11/7/22, 19:01 Premises of Multi-competence

Premises of Multi-competence

Vivian Cook

Draft of background chapter for Cook, V. & Li Wei (eds.) The

Cambridge Handbook of Linguistics Multi-Competence (2016)

MC web MC definition

This chapter introduces the concept of linguistic multi-competence and

sets the scene for the rest of the book. It looks first at issues of definition
and then at three premises that have become part and parcel of multi-
competence. The aim is to examine the ideas underlying multi-
competence rather than to present new views of multi-competence or to
summarise existing research, to be tackled in Chapter 2.

Monolingual and Bilingual perspectives

There are two alternative ways of looking at people who speak more than
one language. On the one hand there is the monolingual perspective that
sees second language (L2) users from the point of view of the
monolingual first language (L1) user. In this case the second language is
added on to the speaker’s first language, something extra; the L2 user’s
proficiency in the second language is measured against the sole language
of the monolingual; ideally the L2 user would speak the second language
just like a native speaker. The research questions and methodology in
classical second language acquisition (SLA) research are mostly
concerned with this monolingual perspective and try to account for L2
users’ lack of success in learning how to speak like a monolingual L1
user.

On the other hand there 1s the bilingual perspective that sees L2 users
from the point of view of the person who speaks two or more languages.
From this angle, the other languages are part of the L2 user’s total

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language system, each language potentially differing from that of

someone who speaks it as a monolingual. It is beside the point whether
the L2 user’s final ability is identical to that of a monolingual native
speaker. Bilingualism and multilingualism research have mostly asked
questions about how L2 users use the other languages and how the
languages connect in multilingual communities, not about how L2 users
compare with monolingual individuals and communities.

One interpretation of the bilingual perspective is captured by the

notion of multi-competence, glossed here as ‘the overall system of a mind
or a community that uses more than one language’. Multi-competence
thus covers the knowledge and use of two or more languages by the same
individual or the same community. At some level, all the languages form
part of one overall system, with complex and shifting relationships
between them, affecting the first language as well as the others.

Defining Multi-competence

Let us start with the conceptual history of multi-competence. Franceschini

(2011) interprets the history with a slightly different focus, largely as
development from a psychological generative tradition to a dynamic
sociolinguistics of multilingualism.

i. ‘the compound state of a mind with two grammars’

The term ‘multi-competence’ was first used in an SLA context to mean

‘the compound state of a mind with two grammars’ (Cook 1991), partly to
complement the term ‘interlanguage’, which refers solely to the L2
component in the bilingual mind, ignoring the L1 component. Multi-
competence saw second language acquisition as involving the whole mind
of the L2 user, not just the second language; multi-competence included
all language-related aspects of the mind. The word grammar in the
original definition was intended in the Chomskyan sense of knowledge of
language -‘we call the theory of the state attained its [the language
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faculty’s] grammar’ (Chomsky and Lasnik 1993). That is to say, grammar

includes all aspects of linguistic knowledge such as vocabulary and
phonology, not just syntax alone. However, this Chomskyan sense of
grammar turned out to be misleading as it led some researchers into
thinking that multi-competence was only about syntax rather than the
totality of language knowledge.

ii. ‘the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind or the
same community’

The definition of multi-competence was later modified to ‘the knowledge

of more than one language in the same mind’ (Cook 2003) and, more
recently, to ‘the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind
or the same community’ (Cook 2012). These changes affected the original
definition by:

e making clear that multi-competence is not confined to syntax but

includes the lexicon, phonology etc.

¢ going beyond the second language to other languages the L2 user may
know. The relationship between three or more languages is equally a
matter of multi-competence.

¢ extending the concept beyond the psychological construct of the mind

of the individual to the sociological construct of the ‘multi-competence
of the community’ (Brutt-Griffler 2002), treating the diverse languages
of the community as a coherent whole rather than separately.

This 2012 definition (11) is the one that most of the contributors in this
volume refer to, apart from Hall (Chapter Eight) who uses the 1991
definition (1).

ili. ‘the overall system of a mind or a community that uses more than
one language’

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Yet the change from ‘the compound state’ in definition (1) to ‘the
knowledge of more than one language’ in definition (11) has the
unintended consequence of implying a static view of language as
knowledge rather than a social definition of language or a multifacetted
view of language and language use. On reflection, a preferable working
definition is ‘the overall system of a mind or a community that uses more
than one language’. This changes ‘knowledge’ to the more neutral
‘system’, does not confine multi-competence to language alone, brings in
language use and implies that language is not separate from the rest of the
mind. This definition is not fully acceptable to all the contributors to this
volume and it still leaves the concepts of ‘system’ and ‘community’ open
to interpretation.

As the multi-competence approach developed and broadened, it

became evident that it was more a perspective from which to view the
acquisition and use of multiple languages than a theory or a model. Multi-
competence is a way of looking at things from another angle rather than of
exploring the implications and contradictions within the same perspective,
‘revolutionary’ rather than ‘normal’ science (Kuhn 1962). The
monolingual perspective yields SLA research questions and methods that
are inextricably linked to monolingual native speakers; the multi-
competence perspective relates its questions and methods to L2 users.
Thus many classic ‘normal’ issues are neither here nor there for multi-
competence research. The failure of L2 users to speak like natives, the
inability of L2 users who start learning at an older age to sound like
natives, the L2 user’s lack of elements of Universal Grammar possessed
by natives - none of these are meaningful from a multi-competence
perspective. The monolingual perspective in essence restricts the field of
SLA research to enumerating the similarities and dissimilarities between
L2 users and native speakers. If L2 users are independent persons in their
own right rather than the shadows of native speakers, the comparison
between L2 users and monolingual native speakers is about as revealing

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as, say, discussing how apples resemble pears, of little interest for those
concerned with the distinctive qualities of apples.

