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A prominent goal of research on second-language acquisition (SLA) is to identify universal cognitive processes involved in acquiring ‘second languages’,1 or L2s. Yet there has been very little SLA research to date on the cognitive processes of illiterate or low-literate adult L2 learners.2 Almost all the adult learners studied in SLA research have been literate, in the sense that they have been able to decode printed or embodied text. Typically, they have even been college students, such as undergraduates in foreign-language programs, graduate students in intensive English programs, or international teaching assistants. These L2 learners have all been initiated into the social practice of print literacy, which is an essential skill that affords them access to, and power in, the academic world. It is a skill providing access to many of academia’s other literacies as well, including media and digital literacies.

But can these literate L2 learners be assumed to be representative of all L2 learners? Can we base an SLA theory of universal cognitive processes on data drawn only from literate learners? What about L2 learners who do not participate in the social practice of print literacy at all? These learners are sometimes referred to as ‘preliterate’ (Robson 1982). Such learners clearly exist in large numbers throughout the world, but we know next to nothing about their processes of oral second language acquisition. Because illiterate and low print literate L2 learners rarely if ever set foot in the social world of academia in which SLA researchers operate, they have been left out of the SLA database. For example, at least since 1990, ours has been the only study published in the TESOL Quarterly that documents the SLA processes of post-critical period L2 learners with low print literacy levels (Bigelow, delMas, Hansen, and Tarone 2006). To leave these learners out of SLA research is both to deny their existence or relevance and to deny them any educational benefits that might accrue for pedagogy, from our improved understanding of the way they may learn L2s differently from literate learners.

This omission is also important for theory generalizability. Theories need to account for major accepted findings in the field if they are to be viable (Long 1990). Of course, if those accepted findings are drawn only from Population Y, and not from Population Z, then, as far as we know, our theory applies only to Population Y. If we want to know whether our theories apply to Population Z, then we will need to test them with data and findings from Population Z. This is the situation we currently face in the field of SLA. Virtually all of our findings on SLA are drawn from Population Y: a group of highly literate learners. We have almost no findings on the SLA processes of members of Population Z: low-literate and illiterate adult learners.

This omission restricts the usefulness and practical applicability of the entire SLA research enterprise. Illiterate and low-literate adults learn second languages all the time. As early as 1970, Hill stated that it was common for unschooled and illiterate individuals in remote places of the world to learn second languages. In 1980 and thereafter, some learners moved from those remote places of the world and into US cities. Large numbers of illiterate Hmong immigrants to the USA had an urgent need to learn English as an L2. Yet, when ESL teachers have asked SLA scholars for research-based advice, the scholars have had little to say to them that pertained directly to the SLA of illiterate learners. There was no research on the SLA processes of illiterate adults.

The cost of disregarding social context in SLA theory-building

The omission of low-literate or illiterate L2 learners from the SLA database can be viewed as an outcome of a more general theoretical problem in SLA research – namely, a general neglect of the social dimension in the process of SLA. In modeling L2 learner competence as an (undefined) abstraction, neutral in terms of its variable realization in different modes of use, SLA researchers have taken the position that social context simply does not matter (cf. Long 1998). Tarone (2000b, 2007, forthcoming) points out that SLA researchers have allowed their investigation of such crucial constructs as L2 learners’ ‘abstract competence’, L2 ‘input’, ‘output’, and even ‘context/setting’ to be restricted to the laboratory-like environment of the academic world, a world that is more conducive to psycholinguistic than sociolinguistic thinking. She argues that major adjustments are needed if these concepts are to make any sense in the socially embedded experiences of L2 speakers in their own worlds. And she cites studies showing that social factors in fact influence the cognitive processes of L2 learners. For example, according to Bondevik (1996), salesmen in a Minnesota electronics store did not provide corrective feedback in the way ESL teachers on the UCLA campus did in Long’s study (1980); Bondevik’s findings raise questions about Long’s claim that corrective feedback behavior is ‘universal’ (cf. Tarone 2007, forthcoming).

