PETER DE COSTA (MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY )

WORLD ENGLISHES AND SLA: ESTABLISHING A COMMON RESEARCH AGENDA : GLOBAL ENGLISHES

While earlier debates within World Englishes (Kachru, 1991) and SLA (Firth & Wagner, 1997) have established the need to look beyond native speakerism, calls to bring together the subfields of Global Englishes and SLA (Jenkins, 2006; Schneider, 2012) have met with limited success. An interdisciplinary alliance between Global Englishes, which includes World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and SLA researchers would also be consistent with recent moves to bridge the gap between cognitive and social approaches to SLA (Hulstijn et al., 2014). In a similar vein, a crossing of the borderlands of Global Englishes and SLA is made possible by several developments that have taken place over the last decade. First, both applied linguistic subfields have experienced a practice turn as seen within Global Englishes (Canagarajah, 2013; Park & Wee, 2015) and SLA (DeKeyser, 2007; Young and Astarita, 2013). Next, dynamicity and complexity have been examined in World Englishes (cf. Schneider’s [2014] Dynamic Model), ELF (Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011), interactionist approaches to SLA (Gass & Mackey, 2015), and usage-based linguistics (Ellis, 2015), all of which recognize the emergent nature of language. Third, scholars from both spheres of applied linguistics have advocated an expansion of their respective research agendas. Moving beyond instructed SLA settings toward naturalistic inquiry, Bayley and Tarone (2012) called for an investigation of the widest possible range of social settings and learner types. Relatedly, there has been a notable shift to explore the development of pedagogy for EIL (Matsuda, 2012) and ELF (Bayyurt, 2015). Working on the premise and promise of greater collaboration, this position paper argues and illustrates how a dialogue and a common research agenda can and should be established between Global Englishes and SLA researchers in order to better account for the multilingual realities of language learners today (Ortega, 2015).

Peter De Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His research areas include emotions, identity, ideology and ethics in educational linguistics. He also studies social (in)justice issues. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly.