INTERLANGUAGE

Unit 1

Introduction

1.1 Background

     An interlanguage is a type of speech or writing developed by people during the process of learning a new language, when the learner is starting to gain proficiency in the new, or “target,” language but has not mastered it. It is a distorted form of the target language that contains errors caused by inappropriately using aspects of the learner's native language while trying to speak the target language, incorrectly applying the target language's grammar or pronunciation rules or trying to express concepts in the target language by using more basic words the learner already knows. This is normal during the process of learning a new language. Every interlanguage is specific to the person speaking it and evolves as he or she continues to learn the target language.

     Although they are both formed from elements of multiple languages, an interlanguage should not be confused with a pidgin or Creole language. Pidgin language is an improvised form of communication created by two or more people who do not share a language in common, while a Creole language is a language that originally arose from a mixture of different languages but has become a natural language in its own right, with children in the society where it is spoken growing up with it as their native language. An interlanguage, on the other hand, is always unique to a particular individual and is by definition never anyone's first language, as it is partially a product of a different language that the speaker already knows.

     Interlanguage typically contain elements of the speaker's original language. For example, in English an adjective appears before the noun it modifies, while in French the adjective usually comes after the noun. Thus, an English speaker learning French who knows that the French words for “green” and “fish” are vert and poisson, respectively, might call a green fish “un vert poisson,” when un poisson vert is actually correct. The interlanguage of a French person learning English might contain the opposite error, causing him or her to say things like “a fish green.”

     An interlanguage can also contain errors caused by knowing the target language's general rules but following them too rigidly. A non-native speaker might conjugate irregular verbs according to the rules of regular verbs, similarly to the way small children learning their first language often do. This can produce mistakes like saying “goed” instead of “went” or “you am” instead of “you are,” for example.

     Language learners may also over-apply previous lessons about how the target language differs from their native language. For instance, while adjectives in French usually follow the noun, there are exceptions. Petit, French for “small,” is an example of this. Once an English speaker has learned how French adjectives generally work, he or she might overgeneralize the knowledge and incorrectly refer to a small fish as “un poisson petit” rather than the correct un petit poisson. The particular way a learner incorrectly applies the rules of the target language depend on when and how they were learned in the first place. An English speaker who had not yet learned that most French adjectives follow rather than precede nouns would be unlikely to make a mistake like “un poisson petit,” for instance.

    Finally, an interlanguage can contain attempts to express things the learner has not yet learned in the target language, using his or her limited existing knowledge of it.

1.2 Focused Questions

1. What is the definition of interlanguage?

2.  What is error analysis?

 

Unit 2

discussion

2.1 Definition of interlanguage

     The term interlanguage was defined by Selinker (1972) as the separate linguistic system evidenced when adult second-language learners attempt to express meaning in a language they are in the process of learning. This linguistic system encompasses not just phonology, morphology, and syntax, but also the lexical, pragmatic, and discourse levels of the interlanguage. The interlanguage system is clearly not simply the native language  morphological and syntactic system relexified with target language vocabulary; that is, it is not the morphological and syntactic system that would have been evidenced had the learner

tried to express those meanings in his or her native language. Just as clearly, it is not the target language system that would have been evidenced had native speakers of the target language tried to express those same meanings. Rather, the interlanguage differs systematically from both the native language and the target language.

     Interlanguage is usually thought of as characteristic only of adult second-language learners (but see ‘Revised Interlanguage Hypothesis’ below), that is, learners who have passed puberty and thus cannot be expected to be able to employ the language acquisition device (LAD) – that innate language learning structure that was instrumental in their acquisition of their native language. Children acquiring second languages are thought to have the ability to re-engage the LAD and thus to avoid the error pattern and ultimate fossilization that characterize the interlanguages of adult second-language learners.

     Central to the notion of interlanguage is the phenomenon of fossilization – that process in which the learner’s interlanguage stops developing, apparently permanently. Second-language learners who begin their study of the second language after puberty do not succeed in developing a linguistic system that approaches that developed by children acquiring that language natively. This observation led Selinker to hypothesize that adults use a latent psychological structure (instead of a LAD) to acquire second languages.

