Introduction: The Changing L1 in the L2 User's Mind

VIVIAN COOK

In 1953 Ulrich Weinreich talked about interference as 'those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language' (Weinreich, 1953: 1). This fits with everybody's common-sense belief that your first language (L1) has an effect on your second language (L2). The foreign accents we hear confirm this every day; an English speaker can tell whether someone is French or Japanese after a few words of English. In the fifty years since Weinreich's book, there has been extensive research into how the learning and use of a second language is affected by the first language, whether conceived as Contrastive Analysis, transfer, cross-linguistic influence, resetting of parameters or in many other ways.

Yet few people seemed to notice that Weinreich's definition concerned deviation from either language. As well as the first language influencing the second, the second language influences the first. Perhaps this effect is less detectable in our everyday experience: only complex instrumental analysis of a Spanish speaker's accent in Spanish will reveal whether the speaker also knows English. It becomes blatant only when the first language starts to disappear, for instance when a speaker brings more and more L2 words into his or her first language.

This volume is perhaps the first book to be devoted only to the effects of the second language on the first, sometimes called 'reverse' or 'backward' transfer. It arose out of an invitational workshop held in Wivenhoe House in 2001, at which all the papers included in this volume were delivered, apart from two (Porte, Chapter 6; Cook et al., Chapter 10). By using a variety of perspectives, methodologies and languages, the research reported here shows that the first language of people who know other languages differs from that of their monolingual peers in diverse ways, with consequences for second language acquisition research, linguistics and language teaching. The range of contributions shows the extent to which this question impinges not only on all the areas of language from vocabulary to pragmatics, but also on a variety of contemporary approaches currently being developed by second language acquisition (SLA) researchers.

The book is intended for researchers in second language acquisition research and bilingualism, students and teachers around the world. The breadth of the contributions in terms of countries, languages, aspects of language and theories means that it relates to most SLA courses at some point, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level.

This introduction provides some background to the different contributions in this volume. It tries not to steal their thunder by anticipating their arguments and conclusions, but provides a more personal overview, with which of course not all of the writers will be in complete accord. It relies in part on a summary overview of issues provided to the writers by Batia Laufer after the conference. It does not attempt to deal with the vast areas of language transfer from L1 to L2 or with the field of language attrition, covered in such classic texts as Odlin (1989) or Weltens et al. (1986).

Multi-competence

For me, and formanyof the contributors, the question of L2 effects on the L1 arose out of the notion of multi-competence. Initially the term was used almost as a convenience. While 'interlanguage' had become the standard term for the speaker's knowledge of a second language, no word existed that encompassed their knowledge of both the second language and their first: on the one hand the L1, on the other the interlanguage, but nothing that included both. Hence 'multi-competence' was introduced to mean 'knowledge of two or more languages in one mind' (Cook, 1991). For convenience we will mostly talk about 'second language' and bilingualism here, but this does not preclude multiple languages and multilingualism.

Since the first language and the other language or languages are in the same mind, they must form a language super-system at some level rather than be completely isolated systems. Multi-competence then raised questions about the relationship between the different languages in use. How do people code-switch fluently from one language to another? How do they 'gate out' one language while using the other (Lambert, 1990)? How do they manage more than one pragmatic and phonological system? Multi-competence also raised questions about cognition. Does an L2 user have a single set of ideas in the mind, more than one set of ideas, a merged set from different languages, or a new set of ideas unlike the sum of its parts? And multi-competence also led inevitably to questions about acquisition. What roles do the first language and the other language or languages play in the creation of knowledge of the second or later languages?

Multi-competence led me in particular to a re-valuing of the concept of the native speaker (Cook, 1999). While the concept of interlanguage had seemed to establish the second language as an independent language system, in effect SLA research still treated the L2 system in an L2 user as an approximation to an L1 system in someone else (i.e. a monolingual L1 user). SLA research methods compared knowledge of L2 syntax against the knowledge of native speakers (Cook, 1997). Whether L2 learners had access to Universal Grammar (UG) was seen as a matter of whether they learnt the same grammars as monolingual native speakers – 'slightly over half of the non-native speakers typically exhibit the correct UG-based judgements on any given UG effect' (Bley-Vroman et al., 1988: 24). Whether age affected L2 learning was seen in terms of how close people...