The second language user

The other term that seemed to go naturally with multi-competence was

‘L2 user’ meaning ‘people who know and use a second language at any
level’ (Cook 2012), rather than L2 learner or bilingual. It seemed better to
treat people as users of a language whatever their level rather than as
learners who would never be complete; ‘SLA researchers often portray
development as a transitional state that is (or should be) ever changing
towards the target’ (Ortega 2007, p.140). It would be insulting to call
Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba, Joseph Conrad the novelist or Aung Sung Lee the
politician L2 learners of English when they are capable of using their
second language to function in their respective ways at a level beyond the
dreams of most monolingual native speakers. Calling people L2 learners
confirms their subordinate status as learners for the rest of their days.

The term ‘L2 learners’can then be reserved for people who are
learning another language but are not using it, in other words those whose
sole purpose is learning the language, say Chinese children learning
English in Shanghai. Of course some L2 learners go on to become L2
users in later life and some L2 learners use the language for real-world
functions in the classroom when they step outside, like Chinese students
in Newcastle upon Tyne. In other words a particular individual may be an
L2 learner or an L2 user at different times in their life or indeed at
different times of day. Classroom L2 learners at best are deferred L2
users. In practice this virtually restricts £2 learner to students or pupils
since people acquiring another language outside education will almost
always be using the second language. And this necessarily raises the issue,
not to be developed here, of whether there are in effect two branches of
SLA research, one concerned with ‘natural’ acquisition and use, the other

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with teacher-induced learning in classrooms, and so results from one

branch do not necessarily apply to the other.

In some ways the distinction between user and learner overlaps with
the traditional, slightly confusing, distinction in language teaching
between secondlanguage learners using a language for everyday living in a
country where it is the main community language, and foreign language
learners who are not learning a language for immediate use in a country
where it is spoken (Klein 1986). One problem with this distinction is the
conflation of function and location (Cook 2010): students at English-
medium universities in Saudi Arabia or the Netherlands may be using
English as a second language; overseas students at UK language schools
may be learning English only to have a qualification to show back home;
waiters use Spanish as a lingua franca in London (Block 2006), giving it a
second language function in an English-speaking country.

There were also reasons for minimising the use of the term ‘bilingual’.
Most people tend to assume that bilingual conveys Bloomfield’s maximal
meaning of ‘native-like control of two languages’ (Bloomfield 1933),
rather than Haugen’s minimal meaning of ‘the point where a speaker can
first produce complete meaningful utterances in the other language’
(Haugen 1953). Multi-competence did not assume that L2 users were at a
high level in the second language, particularly when, like Bloomfield, this
is defined in terms of likeness to native speakers. Multi-competence
concerns the mind of any user of a second language at any level of
achievement. There may well be a maximal level for the L2 user,
sometime called ‘the successful L2 user’. But until a norm is set for L2
use that does not refer to the native speaker, we don’t know what this
might be. And it might indeed vary considerably between the different
users and uses of the second language. Additionally bilingual conveys the
notion that two languages are involved when there may be an indefinite
number. The term ‘multilingual’ is perhaps closest in connotation to L2

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user, not excluding more than two languages and not hinting that
language proficiency has to be high.

Moving from the monolingual perspective that a human being knows

one language to the multi-competence perspective that all human beings
potentially, and some actually, know more than one language changes the
view of the whole landscape. Thus SLA theories as diverse as generative
grammar and usage-based acquisition can be conceived from both
monolingual and bilingual perspectives, as we see in the rest of this book.
On the one hand, say, ideas of innateness are seen from the angle that it is
normal to know more than one language (Cook 2008a), on the other usage
needs to start from the total language input not just that in one language,
in both languages hinting that knowing and using only one language is a
form of deprivation, not so much linguistic deprivation which fails to
provide a child with crucial aspects of one language but language
deprivation which deprives them of a whole second language. Multi-
competence is not confined to psychological theories of the mind but
applies also to the networks of connectionist models, to generative
theories of language knowledge and to sociological models of social
interaction and practice: it is the perspective from which the languages in
the mind are viewed that matters regardless of the theory involved.

Multi-competence alters the way in which people view the acquisition

and use of multiple languages, rather like the shift from seeing Short Term
Memory as boxes to seeing it as depth of processing (Craik and Lockhart
1972), which essentially restated how the very same facts about human
memory were viewed. In part it leads to research with specifically multi-
competence aims, in part to reinterpreting existing research that can be
compatible with multi-competence, in part to a critique of SLA research
that is uninterpretable from a multi-competence perspective.

A logical problem arising out of this addressed in Cook (2010) is the

meaning of second language and L2 (and indeed of language, to be

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discussed below). Second language and L2 are not equivalent in meaning

despite most researchers’ habit of reading L2 aloud as second language.
The word second is ordinal counting for sequence - King Edward IT came
after King Edward I - or for quality - a second-class degree 1s less valued
than a first-class degree. The number 2 on the other hand is cardinal
counting of quantity - two drinks, two Houses of Parliament. The meaning
of L2/second in SLA research could be any of these; Hammerberg (2010,
p.93) describes ‘the linear model’ of counting languages involving ordinal
counting in which a second language comes chronologically after a first
and a third language after that -‘Joseph Conrad’s first language was
Polish, second language French, third language English’.

