Apples and Oranges: Or, Why Apples Are Not Orange and Don't Need to Be A Response to Firth and Wagner

This is a response to the article by Firth and Wagner (F claims that are attributed to certain researchers were not ones made by those researchers. In particular, the scope of inquiry that F&W attribute to some SLA research is quite different from the actual area of inquiry. Second, I deal with the notion of “learners as deficient communicators,” arguing that F&W's attribution of this concept to SLA researchers is flawed. Finally, I discuss F&W's reanalysis of data that originally appeared in some of my earlier publications.