Comment on Firth & Wagner(1997)

The first impression of the article is that, the authors seem to complain the imbalance in SLA studies between cognitive and mentalistic approaches and sociocultural approaches. I've found more than 5 times the 'imbalance' in the article. As I read the article after I had read Canagarajah (2006), it seems to me that the authors try to describe diachronic comparison between the two approaches within linguistic domains. The arguments of Canagarajah (2006) and Firth and Wagner (1997) are not much different but it is interesting to see that the criticism on the imbalance of SLA research in favor of cognitive approach is still vigoroursly and progressively brought on public even a decade later.

One thing we should not miss or misunderstand is that both of the approaches are needed as fundamentals of SLA research. The article criticizes the imbalnce of SLA research between cognitive and sociocultural approaches, not insists abandonment of exsiting cognitive approaches.

When I was reading a part of the article that it was natural only a couple of decades ago, to see nonnative speakers are deficient, imperfect, and faulty, I recognized again that the world is really changing. A lie in the past is true at present, valueless in the past is now valuable. I asked to myself, why they didn't (or couldn't?) think that language learning is dialectal and interactional at that time?
And I recalled a joke about the criticism of transformational grammar in the middle of last century. When transformational grammarians analyzed sentences, it started with 'S(entence)'. No one doubted what consitutes the sentences or what would come before a sentence is composed. The joke is a parody of the first sentence of the Bible - In the beginning God created sentences. Linguistic research started from a given sentence and no suspicion of its origin was allowed. Until microanalytic linguistics emerged in Chomskyan syntax, sentences had been taken for granted, they were just given. Sentences are just a part of human communication, which consists of facial expressions, gesture, eye-movement, and tone, as well and humans learn a language by all the constituents of communication mentioned above, not by a mere verbal delivery of sentential expressions.

I think I understand the argument in the article: (1) the imbalance between research on individual cognition and research on social interaction in SLA needs to be balanced, (2) non-native speakers are not deficient or incompetent, but they are employing and designing purposive strategies in L2 communication, (3) look at L2 learners through a lens of success not through of failure as they are on the way to mastery of their intended language.

The questions are: do we have to believe that every discourse of L2 learners is taken successful, as long as their messages are exchanged communicatively? To what extent the meaning of understanding is expandable? Do L2 teachers teach communicative strategies, not linguistic rules?