Undoubtedly some of the overtones of the ‘quality’ ordinal meaning

carry across to SLA research; second 1s by and large not a good thing to
be - second-hand, second-rate, second home.

Although the now discredited notions such as native speaker or mother

tongue speaker require us to identify ourselves according to our
parental language or language of infancy, even the alternatives such as
L1 and L2 force us to identify a single language as receiving primacy
in terms of our time of acquisition or level of competence.
(Canagarajah 2007, p.16)

The letters of the alphabet are used in a similar ordinal fashion for
defining priority in putting airplane passengers into boarding Groups A, B
or C or marking essays as A, B ... F, and so on.

In cardinal counting the meaning is more neutral: how many languages

you know -‘Joseph Conrad spoke three languages, Polish, French and
English’ - rather than the order or priority between them, in linguistic
terms a synchronic state rather than a diachronic process. Similarly,
thinking ‘cardinally’, the alphabet has 26 equal letters, that happen to
occur in an arbitrary order. Hammerberg’s (2010) alternative terminology

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of primary, secondary and tertiary languages still carries the ordinal

overtones of primary being superior and essential. Dewaele (Chapter 19,
this volume) uses the more neutral term LX to refer to any language
beyond the first.
The academic discussion of first and second languages is also muddied
by the different ways in which countries define their first languages. In
Singapore schools for instance the first language is English; Chinese,
Bahasa Malaysia and Tamil, the mother tongues of most inhabitants, are
regarded as second languages. Another problem is where counting stops -
L3, L4, Ln. Most SLA books claim second subsumes later languages,
whether ‘second (third, etc) languages and dialects’ (Doughty and Long
2003, p.3) or ‘the third or fourth language’ (Lightbown and Spada 2006,
p.204). This simplification assumes that multi-competence with three or
more languages is just a more complex version of that with two languages
rather than something qualitatively different, strongly denied by those
interested in trilingualism and multilingualism who stress ‘the unique
properties that differentiate L2 from L3/Ln’ (Cabrelli Amaro, Flynn and
Rothman 2012, p.3).

THREE PREMISES OF MULTI-COMPETENCE

A way of drawing out the implications of the multi-competence position

for second language acquisition is to derive three premises from the
developing stream of multi-competence-related work. They can be seen as
threads running through the following chapters, which the contributors are
free to accept or reject.

The historical development of the concept of multi-competence has

perhaps been more a matter of teasing out and clarifying the implications
of the original proposal rather than of changing direction. The rest of this
chapter deals with three premises that seem to underly multi-competence.
It was only at the turn of this century that people began to use multi-

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competence to explore the research questions to be discussed in the next

chapter, as it fitted in with the Zeitgeist about the role of the native
speaker and with developing ideas about multilingualism.

Premise 1. multi-competence concerns the total system for all languages

(L1, L2, LN) in a single mind or community and their inter-
relationships.

Despite the many books on bilingualism whose covers feature two heads
(Romaine 1994; Skutnabb-Kangas 1981; Pavlenko 2005, among others),
bilinguals do only have one. (The web page Jmages of SLA illustrates this
from the covers of bilingualism books, the main alternatives to two heads
being diagrams of chaos and pictures of homuncull, 1.e. one head inside
another). At the highest level of all, the languages must be an inter-
connected whole within a single mind, an eco-system of mutual
interdependence. At the same general level, a multi-lingual community is
an interconnected network of different languages; in London in 2011 6.5
per cent of the population spoke Polish, Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali and
Gujarati (Office for National Statistics 2013), not to mention the other 300
odd languages in the community (Baker and Eversley 2000); in
Vancouver in 2011 57.7 per cent of the population spoke an immigrant
language at home (Statistics Canada 2012). The question is not how
linguistic enclaves function in isolation from each other but how the
whole city functions through multiple languages. To take an example of
street signs, it is not which language is used in which signs that matters so
much as how the street signs make up a total multi-competent system
(Cook 2013).

The description of L2 users and communities has thus in principle to

account for all the languages they use, both their first language and any
others, as part of one complex system. Isolating L2 syntax from L1 syntax
in the L2 user’s mind 1s a simplification for convenience of research. The
reality is the overall system that unites the first language and the other

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language or languages of multi-competence. SLA research that ignores

the first language elementis blind to the one inescapable feature of the L2
user’s mind that distinguishes it from that of a monolingual -the first
language system: it is yin without yang. As Stern (1992, p.282) puts it,
‘whether we like it or not, the new language is learnt on the basis of a
previous language’. Unless the presence of the first language is
acknowledged, second language acquisition research inevitably becomes a
footnote to first language acquisition.
It is an empirical question how and at what level the languages of
multi-competence separate in the mind or indeed whether it is meaningful
to attempt to separate them at all, as de Bot suggests in Chapter Six. Cook
(2009a) argues for an overall unified grammar in the mind as the basis of
Universal Grammar theory. The reverse question is whether languages can
be kept separate in the mind: can one be turned off while the other is
being used? Lambert (1990, pp.203-204) posed the question in terms of
gating:

How 1s it that the bilingual is able to 'gate out' or set aside a whole
integrated linguistic system while functioning with a second one and a
moment later, if the situation calls for it, switch the process, activating
the previous inactive system and setting aside the previous active one?

An alternative is that, rather than one language being activated, the other
language is turned off, as in the Inhibitory Control Model (Green 1998),
leading to the emphasis on executive control in contemporary
bilingualism research (Bialystok 2009) .

