plot. On the other, we find those
structural features which, depending on the creativity and the initiative of the collective, on the
ways it perceives itself and it is perceived from the outside - in other words what in the XVIII
century was known as the ‘genio’, somehow translatable with ‘heritage’, of a community and of a
language - remain stable over time. The expression ‘genio’, or heritage, hard to define in strictly
scientific terms, needs to be handled with care, yet it suggests the useful idea of a collective who
develops its own cultural and civil contribution, connected to the contributions provided by other
collectives (keeping into account the many possible cases of competition and emulation, or
unreceptiveness and indifference, or again of transformation, misunderstanding, or distortion,
always all present in the dialogue among cultures). As a consequence, the changes due to unique
circumstances, and those due to long term features, twist together; more precisely, it is exactly the
fickleness of circumstances that allows for the constant features to emerge” 64
(Bruni 2000 – translation by the author)

Let me then close with the sincere wish for language teaching to acknowledge and embrace its very
own natural dynamics of development, taking the complex historic parabolic path of the development
of Italian language, both inside and outside the national borders, as example and inspiration to face the
challenges of these complex times of ours.

64 “Nella storia, ancora in molti punti mal nota, della diffusione dell’italiano fuori d’Italia, è necessario distinguere da un
lato i mutamenti dovuti al gioco mutevole delle circostanze, diverse a causa dell’individualità di situazioni determinate
dal gioco di forze (nel senso più ampio) irripetibili per qualità, intensità e intreccio, e dall’altro quei caratteri strutturali
che, dipendendo dalla creatività e capacità d’iniziativa della collettività, dai modi con cui essa si percepisce ed è
percepita all’esterno, e insomma da ciò che nel Settecento si chiamava il ‘genio’ di un popolo e di una lingua, si rivelano
stabili nel tempo. Il termine ‘genio’, difficile da definire in termini rigorosamente scientifici, va usato con cautela,
eppure suggerisce utilmente l’idea di una collettività che sviluppa un proprio apporto culturale e civile, collegato con gli
apporti prodotti da altre collettività (e tenendo in conto I tanti casi possibili di gara ed emulazione, oppure di sordità e
indifferenza, oppure di trasformazione o equivoco o distorsione, sempre compresenti nel dialogo tra le culture). Di
conseguenza il piano dei mutamenti derivanti da circostanze uniche, e quello dei caratteri di lunga durata, s’intrecciano
tra loro; più precisamente, proprio la mutevolezza delle circostanze lascia trasparire le invarianti”
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