The applied linguistics challenge
THE NATIVE SPEAKER AND THE STANDARD LANGUAGE
I consider current issues in applied linguistics, suggest connections between them and look ahead to future developments. My survey will range widely but I begin with the central – and contentious – issue of the native speaker (Davies 2003a). Preston remarks that ‘nativeness is almost the entire question of SLA’ (Preston 1989: 78). Central to second language acquisition (SLA), central too to applied linguistics. But definitions of the native speaker are difficult to agree on.
Being and doing definitions appear to be incommensurate. Being definitions (psycholinguistic, cognitive, ascribed) insist on first language (L1) childhood acquisition. Doing definitions (sociolinguistic, behavioral, attained) argue that ‘being’ definitions are uncertain and that language identities are not fixed. The cognitive ‘being’ approach must emphasize the individual, but individual variation is such that for representative purposes an idealized social model is needed. Cognitive research investigates ‘the native speaker’, paying no attention to variation among native speakers. What that means is that the cognitive view is still that of the Chomskian idealized native speaker. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, places variation at the heart of its investigations, but when it needs to describe ‘the native speaker’ (rather than native speakers), it too must idealize. Paradoxically, therefore, the cognitive and the social meet in an idealization which operationalizes itself as the standard language. It is, after all the standard language, uncertain and fugitive though it may be, that is the model for language learners: the native speaker as social fact is the standard language.
