and more social orientations are seen as meaningful alternatives. Others try to
explain the reasons for the decline of GG. Michael Sharwood Smith comments:
A distinct decline in interest within AL in general when it took a more
(generative) linguistic character, partly due to its highly technical nature
plus the insistence of mainstream SLA researchers (at the time) that their
focus was not on language teaching so, for many people, GG simply
decisively confirmed the new border between SLA narrowly defined and
AL although this did not prevent any researcher, like VanPatten for
example, from having a foot in both camps.Some informants are quite outspoken about the role of GG in AL. William
Grabe states:“Fundamentally Chomsky is wrong and we wasted a lot of
time. In 1964 Chomsky’sAspectswas published. Now, in 2014, we are 50
years later. What impact has all of that had in real world language use? This
is an overstated theoretical direction.”Jan Hulstijn summarizes:“Generative
linguistics has had no noticeable (or durable) impact.”
The growth of more usage based (UB) approaches is partly a reaction to
both the GG people and the neo-behaviorist psycholinguists. The core idea
of approaches that are referred to as UB is that grammar is not innate, as
GG assumes, and that language development results from the interaction of
general purpose cognitive mechanisms and a rich linguistic environment.
Michael Tomasello is often referred to as the leading figure in the UB
movement. For the application of UB to SLA, Nick Ellis and Andrea Tyler
are mentioned as playing an important role. UB means that learning is pri-
marily statistical learning and that patterns of use emerge through interaction
and input. No rules are assumed, though views on that vary. The distinction
between what constitutes a rule and what is a pattern is less than clear.
Cognitive linguistics emerged in the 1970s from research on concepts
underlying forms. There are now cognitive approaches to semantics, grammar
and phonology. Language learning is based on input mainly, and language is
seen as a social phenomenon. Cognitive linguistics is seen as a useful con-
tribution to the application of Socio-Cultural Theory (SCT) to SLA. The
growth of SCT is one of the most frequently mentioned main trends. The
problem with the Vygotskian approach is that it is a theory of development,
but not specifically of language. The assumptions behind cognitive linguistics
are seen as a useful addition tofill that gap. Chuming Wang sees the growth
of UB approaches as a positive development:
The emergence of educational linguistics, which strikes me as a sub-
branch of AL, makes a more focused study of language teaching possible.
The more recent development of the UB approach to SLA, it seems
to me, bears more on language teaching than any other approaches,
although more research along this line is called for before the potential
of this approach for language education can be fully tapped.60 Main trends I