can be tolerated, nor how the hypothesis interacts with different kinds
of learners (such as age, cultural background, educational background,
or learning style)...A similar point can be made about the concept
“negotiation for meaning”, which was central in the interaction hypothesis.
The term“meaning”has multiple referents (morpheme meaning, phrasal
meaning, clausal meaning, discoursal meaning, and overall pragmatic
meaning, for example) so meaning can be negotiated at numerous levels,
involving widely differing negotiation processes. So one trend is a sad
one–the lack of careful formulation of theories, and a lack of commitment
to investigating them critically and systematically.7.1.3 Language attrition and language loss
Several informants (Theo van Els, Dick Lambert, Lydia White, Eric Kellerman)
mention the growth of interest in non-pathological language decline as one of
the main trends. The terminology on this is often confusing. The most widely
accepted definitions see language attrition as the loss of language skills in indi-
viduals over time, language shift as the process of decline of use and incom-
plete transmission between generations, and language loss as the overarching
term for the two.
Lambert and Freed’s (1982) book on language attrition was the starting
point for various researchers to work on language attrition. Originally, the
research was political in nature with questions like“Why should we teach
French for four years in high school and college when all that knowledge is
lost so easily?”Later it became more cognitive in nature, with connections to
psychological research on memory and forgetting through the work of
people like Bert Weltens and Monika Schmid in the Netherlands, and
Lynne Hansen at Brigham Young University.
Over the years, the research on language attrition has become more inte-
grated with research on acquisition through the application of DST to language,
which poses that language knowledge is never stable and that depending on
the setting and frequency of use, phases of growth and decline may follow
each other, and both are governed by the same principles.
A more recent trend is the interest in relearning languages. The assump-
tion is that relearning a language is easier than learning a new language from
scratch, but there is only limited research on this as yet.
7.1.4 Individual differences
The label“individual differences”typically refers to four aspects, namely:
Age
Attitudes and motivation
Language aptitude
Personality traits.
Trends II 75