ABSTRACT
The functionalist perspective on the nature of language developed by theoretical linguistics such as Givón, Halliday and Langacker was briefly introduced in Section 1.3.3. In this chapter we are concerned with SLL research which is grounded in this viewpoint. That is to say, rather than making the acquisition of a formal linguistic system their starting point, these researchers are centrally concerned with the ways in which L2 learners set about making meaning, and achieving their personal communicative goals; they argue that the great variety of interlanguage forms produced by second language learners cannot be sensibly interpreted unless we pay attention also to the speech acts which learners are seeking to perform, and to the ways they exploit the immediate social, physical and discourse context to help them make meaning. Further, it is argued that these meaning-making efforts on the part of the learner are a driving force in ongoing second language development which interact with the development of formal grammatical systems.
