Where Is the Native Speaker Now?

Author(s): VIVIAN COOK

Source: TESOL Quarterly , MARCH 2016, Vol. 50, No. 1 (MARCH 2016), pp. 186-189
Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

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 Where Is the Native Speaker Now?
VIVIAN COOK
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, England

doi : 10.1 002/tesq. 286

In Speaker
Speakermy
in Language
1999 in Language
Teaching"TESOL
(Cook,Teaching"
1999), I questioned
Quarterly article
the use(Cook, "Going 1999), I Beyond questioned the the Native use
of the native speaker (NS) model in language teaching, reflecting an
overall monolingual bias against second language (L2) users as defi-
cient versions of natives. The NS target led to overlooking the unique
assets of L2 users and to overemphasising NS language and situations.
The article concluded that teaching should concentrate on producing
successful L2 users, not imitation native speakers.
The article was part of the slow development of the concept of mul-
ticompetence, first put forward as a devil's advocate argument (Cook,
1991): what would happen if people who knew more than one lan-
guage were the norm rather than monolingual native speakers? Multi-
competence is defined as "the knowledge of more than one language
in the same mind or the same community" (Cook, 2012, p. 3768),
based on three premises (Cook, forthcoming):
(1) multicompetence concerns the total system for all languages
in a single mind or community and their interrelationships,
(2) it does not depend on the monolingual native speaker, and
(3) it affects the whole mind, not language alone.
Multicompetence provided an alternative bilingual perspective on
second languages to the monolingual perspective, revolutionary rather
than normal science.
The 1999 article was then an initial statement of premise 2. Premis
1 led to investigating the effects of the L2 on the first language (L
(Cook, 2003) and to reconsidering the role of the LI in teaching
(Cook, 2001); premise 3 to exploring how bilinguals think differently
from monolinguals (Cook & Bassetti, 2011). These premises also
impact on research methodology, denying the validity of results and
methods that treat the L2 user as a deficient native speaker (Cook,
1997).
The 1999 article reflected a 1990s "liberal" Zeitgeist in applied lin-
guistics about the political role of native-based models in second

186 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 50, No. 1, March 2016

© 2015 TESOL International Association

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language teaching, particularly linguistic imperialism (Phillipson,
1992). The maximum citations for the article came 15 years after it
first appeared. Its growing relevance over time is presumably because
it falls in with the switch toward the "bilingual turn," probably taken
earlier in European research than in North America. Mainstream sec-
ond language acquisition (SLA) research has tended to recycle the
perennial research questions about age, L1/L2 transfer, and so on in
terms of models borrowed from cognitive psychology and discourse;
ideas from a bilingual perspective provided a breath of fresh air.
Hence multicompetence has lent itself particularly to testing the new
1990s form of linguistic relativity (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Lucy,
1992).
Has it made a difference? According to Ortega (forthcoming), "the
inroads of multi-competence into traditional SLA are visible and by
now indelible"; to Scott (forthcoming), "a multicompetence perspec-
tive is central to our mission as language educators"; to Wei (forthcom-
ing) , "perhaps the most noticeable consequence of the MC
perspective has been in the reconceptualisation of the language
learner as a legitimate, multicompetent language user in their own
right," a direct line of descent from my 1999 article. Yet in a survey of
psychological research, Vaid and Meuter (forthcoming) still found that
"single language use is the implicit norm and that bilingual language
use is something unusual, extra, or special."
It is true that second language acquisition researchers' reliance on
the native speaker is now more covert. Yet by and large research still
falls back on the L2 user meeting the standard of native speakers: the
monolingual perspective is seen in book titles like Incomplete Acquisition
in Bilingualism (Montrul, 2008) or papers entitled "Age of Onset and
Nativelikeness in a Second Language" (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam,
2009). The native speaker is still the ghost in the machine.
The 1999 article suggested basing teaching on L2 user goals, situa-
tions, roles, and language and employing methods that acknowledged
the students' first language: has much changed in this regard? While
there has been academic support for these ideas, notably by Scott
(2009) and Ortega (2009), there has been little impact on syllabuses
and examinations, though Brown (2013) has called for exams based
on L2 users. Published coursebooks still emphasise the roles of the
powerful native speaker; the few L2 users that are mentioned are hum-
ble foreign students. Of course this is tempered to some extent by the
need for teachers, coursebook writers, and the like to fall in with the
monolingual perspective that education and society have fostered in
the students; Grosjean (2008) pointed out bilinguals too are institu-
tionalised into the monolingual perspective. For me the 1999 article
was a message of hope for students that is never out of date: do not

WHERE IS THE NATIVE SPEAKER NOW? 187

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see yourselves as failures always trying to be like native speakers; see
yourselves as successes, achieving things as L2 users that are out of the
reach of monolinguals.

THE AUTHOR

Vivian Cook is emeritus professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle

founder of the European Second Language Association, and co-editor
nal Wńting System Research. His books have concerned the learning an
English, Chomsky, and writing systems, including popular books on E
ling and vocabulary.

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Cook, V. J. (1991). The poverty-of-the-stimulus argument and multi-co
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188 TESOL QUARTERLY

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WHERE IS THE NATIVE SPEAKER NOW? 189

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