Complex communication difficulties involving stylistics, logic and clarity in the discourse structures of advanced English compositions by writers from another language and culture cannot be explained as merely insufficient knowledge of English grammar, diction or idiom. Such problems do not only involve linguistic differences in the native (NL) and target language (TL) but encompass different stylistic habits, different ways of thinking, and different cultural values. Robert Kaplan has frequently argued that the rhetoric and logic in ESL English compositions vary according to the native language and culture of the writer. In one of his early essays he states:

O’Grady (1983) complains that in arguing for task-specific genetic principles the transformational-generative enterprise has not given proper consideration to the alternative Piagetian view that there are no genetic principles specific to language, but that the relevant principles hold for all cognitive domains (he does not specify what the “cognitive domains” are). Although he notes judiciously that “the current research program in linguistics cannot be undermined by simple reference to possible alternate analyses for one or two phenomena” (168), he nonetheless sketches alternatives to two analyses given in The Language Lottery (Lightfoot 1982), claiming that his alternatives do not require appeal to task-specific innate principles and are thus consistent with a Piagetian view of the mind.

Research in second language phonology has, until recently at least, been principally concerned with the interference of the learner’s first language in his acquisition of a new sound system. In practice, the belief that interference from the first language is the major source of pronunciation problems is well established among second language teachers, and teachers have traditionally been trained to recognize and remedy, if not try to prevent, the errors resulting from this interference. Recently, however, researchers (for example, Garnica and Herbert 1979) have begun to conclude that interference is not a sufficient explanation, and that the second language learner’s developing phonology, his approximative system, is undoubtedly influenced by many other factors.