Turning to some evidence, if L2 users are shown pictures of objects

named in one language, their eyes are attracted by objects that have
similar names in the other language: they never switch off either language
entirely (Spivey and Marian 1999; 2003). Both phonological systems are
activated when producing cognates (Hermans et al 2011; Friesen and

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Jared 2011). Monolingual native speakers do not have this complex

interwoven system, except in as much as it parallels the use of two
dialects by the same person or the developmental transition from one
grammar to another -universal bilingualism in the terms of Roeper (1999)
or Mehrsprachigkeit in those of Wandruszka (1971).

We will not review here other evidence for the inter-relationships

between languages in multi-competence, which will come out in many
guises in the following chapters. The integration continuum model used in
Cook (2003) was drawn as an aid for visualising the diversity and
complexity of the relationships between the languages, going along a
continuum from total separation through different levels of
interconnection to total integration.

separation Interconnection integration

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The integration continuum of possible relationships in multi-competence

At the separation pole of the continuum, the languages are completely

independent of each other, like Weinreich’s coordinate bilinguals
(Weinreich 1953); at the integration pole, they are totally integrated with
each other; in between come many possible degrees of interconnection.
The two poles are ideals that could never actually exist; all L2 users are
somewhere on the continuum in between. And of course different aspects
of language may be located at different points of the continuum; the
lexicon may be well integrated, as we have seen, syntax perhaps less so.

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The continuum is not static but dynamic, moving constantly as the

influence of particular languages waxes and wanes, variously through
attrition and transfer between some or all of the languages in multi-
competence, and through activation of language mode in speech. But the
direction of movement may be in either direction; an L2 user’s multi-
competence may separate the languages more over time or integrate them
more.

This implies then that individuals vary greatly in the relationships

between the languages of their multi-competence, depending on many
factors. To progress, SLA research needs to get away from generalisations
that apply to all L2 users. Rather than a single common system for L2
users, there may be many possible systems, unlike the relatively
uniformity of monolinguals. Putting learner groups to one side, Cook
(2009b) defined five groups of L2 users:
- ‘people using an L2 globally for a wide range of functions’,
- ‘people using an L2 internationally for specific functions’,
- ‘people using an L2 within a larger community’,
- ‘people historically from a particular community (re-) acquiring its
language as an L2’
- ‘people using an L2 with spouses, siblings or friends’.

Such a scheme begins to cover the varieties of L2 users and uses. In

particular it distinguishes between research with L2 learners and with L2
users; L2 learners in classrooms are subject to a different set of influences
and language input than L2 users, inevitably reflecting decisions made by
language teachers and educational systems about teaching goals, methods
and techniques; they are more the product of their circumstances than
specimens of ‘pure’ language learning.

Multi-competence has affinities with other views within SLA research

that treat the languages of the L2 user within a single over-arching system.
For example Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) captures the flexibility and
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interconnectedness of language systems that are never static over both

short and long periods of time; any description is a single frame taken
from a continuous movie, as described by De Bot in Chapter Six (this
volume).

Recently the idea of Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) has

been proposed by Aronin (2006, p.145) (see Chapter Seven): ‘the group of
the most important languages for a particular individual, enabling as a
whole unit, the person to act in a multilingual environment and to meet all
his/her needs’. This conceptualises the relationship between the languages
of multi-competence in the individual and in the community as a
constellation of inner circle languages, orbited by the languages of the
linguistics repertoire, surrounded by an oort cloud of languages the person
is merely aware of to some degree. In practical terms the number of
languages in a DLC seem to be about three, with the others coming into
play in particular circumstances. DLC is one useful way of looking at
multilingualism from a multi-competence perspective.

The concept of transfer, alias cross-linguistic influence, also takes on a

different meaning in multi-competence (Cook to appear): the L1 part of
the system may influence the L2 part; the L2 may influence the L1; the L3
may influence the L2; and so on for all the relationships detailed in Jarvis
and Pavlenko (2009). Attrition of the first language too comes to have a
different meaning (Schmid 2011); rather than the metaphor of the first
language being lost or ground down, multi-competence balances itself in a
kind of eco-system: one language’s gain is another language’s loss. Multi-
competence is not a frozen state but a continuous interaction between the
different languages in the community and the individual.

The consequences of Premise 1 extend beyond the areas of

bilingualism and SLA research to all of linguistics. For example,
historically the norms for native speakers have often been established
from L2 users, whether Voice Onset Time for Japanese based on Japanese
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in the USA, as pointed out by Kato (2004), Hopi grammar established

from a native speaker living in New York (Whorf 1940/1956), or Greek
path preference based on Greeks living in the USA (Paprafragou et al
2008). The language informants called on by linguists or the participants
in experiments may respond differently from monolingual native speakers
because of the influence of their other languages. People who know more
than one language are suspect informants on their first language: “the
judgments about English of Bloomfield, Halliday or Chomsky are not
trustworthy, except where they are supported by evidence from “pure”
monolinguals’ (Cook 2002a, p.23), by virtue of the influence of the
second language that each of these linguists knows. For these reasons,
multi-competence research has often dealt with speakers with minimal or
maximal knowledge and use of another language, not with polarised
monolingual and balanced bilingual speakers, as we see in Chapter Two.
In multilingualism research, the argument has been taken further; much
SLA research is using participants who know more than two languages
and hence fails to distinguish the nature of L2 learning from L3/Ln
learning; ‘the control for this variable is often poor, inadequate, if not
lacking altogether’ (De Angelis 2007, p.6). At the very least this suggests
that all participants and informants in language-related research need to be
described in terms of their full language backgrounds, in linguistics as
much as in second language acquisition research.

