Has this ever happened to you? Summer vacation has started, you've just settled in to your cabin on the lake, when suddenly you remember: You have a contract to write an introduction to SLA, and the manuscript is due next week. What do you do?
Well, if you decide not to go back to the office and actually work, you might try to write down as many of the standard topics as come to mind—learning versus acquisition, performance versus competence, morpheme acquisition, processability, critical period, UG, connectionism, and so forth—and scribble a few anodyne lines about each, without actually providing any details about any. If you did that, you might wind up with something not too different from Saville-Troike's truly embarrassing new book.
“The intended audience,” we are told, “is primarily undergraduate students” (p. vii); undergraduates, evidently, who are both innocent of any knowledge of linguistics or language acquisition and satisfied to remain in that state, and who are incapable of boredom. The intended reader is not expected to feel insulted by “Questions for Self-Study,” such as “Sounds that make a difference in the identity of words are called __” (p. 29) or “Match the following linguistic terms [lexicon / phonology / morphology / syntax] to their corresponding synonyms/definitions [word structure / grammar / vocabulary / sound system]” (p. 63). The intended reader will benefit from explanations that belabor the obvious: “Functions of L2 writing may include composing informal letters…” (p. 163); “ ‘formal learning’ occurs when a high school student in England takes a class in French, when an undergraduate student in Russia takes a course in Arabic,” and if you still haven't caught on, “or when an attorney in Colombia takes a night class in English” (p. 2). Now, who can tell me what you call it when a Peruvian steamfitter takes a Swahili class?
It would be unjustified praise to call this book superficial: If the discussion were any shallower, it would be convex. Readers interested in the question of “access to UG,” for instance, are told literally nothing but that “four possibilities have been suggested [sic]: (i) Learners retain full access … (ii) Learners retain partial access … (iii) Learners retain indirect access … (iv) Learners retain no access…” (pp. 50–51). (Question for Self-Study: What other possibilities are there?) Readers curious to learn about communicative competence will gain the insight in chapter 5 that it is “what a speaker needs to know to communicate appropriately within a particular language community” (p. 100). Readers whose thirst for knowledge of communicative competence remains unslaked can proceed to chapter 6, where they will learn that language knowledge has five components—vocabulary, morphology, phonology, syntax, and discourse—and that communicative activities are either oral or written and either receptive or productive; in other words, there's reading and writing and speaking and listening. There is even a four-cell chart—I am not making this up, it's on page 137—for those readers unsure as to whether writing is oral or written.
Yet despite the book's tenacious refusal to provide content, it still often manages to go beyond mere banality to achieve outright misunderstanding. Right off the bat (in chapter 1), Saville-Troike botches the distinctions between linguistics and psycholinguistics (psycholinguists, as opposed to neurolinguists, are interested in the representation of language in the mind, not the brain, but so, of course, are linguists) and between competence and performance (the latter is not the same thing as production), and she also mischaracterizes sociolinguistics as being primarily the study of variability. In chapter 2, she tells us that “all L1 development follows essentially the same sequence” (p. 14) without bothering to indicate what that sequence might be, or what it is a sequence of. Her explanation of the poverty of the stimulus problem is not only about as wrong as one could hope, it contradicts itself. Saville-Troike says that children “are able to abstract general principles and constraints” (p. 22)—which will come as a surprise to most linguists—then 12 lines later notes that “constraints and principles cannot be learned” (p. 22).
This is a slim volume, and yet it manages to pack into its small space as much tedium as can be found in a whole issue of the Federal Register while still leaving the uninformed reader as uninformed as before. I can think of no introductory textbook, in any field, that so thoroughly, scandalously, fails as this one does.
On the other hand, I know of no other introductory SLA text that contains a photograph of Wallace Lambert.
