INTERLANGUAGE AND THE ‘NATURAL’ ROUTE OF DEVELOPMENT (TAKEN FROM a Rod Ellis book:UNDERSTANDING OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISTION)

INTERLANGUAGE AND THE ‘NATURAL’ ROUTE OF DEVELOPMENT

(TAKEN FROM UNDERSTANDING OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISTION)

Summarized by

IMELDA MALLIPA, S.Pd (11B01113)

SYARIFAH SALEH, S.Pd (11B01116)

English education

This chapter will explore the case for a mentalist interpretation of SLA. In order to do so, it will consider mentalist accounts of L1 acquisition, the interlanguage construct in SLA, the empirical evidence for natural developmental route, and the extent to which this route is the same in L1 acquisition and SLA.

1.    Mentalist Account of First Language Acquisition

According to mentalist theory, L1 acquisition was the product of an ‘Acquisition Device (AD)’ by which means the child related a set of Universal Grammatical Rules to the surface structure of the language he was learning.

Mentalist view of L1 acquisition posited the following:

1)      Language is a human-specific faculty

2)      Language exist as independent faculty in human mind

3)      The primary determinant of  L1 acquisition is the child’s AD, which is genetically endowed and provides the child with a set of principles about grammar

4)      The AD atrophies with age

5)      The process of acquisition consists of hypothesis testing, by which means the grammar of the learner’s mother tongue is related to the principles of ‘Universal Grammar (UG)”

Mentalist theory views language acquisition as universal process. Process is used to refer to the stages of development that characterized the route of child follow, it is a descriptive term/ process also concerns how the child constructs internal rules and how he adjusts them from stage to stage, it is an explanatory term. The process are internal and operate largely independently of environmental influences is no longer entirely defensible. The research has shown that many of the children’s early utterances were unique, in the sense that no native-speaking adult could have produce them, for example ‘no the sun shining’. The utterance of children can be explained only in terms of the child operating his own system, consisting of rules which were not part of the adult code.

2.    Interlanguage

The term interlanguge was first used by Selinker (1972). Interlanguage refer to the structure system which the learner at any given stage in his development and it also refer to the series of interlocking systems which form what Corder (1967) called the learner’s built-in syllabus (i.e. the interlanguage continuum).

Interlanguage focused on its three principle features, all of which were raised by Selinker in one way or another. They are listed as follows:

1)      Language-learner language is permeable

The learner’s interlanguage system is permeable, in the sense that rules that constitute the learner’s knowledge at any one stage are not fixed, but open to amendment. In many respects this is a general feature of natural languages, which evolve over time in ways not dissimilar to the developments that take place language-learner language.

2)      Language-learner language is dynamic

The learner’s interlanguage is constantly changing. However he does not jump from one stage to the next, but rather slowly revises the interim systems to accommodate new hypotheses about the target language system, for example, early WH question are typically non-inverted, (e.g. ‘what you want), but when the learner acquires the subject inversion rule, he does not apply it immediately to all WH question. To begin with he restricts the rule to limited number of verbs and to particular WH pronouns (e.g. ‘who’ and ‘what’) later he extends the rule, by making it apply  both to an increasing range of verbs and to other WH pronouns.

3)      Language-learner language is systematic

It is possible to detect the rule based nature of the learner’s use of the L2. He does not select harphazardly from his store of interlanguage rules but in predictable ways.

            The empirical the research of the 1970s was of three types- Error Analysis, Cross-Sectional Studies, and Longitudinal Case Studies.

1)      Error Analysis

The goals of traditional Error Analysis were pedagogic-errors provided information which could be used to sequence items for teaching or to device remedial lessons.

The procedure for Error Analysis is spell out in Corder (1974). It is as follows:

(1)   A corpus of language is selected. This involve deciding on the size of sample, the medium to be sampled, and the homogeneity of the sample ( with regard to the learner’s age, L1 background, stage of development)

(2)   The errors in corpus are identified.  Distinguish lapses from errors

(3)   The errors are classified. This involves assigning a grammatical description to each error.

