Where Is the Native Speaker Now?
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Cook - 2015 - Where Is the Native Speaker Now
Where Is the Native Speaker Now? VIVIAN COOK Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, England doi: 10.1002/tesq.286 I n my 1999 TESOL Quarterly article “Going Beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching” (Cook, 1999), I questioned the 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. Premise 1 led to investigating the effects of the L2 on the first language (L1) (Cook, 2003) and to reconsidering the role of the L1 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 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 50, No. 1, March 2016 © 2015 TESOL International Association 186 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 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 University, a founder of the European Second Language Association, and co-editor of the jour- nal Writing System Research. His books have concerned the learning and teaching of English, Chomsky, and writing systems, including popular books on English spel- ling and vocabulary. REFERENCES Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2009). Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language: Listener perception versus linguistic scrutiny. Language Learn- ing, 59, 249 –306. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00507.x Brown, A. (2013). Multi-competence and second language assessment. Language Assessment Quarterly, 10, 219 –235. doi:10.1080/15434303.2013.769551 Cook, V. J. (1991). The poverty-of-the-stimulus argument and multi-competence. Second Language Research, 7, 103 –117. doi:10.1177/026765839100700203 Cook, V. J. (1997). Monolingual bias in second language acquisition research. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 34, 35 –50. Cook, V. J. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 185 –209. doi:10.2307/3587717 Cook, V. J. (2001). Using the first language in the classroom. Canadian Modern Language Review, 57, 402 –423. doi:10.3138/cmlr.57.3.402 Cook, V. J. (Ed.). (2003). Effects of the L2 on the L1. Clevedon, England: Multilin- gual Matters. Cook, V. J. (2012). Multi-competence. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 3768 –3774). Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Cook, V. J. (Forthcoming). Premises of multicompetence. In V. J. Cook & L. Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Cook, V. J., & Bassetti, B. (Eds.). (2011). Language and bilingual cognition. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Grosjean, F. (2008). Studying bilinguals. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Gumperz, J., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (1996). Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lucy, J. (1992). Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic rela- tivity hypothesis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London, England: Hodder Education. Ortega, L. (Forthcoming). Multicompetence in second language acquisition: Inroads into the mainstream? In V. J. Cook & L. Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. TESOL QUARTERLY 188 Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Scott, V. M. (2009). Double talk: Deconstructing monolingualism in classroom second lan- guage learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Scott, V. M. (Forthcoming). Multicompetence and language teaching. In V. J. Cook & L. Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Vaid, J., & Meuter, R. (Forthcoming). Not through a glass darkly: Refocusing the psycholinguistic study of bilingualism through a “bivocal” lens. In V. J. Cook & L. Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Wei, L. (Forthcoming). Epilogue: Multi-competence and the translanguaging instinct. In V. J. Cook & L. Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multi- competence. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. WHERE IS THE NATIVE SPEAKER NOW? 189 Download 41.81 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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