LALI I2 V5 746. - socling.genlingnw.ru

1 InterlanguageE Tarone 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 4,pp. 1715 1719, 1994, Elsevier notion of interlanguage has been central tothe development of the field of research on second-language acquisition (SLA) and continues to exert astrong influence on both the development of SLAtheory and the nature of the central issues in that term interlanguage (IL) was introduced by theAmerican linguist Larry Selinker to refer to the lin-guistic system evidenced when an adult second-language learner attempts to express meanings in thelanguage being learned. The interlanguage is viewedas a separate linguistic system, clearly different fromboth the learner s native language (NL) and the target language (TL) being learned, but linked toboth NL and TL by interlingual identifications inthe perception of the learner.

2 A central characteristicof any interlanguage is that it fossilizes that is, itceases to develop at some point short of full identitywith the target language. Thus, the adult second-lan-guage learner never achieves a level of facility in theuse of the target comparable to that achievable by anychild acquiring the target as a native language. Thereis thus a crucial and central psycholinguistic differ-ence between child NL acquisition and adult second-language (L2) acquisition: children always succeed incompletely acquiring their native language, but adultsonly very rarely succeed in completely acquiring asecond language. The central object of interlanguageresearch is to explain this difference essentially, todescribe and explain the development of interlan-guages and also to explain the ultimate failure ofinterlanguages to reach a state of identity with thetarget language.

3 Thus, some central research ques-tions are: What are the psycholinguistic processesthat shape and constrain the development of interlan-guages? How are these different from those processesthat shape and constrain the development of nativelanguages? How might these differences account forthe phenomenon of fossilization?The interlanguage HypothesisOrigins of the Concept of InterlanguageThe notion that the language of second-languagelearners is in some sense autonomous and cruciallydistinct from both NL and TL was developedindependently at about the same time in the work ofseveral different researchers (see Selinker, 1992, for adetailed account of the historical development of thisnotion). Slightly different conceptualizations of learn-er language were referred to as approximative sys-tem by Nemser and as transitional competence byCorder.

4 However, the notion of interlanguage seemedto be the one that caught on and which was used inthe literature on second-language acquisition in to the development of the idea of inter-language, contrastive analysts had asserted that thesecond-language learner s language was shaped solelyby transfer from the native language. Because thiswas assumed to be so, a good contrastive analysis ofthe NL and the TL could accurately predict all thedifficulties that learner would encounter in trying tolearn the TL. These claims were made on logicalgrounds and almost always supported only by refer-ence to anecdotal evidence. It is important to notethat these claims were not supported by reference todata obtained from the systematic study of learnerlanguage itself, but usually only to utterances thatanalysts happened to have noticed and , it is all too likely that analysts tend tonotice data that their theories predict and not tonotice data that do not fit their theories.

5 Learnerutterances that were clear evidence of transfer werenoticed and quoted, but learner utterances that didnot provide evidence of transfer apparently wentunnoticed or were classified as residue. Thus, in thelate 1950s and the 1960s, there were virtually nosystematic attempts to observe learner language andto document scientifically the way in which learnerlanguage developed, or to independently and objec-tively verify the strong claims of the contrastive anal-ysis hypothesis that language transfer was the soleprocess shaping learner (1957: 72), in an influential statement, ex-plicitly characterized the predictions of contrastiveanalysts as statements that should be viewed as hypo-thetical until they could be validated by reference to the actual speech of students.

6 Error analysis was an enterprise born of the attemptto validate the predictions of contrastive analysis bysystematically gathering and analyzing the speech andwriting of second-language learners. For perhaps thefirst time in history, the focus moved from teachingmaterials and hypotheses about second-languagelearning problems, to the systematic observation oflearner language. The focus was what scientific studycould reveal about the real problems of second-language learners. Preliminary evidence from earlyInterlanguage747studies began to come in, the results of which showedan increasingly large residue of errors that did notin fact seem to be caused by transfer as contrastiveanalysts had predicted. These errors became an in-creasingly major source of difficulty for the contras-tive analysis hypothesis, a hypothesis that had posedthe interesting question of what shapes learner lan-guage, but which, increasingly clearly, could notanswer that question (1967, 1981) was the first and most persua-sive scholar to develop an alternative framework: theidea that second-language learners do not begin withtheir native language, but rather with a universal built-in syllabus that guides them in the systematicdevelopment of their own linguistic system, or tran-sitional competence.

7 Thus, the second-languagelearner s transitional competence is different fromeither the NL or the TL or even some combinationof the two, since it begins with an essential, simple,probably universal grammar. Corder also pointed outthat the native language often serves as a positiveresource for second-language acquisition, facilitatingthe learning of TL features that resemble features ofthe NL. Corder argued that second-language learners errors were evidence of the idiosyncratic linguisticsystem that they were building and so were valuabledata for research into the nature of the built-in sylla-bus. Corder called for research involving the analysisof learner errors gathered longitudinally, proposed aframework for eliciting and analyzing those errors,and posed the goal as one of characterizing the built-in syllabus and the transitional competence of sec-ond-language learners.

8 His students and colleaguesset about pursuing that term interlanguage was most persuasivelyintroduced and developed into a set of testable hy-potheses by Selinker (1972), after long conversationswith Corder and other scholars in the field. The inter-language hypothesis was intended to, and did, stimu-late systematic research into the development of thelanguage produced by adult second-language learners,with a view to objectively identifying psycholinguisticprocesses (transfer included) that shaped learner lan-guage, explaining how learners set up interlingualidentifications across linguistic systems, and account-ing for the troubling tendency of adult learners tostop learning, or to InterlanguageThe term interlanguage was defined by Selinker(1972) as the separate linguistic system evidencedwhen adult second-language learners attempt to ex-press meaning in a language they are in the processof learning.

9 This linguistic system encompasses notjust phonology, morphology, and syntax, but also thelexical, pragmatic, and discourse levels of the inter-language. The interlanguage system is clearly not sim-ply the native language morphological and syntacticsystem relexified with target language vocabulary;that is, it is not the morphological and syntactic sys-tem that would have been evidenced had the learnertried to express those meanings in his or her nativelanguage. Just as clearly, it is not the target languagesystem that would have been evidenced had nativespeakers of the target language tried to express thosesame meanings. Rather, the interlanguage differs sys-tematically from both the native language and thetarget is usually thought of as characteris-tic only of adult second-language learners (but see Revised interlanguage Hypothesis below), that is,learners who have passed puberty and thus cannotbe expected to be able to employ the language acqui-sition device (LAD) that innate language learningstructure that was instrumental in their acquisition oftheir native language.

10 Children acquiring second lan-guages are thought to have the ability to re-engage theLAD and thus to avoid the error pattern and ultimatefossilization that characterize the interlanguages ofadult second-language to the notion of interlanguage is the phe-nomenon of fossilization that process in which thelearner s interlanguage stops developing, apparentlypermanently. Second-language learners who begintheir study of the second language after puberty donot succeed in developing a linguistic system that ap-proaches that developed by children acquiring thatlanguage natively. This observation led Selinker to hy-pothesize that adults use a latent psychological struc-ture (instead of a LAD) to acquire second five psycholinguistic processes of this latentpsychological structure that shape interlanguagewere hypothesized (Selinker, 1972) to be (a) nativelanguage transfer, (b) overgeneralization of targetlanguage rules, (c) transfer of training, (d) strategiesof communication, and (e) strategies of learning.