ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a triad that has always existed but that has hardly ever been discussed together: context, complexity, and L2 learning strategies. For a quarter century, the concepts of context and complexity have been talked about in relation to language learning. Complexity theory implies a drastic ontological and epistemological change from the postpositivist worldview, which primarily focused on isolated components or on statistical relationships among such components, typically called “independent” and “dependent” variables. Complexity theory takes a much more holistic view: it looks at components of complex systems in terms of dynamic, bidirectional “connectivities,” not statistical correlations or one-way influences. Complexity theory can also be distinguished from a purely humanistic viewpoint. The humanistic perspective concerns the human being, often in context, but without a thoroughgoing analysis of multiple human-environment connectivities (although Moskowitz, 1978 and Stevick, 1990 were going in the right direction).
