24JValdivia ATL

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Approaches

to
LL
22 Language
Logins:
EUFPMLAEILE669997 and
ARFPMLAEILE640888
Group: 24
Interlanguage
Interlanguage Date: October 3, 2010

Javier Valdivia
L1
L1
SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT:
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE

Contents
SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT: APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE................................................................. .2
Introduction....................................................................................................................................................2
Task 1.............................................................................................................................................................3
DATA:...................................................................................................................................................... .3
QUESTIONS:............................................................................................................................................3
- Task 2......................................................................................................................................................... .5
DATA:...................................................................................................................................................... .5
QUESTIONS:............................................................................................................................................6
Task 3.............................................................................................................................................................9
DATA:...................................................................................................................................................... .9
QUESTIONS:............................................................................................................................................9
CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................... .13
Introduction
The history of foreign language teaching has seen radical shifts as regards the perception of the errors
made by learners, ranging from the utter prohibition of incorrect forms deemed as failure on the part of
the students, through the acknowledgement of the possibilities of both positive and negative
consequences of the transfer of features from the students’ mother tongue, and to the consideration of the
uniqueness and acceptability of different intermediate stages in the learners’ development. The goal of
this piece of work is to analyze different data that show some of the peculiar traits of that interlanguage
(Selinker, 1972), focusing on different aspects relevant to the topic.

Task 1

● Native Languages: Mixed.


● Target Language: English.
● Background Information: Intermediate level, students on an intensive course.
● Data Source: student compositions.
DATA:
1. Soccer is the most common sporting.
2. America refused continual supported our military request.
3. When he was 7 years old, he went schooling.
4. About two hours driving eastern from Bangkok.
5. After finished my college studied, I went to my country.
6. Doctors have the right to removed it from him.
7. There is a night for asleep.
8. Moreover it may lead to conflicting.
9. I am not going to get married when I will graduation the school.

QUESTIONS:
1. Work out an IL generalization that might account for the forms in boldface. Give your reasons
for postulating this generalization.
The linguistic process involved in the construction of these students’ interlanguage (IL) is an
overgeneralization of the target language (TL) structures. In the case presented above, the
overgeneralization is independent of the students’ mother tongue since the class is a mixed classroom of
native languages. According to Richards (1974) these errors are common to speakers of different
languages when they develop hypotheses about the structure of the foreign language.
After analyzing the above sentences, taken from the students’ compositions, we observe that all of them
have in common a grammar mistake. It seems that the students have simplified elements and structures of
the language to reduce the complexity of the language system.
In the first sentence for instance, the learner is using the adjective “sporting” as a verb.
In sentence number 2, the learner is using the adjective “supported” instead of the noun “support”. In
sentence number 3, the learner is making a mistake between the “act of teaching” (adjective) and the
institution “school”. In sentence number 4, the learner uses again the adjective “eastern” instead of the
noun “East”. Sentence number 5 is another example of the use of an adjective (“studied”) instead of the
noun “studies”. In sentence number 6, the learner should have said “remove”, instead of using the
adjective “removed”. In sentence number 7, apart from the incorrect use of the form “asleep” (when he
probably meant “sleeping” or “sleep”), the sentence produced by the student contains a preposition that
does not fit in the assumed intended meaning. Sentence number 8 is a clear example of the wrong use of
the adjective “conflicting” where “conflict” or “war” would have been more correct. In the last sentence,
the noun “graduation” has been placed instead of the correct grammar element, which is the verb
“graduate”
Once we have observed and analysed from the grammatical point of view all these sentences, we can
postulate the following interlanguage generalization;
“The English learners of this classroom tend to overgeneralize at a morphological level: they seem to be
confused with the suffixes that indicate word categories”. They tend to select the right root for the
meanings they want to put through, but they have problems picking out the correct derivational suffix”.
According to Jain (1974) this overgeneralization is based on the L2. It is an example of simplification,
where meaning remains clear, despite grammatical elements are left out.