A very serious outcome of SLA researchers’ construction of SLA as an abstract cognitive process, universal and unaffected by social context, is that it has led to a general failure to study the process of SLA as it is routinely engaged in by a whole range of populations of L2 learners in a range of social contexts outside schools and academia. As a consequence, we know very little about the process of SLA of such learners as: completely illiterate but bi- or multilingual learners in newly industrialized countries; unschooled (but possibly functionally literate) L2 learners in newly industrialized countries; immigrant and refugee L2 learners in low-wage jobs in industrialized countries. Indeed, we even know little about the way SLA occurs in classrooms and communities closer to home, or in learners with different individual or cultural learning styles from our own. To take just one example: how did Kao Kalia Yang, as a young Hmong refugee, manage to acquire oral English L2 in St Paul, Minnesota classrooms when, by her own account, she said almost nothing in her classes for years and years? She was not the traditional ESL learner that our SLA theories assume. Yet, as a graduate of Carleton College and author of a well-written memoir (Yang 2008), she was clearly a successful learner of L2 reading and writing. We do not know how she achieved this. We need longitudinal SLA studies of non-traditional L2 learners embedded in a range of real social contexts. Current SLA theory that minimizes the importance of social context leads to major omissions and gaps in our database such as these; models of SLA that incorporate social context, such as Preston (2000, 2002) and Lantolf (2000a), will help us address such omissions and gaps.

In this book, we would argue that the inclusion of less-literate L2 learners will contribute to SLA theory-building. Perhaps most fundamentally, it will enable us to examine the impact that some of our own uncritically accepted cultural assumptions and presuppositions, founded in our own literacy, have on our perceptions as researchers. In enabling us to do these things, research with this unstudied population will broaden our view of the nature of SLA and of the human potential for language learning.

The impact of native language literacy on second language literacy

As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, there has been virtually no research on the impact of literacy on L2 oral skills; however, a good deal of research has documented the impact of first language (L1) literacy on the development of L2 literacy. Cummins (1991) has taken the position that L1 literacy facilitates learners’ acquisition of L2 literacy. Collier (1989), for example, reviewed the published literature on L2 learner performance on standardized tests believed to correlate highly with academic language proficiency. One of the two major factors correlating positively with learners’ academic literacy in the L2 in all these settings was whether the learners were literate in their L1. Adolescent L2 learners who were not literate in their L1 took seven to ten years to learn age-appropriate L2 literacy-related context-reduced and cognitively demanding academic language skills; some never seemed to catch up with their native speaking peers. Those who did have L1 literacy skills took less time to acquire comparable literacy skills in their L2.3 According to this research, the length of time to full academic literacy increases with age of onset of initial literacy.

Table 0.1. Relationships between L1/L2 oracy and L1/L2 literacy

However, scholars have not examined the impact of L1 or L2 literacy on L2 oral skills. Even recent major research initiatives fail to examine this. The research questions typically investigated by SLA scholars deal with relationships between literacy and oracy, such as:

1 What is the relationship between L1 oral skills and L2 literacy?

2 What is the relationship between L2 oral skills and L2 literacy?

3 What is the relationship between L1 and L2 literacy?

Table 0.1 offers another way of understanding these relationships; the focus of most research is on relationships of various cells to Cell 4: L2 literacy.

However, what has been missing is any exploration of the impact of L1 or L2 literacy (Cells 2 and 4) on Cell 3 – the cognitive processing of oral L2. Using this table, we can better conceptualize such interesting research efforts as those of Keiko Koda and her colleagues (Koda 1989, 2005; Wang, Koda, and Perfetti 2003); these researchers have documented the impact of Cell 2 on Cell 4: literate learners’ knowledge of different types of L1 writing systems (alphabetical versus logographic) on their phonological or semantic cognitive processing of reading materials in L2. Koda and colleagues, while they have perhaps come closest in their work to that explored in this book, carefully documenting the impact of different L1 writing systems on L2 reading and writing, have not, to our knowledge, explored the impact of this knowledge on Cell 3: learners’ L2 oral

1

We will follow standard practice in the field of SLA research in using the term ‘second language’ to refer to any and all languages acquired after the native language; such languages may in fact be second, third, or fourth languages.

2

An encouraging recent development has been the ‘Low-Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition (LESLLA) publications: Van de Craats, Kurvers, and Young-Scholten (2006) and Faux (2007).

3

This research does not imply that illiterate adolescents or adults who enroll in high school or adult basic education classes will take 7–10 years to finish. This research suggests only that the process of developing literacy to the level of native-speaking peers may take much longer than if the individual were literate upon arrival.