A Review of Theories in L2 Socialization and Cognitive Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

In the past 20 years, there is a shifting trend in the second language acquisition (SLA) field departing from the traditional “logical science” (Zuengler & Miller, 2006) to a context-oriented perspective for its robust power in exploring social factors beyond individual internal cognition in L2 processing research. While context-oriented researchers claim the formal linguistic-focused research decontextualizes L2 learning from its environment and thus is problematic to comprehensively explain the L2 acquisition process, some scholars taking formal linguistic perspectives resist such critique and contend that social conditions are neither sufficient nor “necessary for scientific discovery” (Zuengler & Miller, 2006, p. 15). Within this paper, I will interrogate what differentiates the cognitive paradigm from L2 socialization paradigm in terms of second language acquisition.