Firth and Wagner (1997) - September 7th

First of all, I’d like to get excuse on my poor English from you, colleagues.

While I had read this article, I felt lots of questions have come across my mind. I thought I knew why. Because I don’t have enough knowledge on Linguistics & TESOL. Under the cloak of that reason I had tried to console myself, whenever I faced with linguistic (academic) theories and terms like interlanguage, even though I could find the definition of them in the article. But I couldn’t understand them completely, was so frustrated and blamed my ‘incompetence’. ‘English’ in the article seemed to irritate me and say, ‘frustrate and blame yourself. You’re a FL learner & NNS! Of course you’re deficient and have many problems!’

OK, dear article, I will squeeze my energy, conquer and read you!

Oh, as I had read the article, the article seemed to say to me differently, like ‘You aren’t deficient. Your anger that you are incompetent to use English, is just from your unconscious mind resulted from your education. Why don’t you read me more comfortably? Sometimes you make misunderstanding or miss important meaning that I suggest. But it’s OK. Just read me.’ OK, I will try.

As we can see the abstract, the article suggests that traditional SLA has so many theories, which don’t have a proper critical assessment for them, and usually fail to account for interactional and social access to language. For that reason, Firth and Wagner (2006) tried to do the reconceptualization of SLA. We can see their three major changing goals in SLA in page 286.

In 1960s, there were two strands of language research in SLA (“the social-anthropological and the cognitive”), and tension between them (“an acknowledgement of the social, contextual dimensions of language… and the centrality of the individual’s language cognition and mental processes”)(p.287). But “the tension was weighted against the social and the contextual”(p.288). Authors criticized this tendency with comments on “experimental settings rather than naturalistic ones”(ibid.)

“Code-switching” (p.289) is hmmm.. Is this the same thing as matching each Korean spelling to English spelling, when I was a kid? “Meaning is negotiated” (p.290). Yes! And I think it is changed a little bit and developed by time, space and interactions of people.

For concerning with the term ‘native speakers’, I was wondering if he(or she) is 1.5 generation so he loses or forgets his ‘previous’ language, is he a native speaker? According to Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee who is a Korean- American writer and 1.5 generation, it seems that the hero(just like the author) doesn’t think he’s a native speaker. He said he’s between NS and NNS.

For Interlanguage, I don’t know what are differences among IL, pidgin, and creole. Is pidgin an IL and creole is not?

And actually I was shocked when I found typo two times in the article which may be one of the journals of authority in academic world! Did you recognize them?