Reconsidering the Social in Language Learning: A State of the Science and an Agenda for Future Research in Variationist SLA

The current paper offers a critical reflection on the role of the social dimension of the second language (L2) development of sociolinguistic competence. We center our discussion of L2 sociolinguistic competence on variationist approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) and the study of variable structures. We first introduce the framework of variationist SLA and offer a brief overview of some of the social, and more broadly extralinguistic, factors that have been investigated in this line of inquiry. We then discuss the three waves of variationist sociolinguistics and various social factors that have been examined in other socially oriented approaches to SLA. By reflecting on these bodies of research, our goal is to identify how the insights from this work (i.e., research couched in the second and third waves of variationist sociolinguistics and in other socially oriented approaches to SLA) could be extended to the study of L2 sociolinguistic competence. We argue that greater attention to the social nature of language in variationist SLA is needed in order to more fully understand the L2 development of variable structures.