Abstract
We do not often include an editorial in this journal. This one, however, is to mark my departure as editor at the beginning of 2015. I had been editor since Second Language Research (SLR) was founded so you may expect a retrospective look at the years that have elapsed since that very first issue in 1985 and, of course, taking a very personal viewpoint of how the journal and our research field has evolved (for a broader, more objective account, see Thomas, 2013). Still, since the present and future seem more immediately relevant, I will begin with where I think we are now.
The theoretical and experimental field served by this journal that we call second language acquisition (SLA) is still quite a small one considering the enormous subject pool of people in the process of acquiring and using second languages across the world (L2s, L3s, L4s, etc). Nevertheless, there has definitely been expansion. In the 1980s it would have been a major triumph to scrape together a hundred people for an SLA conference, that is, without also including participants whose main interest was in practical applications. That said, there are still a relatively few major conferences, journals and associations that focus on SLA proper. Furthermore, there is only one truly international SLA association, by which I mean only one with a proper constitution and elected committee, involving a range of activities each year and crossing national boundaries. I am referring to the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA), the scope of which officially, as the name implies, still only covers countries within a single continent. You might say that, in the absence of a worldwide association of second language acquisition, EUROSLA might be regarded as the next best thing: its members certainly range well beyond the confines of Europe. Since – if not in ideas then certainly in terms of empirical investigation – much of the early impetus came from North America, you might also have expected a continent-wide SLA association in that continent as well; yet there is none. Researchers in Canada and the USA have been content to stay low key, with conference series like the long-running Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) and special interest meetings such as the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA) meetings and the International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism series. There have, admittedly, been other attempts to form broad-based international associations outside Europe. The Pacific Second Language Research Forum (PACSLRF) meetings began in 1992 with a conference in Sydney, Australia. It was organized by Manfred Pienemann, but efforts to develop it into a fully fledged association for the Asia-Pacific region apparently foundered although it still maintains a steering committee for the selection of sites for its meetings (http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/pacslrf/history.html). The region would have to wait until 2001, when the Japan Second Language Acquisition Association (J-SLA) was founded with a journal and regular meetings (http://www.j-sla.org/en). SLA as a subject area also features in other types of conference, for example, first language acquisition annual meetings, notably the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BULCD) series, and in international bilingualism conferences such as the biennial International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB) meetings. It also figures in workshops and special sections of the larger applied linguistics conferences.
In the 1980s the idea of engaging in research that sought to promote understanding of the phenomena in question, that is to say, irrespective of any possible application that such research might have was a new one. The field badly needed its own specialist journals and specialist conferences to promote research and to develop a sizeable research literature. As I recall, the only serious publication that appeared regularly then was the ring-bound Working Papers in Bilingualism, produced and distributed free of charge by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and, for SLA researchers to meet together, there was only SLRF, which started life alternating each year along the San Diego highway in Los Angeles, that is, between the campuses of the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA). This was a long way for people from Europe to travel if they wanted to keep abreast of developments, and it was undoubtedly one of the reasons that prompted Europeans in the 1980s and 1990s to organize their own meetings. Initially this took the form of small-scale international meetings like the Colchester SLA workshop (COLESLAW) organized by Vivian Cook (also the founder of EUROSLA), the Language Acquisition Research Symposia (LARS) in Utrecht, New Sounds (started in Amsterdam by Allan James and Jonathan Leather in 1990), and various meetings organized by groups in France, Germany and the Nordic countries. The two leading SLA journals began life as European-based publications from those days and were also associated with these small-scale meetings.
