DOI: 10.1111/weng.12308 ARTICLE Coda 2 A bridge half-built: Toward a holistic theory of Second Language Acquisition and world Englishes S.N. Sridhar Kamal K. Sridhar Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and Mattoo Center for India Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Correspondence S. N. Sridhar, Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and Mattoo Center for India Studies, Stony Brook University, 1046 Humani- ties, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA. Email: s.sridhar@stonybrook.edu Abstract In the concluding contribution to this special issue, we return to the key issue that motivated our 1986 article on world Englishes (WE) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This coda begins by con- sidering the impact of WE on SLA at a number of levels, with ref- erence to the pluricentricity of English, conceptions of the ‘native speaker’, formalist ontology, functional perspectives, multilingual- ism, and other dynamic approaches to SLA. We then proceed to consider recent critiques of the WE paradigm, before moving to a discussion of the current synergy between world Englishes and Second Language Acquisition studies, noting that in many contem- porary approaches to SLA, ‘the monolingual bias has given way to a multilingual turn.’ Nevertheless, even if there is a far greater appre- ciation of world Englishes than three decades ago, it is still evidently the case that textbooks in Second Language Acquisition continue to be focused on cognitive and structural dimensions of language acqui- sition, and often fail to incorporate social, functional and multilingual perspectives. 1 INTRODUCTION ‘Man will attain happiness if he lives, even if it takes a hundred years’, Hanuman, India's beloved monkey god, in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana says to Sita, kidnapped and languishing in captivity. In the 30 years since our critique of the field of Second Language Acquisition, ‘Bridging the paradigm gap’, appeared in this very journal, most of the changes we called for, as the papers in this special issue point out, have become practically mainstream. The wise Hanuman was right, as usual. The invited papers in this issue, all by distinguished scholars, together provide a valuable audit of the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), its history and evolution, founding assumptions and methodologies, its ontologies, explanatory scope and limitations, in relation to the challenges, contributions, as well as limitations of the world Englishes (WE) paradigm. WE and SLA between them address many central issues of SLA. These include: What is the theory of language and communication that underlies the study of the Second Language Acquisition? How does this theory apply to the special World Englishes 2018;37:127–139. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/weng c  2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 127