The purpose of this chapter is to present some of the basic ideas and research associated with the multi-competence view of second language acquisition (SLA). If these are taken seriously, much of existing SLA research could disappear into a black hole, as its methods and results are partial, suspect, or irrelevant. Perhaps, however, there is a wormhole through which SLA research can escape to another universe ...

Multi-Competence

The common-sense belief about people speaking a second language is that they are imperfect imitations of native speakers, embodied in a typical Chomsky quotation:

The goal of SLA is then to acquire the language as spoken by the native speaker; 'English' or 'Spanish' is what native speakers know so all second language (L2) learners can do is try to become like them.

The first challenge to this was the concept of the 'independent language assumption' that learners are not wilfully distorting the target system, nor arbitrarily selecting bits of the system, but are inventing a system of their own, mooted by McNeill (1966) and others in the 1960s for the first language (L1) and captured in the term 'interlanguage' (Selinker, 1972) for the second language. L2 learners do indeed speak interlanguages that do not correspond to established languages such as Spanish or English, with unique grammars, phonologies, and so on.