ABSTRACT
The theory of dialogue elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin is of great interest to second language research and practice. It focuses on cultural and interpersonal dimensions of language and examines discourses that are formed by multiple voices. Grounded in a philosophical aspiration for dialogic polyphony, it can help us see the relations among languages and cultures in a different light from the traditional approaches in second language learning (SLL) scholarship. These traditional approaches emerged at the time of the Chomskian revolution in linguistics in the 1960s, simultaneously with the transition in psychology from behavioral to cognitivist theories. SLL research in its early phase was likewise interested in the linguistic properties of learner language; that is, many researchers were preoccupied with the acquisition of second language grammar. The traditional interest of linguistics has always been concentrated on the universal principles, grammatical structures and modeling at the level of an individual sentence. Accordingly, the linguistic approach in SLL seeks to describe the language that learners acquire and to explain its structure. Psycholinguistics, by contrast, focuses on how a new language is acquired and attempts to explore the internal processes that the learner undergoes and the strategies he or she uses in acquiring the new language. The SLL researchers who came from the psycholinguistic perspective from the beginning were interested in describing and analyzing such phenomena as interlanguage and the mental processes associated with its functioning (Corder, 1967; Selinker, 1972). In both linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches the social, cultural, and discursive contexts in which language learning takes place are not acknowledged as important factors, even though they may be
recognized as potential variables that can either help or hinder the development of a purely internal knowledge of language by an individual.
