Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy. Heidi Byrnes Georgetown University

Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy Heidi Byrnes Georgetown University On the occasion of this 30 th anniversary celebration, it is fitting to recall that a distinguishing characteristic of AAAL is its explicit focus on developing theoretical and empirical studies of language as a key element in real world problems (Bygate, 2004, p. 6), as contrasted with entertaining purely theoretical considerations. Applied linguistics lays claims to being a separate discipline and not being linguistics applied precisely because of this orientation and linkage to real social problems (Widdowson, 2000b). Furthermore, whereas applied linguistics has, over the last three decades, branched into many different areas from assessment to multilingualism, to language planning and policy, to translation, to mention but a few language teaching and learning have always been core enterprises of the field. In my remarks today I would like to return to those two statements with the intent of strongly reasserting them as linked propositions. I do so by foregrounding second/foreign language pedagogy (henceforth L2 pedagogy) and by taking the position of L2 pedagogy, I take a strategy that may strike you as a bit odd. You may wonder about the appropriateness of reasserting the link between applied linguistics and pedagogy. After all, this conference does not present itself as a language teacher conference, nor as an education oriented gathering, nor even as an educational research conference; in turn, language teachers do not see it as their primary professional venue and applied linguists may not want it any other way. You may wonder as well why L2 pedagogy as a field is so insistent that SLA research ought to address its particular issues. As I will show, sentiments of doubt about this conjugal arrangement are expressed on both sides: by educational linguists, by way of reshaping what they consider to be educationally relevant SLA research, and by SLA researchers, by way of interpreting it primarily as a patriarchal marriage between a dominant theory and a compliant pedagogy. But if applied linguistics really is committed to language teaching and learning, then these sentiments and increasingly marked separations in terms of professional practices merit closer scrutiny. Specifically, if we were to place teaching practice in the center, a first round of considerations might yield the following queries: What questions do diverse language professionals who teach diverse languages to diverse students with diverse language educational goals and needs in diverse educational contexts with diverse societal expectations at this time of migration, globalization (Block & Cameron, 2001; Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005), and even security concerns have about language teaching and learning? In a subsequent step we would ask: Which questions can applied linguistics, particularly instructed SLA research, reasonably be expected to address? Which, most likely, are outside of its purview? What are the valued questions being posed and the findings arrived at in applied linguistics research, particularly instructed SLA research? How are these questions determined, what interests and intentions drive both their formulation and their way of being researched? What kinds of findings does this research present? What does the research community expect teachers to do on account of these findings, under what circumstances, for what learners, for what learning goals? What persuasive evidence recommends changed teacher action even in the face of formidable institutional constraints on just such change? What aid is provided for the desired change to occur? As Widdowson (2000a) referring to Chomsky s famous 1966 dictum that the usefulness of

Byrnes 2 insights supplied by linguistics for pedagogy must be demonstrated showed, that usefulness remains to be demonstrated to this day in SLA research. My assumptions and interpretations in posing these questions should be obvious. Taking a retrospective view, I see an increasingly pronounced discontinuity and mismatch between research and teaching practice as characterizing the core of the most theorized and most privileged areas of instructed SLA research as they have evolved since roughly the mid 1980s. Of course that research has yielded many insightful findings or, perhaps more precisely, it has provided conceptual worlds within which teacher decision-making has tended to take place. What remains debatable, however, is not only the extent to which those conceptual worlds have actually been advantageous for both teaching and learning, but, on a deeper level, whether the neglect of the core disciplinary identification of applied linguistics, which lies in attending to real-world problems in order to generate usable responses, has compromised the entire field. If that interest and that purpose are marginalized, attenuated, perhaps even entirely abandoned, then, from a disciplinary perspective, applied linguistics is redefining itself as a theoretical discipline with all the consequences that has. Taking a prospective view, however and anniversaries are both retrospective and prospective events one can be hopeful that the foundational orientation of applied linguistics, which built on a strong interest in engaging in research that can be translated into social action, in this case social action in the language educational sector broadly understood, can be revitalized to the benefit of both sides the research community and the practitioner community. There have been numerous signs over the last decade that this hope is well founded, with prominent voices within the research community and the teacher education community offering suggestions for the kinds of direction that might consequently be taken (e.g., Ellis & Larsen- Freeman, 2006; Firth & Wagner, 1997; Lantolf, 2005; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Larsen-Freeman, 2000; Ortega, 2005a, 2005b; van Lier, 2004; Watson-Gegeo, 2004; Widdowson, 2001). I place my remarks in that latter context. With that as framing considerations, let me now look more closely at some L2 pedagogical practices that are based on major constructs that L2 pedagogy seemingly has adopted from mainstream SLA research. However, instead of merely relating them, I will probe more closely the old assumption that SLA research was, is, and should continue to be the lead discipline for L2 pedagogy with the intent of laying the groundwork for the new assumption that both fields would have much to gain if the most pressing issues and challenges for L2 pedagogy could also become prominent issues and challenges in SLA research. Negotiating Communicative Competence in L2 Pedagogy There can be little doubt that an emphasis on communication is the driving force behind current L2 pedagogy. Initially spurred on, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by efforts emanating from the Threshold Level project in Europe and by the 1979 presidential commission report Strength through Wisdom in the United States, the kind of spoken communication that characterizes everyday exchanges in personal and public settings was to supersede elitist engagement with literary texts, translation, mechanical inauthentic language use, and grammar drills. For that enormous challenge language pedagogy received the necessary intellectual and practical dynamic from two sources: through the construct of communicative competence in applied linguistics, as presented in the seminal paper by Canale and Swain (1980), and through the notion of proficiency as represented by the assessment procedure of the oral proficiency

