Towards an Ecology of Language Acquisition

Abstract

Like any other scientific enterprise, the study of language acquisition (LA) evolves: the issues which dominate its agenda, the consensus on what constitute its `data', the hypotheses that motivate its research programmes---all wax and wane in the cycles we know and expect in human affairs. At the end of the 20th century thinking in language acquisition research was showing signs, we believe, of a new kind of convergence. This volume aims to explore how a number of contemporary approaches and insights in LA research might be coherently interrelated through a perspective that can be called ecological. While much research on LA continues to consider the individual acquirer largely in closed-system terms, there is growing attention to the acquirer's extensive interaction with their environment spatial, social, cultural and so on. Recent studies in such diverse fields as discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, robotics, and cognitive semantics underline the heuristic value of the perspective promised in our title: ecology of language acquisition. In this introductory chapter we first offer an ecological critique of some dominant paradigms of LA research. We then go on to suggest how an ecological perspective motivates new approaches to acquisition issues, and how it informs each of the contributed chapters which follow. Our hope is that readers of all theoretical persuasions will find in this volume ideas, arguments and insights which, even if not woven into a fully-fledged theoretical fabric, at least point a way to fruitful theoretical reassessment.