(4)   The errors are explained. In this stage of the procedure an attempt is made to identify the psycholinguistic cause of errors.

(5)   The errors are evaluated. This stage involves assessing the seriousness of error in order to take principled teaching decisions.

The context for the new interest in errors was the recognition that they provided information about the process of acquisition. Error analysis provides two kinds of information about interlanguage. They are the linguistic type of errors produced by L2 learners, for instance, provides a list of different types of error involving verb and the psycholinguistic type of errors produce by L2 learners such as overgeneralization, ignorance of rules.

2)      Cross-Sectional Studies

A number of studies, commonly referred to as the morpheme studies, were carried out to investigate the order of acquisition of a range of grammatical factors in speech of L2 learners.

Stage                                       Grammatical feature acquired

1 

       

 

2  

         

 

3

                

 

4         

The acquisition hierarchy

3)      Longitudinal Case Studies

Longitudinal studies tried to account for the gradual growth of competence in terms of the strategies used by learner at different developmental studies. Ditmar (1980) found the acquisition of L2 syntax involves a series of transitional stages which are more or less universal. Transitional construction in SLA are defined by Dulay et al. (1982:121) as the language forms learners use while they still learning the grammar of language. L2 learners do not progress from zero knowledge of a target language rule to perfect knowledge of the rule. They progress through a series of interim or developmental stages on their way to target language competence.

The grammatical sub-systems of negation, interrogation, and relative clause are example of transitional construction in SLA.

(1)   negation

Negative utterances are characterized by external negation. That is, the negative particle (usually ‘no’) is attached to a declarative nucleus:

e.g. No very good

      No you playing here

A little later internal negation develops; that is negative particle move inside the utterance.

e.g. Mariana not coming today

      I no can swimm

A third step involves negative attachment to modal verbs, although this may again occur in unanalyzed units initially.

e.g. I can’t play this one

      I won’t go

In the final stage of negation the target language rule is reached. The learner develops an auxiliary system and uses “not regularly as the negative particle.

e.g. He doesn’t know anything

      I didn’t said it

      She didn’t believe me

The way along route is a gradual one, which for some learners can take longer than two years. The stages are not clearly defined, they overlap and there are also some differences among learner.

(2)   Interrogation

There appears to be an early ‘non-communicative’ stage during which thee learner is not able to produce any spontaneously interrogatives, but just repeats a question someone has asked.  The first productive questions are intonation question, e.g. Sir play football today?

The next development sees the appearance of productive WH-question but there is no subject- verb inversion to start of with, and the auxiliary verb is often omitted, e.g. what you are doing?, where you work?

Somewhat later, inversion occur in yes/no question and in WH question. Inversion with ‘be’ tends to occur before inversion with ‘do’, e.g. Are you a nurse? Where is the girl? Do you work in television?

Embedded questions are the last develop. When they first appear, they appear, they have subject-verb inversion, as in ordinary WH-questions, e.g. I don’t know where do you live and only later the learner successfully differentiate the word order of ordinary and embedded WH-questions, e.g. I don’t know what he had.

(3)   relative clause

Schuman examined the development of relative clause. He found that relative clauses used to modify the object of a sentence were acquired first, e.g. And she said all the bad things that he do, while relative clauses modifying the subject of a sentence appeared later, e.g. The boys who doesn’t have anybody to live, they take care of dogs

Ellis (1984) attempts to summarize the developmental progression which has been observed in longitudinal studies. He identifies four broad stages of development. The first is basic syntax (i.e. invariant word order), the second variant word order, the third is morphological development, and the fourth is complex sentence structure.

The mentalist view of the language learner’s knowledge of language as an internal system which is gradually revised in the direction of the target language system underlies both the notions of ‘Acquisition Device’ and ‘interlanguage’. SLA and L1 acquisition both involve transitional competence and, as might expected, this is reflected in similarities, which are not total but nevertheless are strong between both the acquisition routes and strategies that are responsible for them. It is this aspect of language learning which the notion of creative construction. The nature of the rules that learners construct is determined by mental mechanisms are innate, L1 acquisition and SLA will proceed in the same way.