Adjusting Expectations: The Study of Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency in Second Language Acquisition

It is a good practice to try to understand matters at hand by first stepping back and adopting an historical perspective, which I will begin this review by doing. Next, I will take up the challenges that each of the authors in the articles in this volume has presented for the study of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in second language acquisition. Finally, I will conclude by issuing a few challenges of my own, along with proposing a broader frame in which to situate the study of CAF. A BRIEF HISTORY Since shortly after the birth of the field of second language acquisition (SLA), which most researchers date back to the early 1970s, there have been calls for means by which to gauge second language development, apart from the use of lengthy standardized proficiency tests, which serve other purposes. To my knowledge, the first call came from Kenji Hakuta (1976). Hakuta was interested in tracking his subject Uguisu’s English language development over time, as Roger Brown (1973) and other L1 acquisition researchers had