     The five psycholinguistic processes of this latent psychological structure that shape interlanguage were hypothesized (Selinker, 1972) to be (a) native language transfer, (b) overgeneralization of target language rules, (c) transfer of training, (d) strategies of communication, and (e) strategies of learning. Native language transfer, the process that contrastive analysts had proposed as the sole shaper of learner language, still has a major role to play in the interlanguage hypothesis; though it is not the only process involved, there is ample research evidence that it does play an important role in shaping learners’ interlanguage

system. Selinker (1972, 1992; following Weinreich, 1968: 7) suggested that the way in which this happens is that learners make ‘interlingual identifications’ in approaching the task of learning a second language: they perceive certain units as the same in their NL, IL, and TL. So, for example, they may perceive NL ‘table’ as exactly the same as TL ‘mesa,’ and develop an interlanguage in which mesa can (erroneously in terms of the TL) be used in expressions like ‘table of contents,’ ‘table the motion,’ and so on. Selinker followed enrich in pointing out an interesting paradox in second-language acquisition: in traditional structural linguistics, units are defined in relation to the linguistic system in which they occur and have no meaning outside that system. However, in making interlingual identifications, second-language learners typically ‘stretch’ linguistic units by perceiving them as the same in meaning across three systems. An interesting research issue is how they do this and what sorts of units are used in this way; for example, they could be linguistic units like the taxonomic phoneme or the allophone, or syllables. Selinker raised questions about the ability of traditional linguistics frameworks, based as they are on assumptions of monolingualism, to handle interlanguage data in which transfer across three linguistic systems plays a central role.

     A second psycholinguistic process is that of overgeneralization of target language rules. This is a process that is also widely observed in child language acquisition: the learner shows evidence of  having mastered a general rule, but does not yet know all the exceptions to that rule. So, for example, the learner may use the past tense marker-ed for all verbs, regular and irregular alike: walked, wanted, hugged, laughed, *drinked, *hitted, *goed. The overgeneralization error shows clear evidence of progress, in that it shows that the learner has mastered a target language rule, but it also shows what the learner has yet to learn. To the extent that second-language learners make overgeneralization errors, one might argue that

they are using the same process as that employed by first-language learners.

    Transfer of training occurs when the second-language learner applies rules learned from instructors or textbooks. Sometimes this learning is successful; that is, the resulting interlanguage rule is indistinguishable from the target language rule. But sometimes errors result. For example, a lesson plan or textbook that describes the past perfect tense as the ‘past past’ can lead the learner to erroneously use the past perfect for the absolute distant past – for all events that occurred long ago, whether or not the speaker is relating these to any more recent or fore grounded event, as in the isolated statement, *‘My relatives had come from Italy in the 1700s.’ These have also been called ‘induced errors.’

     Strategies of communication are used by the learner to resolve communication problems when the interlanguage system seems unequal to the task. When, in the attempt to communicate meaning, the learner feels that the linguistic item needed is not available to him, he can resort to a variety of strategies of communication in getting that meaning across. So, for example, if the learner wants to refer to an electrical cord in English and does not know the exact lexical item to use in referring to it, he can call it ‘a tube,’ ‘a kind of corder that you use for electric thing I don’t exactly the name,’ or ‘a wire with eh two plugs in each side.’ The linguistic forms and patterns used in such attempts may become more or less

permanent parts of the learner’s interlanguage (see Communicative Language Teaching).

     Strategies of learning are used by the learner in aconscious attempt to master the target language. One such strategy of learning is learners’ conscious comparison of what they produce in IL with the NL and a perceived target, setting up interlingual identifications (see the example given above for transfer). Other examples of learning strategies are the use of

mnemonics to remember target vocabulary, the memorizing of verb declensions or textbook dialogues, the use of flash cards, and so on. Clearly, such strategies are often successful, but they can also result in error. Memorized lists can get confused with one another, for example, or the mnemonic mediator word may become confused with the TL word. An example of the latter might be that an English speaking learner of Spanish might use a mediator word pot in order to remember that the Spanish word for duck is pato – but might end up using pot in

interlanguage references to a duck.

