Second Culture Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition: Faux amis?

One of the well-known characteristics of modern approaches to second language learning is the view that successful second language acquisition (SLA) is accompanied by second culture acquisition (SCA) (e.g., Hamers & Blanc,1989; Schumann 1978). It seems clear that a learner's acquisition of communicative competence must involve more than the command of the grammatical structures of the target language and a mastery of its phonology. The learner must also acquire new cultural knowledge and a set of culture-specific constraints on linguistic behaviour. The claims above make sense. There is little doubt that, in the best case, expansions of linguistic competence should be accompanied by expansions of cultural competence. But there is also a way in which the claims above make too much sense. They suggest a straightforward parallelism between SLA and SCA as well as a parallelism between the successful end-states of bilingualism and biculturalism. In this paper, we suggest that although the parallels between SLA and SCA are intuitively appealing, they often mask important underlying differences in the ways in which linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge are organized as well as important differences in the acquisition process.