Linguistics: Interlanguage

What is Interlanguage (IL)?

• A linguistic system used by second language learners to communicate in the target language.
• Created by learners as they attempt to communicate in the target language.
• Affected by the learner's native language, which is used to understand and organize the second language.

Characteristics of Interlanguage

• Has its own rule system, but contains ungrammatical sentences and elements.
• Unique to each speaker, consisting of elements from both L1 and L2, as well as the speaker's perceptions.
• Dynamic and permeable, with rules that can be altered, deleted, or added over time.

Types of Transfer

• Interlingual transfer: an error resulting from language transfer, caused by the learner's native language.
• Intralingual transfer: an error resulting from faulty or partial learning of the target language.

Fossilization

• A mechanism underlying surface linguistic material that speakers tend to keep in their IL productive performance, regardless of age or instruction.
• Defined as a permanent cessation of IL learning before the learner has attained TL norms at all levels of linguistic structure and in all discourse domains.
• Classified into temporary fossilization (stabilization) and permanent fossilization.
• Temporary fossilization indicates learning plateaus, where development of given TL features is arrested or inhibited for shorter or longer periods of time.
• Permanent fossilization often occurs among adult learners who have no intention to improve their target language, commonly in pronunciation.

Individual Fossilization

• Consists of two types: error reappearance and language competence fossilization.
• Error reappearance refers to the inappropriate interlanguage structures that are thought to have been corrected but continue to appear regularly.
• Often found in IL of beginners or learners with low proficiency.