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