     Research evidence was provided to show that all five of these psycholinguistic processes could affect the construction of interlanguages, and a call for more research went out. Many research projects were undertaken in response to this call to investigate each of these hypothesized processes, and the result was a flurry of papers, conferences, and publications, and ultimately something that was referred to as a field of research on second-language acquisition.

2.2 Error analysis

     It was the British applied linguist, Pit Corder, who re-focussed attention on error from the perspective of language processing and language acquisition. In his seminal (1967) paper “The significance of learners’ errors” he stressed the learner’s positive cognitive contribution to learning. His view was that the learner is engaged in a process of discovering the language. The learner forms hypotheses based on language input and tests those hypotheses in speech production. In this view errors are not only an inevitable but also, very importantly, a necessary feature of learner language, without which improvement cannot occur. Corder coined the term “transitional competence” to indicate the essential dynamism and flux of the

language learner’s evolving system. A learner’s errors, according to Corder (1967), represent the discrepancy between the transitional competence of that learner and the target language. Drawing heavily on Chomsky’s (1965) view of first language acquisition, he suggested that just as for the child acquiring its mother tongue the language evolves in a more or less fixed pattern, so the foreign language learner may possess an “inbuilt syllabus” which determines the order in which the language system is acquired and which is largely independent of the order of the external syllabus according to which the classroom learner is ostensibly learning. Corder further suggested that studying error might supply clues to this inbuilt order of acquisition, persistent errors indicating those elements acquired late. Corder, however, invoked Chomsky’s (1965) distinction between “competence” and performance” to draw a distinction between true errors of competence and errors of performance, which he denoted as mere “mistakes”, the product of “chance circumstances” analogous to slips of the tongue in the native language (Corder 1967: 166). These performance “mistakes”, he maintained, say nothing about the underlying speaker competence and should therefore be excluded from analysis. In a later paper Corder (1971: 107-108) suggested that error analysis should include not only “overt” errors but “covert” errors. Covert errors, unlike overt errors, are formally

acceptable but do not express the meaning intended by the learner. For example, “I want to know the English” is a formally correct sentence, but it would be a covert error if the learner wanted to express the meaning carried by “I want to know English”.

The procedure for error analysis was elaborated by Corder (1974) as comprising five stages:

• selection of a corpus of language

• identification of errors in the corpus

• classification of the errors identified

• explanation of the psycholinguistic causes of the errors

• evaluation (error gravity ranking) of the errors

In fact, error analysis has turned out to be more problematic than one might expect for various reasons. There are problems of identification. Notwithstanding native-speaker intuitions, error is difficult to define and can by no means always be unambiguously identified in production (Hughes / Lascaratou 1982). The distinction between “errors” and “mistakes” is highly problematic since in performance correct andincorrect forms of a single target often occur side by side. Learner transitional competence has been found to be highly variable, influenced by various external factors such as situation, interlocutor, speech versus

writing, and certain internal factors, especially anxiety. Furthermore, there appears to be a middle ground between completely acceptable language and erroneous language, which may variously be judged as infelicitous, stylistically inappropriate, non-nativelike, obscure (Azevedo 1980; Pawley / Syder 1983).

     There are problems of classification. Classification of errors depends on error being localisable to the domains of phonology/graphology, morphology, syntax, lexis, discourse. This is by no means always unproblematic, for example when inaccurate pronunciation or orthography produces another word. Counting of errors becomes problematic when multiple errors occur in close proximity or one error occurs within an already erroneous element. For example “The man is drunken” for “The man has drowned” could be counted as one mistake (“is drunken” for “has drowned”), two mistakes (“is” for “has” and “drunken” for “drowned”), or three mistakes if we add (“drunken” for “drunk”). Burt and Kiparsky (1974) first drew attention to what they called “global errors”, which are difficult to localise to a

specific item and seem to extend over the whole sentence. An example might be a sentence like “Well, there’s a great hurry around”.

