interlanguage and interlanguage continuum
TRANSCRIPT
Interlanguage And InterlanguageContinuum
'Tofan Dzui:Harrfjanto
~ewing the approximative systems of language learners not aspathologies tt;' .~ eradicated but as necessal)' stages in thegradual ~Ulslbonof the tMget system may result in a deeperunderstanding of language in general and a more humane approach to language teaching. "Richards & Sampson, 1974b:17-8)
1. Introduction
O ut of his interest in analysing learners' errors, and of his dissatisfaction
with the then very popular method ofContrastive Analysis in dealing withlearners' errors Corder (1967) wrote anarticle entiUed "The Significance of Ieamers' Errors," in which he proposed that atleast some ot the strategies empoyed bythe second language learner are the~me a~ those by which a first languageIS acquired. He further maintained thatboth first and second language learnersmake errors in order to test out certainhypotheses about the nature of the language theyare leaming.To him.then,themaking of errors is. as opposed to theview adopt eel by the Contrastive Analysis Theory, a strategy used both by chi ldren acquiring thei r firs t language and bythose learning a second language.
Furthe rmore. Corder advocated thestudy 01 learners' language, which. borrowing from Chomsky's terminology, hecalled transl tlonal co mpetence. Thisconcept 01 language learners' languageas a lingu istic system in its own right wasthen take n up by re searc hers working inthe field of second language acquisition.These studies of learner language developed very rapidly through out the 1970s.and grew into what is now commonlyknown as Inter language studies or In-terlanguage theory. Acco rding to thistheory,
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·second language speech rarely contorms 10what one expeclS native speakers of .the Iargel language 10 produce,that It IS~ an exac t translatiOn 01 thenative Iangua~. that it differs from theIalTjJet language in systematic ways, andthai the forms 01 utterances produce<! inthe seccnd language by a leamer are notrandom. Ttis interlanguage hypothesisproposes lhatthe relevant data of a theory of second lanouage leam ing must bethe speech fo rms wtlid'l rewt from theanempted expression of meaning in asecond language· (Seli nker el. er.,1975:140).
This theory has now developed tosuch an extent that as Stem (1983.354)observes, -it is the most theoretically developed and at the same time the mostempirically investigated approach to thestudy of second language profICiency .·
It is not th e aim ot th is article. however, to trace the development 01 interlanguage studies. It will instead attemptto examine the basic concepts underlyingthe notion 01interlanguage and its relatedaspects, that is interlanguage continuumand tossilisation . It will be obvious in thecou rse of the discussion that attention willbe focused on the interlanguage contlnuum, th e ways in which second languagelearners prog ress along it. and why at anyone stage in this continuum a learner mayfossi lise .
2. Interlanguage
The term Interlang uage was firstused by Selinker (1972) to refer to aseparate linguistic system whose exist-
Humtur ioN 1111995