Although now with Sage, when SLR was first set up, it was with the London publisher, Edward Arnold (later merged with Hodder & Stoughton, which then became Hodder Headline). At that time, there was no non-applied journal devoted to second language acquisition research. Arguably not enough could be published in this field to warrant the complete exclusion of contributions with some sort of pedagogical focus. As editors, James Pankhurst and myself decided nevertheless to take a leap of faith and depart from the line followed by SLR’s precursor, the Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, to which I will return below. With SLR, we opted to publish only articles that focused on the investigation and explanation of second language acquisition phenomena without regard to any practical applications. Our sister journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA) played it safe by accepting pedagogical submissions but with the proviso that they were related to some theoretical issue in the field, and this is still the case. At any rate, it was a few years before we could establish if our 1985 decision not to accept even this type of submission for SLR was a rash one. As a consequence, we had more than a few nail-biting moments in the early years, hoping that sufficient copy would be available in the nick of time to meet the publisher’s printing deadlines. And this was for a journal that came out only twice a year. In the end the gamble paid off because SLA, as an independent area of research, became more widely established and the flow of suitable submissions increased correspondingly, causing us to go to three and then eventually to four issues a year.
The early history of both SLA journals – SLR and SSLA – is an interesting one. They both started up as journals produced by the editors’ university. In the case of SSLA, it was Albert Valdman who started up the journal at Indiana University. It began its life as a soft-backed A4 publication in 1978, publishing the proceedings of, respectively, the fourth and sixth sessions of the Neuchâtel Colloquia on Theoretical Issues in Applied Linguistics run by Pit Corder and Eddy Roulet, with an editor, Albert Valdman, an associate editor, Harry Gradman, and an editorial board. The stated aims of the journal might also have seemed ambitious at the time: they were to produce a specialized journal on second language acquisition whose central concern was not pedagogical but theoretical. It would not be too long before Cambridge University Press took over the production of this journal from the Indiana University Club, but in their case retaining the original name.
In the case of ISB (the Interlanguage Studies Bulletin-Utrecht, to give it its full name), the aims seem, in retrospect, much less ambitious than those of its sister publication since we welcomed submissions in both naturalistic and guided second language learning. To cite the first editorial, ‘It is fitting that the priority for research should be the investigation of how the learner learns so that more effective pedagogical methods and techniques may be devised’ (ISB editorial, 1976: 3). The name of the journal, founded in 1976, took its name from the topic and title of Selinker’s seminal article that had appeared only four years earlier (Selinker, 1972). Its intended readership was also more modest than that of the Indiana publication as it was initially intended to stimulate the rapid distribution of ideas for people working within the Netherlands, so the much wider interest it elicited came as quite a surprise. The idea for the journal was born at the fourth AILA (Association Internationale de la Linguistique Appliquée) conference in Stuttgart, in 1975, where the editors-to-be shared a hotel room with Trevor Tinkler, a colleague from a teacher training college in Utrecht. The baptism of the journal took place in that room, and the ensuing noise almost resulted in the occupants being expelled from the hotel. The celebrating guests had to continue the party at the conference venue but luckily were able to return to their hotel beds later that evening. Even when our heads had cleared we had no inkling of the way in which this very modest publication was to develop into something much more ambitious.
The very first issue of ISB contained four articles, only two of which might be regarded as early SLA publications. One was a contribution by Tomasz Krzeszowski on interlanguage and contrastive generative grammar, and the other one was by Eric Kellerman on elicitation, lateralization and error analysis (Krzeszowski, 1976; Kellerman, 1976). The journal was initially distributed free of charge to interested colleagues in the Netherlands and later a handful of addresses abroad, mainly in Canada and the USA. The bill for the printing of the first issue – soft-bound, A5 size and yellow – was presented at an English Department meeting of the University of Utrecht. The head of department’s response was immediate. His jaw dropped and he immediately objected that no permission had been granted for this enterprise. However, faced with a fait accompli, he sighed and gave it the all clear.