Premise 2. multi-competence does not depend on the monolingual

native speaker

A native speaker is typically considered to be ‘a person who has spoken a

certain language since early childhood’ (McArthur 1992, p.682). The
crucial elements in this definition are: the speaker acquired language as an
infant, and has spoken it continuously throughout life. Clearly this state
cannot be achieved by any L2 user, with the exception of early childhood
bilinguals. An element that seldom emerges overtly in the definition is
that a native speaker is assumed to speak only one language: ‘From
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Saussure to Chomsky "homo monolinguis" is posited as the man who uses

language’ (Illich and Sanders 1988, p.52). The native speaker in question
is also tacitly assumed to speak a status version of the language, in terms
of British English, a Received Pronunciation accent actually found in a
small minority of native speakers, using ‘standard’ grammar, not the
you/yous distinction found in Geordie or the multiple negation J never did
nothing to no-one nowhere found in many regional and historical varieties
of English other than the present-day ‘standard’. Indeed some Japanese
students of English apparently think of the native speaker as male, white
and, hopefully, handsome (Takamishi 2013).
The concept of native speaker is then highly simplified, excluding all
but the monolingual speakers of a standard form of the language. The
native speaker is seen as knowing the abstract institutional form of the
language meant when people say ‘I love the French language’ (Cook
2010). This reflects the prestige form of the language that grammar-books
and dictionaries of the language are based on, usually associated with the
pretensions of a nation-state, English as the language of England, Chinese
as the language of China. Hence the term ‘native speaker’ invokes aspects
of national or group identity; it is a small step further to assume that a
native speaker of French has to be born in France, not Burkina Faso,
another step to assume that they come from Paris, not Marseilles.

Undoubtedly most commonsense thinking about second language

acquisition by both the general public and linguists takes this idealised
monolingual native speaker to be the goal of second language acquisition:
‘Relative to native speaker's linguistic competence, learners’
interlanguage is deficient by definition’ (Kasper and Kellerman 1997, p.5)
or the book title Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism (Montrul 2008).
Many bilinguals, teachers, psychologists and SLA researchers believe that
the more your speech resembles the native speaker’s the greater the
achievement: they too adopt the monolingual view of bilingualism
(Grosjean 2008). Conversely you have failed if other people can detect

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your foreign accent, spelling mistakes etc. The native speaker is the
touchstone against which all other speakers are tested - ‘an idealised
monolingual native speaker, who is held to be the ultimate yardstick of
linguistic success’ (Ortega 2007, p.140). Yet it is logically impossible for
any L2 learner to achieve native speaker status according to the definition
given above; you can’t change your early childhood experiences.
Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson (2003) for instance suggest ‘absolute
native-like command of an L2 may in fact never be possible for any
learner’ - how could it be? Why should it be? Ducklings grow into ducks;
cygnets into swans: there is little point in lamenting the deficiencies of the
duck compared to the swan. As the APA Guidelines (2010) say:

Bias may occur when the writer uses one group (usually the writer's
own group) as the standard against which others are evaluated. ...
Authors should recognise that differences arising from racial/ethnic
comparisons do not imply deficits.

But this is exactly the bias that occurs when research from the
monolingual perspective takes the native speaker group as the norm rather
than the L2 user. As Mauranen (2012, p.4) points out, ‘monolingualism is
neither the typical condition nor the gold standard’.

Looking at multi-competence as ‘the overall system of a mind or a

community that uses more than one language’ implies that it exists in its
own right, not as an ancillary to the systems in monolingual minds or
communities. L2 users are unique users of multiple languages, not pale
imitations of native speakers. The presence of the first language in second
language acquisition makes the whole language system different from that
of a monolingual, affecting both the second language, the first and any
others in the system. Birdsong (2005, p.320) claims ‘Neither of the two
languages of a bilingual can be expected to resemble that of a native
monolingual. Accordingly, non-nativelike performance is not necessarily
indicative of compromised language learning abilities’.
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Premise 2 is then a declaration of independence for the L2 user from

the monolingual native speaker and the mono-language community. To
quote Francois Grosjean, the bilingual is ‘a specific and fully competent
speaker/hearer who has developed a communicative competence that 1s
equal, but different in nature, to that of the monolingual’ (Grosjean 1994,
p.1657). There may indeed be languages that do not have living native
speakers as in the revival of Hebrew in Israel in the twentieth century, or
Miami-Illinois, taught as an ancestral language to childrenby parents who
do not speak it natively (Hirata-Edds and Peter, Chapter 14 this volume).
There is inevitably a danger of emphasising the advantages of
bilingualism, the disadvantages of monolingualism and the like. However,
whichever direction the comparison faces, it is ultimately a question of
difference not superiority or deficit, of independence for both monolingual
and bilingual.

The history of modern SLA research starts with the independent

grammars assumption that L1 children have their own language systems
at different ages, independent of adult grammars (e.g. Klima and Bellugi
1966). The version of this assumption that dominated SLA research for
many years was ‘interlanguage’ - ‘the utterances which are produced
when the learner attempts to say sentences of a TL [target language]
(Selinker 1972). This quotation shows that interlanguage had not cut the
umbilical cord between SLA research and native speakers; learners’
sentences were still seen as approximations to those of native speakers
through the construct of target language. Spolsky summarised this as
‘Native Speaker Target condition ...: Second language learner language
approximates native speaker language’ (Spolsky 1989, p.34). Perhaps the
bulk of classical SLA research ever since has described and explained
approximation to the monolingual native speaker.