Byrnes 3 interview, the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), based on the original ILR speaking guidelines. But the influence exerted by these two sources within pedagogy was dramatically different. As Canale (1983) himself rightly pointed out, the four areas distinguished as minimal components of communicativel competence grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence were part of a theoretical framework. What remained to be devised was a model of communicative competence, where model implies the specification of the manner and order in which the components interact and in which the various competencies are normally acquired (Canale, 1983, p. 12) in other words what was and continues to be missing is exactly what pedagogy centrally requires. Small wonder, then, that the following curious scenario occurred. For the language profession, particularly the foreign language profession in K-12 but also at the college level, the proficiency guidelines became the dominant framework of reference for curriculum development, pedagogy, materials development, and assessment in all modalities. The enormous popularity of Omaggio-Hadley s (2001) methods book, with its explicit basis in the proficiency guidelines and multiple editions over an extended period of time, is but the most obvious indicator for this success. Meanwhile, the research community raised strenuous objections to the assessment construct of the OPI and its foundation in the ACTFL guidelines. Indeed, I can think of few recent incidents where researchers occupied themselves so directly and so critically with pedagogical matters. Such critiques notwithstanding, the notion of proficiency often happily sprinkled in pedagogical and teacher education talk with the previously mentioned theoretical terms entered the core of the enterprise of teaching, teacher education, teacher certification, and teacher development at an astounding pace. What s more, the influence of the proficiency movement continues unabated to this day inasmuch as the Standards project (Standards, 1996; also Phillips, 1999), which now undergirds the bulk of public L2 education decisions in the United States, is but an extension of those earlier efforts (Hall, 1999, 2002). The practical staying power of this framework is such that, even though communicative competence has most recently been called into question as an appropriate frame of reference and appropriate learning goal for collegiate foreign language teaching, there are those who would rather point to flawed pedagogical realizations of proficiency as being the cause for such sentiments instead of disavowing an ACTFL guidelines-based proficiency itself (see the papers in Byrnes, 2006b, particularly the contribution by Rifkin). That state of affairs calls up the question why proficiency has been so influential in L2 pedagogy despite numerous and in many cases valid objections from the research side (see, among others, Bachman & Savignon, 1986; Lantolf & Frawley, 1985; Savignon, 1985; for the Hymesean notion of communicative competence, also Widdowson, 2001). I venture an answer following several interrelated strands. First, through the framework of the guidelines a framework that was propagated through countless tester training, curriculum, and pedagogy workshops across the country teachers were given a way of imagining the very thing that research to this day ignores nearly completely: namely, an idea that is plausible to practitioners of how learners might develop in their ability to use a language not just at a time but, importantly, over time, potentially including study abroad sojourns and re-entry into the instructional program. In that sense, L2 pedagogy with a proficiency orientation absorbed the often abstract notion of interlanguage that has been so prominent in SLA research (Tarone, 2000), drawing from it the important understanding that language develops over longer periods of time and is likely to be both errorful and nonlinear.