After two volumes had been produced free of charge, each year with cover of a different colour, ISB began to be distributed at a modest price to cover the costs to 30 different countries. The interest it generated took the editors by surprise. It was soon able to feature a number of contributions by well-known scholars. Catherine Snow’s contribution on ‘semantic primacy and second language acquisition’ led the first (red) number of the second volume in 1977, and articles by researchers already, or soon-to-be, well known filled the next six volumes, including, for example, Ruth Aronson Berman, Ellen Bialystok, Theo Bongaerts, Vivian Cook, Teun van Dijk, Claus Faerch, Uli Frauenfelder, Liliane Haegeman, Birgit Harley, Carl James, Peter Jordens, Gabriele Kasper, Mary-Louise Kean, Eric Kellerman, John Lamendella, Eddie Levenston, Teresa Pica, Nanda Poulisse, Larry Selinker, Merrill Swain and Henning Wode. When OISE’s pioneering Working Papers in Bilingualism was finally wound up, in their final issue they kindly acknowledged ISB as their natural successor. In 1984, a surprise development caused the editors to make the eighth, buff-coloured volume of ISB the very last one: Paul Meara, one of the contributors, had been approached by Edward Arnold, who were searching for a suitable editor to start up a new journal in second language acquisition. His response was to decline the offer but suggest the two editors of ISB instead. The result was the rebirth of ISB as SLR.
The rebranding of ISB and the switch to peer-reviewed journal status gave the editors the opportunity to reformulate their aims more ambitiously, and these have been maintained up to the present day. Apart from the early difficulties of ensuring enough quality material to fit the now strict copy deadlines imposed by the publisher, there has also been a longer term issue related to overspecialization, real or perceived. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, in a field still very young, the major thrust on the theoretical front was driven by researchers working within a generative linguistic framework; in fact, SLR published some landmark contributions in this particular area. Nevertheless it has never been the intention to become viewed as the journal that ‘will only publish papers on generative grammar’. With me, my fellow SLR editors, James Pankhurst, Roger Hawkins, John Archibald, Silvina Montrul and Margaret Thomas, have sought to avoid this typecasting in their selection of reviews, review articles, and special issues on other topics of theoretical interest, as well as in the regular issues. Ultimately a journal of this type should try as best it can and reflect the field as it is, and a historian of SLA should be able to study trends by examining the titles of the main journals in the field, reasonably confident that the peer review process has made the personal whims of editors irrelevant, and that the contents are a true reflection of how the field has developed over the years. The peer review process can never be 100% perfect but it is a bit like democracy of which Winston Churchill famously said that it was ‘the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried’.
A related and more pressing problem than overrestrictive typecasting has emerged more recently, one which seems to have affected a number of journals in SLA and applied linguistics, namely the availability of suitable peer reviewers willing and able to spend time reading and evaluating submissions. The peer review process is crucial to the field, and so it is in everybody’s interest to contribute. At the same time, especially as new lines of SLA research open up, there remains a relatively small pool of quality reviewers to service an increasing volume of journal submissions. My message, in passing, to those invited to review for us would be to always suggest a number of alternative reviewers if you yourself cannot manage it, including younger researchers in your area who, perhaps with a little expert guidance, can also contribute to maintain quality in this publish-or-perish world in which we live.
I am confident that SLR will go to even greater heights. I still see its future as a journal that contributes to our understanding of how the mind/brain works. In other words, I see its prime focus as directed towards the cognitive, the psychological, the neurological and the linguistic aspects of second language (L2) development and L2 use, but I realize that ultimately that is for others to decide and, to close this rather lengthy addition to our normal set of contributions, I would only add that I have been immensely privileged to work with not only many inspiring authors but also with some very dedicated assistants and some exceedingly talented editors: Margaret Thomas, Roger Hawkins, John Archibald and Silvina Montrul have already been mentioned, as also co-founder James Pankhurst without whom the journal would never have been born. My thanks also go to Paul Meara for providing the opportunity for ISB to re-emerge as a fully-fledged, peer-reviewed journal. Many thanks too for the wonderful support from our publishing teams over the years. And, last but not least, my heartfelt congratulations to Roumyana Slabakova, whose appointment as my successor just happens to have brought SLR full circle from an initially all-male editorial team to an all female one comprising Margaret, Silvina and Roumyana, together with our first Associate Editor, Christine Shea, and Assistant Editor, Alice Foucart, both of whom have my very best wishes. Whatever else happens, the future of Second Language Research is assured.