A few researchers have nevertheless insisted all along on the L2 user’s

independence, as in the Comparative Fallacy of comparing L2 users with
native speakers (Bley-Vroman 1983). Yet many still imply covertly that
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the goal of learning a second language is to speak like a native. For

example a highly thought-of paper by Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam
(2009) is entitled ‘Age of onset and nativelikeness in a second language’:
the important question about age of acquisition is taken to be whether it
helps learners become like native speakers, not like successful L2 users;
the measure of success is ‘perceived nativelikeness’ of L2 Swedish
speakers’ accents in terms of Stockholm speech. It seems hard to counter
the assumption implicit in so much SLA research that linguistic difference
is linguistic deficit, even if this has been denied by Labov (1969) for
American Black English, Boas (1920/1940) and Sapir (1921) for non-
European languages and Bernstein (1971) for working class dialects. The
monolingual perspective in much research is not acknowledged, let alone
justified.

Apart from clinical linguistics, no area of language study starts from

the assumption that its speakers are deficient in terms of some other
group, the ‘monolingual bias’ described in Cook (1997); it is the fallacy
that Plato drew attention to of dividing the people in the world in two, one
group consisting of Greeks, the other of non-Greeks (Plato ca 187BC,
262c). When L2 users differ in pronunciation or syntax from monolingual
native speakers, this does not mean they are wrong - as L2 users in their
own right. A foreign accent does not necessarily show lack of proficiency,
only difference from the ideal native speaker, and may often be a sign of
national, ethnic or dialect identity. If it is acceptable for your English to
show you come from Glasgow, Texas or Sydney, why is the same not true
if you come from Tokyo, Berlin or Santiago?

The advocacy of premise 2 coincided with a movement in applied

linguistics to question the power of the native speaker. Phillipson (1992)
argued that the role of the native speaker in language teaching was a form
of linguistic imperialism. Ex-colonial countries assert their power by
claiming to own their national language. When a language becomes

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supercentral or hypercentral (De Swaan 2002), it is a great asset to a

country in political and economic terms. For example the view that native
speakers based in England should write the textbooks for teaching English
around the world was a godsend for many British publishers. People in
different countries nevertheless have the right to use a language as they
see fit; they are not tied down by the wishes of other countries. Some may
indeed choose a native model to aspire to, others may decide a local
variety, a form of English Language Franca and or an L2 user variety are
more appropriate. The same argument has been used by British jazz critic
Stuart Nicholson (2005) to argue for the independence of European jazz
from American jazz as a form of music in its own right, not be judged by
its Americanness.

Inevitably this line of thinking leads to questioning the appropriateness

of the native speaker model for language teaching (Llurda 2005). It seems
a universal, almost instinctive, assumption that native speakers make
better language teachers because of the authenticity of their language and
their immersion in the native culture: generations of expat English
teachers have made their living out of this. But, if native speaker language
and culture is no longer the target, there is no absolute virtue in being a
native speaker, whether linguistically or culturally. Non-native speaker
teachers may make better role models for the students because they have
travelled the same route as them and are living exemplars of successful L2
users able to handle two languages at the same time. Indeed Brown (2013)
suggests that ‘L2 performance be assessed by multi-competent speakers of
the L2’: the appropriate people to judge L2 users must themselves be L2
users.

This is not to say that the change in attitudes towards non-native

speaker teachers has improved their job prospects. In 2015 the University
of Essex website proclaimed ‘AII languages are taught by native or bi-
lingual teachers’, the University of East Anglia ‘The majority of our

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undergraduate students are taught by native French, Spanish or Japanese

speaking lecturers and tutors’, the Modern Language Centre in Kings
College London ‘AII teaching staff are native speakers of the language
they teach’: native speaker teachers are alive and well and teaching at
English universities.

If the monolingual native speaker is no longer the only true owner of a

language, SLA research needs to investigate L2 learning and L2 use as
distinctive properties of L2 users. Research questions need to be couched
in terms that refer to L2 users as independent people rather than
subordinating them, implicitly or explicitly, to native speakers; SLA
research is not a matter of investigating the shortfall of L2 users compared
to natives but of seeing them as themselves. While lip-service is now
often paid to the multi-competence perspective in SLA research questions,
the native speaker is still a ghost in the machine in terms of research
methodology, whether grammaticality judgements, error analysis, speech
processing or obligatory occurrences, all of which typically involve
‘monolingual bias’ through implicit comparison with natives (Cook
1997), a point developed by Vaid and Meuter in this volume (Chapter
Four). This is not to say that SLA research cannot borrow techniques
derived from other areas, such as fMRI, L1 developmental scales, and so
on, provided they are used for its own purposes, not as a way of putting
down the L2 user. Comparison of one group of language users to another
can sometimes be an effective research tool - among many others; we can
learn from the variety of language users what is special about each. But
the uniqueness of L2 users will be forever hidden if they are always
described in terms of native speakers, rather like trying to fit a quart into a
pint bottle.

From a multi-competence perspective, classical SLA research has

established very little about L2 users themselves, only vast quantities of
information about their differences and similarities compared to native

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speakers. Some classical research can be reinterpreted by stripping away

the native speaker element and discovering what it may show about L2
users in their own right. However, as we see in the next chapter, multi-
competence has posed its own research questions and utilises research
methods that do not invoke the native speaker.

