TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 42, No. 3, September 2008

QUARTERLY In This Issue Ⅲ The guest editor for this special topic issue on psycholinguistics and TESOL, John Field, wonders why the scholarship from his field has failed to generate much enthusiasm from other TESOLers He considers the way in which some of the principles of this field are in tension with linguistics From a historical perspective, however, there was a time when everything we did in TESOL was supposed to be informed by cognitive and psycholinguistic perspectives Arguably, cognitive approaches are still popular in some schools of second language acquisition What we are seeing now is, in some ways, a reaction against what psycholinguistics represents for some in our field Movements like the social turn or the discursive turn in TESOL and in many other disciplines have helped us understand conditions and contexts that we were not sensitive to before Though we are enriched by the new orientations in TESOL, we cannot wish the mind away from speaking or learning a language The challenge facing TESOL is not to swing from fad to fad but constantly to take stock of our expanding knowledge by engaging with the diverse research traditions in our field It is for this reason that I am happy the editorial board approved a special topic issue on psycholinguistics Though the authors in this issue operate within the discourses of their specialization, and not engage directly with other paradigms in TESOL, it is interesting still that the trends in psycholinguistics are in tune with the broader conversations in the field Going through the rich collection of articles in this issue, I am amazed how our theoretical and scholarly activity are closely aligned in many areas Consider the dominant view on vocabulary storage The view that informs the studies by Sunderman & Schwartz and Ecke is that words from both languages are stored together with an integrated semantic base This perspective sits comfortably with the notion of multicompetence, an integrated competence for both languages, qualitatively different from that of monolinguals Although the authors are aware of the advantages for multilinguals, they also explore the new challenges in word recognition and TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 3, September 2008 357 language processing when the tokens from languages are similar or dissimilar Or consider the dominant position on language acquisition, what Field calls the instance-based or exemplar models of language acquisition, which inform the article by Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, and Maynard The notion that we acquire a language by assembling multiple traces of the encounters we have had with speakers, and the resultant emphasis on the potentially implicit, emergentist, and situational acquisition, accord with models from activity theory, chaos theory, and language ecology that are currently in conversation among TESOLers Or consider the perspective on listening that influences Field’s study Rather than treating decoding input as the passive, mechanical, and separate aspect of the more conceptual activity of building a context for interpretation, scholars are now looking at both processes as interdependent This perspective goes well with the fluid nature in which language, text, and context are considered to shape each other in discourse studies Such constructivist orientations are a corrective to earlier foundationalist views that resorted to prioritizing certain contextual clues and data as always fixed and available to ground interpretation Or, again, consider the role phonological representation plays in reading ability The studies by Walter and McDowell & Lorch lead to the paradoxical conclusion that to become a better reader one has to develop one’s aural sensitivity and speech exposure Walter also recommends activities such as listening to the radio, watching TV, or listening to a CD recording while reading a book in order to improve reading ability We recognize how the skills, traditionally taught separately, are quite interconnected in terms of the processes involved Along the same lines, Crossley, Greenfield, and McNamara adds to traditional text-based views of reading difficulty by arguing that we need to take account of the reader as an individual attempting to reconstruct the writer’s intentions Such perspectives further encourage the resistance in our field toward teaching the four skills as separated from each other and from context Farris, Trofimovich, Segalowitz, and Gatbonton fits neatly into the ESP tradition of designing classroom practice that takes full account of the constraints of the target workplace context The constraints they unveil are those of cognitive task demands rather than of employer expectations or requisite language skills This special topic issue is an opportunity for TESOLers from other theoretical persuasions to make connections with the changing field of psycholinguistics The articles in this volume help us probe deeper into the workings of the mind and fill in the missing pieces of other currently fashionable theories, some of which simply outline a vision or sketch the rudiments of an alternative The empirical bent of these studies also complements the theoretical activity in other areas of TESOL 358 TESOL QUARTERLY Pondering why the contributions in this issue come from a narrow geographical context, the guest editor and I reflected on the possibility that psycholinguistic studies are done most prominently in the West Though thinkers in antiquity from non-Western communities displayed a keen interest in the life of the mind, the field needs more involvement in empirical research along the lines of contemporary paradigms from diverse communities We hope that this issue sparks an interest in other communities to engage more with this area of scholarship, even as they seek to find points of cultural and theoretical connection with the dominant paradigms in their local context This collection samples empirical research being conducted in diverse areas of psycholinguistics, from language acquisition to the teaching of skills, to give us a sense of the changing field The articles straddle the theory–research–practice divide to show how the most specialized research can inform everyday teaching practice I thank John Field for gathering a set of articles in psycholinguistics that bring us the most interesting and most promising lines of enquiry for TESOL Suresh Canagarajah Editor IN THIS ISSUE 359