Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Commentary on “Proactive Language Learning Theory”

2025; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/lang.12703

1467-9922

Dwight Atkinson,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Congratulations to Mostafa Papi and Phil Hiver for providing a thought-provoking contribution to the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. I appreciate this opportunity to engage with their ideas and to think dialectically and dialogically with them about second/additional/multilingual language learning. One thing virtually all SLA researchers seem to agree on is the highly complex and multifaceted nature of what we study. If so, then the more thought, discussion, and research—and the greater their diversity—the better. To do justice to a phenomenon as complex as SLA (and in some scholars' eyes as variable: e.g., Geeslin & Long, 2014; Larsen-Freeman, 2020) requires many heads and hands, both working independently and, especially, working together (Atkinson et al., in press). I agree with Papi and Hiver that the study of language learning behavior itself has been rather "neglected and under-theorized" in SLA studies. This is due largely to "the cognitive revolution," the founding inspiration of our field (e.g., Corder, 1967). The cognitive revolution was a radical response to the behaviorism then dominating psychology and education. As a result, behavior was exiled to the periphery and learning relocated in the head—the new center of action. But because they are locked away in the head, "it is impossible to directly access or measure learning processes" (Lichtman & VanPatten, 2021, p. 288). I am not sure that the "proactive learning behaviors" that Papi and Hiver propose solve this black-boxing problem. One issue may be that these behaviors are themselves "pro-" behaviors (where "pro-" means "earlier than; prior to; before"; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pro). That is, these pro-behaviors do not in themselves constitute language learning but rather are behaviors that seek language learning, thereby maximizing learners' "engagement with the affordances of L2 input, interaction, feedback, and metalinguistic information." As the authors state, "we do not propose that the consequential cognitive processes underlying language development are different within our perspective" vis-à-vis more traditional cognitivist perspectives. In this sense their theory may be a cognitivist theory. Papi and Hiver accurately characterize interaction as a "central notion" across diverse approaches to SLA. Yet this key term represents fundamentally different understandings across these approaches. In cognitive-interactionism, for instance, interaction is primarily a form of cognitive preprocessing; it prepares input for efficient processing by the brain. This appears to be what the authors mean when they state that "it is not interaction per se … that contributes to L2 development." In other SLA approaches, however, interaction is a direct contributor—the very crucible or engine of SLA. Conversation analysts, for instance, posit a direct role for interaction, as learners build their "interactional repertoires" through employing communicative affordances like turn-taking, sequence organization, and repair (Hall, 2019). As Papi and Hiver note, the sociocognitive approach I have been involved in (see final section below) also gives interaction a central role, as does sociocultural SLA. I am struck by Papi and Hiver's attempt to broadly characterize the role of interaction in SLA while apparently limiting their own theory to one particular version of it. I am also struck by the idea of "interaction-seeking behavior" for the purpose of language learning. From a social and anthropological perspective, humans are naturally predisposed to interact, and social interaction plays a crucial role in our individual and species survival. True, some humans are more sociable than others (see below on the case study of "Wes" by Schmidt, 1983), but we are generally driven to interact. To engage with someone interactionally for the purpose of getting and refining linguistic input, although strategically plausible, seems a bit instrumental and even socially odd, except perhaps in service encounters. For instance, in one place where I lived for many years, people sometimes approached me in public places and told me they wanted to, in effect, practice their English, then got up and left after having done so. It seems likely that they would have obtained more and higher quality input and interaction had they had any interest in befriending me, understanding me, or making common cause with me rather than engaging me in purely instrumental interaction. I am also reminded of the case of "Alice" (Kinginger, 2004) from the study-abroad literature that Papi and Hiver highlight; Alice described herself as resorting to "let[ting] old, drunk French men buy me drinks … to practice my French" (p. 233) in France, which doesn't sound highly motivating. To me, language is first and foremost a form of gregariousness and cooperative alignment—that is, social action—that is therefore more productively learned as an effect of social action than through proactively seeking instrumental learning opportunities. But I understand the idea from the viewpoint of learning strategies and believe that there is no single royal road to learning. the mind of the human subject as the [ultimate] source of knowledge; a psychological assumption that humans are masters of their own minds and intentions; a moral argument that humans define their own ethical values rather than receive them from God …; an agential focus that assumes the power and uniqueness of human agency. … [This view] puts humans at the centre of the world, in control of themselves, their thoughts and desires, their ethical and rational conduct. (p. 