This premise has perhaps the most implications for language teaching.
We have already seen that the role of the native speaker teacher needs
reassessing. But so do the very goals of language teaching and those of
many language students (Cook 2007). If the purpose of language teaching
is not to speak like a native speaker, then just what is it? For practical
purposes much second language use may be with non-native speakers, for
example the use of English in the tourist industry regardless of the
traveller’s first language or the use of English by air traffic controllers
everywhere in the world. And indeed, if both the first and second
languages are so inextricably woven into everything that an L2 user does,
we need to rethink the widespread view in language teaching that the
students’ first language has no role in classroom learning.

Premise 3. multi-competence affects the whole mind, 1.e. all language

and cognitive systems, rather than language alone.

As the concept of multi-competence developed, it became apparent that it

concerned the whole mind of the L2 user, not just language and so was
linked to wider cognitive processes and concepts. One theoretical slant in
contemporary acquisition studies is called by Chomsky (2013) the ‘no-
language’ position, typified by ‘language is entirely grounded in a
constellation of cognitive capacities that each - taken separately - has
other functions as well’ (Enfield 2010). In other words, language is a mere
artefact of other cognitive processes. The alternative position is that
language is a unique part of the human mind with its own characteristics
that cannot be explained solely in terms of other “cognitive capacities’.
Essentially this is another skirmish in the territorial battle between
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linguists and psychologists that has been waged for many a generation.
The multi-competence perspective can presumably be adopted equally by
those who see language as an independent cognitive system, mostly
linguists, and those who see it as an interaction of other cognitive systems,
mostly psychologists. The import of this premise depends more on one’s
overall theoretical orientation than do the other two premises, which in a
sense apply to any research with second languages.

Premise 3 extends multi-competence to cover any aspect of the L2

user’s mind that may be connected to their multilingualism. In one view,
the linguistic and conceptual systems are partitioned from each other and
do not contribute to each other's development or use. Cognition consists
of a set of unvarying universal concepts ‘essentially available prior to
experience’ (Chomsky 1991, p.29) and ‘assumed to be both fundamental
and universal in the semantic organisation of language’ (Talmy 2007,
p.81). While languages vary in principled ways, concepts are constant,
thus rejecting the linguistic relativity hypothesis that language affects
concepts -how could it if concepts are invariable?

The recent wave of research has, however, shown that some version of
linguistic relativity is tenable and empirically supported, even if still hotly
disputed. In the 2000s multi-competence research started to ask, if
speakers of different languages think differently, how do L2 users who
know more than one language think (Cook 2002b; Cook and Bassetti
2011)? Going beyond the crosslinguistic comparison of most linguistic
relativity research, the purpose was to see whether speakers of two
languages think differently from monolingual native speakers and how an
individual L2 user deals with such conceptual differences. Linguistic
relativity could be tested, not just by comparing the thinking of
monolinguals across languages, but by comparing L2 users with
monolinguals. If there are indeed cognitive differences between

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monolingual native speakers and L2 users, the obvious conclusion is that

this is an effect of the other language or languages they have acquired.

The cognitive effects of L2 learning might be general for anylearning

of other languages regardless of language, such as the benefits of greater
metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok 1991) or reasoning (Han and
Ginsburg 2001). Peal and Lambert (1962, p.20) summed up some fifty
years ago: ‘Intellectually [the bilingual child’s] experience with two
language systems seems to have left him with a mental flexibility, a
superiority in concept formation, a more diversified set of mental
abilities’. Language teaching has indeed often maintained that learning
another language helps children to think better, particularly classical
languages. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London in the 2010s, claims
‘Latin and Greek are great intellectual disciplines, forcing young minds to
think in a logical and analytical way’, a claim that probably has more to
do with the teaching methods employed than the languages concerned.

Or these effects might appear only for relationships between specific

first and second languages rather than second language learning in general
(Bassetti and Cook 2011). If you speak Japanese, which calls both the leg
and the foot ashi, what happens when you learn English, in which there
are different words Jeg and foot?

In the view reflected in say Levelt et al (1999) and Slobin (1991),

lexical concepts underlie speech production: speech to Levelt involves
connecting lexicalised concepts to the mental lexicon, to Slobin selecting
concepts that can be expressed in a particular language, ‘thinking for
language’. The concepts they are interested in are those that are intimately
tied to language production, not those which lie behind it. Concepts lie on
a continuum between lexicalised concepts, which are necessarily
embedded in language and non-lexicalised concepts, which are minimally
linked to language itself.

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As the following chapters show, many L2 researchers have used multi-

competence in the context of the thinking for language approach
(Pavlenko 2011; Han and Cadierno 2010). It is not clear that this is
actually linguistic relativity. In one sense it is tautologous to say that
lexicalised concepts affect the language we use. To explore the effects of
language on non-language-related concepts not involved in the selection
of concepts to be expressed, we need on the one hand to minimise the
amount of language involved in the task, on the other to examine aspects
of language such as word order that have purely syntactic meaning rather
than such language-related semantic notions as gender and motion. The
test of linguistic relativity is whether L2 users differ in concepts that are
not explicitly used in speaking (Cook 2015), an issue developed by De
Groot (Chapter 11).

Finally the conundrum that still has to be solved is the meaning of the
word /anguage, as we see in several chapters that follow, taken up by
Singleton (Chapter 24). In most SLA research language is taken as a
primitive term, so obvious in meaning that it needs no discussion.
However its meaning changes from one theory to another and one context
to another and indeed does not necessarily translate into other languages
(Wierzbicka 2014). For example the difference between English two-way
language and speech and French three-way langue, langage and parole
(de Saussure 1916/1976) has often puzzled English-speaking linguists.
The division between the ‘no language’ position and generative linguistics
arguably reduces to a dispute over the meaning of /anguage and is
unresolvable without agreement on a mutually acceptable meaning of
language.

