It is a well-attested truth that students devote errors when discovering a second language. Mistakes remain in fact thought about inevitable in any finding out procedure. For a really long time various authors (Corder, 1967; Richards, 1971; Dulay and Burt, 1972, as cited in Taylor, 1975;-RRB- see those mistakes not only as variances of the guidelines but also as essential sources for studying the procedure of discovering a target language. The learner’s psychological procedure and guidelines embraced by them at different stages are evidenced by those mistakes.
(Fauziati, 2011). It is, therefore, the language of the student that Larry Selinker (1972) would study and name interlanguage. He would think about interlanguage as follows:
L2 students build a linguistic system that draws, in part, on the student’s L1 but is also various from it and also from the target language. A learner’s interlanguage is, for that reason, a special linguistic system (as cited in Ellis, 1997, pag. 33).
This system of the language is evolutional and dynamic, and its grammar is under building and construction and in consistent development.
It might have disparity errors but it will be altering and developing all the time. Selinker (1972, as mentioned in Taylor, 1975) declares that interlanguage is not simply the student target language grammar that is filled with errors due to the learner’s L1 disturbance however, instead, it is a linguistic system that reflects the student’s dealing with the variances of the target language itself. Selinker also mentions that the viewpoint of Interlanguage thinks about the learning methods which the student employs in a task despite of their mom tongue or type of training they receive.
According to Selinker (1972 ), there are a number of processes or methods that the learner embraces in order to assist them get the target language. The first one is L1 Transfer, which is a knowing strategy where the student uses their own L1 as a resource.” The learner transfers their knowledge of their native language into their target language efforts” (Taylor, 1975, p. 393). The second procedure is L2 Transfer, in which the student works out the guidelines of L2 and challenges them. The 3rd process is Overgeneralization; the student uses an L2 rule in scenarios in which a native speaker would not use them.
This can occur at different levels, namely, at the phonetic level, at the grammatical level, at the lexical level and at the level of discourse. Taylor (1975) defines overgeneralization as “a process in which a language learner uses a syntactic rule of the target language inappropriately when he attempts to generate a novel target language utterance”. The fourth process or strategy is General Learning Principles; the learner acquires strategies for learning the language, such as association or grouping.
However, these strategies are not exclusive to language learning; they can be applied to any other kind of knowledge. Finally, the fifth process is Communication Strategies, which are actions that the learner carries out in order to compensate their lack of knowledge and also to reinforce or optimize communication. Among these strategies are body language, circumlocution, using a general term, resorting to L1, asking for help (the teacher or the dictionary), coining (making up a word) and avoidance. All of these five processes contribute to the development of the L2.
Another important characteristic of Interlanguage is Fossilization, which is a term introduced also by Selinker in 1972. It refers to “the persistence of plateaus of non-target-like competence in the IL” (as cited in Fauziati, 2011, p. 25). Selinker (1972) provides a precise definition for fossilization:
A mechanism that underlies surface linguistic material which speakers will tend to keep in their IL productive performance, no matter what the age of the learner or the amount of instruction he receives in the TL. (Selinker, 1972: 229, cited in Han, 2002) In other words, fossilization can be described as the interruption of the process of development of interlanguage. Learners are usually expected to achieve progress as their competence advances towards the target language system, and thus it contains fewer errors. However, some errors continue to occur and never disappear completely, and are, therefore, considered as fossilized. That is to say, such errors are permanent and defining characteristics of the learner’s language system (Fauziati, 2011).
Among the factors that influence fossilization in the learner’s learning process, there are both external and internal reasons that are worth mentioning. Environment is an external reason that can influence the student’s performance and it can be due to the lack of exposure to the language or probably the level of the course the student is taking is either higher or lower than their level of the language. As regards internal reasons, the learner himself is considered to be a significant influence on their performance. His personality (insecurity, family background, uncertainty), motivation, demotivation and backsliding (the student unlearns things he already knows and goes back to previous stages) contribute to the mechanism of fossilization.
Another important point to consider is that of interlanguage pragmatics, which has been defined by some authors, namely, Kasper and Dahl (1991), Kasper (1998) and Kasper and Rose (1999). However, in this paper, the concept of interlanguage pragmatics will be considered as follows:
The investigation of non-native speakers’ comprehension and production of speech acts, and the acquisition of L2-related speech act knowledge. (Kasper and Dahl, 1991:215, cited in Barron, 2001) Interlanguage pragmatics deals with use of the language as action and its research focuses on the learner’s use and acquisition of pragmatic knowledge.
Although many studies on interlanguage have been based on spontaneous speech data, there is considerable difficulty in processing such data in order to tackle with problems persisting in the L2 learner’s initial state. One possible reason for this is that the speech utterances are gathered so early and may not exactly mirror the L2 initial state. Another perplexing problem is that the collection may be scarce and useless. (Lakshmanan and Selinker, 2001)
A further problem is that language learners, especially young L2 learners, have been thought to undergo a ‘silent period’, during which they do not produce any utterance (Lakshmanan and Selinker, 2001). Although students may differ significantly with respect to the duration of their silent period since some of them undergo longer periods than others, it is not proven what is exactly happening in this stage. Moreover, it cannot be proved whether there is passive acquisition of some of the elements of the target language while undergoing the silent period. Consequently, an accurate account of the development of the language of the learner is difficult to provide.
Another main argument concerning interlanguage is that of comparative fallacy. As Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001) state, criticizing the language learner’s speech utterances as ungrammatical without drawing first a comparison between the interlanguage speech utterances with the related speech utterances of the native speaker is not advisable since it leads to either underestimation and/or overestimation of the student’s linguistic performance. The interlanguage competence’s information should be obtained by examining the data of the interlanguage performance. Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001) suggest that in order to achieve this and not belittle or overvalue the student’s performance, it is necessary to compare consistently the interlanguage performance data with the native speaker’s performance.
Taking everything into account, interlanguage is a theory that has been supported by a number of scholars because it helps educators know what their learner’s language is like. However, it is worth mentioning that it has some weaknesses that need to be addressed. As for teachers, it is not only important that they support this theory but they also should identify its flaws as well so as not to misjudge our language learner’s performance on the language.
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