22) Pennycook's words almost perfectly describe the proactive individual that the authors hypothesize: "the learner as a human being with will, desire, goals, intentions, and actions they choose to take to achieve certain outcomes," or, more specifically, who proactively exhibit "input-seeking," "interaction-seeking," "information-seeking," and "feedback-seeking" behavior. I agree with the authors that human individuality is crucial in understanding human beings, and that cognitivist SLA research has tended to neglect individuality. But my own experience of successful language learners is that they are not all motivated in the same ways, by the same goals, or according to the same standards. As a result they do not follow the same paths or reach the same end points as defined by a single criterion of success. To reduce successful language learners to one particular form of individuality—and particularly a highly rationalistic, autonomous form—seems limiting. To both illustrate and complicate this point, consider two classic case studies in the SLA literature, both gifted to us by Richard Schmidt. The first (Schmidt, 1983) was of "Wes," an artist, immigrant-in-transition, and inveterate schmoozer/man-about-town with little evident interest in speaking "correctly." He appears to be the diametric opposite of Papi and Hiver's proactive learner. Although Schmidt himself regarded Wes as a failed language learner, he nonetheless acknowledged that those "who are not in the language or language teaching business generally evaluate Wes's English favorably, pointing out, for example, that 'I understand him a lot better than X, who's been [in Hawaiʻi] for over twenty years'" (p. 168). On the other hand, "grammar teachers … generally consider [Wes] a disaster, possibly beyond rescue" (p. 168). In contrast, we have Schmidt's case study of himself as a Brazilian Portuguese learner over a 5-month period (Schmidt & Frota, 1986). Schmidt appears to have gone from zero L2 proficiency to being able to converse comfortably around a dinner table, and he apparently did so by focusing his attention on the language itself, using most of the proactive learning behaviors that Papi and Hiver hypothesize. But who was a better language learner, Wes or Schmidt? This of course hinges on how one defines language and language learning, as Schmidt (1983) himself concludes. But my point is simply this: There is more than one kind of success in language learning. Wes is de facto successful by most nonlinguists' accounts, according to Schmidt. As stated previously, I believe that there are many pathways to success in SLA. I appreciate Papi and Hiver's incorporation of emotion in their theoretical framework. As Prior (2019) pointed out, emotion is "the elephant in the room" in SLA research. Individual differences researchers have been trying seriously to give emotion a more central place in their work, but my sense is that those efforts are still haunted by cognitivism. My own view (Atkinson, 2019; Atkinson et al., 2024), as well as that of many "embodied cognition" researchers, is that our most basic experience of the world/environment, including experience of/with other humans, is evaluative and visceral rather than highly conscious, rational, and intentional. That is, we are bound by basic needs of safety and survival to like/dislike or approach/avoid environmental phenomena, including other people, before bringing our conscious intentions and rational decision-making behavior into play. In this sense, cognition is an outcome of affect: We can know what we think only based on what we feel. All kinds of learning must therefore be affective before they are intentional, thoughtful, and rational. In the ways noted above, my own attempts to understand SLA have led me in different directions than Papi and Hiver's. I do not see this as a problem but as an opportunity to discuss, agree, differ, explore, and engage in all the other speech acts and activities used by academics in order to productively and respectfully make new knowledge together. In this sense, nothing in the authors' theory strikes me as wrong; I do believe that individuals and their actions influence what they learn. Where we differ is as much in what the authors may leave aside or not emphasize as in what they foreground in their theory. As already noted, my own attempts to understand SLA include social interaction, but as the centerpiece rather than as just a contributing influence. The sociocognitive approach (Atkinson et al., 2024) proposes that in the course of interaction we naturally adapt to or align with our interactive partners, not so much to build or run a cognitive algorithm as to satisfy basic needs. As ice hockey hall-of-fame goalie Bernie Parent remarked regarding his L2 learning, "Listen, when you are hungry you learn how to speak a language" (https://www.npr.org/2018/08/18/639365728/not-my-job-former-flyers-goalie-bernie-parent-gets-quizzed-on-cake-icing). Human cooperation is perhaps the most notable social survival skill we have, and co-operating requires the social tools to do so. Language is one of those tools, perhaps even "the tool of tools" (Wells, 2009). A sociocognitive approach further treats humans as inseparable parts of their ecological environments. Standard cognitivist approaches seem to suggest that individuals progressively extract linguistic knowledge from the world and build more or less elaborate internal re-presentations. Once again, I do not totally disagree, but I believe that learning is the progressive development of communicative, highly social individuals more than autonomous, cognitivist individuals. That is, learning entails becoming part of the world more than growing apart from it, although learning is obviously complex and multifaceted. This unifying view may also be something we need in a world that seems to be disaligning, disintegrating, and disuniting.