The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (review)

Looking at recent history leaves little doubt that second language acquisition (SLA) research and praxes have been enlivened by a powerful dynamic of change that strongly signals that the existing paradigm is at the very least undergoing serious questioning - some might say experiencing challenges that go to the core of its continued intellectual viability and validity. Now a compact volume by David Block, no stranger to the sometimes robust give-and-take that has accompanied this development, locates its defining changes in a larger context, while presenting them in a tightly argued, well-researched, and highly readable format. In The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition, Block aims to explore the prospect of such a turn in that part of SLA which is devoted to the Input-Interaction-Output (IIO) model, precisely because it is the most ambitious, best developed, and most productive area of SLA. At the same time, recent scholarship indicates that its basic notions and assumptions must be subjected to a critical analysis from an interdisciplinary and socially informed perspective - that is, from a viewpoint that would constitute a social turn in SLA.

The core of Block's argument is presented in three chapter-long critiques of what the dominant paradigm subsumes under its fundamental terms 'second,' 'language,' and 'acquisition'; how it does so; and what aspects of the phenomenon that other theoretical or empirical approaches have recently brought to the fore it either is unable to account for satisfactorily or cannot or will not include in its purview in the first place, despite their relevance for language learning. An introductory chapter lays out Block's intentions for doing so constructively in a way that leaves open the hope of advocating two complementary frameworks. Such a stance is all the more laudable as key proponents of the IIO model, particularly Gass and Long, give little indication for a willingness to foster similar forms of intellectual and dialogic engagement. Those prefatory comments are followed by a short history of SLA that traces how the new field of SLA came to life in the sixties and early seventies, when it started to formulate its own concerns, its own hypotheses, and its particular forms of tackling its main questions. Here Block gives proper recognition to Krashen, whose five interrelated hypotheses - the acquisition-learning dichotomy and the natural order, monitor, input, and affective filter hypotheses - set the stage, in the late eighties and into the nineties, for the highly productive IIO model that is at the centre of his interest. Block identifies the versions worked out by Gass (but also by Gass and Selinker and Long) as definitional for the approach, particularly through their specification of five stages that lead from input to apperceived input, to comprehended input, to intake, to integration, and, finally, to output.

Yet for all its productiveness, the model provides unsatisfactory answers to what is meant by the 'S,' the 'L,' and the 'A' in SLA, a criticism that lends both focus and enlarged vision to the volume's three central chapters. Here Block draws richly on the extant controversies, particularly that sparked by the pivotal article by Firth and Wagner and their respondents, and also on literature from a number of adjacent disciplines. Specifically, with regard to the 'S,' Block argues that the designation of second language learning, even when it includes foreign, second, and naturalistic learning of an additional language, is insufficiently predictive of the nature of learning that one can and should associate with them. Furthermore, the approach has an inherent monolingual bias that essentializes notions of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) and sees them as self-contained entities. As a consequence, it also essentializes the learners or non-native speakers as just that - with no other forms of identity on their part having any substantive role to play.

And therein lies the critique: Not only is learner background disregarded (e.g., second and third language learning), but incorrect assumptions are also being made about the...