Byrnes 4 Furthermore, a notion of proficiency that built on the ACTFL assessment guidelines seemed to create sensible scenarios for what teachers might do to support that long-term development against some of the excesses in terms of overly communicative fluencies that lacked either accuracy or complexity and potentially could lead to fossilization. Small wonder that, within a proficiency-oriented pedagogy, skirmishes occurred precisely there: grammar as contrasted with communication became the debating points about what language performance profile needed to be guaranteed at certain developmental stages, a more accurate one versus a more communicatively fluent one if learners were to continue to develop their language abilities. Contrasting with this developmental, longitudinal perspective, which is inherent to any pedagogy, nearly all research to this day is cross-sectional, despite the ritual affirmation in research studies that the findings might not hold unless they are confirmed by longitudinal study and despite the mostly cursory and often wholly impracticable pedagogical recommendations that are ritually attached (but see Ortega & Byrnes, in press b). What developmental trajectories are claimed by research are either insignificant, because highly restricted, or not amenable to extended teaching practice. For example, claims of fixed developmental sequences of a relatively few features, mostly in English, some in German (Ellis, 1989), provide few insights to pedagogy inasmuch as they address only the minutest of phenomena in the overall task of long-term language development. They also leave little room for every teacher s daily experience: on the one hand, the noteworthy variation in performance among students who all sit in the same classroom and, on the other hand, the importance of the pedagogical actions he or she takes or does not take in a particular lesson or course. Only in the rarest of instances has pedagogy over an extended period of time even entered the discussion of language learning in SLA research, thereby ignoring teachers entire raison d être and their self-worth. For better or for worse, the experience with OPI training, or at least familiarity with the rating scale, gave teachers a sense of how language developed. In other words, I don t think it was a newly discovered enchantment with oral proficiency testing in and of itself that enabled the considerable impact of the proficiency guidelines on L2 pedagogies; rather, it was the projection onto the proficiency scale of a seemingly plausible, or at least actionable, developmental progression that led to proficiency s profound influence on pedagogy, an interest shared by individual teachers and ultimately the major players in state departments of education that develop state curricular guidelines. Second, longitudinal interests are, as I just mentioned, inherent to teaching. In the American context they take on an additional prominence for teachers and the pedagogical actions they should take because language instruction is not part of the curricular core. Because teachers can therefore not rely on an assured long-term instructional sequence, American L2 pedagogy must find ways of being efficient in ways that may not be possible for language learning but that are demanded by the educational and societal context. Small wonder that, among the perennial challenges for the language profession overall and for L2 pedagogy in particular, is that of articulation. Small wonder, too, that the challenge of articulation is really the challenge of finding principled proposals for imagining language development absent steady and guaranteed curricular contexts. Absent substantive findings and recommendations from SLA research, an assessment framework like the ACTFL guidelines provided some semblance of both articulation and curricular progression. But it is not difficult to conclude that both pedagogy and SLA research are the poorer because of that lacuna and that language learners are not as well served as they should be.

Byrnes 5 Third, increasingly, at all levels of instruction, language learning is not merely about learning the formal features of language, it is also about learning content through language. This is, of course, particularly true for ELL learners, mostly in primary education. But it is also a concern in postsecondary education foreign language departments (Crandall & Kaufman, 2002) as well as in diverse content-based, language-across-the-curriculum, and language for special or academic purposes contexts. Here, too, pedagogy has not benefited from SLA-based principled insights about how one might assure that content and language are learned simultaneously in a well motivated and effective fashion. In my own department, the German Department at Georgetown University, the curricular project Developing Multiples Literacies (2000) saw that as a key issue that needed to be addressed if a collegiate foreign language department wants to assert an intellectually valid presence within the university rather than taking on service status almost by default (extensive information on this four-year integrated program is provided on the departmental web page, http://www3.georgetown.edu/departments/ german/programs/curriculum/index.html; see also the insightful discussion in Davison & Williams, 2001). Once more, what pedagogical recommendations exist have almost exclusively arisen from teacher experience (Snow & Brinton, 1997). That does not make them less valuable and workable for the individual teacher, but it does make them unavailable for the kind of public scrutiny that could both improve upon them and serve as the basis for widely shared approaches to this pervasive challenge (Byrnes, 2005a; Wesche & Skehan, 2002). But linking content and language learning is not merely a desideratum for quality programs; it is at the heart of some of the most high-stakes testing now being undertaken in the United States, the testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (Byrnes, 2005b). Yet, to date, assessment practice seems to offer few models for linking both content knowledge and language ability that could be used in classrooms and for entire programs (Byrnes, 2007). Finally, I suggest, teachers have made their own adaptations of the constructs of communicative competence, proficiency, and notions of language development in order to meet another challenge that has gained considerable prominence in contemporary language teaching, the challenge of heritage language teaching. In many cases, heritage learners have levels of L2 performance that far outpace the learning outcomes of the typical foreign language classroom, or they show learning profiles that are difficult to accommodate within the proficiency framework. And yet, that is exactly what is being done (see Kagan & Dillon, 2004) because SLA research has few insights into the advanced learner in general, and the heritage learner in particular. Only most recently have these areas received attention in the American context. This has been possible not by using the standard structuralist theory of language that underlies most SLA research, but by turning to systemic functional linguistics as a theoretical framework, which, under Michael Halliday s inspiration, has retained and foregrounded its explicit orientation toward educational issues and language-based learning from the 1960s into the present. As the selection of articles included in the collected works of Halliday (2007) on language and education indicates, the initial orientation was toward mother tongue education. However, L2 education in multilingual societies followed soon thereafter. Indeed, as a number of recent publications in the American context have shown, this approach appears to be particularly promising for moving adult learners, including heritage learners, to advanced levels of ability (Achugar & Colombi, in press; see several contributions in Byrnes, 2006a; Byrnes et al., 2006; Ortega & Byrnes, in press a; Schleppegrell, 2004; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002).