In Cook (2010) I argued that this issue lies at the heart of the disputes
that have riven SLA research. Jackendoff (2002) distinguishes:

e language as a countable whole (‘The French language’)

e language as a set of abstract formal expressions (S—aSb) and

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¢ language that instantiates the rules of (11) into meaningful

representations.

Cook (2010) tried to sketch six meanings of language that are encountered
in language research, namely:
- Lang, human representation system: 1.e. ‘humans possess language’
- Lang) an abstract external entity: ‘The French language’
- Lang; a set of actual or potential sentences: ‘the language of
Moliere’
- Lang, the possession of a community: ‘the language of French
people’
- Langs the knowledge in the mind of an individual: “I know French’

- Lang¢ a form of action: ‘I sentence you to twenty years

imprisonment’

We always need to be aware how the many concepts of ‘language’ are

used in second language and multilingualism research. Tomasello (2003,
p.7) for example claims that ‘the principles and structures whose existence
is difficult to explain without universal grammar ... are theory-internal
affairs and simply do not exist in usage-based theories of language - full
stop’. Statements about Lang3 are indeed not statements about Langs But
the reverse also applies; statements about mental Langs make no claims
about corpus-based Lang3, an issue discussed at least since Chomsky
(1957). Neither do statements about mental Langs always connect to the
institutional Lang»; individuals do not necessarily use the rules etc of the
formally described language in their everyday speech and writing. Indeed
any individual person only commands a fraction of the lexical and
grammatical resources of the standard Lang, in their mental Langs.

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The Lang» sense of an abstract entity - objective knowledge in

Popper’s world 3 of abstract ideas (Popper 1972, p.159) - is central to any
discussion of second language learning since we need a label for the
overall object, whether the French language, Chinese or whatever.
Dictionaries and grammar books are usually descriptions of Lang); since
the eighteenth century, national identity has been seen as a matter of
Lang» (Anderson 1983), leading to the rise of the assumption that
monolingualism is the norm (Yildiz 2012). But this does not necessarily
have implications for the organisation of language in the mind of the
individual, called Langs; the mental representation of language 1s a
complex system with all sorts of internal and external relationships; it may
be quite arbitrary to divide a bilingual system into separate areas, modules
and subsystems, that can be called languages in the plural; multi-
competence is a complex overall system that may be indivisible into
languages. Language in sense Lang) is countable, in sense Langs
uncountable. So, while we can say someone speaks two languages,
English and French, in sense Lang», this does not mean that they
necessarily have two discrete languages in their mind in sense Langs. It is
easy to slip into reifying objects called languages in the mind which relate
together like the coloured balls in Bohr models of the atom. Langs is,
however, more like an amorphous indeterminate entity from quantum
theory than a clearly defined object.

So it is a moot point whether one can count Langs languages in the

mind: can the multi-competent system be divided into separate sub-
systems labelled languages without destroying or denying the whole
system, as discussed in De Bot (this volume)? And the same for the
community; the Polish of the London Polish community is not the Polish
of Warsaw, the Cantonese of the Newcastle community 1s not that of
Hong Kong, and so on: the languages in the multilingual community are

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so tied in to each other that it becomes arbitrary to separate them. What is

needed is more like a DST of constantly changing relationships in which
some grouping of elements may be arbitrarily and temporarily called a
language in sense Langs without accepting that it 1s a discrete ‘language’
object. Just like the phoneme, so Langs /anguage can be seen as a
convenient shorthand for a complex of features.

Conclusion

The idea of multi-competence then raises a number of issues for all the
disciplines dealing with the acquisition and use of language. These
concern fundamental assumptions about language, about community and
identity and about research methodology. They have yielded a generation
of research on different lines, to be described in the next chapter. We
should never forget that the L2 user is not an outsider lurking on the
outskirts of society but is in the main throng of humanity today. It is for
instance notoriously hard to find participants for language research
anywhere in the world who are ‘pure’ monolinguals untouched by other
languages, particularly English. Human beings have a potential, not for
acquiring one language as in Chomskyan discourse, but for acquiring
more than one language. Monolingualism is a problem in that it is a
restriction on human potential and a partial account of what makes a
human being: ‘Speaking another language is quite simply the minimal and
primary condition for being alive’ (Kristeva 2007).

In terms of numbers, it is no more possible to count how many L2

users there are in the world than to count how many monolinguals there
are. Claims that the majority of the human race are now L2 users (Clyne
1997) are impossible to substantiate, however plausible. The sheer
numbers of speakers of languages that are not the central languages of
their countries go some way to show how many L2 users there must be.
To take some arbitrary figures related to English:

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¢ 42.6 per cent of people in California speak another language than

English in the home (US Census Bureau 2010);

¢ 90 per cent of children in Europe learn English as a second language

(EACE 2008);

¢ 546,000 Polish speakers are living in the UK (Office for National

Statistics 2012), 119,528 in Ireland (An Phriomh-Oifig Staidrimh
2012);

¢ out of the 3.3 million UK residents with a main language other than
English 79 per cent could speak English very well or well (Office for
National Statistics 2012).

Research into second language acquisition, bilingualism and

multilingualism is not a fringe discipline but concerns central aspects of
human life for individuals and for communities in the 21st century. Indeed
the argument for the normalcy of L2 users means that linguistics has to
decide whether basing itself on the question ‘What constitutes knowledge
of language?’ (Chomsky 1991) is a significant distortion of the real
question ‘What constitutes knowledge of languages?’

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