     There are problems in assigning psycholinguistic causes. Assigning psycholinguistic causes to error is by its very nature speculative, particularly for global errors. In practice, it is often difficult to decide whether an error is caused by language transfer or not. Often various factors seem to interact to produce error, including first language influence, intrinsic difficulty of the sub-system of the foreign language, but also factors such as communicative strategies have to be considered, where learners have a deficit, perhaps a lexical deficit which they seek to compensate for. To do this, they may coin a word, use an L1 word, anglicise an L1 word, use a more general L1 word, use a near synonym, paraphrase, resort to non-linguistic strategies or appeal to their interlocutor.

     There are problems of error evaluation. Studies of errors in English have found great differences in error gravity rankings among individual judges who may employ quite different sets of criteria. In particular, native-speaker judges who are not language teachers tend to employ communicative criteria, judging an error as less serious if it does not impede communication and more serious if it does. By contrast, language teachers, and particularly language teachers who are not native speakers of English but are native speakers of the learner’s native language, tend to employ formal criteria, judging errors particularly harshly that violate rules taught explicitly in the early years of formal instruction, for example, the sequence of tenses in conditional sentences. They are also extremely severe on obvious interference errors from L1 (Hughes / Lascaratou 1982; Davies 1983).

     There is another more fundamental objection to error analysis as a tool for describing transitional competence. At best, error analysis can only provide negative evidence concerning certain aspects of the language that have not been acquired by a learner at a particular time. If learners do not produce any passive verb forms, for example, error analysis cannot say whether they have mastered the passive or not. Learners who are low risk-takers and who work with a restricted code, who avoid structures they are unsure of and do not venture into areas where they feel uncertain, may have relatively few errors. These errors, however, will only very inadequately document the language deficits of these particular learners. It would, therefore, seem preferable, not only to study learners’ errors, but to attempt to describe their language as a whole so as to fully comprehend their “transitional competence”.

Unit 3

Conclusion

     An interlanguage is a type of speech or writing developed by people during the process of learning a new language, when the learner is starting to gain proficiency in the new, or “target,” language but has not mastered it. It is a distorted form of the target language that contains errors caused by inappropriately using aspects of the learner's native language while trying to speak the target language, incorrectly applying the target language's grammar or pronunciation rules or trying to express concepts in the target language by using more basic words the learner already knows. This is normal during the process of learning a new language. Every interlanguage is specific to the person speaking it and evolves as he or she continues to learn the target language.

     Interlanguage is usually thought of as characteristic only of adult second-language learners (but see ‘Revised Interlanguage Hypothesis’ below), that is, learners who have passed puberty and  thus cannot be expected to be able to employ the language acquisition device (LAD) – that innate language learning structure that was instrumental in their acquisition of their native language. Children acquiring second languages are thought to have the ability to re-engage the LAD and thus to avoid the error pattern and ultimate fossilization that characterize the interlanguages of adult second-language learners.

     Central to the notion of interlanguage is the phenomenon of fossilization – that process in which the learner’s interlanguage stops developing, apparently permanently. Second-language learners who begin their study of the second language after puberty do not succeed in developing a linguistic system that approaches that developed by children acquiring that language natively. This observation led Selinker to hypothesize that adults use a latent psychological structure (instead of a LAD) to acquire second languages. The five psycholinguistic processes of this latent psychological structure that shape interlanguage were hypothesized (Selinker, 1972) to be (a) native language transfer, (b) overgeneralization of target language rules, (c) transfer of training, (d) strategies of communication, and (e) strategies of learning. We can study these five psychological structure in error analysis.

     Language learning is actually process of tria and error, in which a learner form a hypothesis in which they can abort it or adjust it. Therefore error analysis study how to examine learner’s errors in a longitudinal way in order to state the individual learner’s hypothesis and locate the progress he is making.

References       

Tarone. 2006. Interlanguage. London: Elsevier

Lenon. 2008. Contrastive analysis, Error analysis, Interlanguage. ……..: Gramley