World Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, and the linguistic system conundrum. Issue 1 (17th April 2018) - Wee, Lionel
Abstract: Despite the good reasons why WE and SLA ought to be establishing a dialogue with one another, this has yet to be the case in any substantive manner. This paper argues that a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed if the gap between world Englishes (WE) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is to be bridged is 'the linguistic system conundrum', or how references to distinct L1s and L2s (common in SLA) can be coherently related to sociolinguistic claims (increasingly common in WE) about the porosity of language categories. I suggest, by drawing on Deleuze's notion of an 'assemblage' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), how the conundrum can be resolved in a way that: (i) preserves the insights gleaned from SLA and WE; as well as (ii) opens up pathways for greater dialogue and common research.