Byrnes 6 The Pedagogy of Task: What is the Teacher s Task? Whereas communicative competence and proficiency can be considered the foundation of L2 pedagogy, a more recent and highly influential construct is that of task. However one defines task for research purposes or for testing purposes (Bygate 2000; Bygate, Skehan, & Swain, 2001; Ellis, 2003, 2005), for teachers, task refers to a meaning-oriented activity that engages learners, using any of the four modalities in order to arrive at a certain outcome, defined or not, with or without a workplan. Significantly, for SLA research, the considerable attraction of task lay in the potential for carefully controlling, if not to say manipulating, key features of language processing that were deemed to affect language performance, frequently with little attention to issues of meaning (but see Samuda, 2001) and little in the way of discursive context (but see Bygate & Samuda, 2005). By contrast, for teachers the notion of task had a number of highly beneficial consequences that favored the exact opposite characteristics of task, namely its high adaptability to diverse contexts (Freeman, 2004; Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Hall, 2002). For them, task is a concept within which to locate a wide range of innovative and imaginative classroom activities and even extended classroom projects. It presents opportunities for authentic language use that have strong interactive, dialogic overtones. It instantiates pedagogical practices that are meaning oriented, rather than grammar driven (Samuda, 2001). It shifts classroom dynamics to learner agency and echoes constructivist notions of learning alongside teachers situated practice that are gaining prominence in general education theory (Freeman, 2004; Lave & Wenger, 1991). It has the potential for a kind of communicative authenticity and agency that fits well with increasing awareness of the role of identity construction through language that is part of the larger push toward the incorporation of culture that the Standards movement has made a central concern. It accords with sociocultural theory as it has become prominent, in particular through the work of Lantolf (Lantolf, 2005; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), especially Vygotskian notions of learning in the zone of proximal development, thereby superseding teachers role as passive providers of comprehensible input envisioned by Krashen and in so much input-interaction research (Gass & Mackey, 2006). It allows as well an explicit focus on meaning making in expansive discursive environments that the classroom can become precisely because it can be in the hands of a skillful teacher (Samuda, 2001), a consideration that is so often missing in input-oriented task-based research (but see Bygate & Samuda, 2005). Finally and returning to my earlier point regarding the urgent need for curricular proposals most recently the notion of task as it was originally proposed by Long and Crookes (1992) as a way of overcoming the shortcomings of synthetic syllabi has been reinterpreted as a genre-based that is, text-based construct. In that reincarnation, task has become the centerpiece of the curriculum project spanning all four years of undergraduate study that characterizes the study of German at Georgetown University (Byrnes, Crane, Maxim, & Sprang, 2006). Pedagogy and Methods: What is the Connection? Tasks became the liberating moment for teachers in yet other ways, from the strictures of grammar and form and from the strictures of methods. For fixed methods dictums, once the hallmark of a well trained teacher, are inherently unsustainable in the highly situated context of communicative tasks. As has repeatedly been noted, we seem to be in a postmethods condition,

Byrnes 7 though not in an everything goes environment, as teacher educators interested in that aspect of their professional work, like Hall (2002), Larsen-Freeman (2003), Lightbown (2002), Lightbown and Spada (1999), and Kumaravadivelu (2001, 2005), do not fail to emphasize. To what extent the kinds of principles that Kumaravadivelu has proposed can come to replicate methodological dictums will surely depend on how they are deployed. At the very least, that kind of pulling back from an overenthusiastic dismissal of methods is itself indicative of the dynamic relationship between the relatively steady beliefs teachers tend to have about their practices and yet their flexibility in a particular pedagogical moment. One cannot help but be reminded of the exquisitely complex interaction between centripetal and centrifugal forces that Bakhtin (1981, 1986) identified for the system of language itself and the dialogicality between the system of language and the individual utterance or text. Perhaps no other environment than that of methods shows more clearly the prominent role that general educational theory has taken on in L2 pedagogy. What that means close to the ground in the classroom is increasingly being investigated (e.g., Zuengler & Mori, 2002). It is particularly well illustrated in research by Breen, Hird, Milton, Oliver, and Thwaite (2004). In a careful study of experienced teachers, they found that a practice widely adopted across the group appeared to be based upon diverse principles, just as a single principle that was commonly shared among the teachers was associated by them with a wide range of practices (p. 470). Although that may appear to be unprincipled variation, these teachers have developed for themselves what Bourdieu calls le sens pratique that is, a sense of coherence and plausibility that can evolve into a theory of teaching that goes far beyond notions of methods. Furthermore, the authors note the extent of individual adaptation [on the part of an individual teacher] may be constrained within that collective pedagogy wherein certain principles predict specific practices and which the teacher shares with a group of practitioners of similar experience in a similar working environment (Breen, et al., p. 497). Taken together, both of these characteristics of teachers professional actions allow them to continue to develop on their own, as contrasted with being trained or even being educated by others, including ways of developing a socioculturally located teacher identity (see Crandall, 2000; Duff & Uchida, 1997). In other words, far from the restrictive realizations of task in research practice where it is primarily interpreted in individual, psycholinguistic processing terms (Robinson, 2001, 2002; Skehan, 1998) and, even more pronounced, in the almost prescriptive notions about the relation of form and meaning in focus on form instruction (e.g., Doughty &Williams, 1998), restrictions that are essentially nonpracticeable in a classroom context teachers arrive at their own forms of coherence in pedagogy that negotiates authenticity of interaction and the multiple relations between meaning and form and guides how they should react to diverse aspects of learner behavior in L2 development in terms of the feedback they provide. This has meant that L2 pedagogy has found little to appropriate from such a prominent SLA research area as that of implicit and explicit learning. Beyond a nontechnical sense of these two terms, it would be difficult to see how the normal classroom environment could really ascertain, much less control, whether a particular teaching strategy resulted in implicit or explicit learning and whether that was appropriate or not for a particular feature of the language system, as SLA research seems to suggest. Similarly, the expansive treatment and claims for pedagogical relevance of the attention and awareness literature (Schmidt, 1995), too, have left little trace in L2 pedagogy beyond that which one would already associate with the nontechnical meaning of those terms. By comparison, notions that are central to Vygotskian approaches to teaching and learning, such as the zone of proximal development or scaffolded learning, at heart ways of

