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,

9.

·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