are typically non-native speakers. As Barbara Seidlhofer mentions,“having a
C2 level may be a hindrance rather than an asset in communication with
speakers with lower levels of proficiency”. Related to this, Ben Rampton sees
“the erosion of an exclusive Anglo perspective, and the challenge to native-
speaker ascendancy”. Paul Meara sees this“as the move away from Britain
and the USA as the fountains of all knowledge”. According to Tim McNamara
ELF is the biggest challenge facing the testing world, which, in his view,
tends to be quite conservative. The ELF movement undermines some of the
key assumptions current language testing is based on. But not all informants
agree with this. Robert Philipson:“I am worried that a considerable amount
of fashionable research of the kind that Blommaert, Pennycook, and the
ELF gospel and others are churning out is intellectual games rather than
concerned with existential issues for language learners or language policies.”
7.2.5 Variation and variability
A distinction is often made between intra-individual variability and inter-
individual variation. The interest in variability and variation in interlanguage
has grown, according to Robert DeKeyser, as has the awareness of the
dependence of variation on task and individual. There is a rich literature and
a well-tested methodology in sociolinguistics for the analysis of variation
(VARBRUL) and Elaine Tarone deplores that applied linguists have not
taken advantage of that in the study of SLA. In her view, variation in devel-
opment can be studied with VARBRUL, though the software does not allow
for the analysis of the interaction of variables over time, which would be the
focus in a CDST-based analysis of variation.
In the early days of SLA, studies on morpheme orders were very popular
and the conclusion of those studies was that thefirst language does not really
play a role in SLA, as all learners go through the same order or stages,
independent of theirfirst language. John Schumann argues that such universal
orders are arrived at by eliminating variation:
Let’s suppose that the sequence for the acquisition of English negation is
universally true. How did we arrive at that? We accomplished that by
abstracting from the individual variation. The initial research involves
six different case studies – two children, two adolescents, and two
adults. We determine the acquisition for each individual by, for each
sample, taking the total number of negative utterances and dividing that
figure into the number of each negative form–excluding“I don’t know”
and negative phrases (we only considered verbal negation). The form
with the highest percentage was seen as characteristic of the sample as a
whole. In every sample each subject had a variety of negative forms,
hence variation was recognized, but largely ignored. On the basis of this
analysis, we then constructed a common sequence.80 Trends II