ABSTRACT
Scholarship in second and foreign language learning has traditionally looked to the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics for its epistemological foundations. One assumption in particular that has exerted much influence over the years on research concerned with language learning is a formalist view of language. Drawn from mainstream linguistics, this view considers language to be a set of abstract, self-contained systems with a fixed set of structural components and a fixed set of rules for their combination. Moreover, the systems are considered objects of study in their own right in that they can be extracted from their contexts of use and studied independently of the varied ways in which individuals make use of them.