Byrnes 8 satisfying the requirement of shared attention and attentiveness, are readily being absorbed into L2 pedagogy because of their suitability for the situated practice of teaching. Finally, except at a very gross level, actual teaching practice is unlikely to benefit in any noteworthy fashion from the differentiations that SLA research has come to make in the matter of feedback, from recasts to clarification requests, to forms of elicitation, metalinguistic feeback, explicit correction, and repetition of error (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). L2 Pedagogy as Educational Practice in Variation As the previous discussion has shown, ultimately teachers must and do take variation seriously as they develop pedagogical reasoning and action within their professional work, very much in line with Preston s (1996) work. That judgment may lead one to wonder whether the realizations of major SLA constructs in educational practice are at all the same constructs, all the more so as that would imply an intellectual indebtedness to and dependency from SLA research. Early on, as communicative language teaching was beginning to take hold, Valdman and Warriner-Burke (1980) made exactly that point when they claimed that major surgery in syllabus design was necessary if higher levels of communicative ability were to be attained. Behind that claim stands, of course, another way in which the centrality of variation comes into play in pedagogy: What are the norms toward which pedagogy is to aim, how do they differ from the norms of structuralist linguistic descriptions, and how do they differ from notions of the educated native speaker? Valdman has long reminded us of the need to consider just those points if pedagogical efforts are to be as successful as we want them to be (see e.g., Gass, Bardovi-Harlig, Magnan, & Walz, 2002). We have long held that language teaching has looked to SLA research and the construct of language it represents as its core knowledge base. Freeman (2004) presents an excellent discussion of the limitations of what he refers to as the technology of subject matter, which assumes stability for what is being taught namely, language and for the architecture of instruction, which assumes that content plus method equals teaching (p. 170, italic in original). On that latter point, more recent and close-up investigations of teacher knowledge and beliefs (such as those I just cited by Breen et al., 2004) and the professional judgments of eminent teacher trainers like Crandall or Freeman, as well as, teacher training professionals like Crookes (2005) and Larsen-Freeman (1990, 1995), among others, present a rather different picture. In their experience, both pre-service and in-service teacher education has increasingly looked beyond linguistics and has determined that preparation for the realities of the classroom is more substantively addressed by general education theory and practice, particularly in terms of the need for practical experience, for classroom-centered or teacher research (Allwright, 2005; Allwright & Bailey, 1991; Crookes, 2005), and in terms of fostering teacher beliefs and teacher cognition (Freeman & Johnson, 1998). Here the efforts of the journal Language Teaching Research to include such work on a regular basis, including separate editorial commentary, is particularly noteworthy (Allwright, 2003). As Crandall (2000), echoing Larsen-Freeman (1990, 1995) stated, we may be observing the gradual development of a theory of language teaching that is quite distinct from an application of SLA research findings (p. 34). One can debate whether a move away from more specifically language-oriented insights for teacher practice is a negative development. However, the answer is obvious in such fundamentally language oriented decision-making as materials development, curriculum

Byrnes 9 development, and assessment or at least it should be clear if applied linguistics succeeded in nurturing an SLA research culture that takes these social responsibilities seriously and intends to be relevant in the very settings namely, educational settings that were to benefit from its insights in the first place. If we waiver here, applied linguistics increasingly becomes a theoretical discipline and a discipline that is marginal for L2 teachers, placing all the burdens of assuring the social good of multilingual language education on those who work under the most difficult circumstances. Perhaps acknowledging that responsibility and acting on it would be the real social turn in applied linguistics the real socialization of the field that is increasingly being talked about (Block, 2003). I began this talk with the claim that reaffirming the link between the research and real world problems, particularly real world problems that occur in the context of language teaching and learning, is likely to be highly beneficial for both researchers and research practice and teachers and teaching practice. Obviously I have been able to make this case only in the sketchiest of ways. I leave you then with three things to ponder, in each case doing so from the standpoint of L2 pedagogy. First, and beginning with the SLA research side, in the fiftieth anniversary volume of Language Learning, Wolfgang Klein (1998) made the following observation as he noted that SLA as a field has not yet exerted the expected theoretical impact on our general understandings of the human capacity for language: SLA researches learners utterances as deviations from a certain target, instead of genuine manifestations of underlying language capacity; it analyses them in terms of what they are not rather than what they are. For some purposes such a target deviation perspective makes sense, but it will not help SLA researchers to substantially and independently contribute to a deeper understanding of the structure and function of the human language faculty. Therefore, these findings will remain of limited interest to other scientists until SLA researchers consider learner varieties a normal, in fact typical, manifestation of this unique human capacity. (p. 527) Second, making much the same argument as I have here presented it, Bygate (2004) proposed the following as guiding questions for SLA research: 1. Where is the real world problem and how is it defined? 2. What are the stakeholders' views? 3. How far can the research be a joint enterprise between scholars and lay stakeholders? 4. How can research be designed to help find effective responses to stakeholders' concerns? 5. What different kinds of applied research are needed to enable effective responses? (p. 8) Provocatively, he suggests that, beyond the contested issue of the nature of the relationship between surface data and theory, that such a linkage inevitably brings about and beyond the problem of how to handle the specific and the general, the kind of accountability that applied linguistics researchers, and, by implication, SLA researchers, may need to countenance is that of exposing their account of the data to the potentially disconfirming view of the users (p. 12), a challenge that would inherently involve the challenge of gathering the disconfirming accounts in the first place. Finally, in reflecting on the new millennium, G. Richard Tucker (2000), a long-time and astute observer of our profession, concluded that full disciplinary acceptance will occur only to the extent that applied linguistics responds to wider social needs and to the extent that its

Byrnes 10 expertise is valued by people beyond the professional field (p. 243). Particularly at this time, which, for better or for worse, might well be another sputnik age for languages in the public sphere, there is ample reason to seize and define the moment from our side and to seize and define it well, both for the benefit of our field and that of the publics we have the privilege to serve.

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