2. What strategy/strategies do you think these learners have come up with regarding lexical use?
Before answering the question given to us, we certainly have to determine what we understand by
strategy referred to a group of students learning the same target language. In Richards, Platt and Weber
(1986) words strategies are “procedures used in learning, thinking, etc... which serve as a way of
reaching a goal. In language learning, learning strategies and communication strategies are those
conscious or unconscious processes which language learners make use of in learning and using a
language”
Once the definition is clear, we will attempt to say that it appears as if the students have resorted to the
use of learning strategies, particularly cognitive strategies (following Ellis’, 1997, classification), as they
seem to be transforming certain features of the input so as to bridge the gap between their interlanguage
level and the target language. In this case, the errors are derived from the use of particular word-forms
that share the root of the words the students might have been trying to utilize, but as the forms they use
belong to different grammatical categories, the resulting sentences end up being ungrammatical.
We cannot speak of the use of a particular communication strategy (in Tarone’s, 1980, taxonomy) such as
word coinage, since the words the students wrongly use do form part of the TL lexis, that is to say, they
are not inventing new words, but rather using already existing lexical items in functions they cannot have.
We cannot be certain in the use of conscious transfer either, which is the transferring of a feature from L1
to L2 or another L2 to L2, since the group of targeted students has a mix of different mother tongues. We
can, however, identify a possible misuse as a result of the transfer of training. The way in which the
teacher teaches play a fundamental role in the individual’s IL. As researchers such as Richards (1971)
suggests, the teacher may have overemphasized some aspect of the prefix and suffix formation that had
encouraged student mistakes related to the incorrect transformation of words.
3. What additional information, if any, would you like to have from these learners to test your
hypothesis?
In order for us to test the hypothesis proposed before and to develop adequate materials and feedback to
help the student to restore and reorganise his interlanguage, we need to find out what was the cause of the
problem in the first place.
First of all, we need more data. We need to give the students more opportunities to make use of the
elements and grammar mistakes that they are carrying out. This can be done through pre-assessments,
assessments, questionnaires, grammar exercises, compositions and communication activities.
Once we have enough data, we need to conduct an individual study to determine whether our students
need input enhancement. For our individual study we will need to know the level of our student, his/her
mother tongue, and a variety of input activities where the student has to demonstrate his/her knowledge of
the grammar feature that we are intending to study.
After our research we will be able to conclude if our student’s misunderstandings can be classified as
“errors” or as “mistakes”. If it is a mistake, we will evaluate if that mistake needs to be corrected or not
and if it is an error, we will possibly be able to establish if that error is derived from “fossilization”,
“creative construction from universal grammar”, “transfer of training” or “transfer from L1”

Task 2
● Native Language: Spanish.
● Target Language: English.
● Background Information: Pre-adolescents, born in Mexico, living in United States.
● Data Source: Responses to a picture story from a standard proficiency test.
DATA:
Below are the "correct" responses to standardised test items.
1. He wants to eat some food. 3. The king would have eaten it.
2. The dog ate the food. 4. It fell.

Below are the responses to these test items by five ESL learners (A-E).
A. B.
1. he wants to eat 1. he want the food
2. the dog ate it 2. the dog ate ...
3. the king would eat it 3. the king eat ...
4. it fell 4. they fall
C. D.
1. he wants to get some food 1. he want ...
2. the dog ate it 2. the dog eat ...
3. the king would have ate it 3. the king will eat ...
4. it fell 4. it fall
E.
1. he wanna eat ...
2. the dog eat-ate it
3. he would eat it
4. it fall
QUESTIONS:

1. What feature of English grammar is being tested in each of the test items?
The features of English grammar that are tested in each of the items are the following:
 Item 1: The main feature of the first item appears to be subject-verb agreement between a third-person
singular subject and the verb in the simple present verb tense. Besides, the item is testing subject-less
infinitival subordinate clauses and the overt realization of the internal argument of the verb “to eat”.
 Item 2: The second item attempts to evaluate the irregular simple past form of the verb “to eat”, plus
the overt realization of the internal argument of the same verb.
 Item 3: In this case, the tested feature is the conditional mood of the verb “to eat” in the present perfect
verb tense.
 Item 4: In this case the irregular simple past form of the verb “to fall” is tested.

2. Who appears to be the most advanced learner and why?


Apparently, student c) seems to be the one that shows the most advanced mastery of the TL, as the
following data can show:
 The student is able to come up with the correct form of the verb “to eat” in the simple present. In the
same sentence, (s)he provides the required subject-less infinitival embedded clause with the overt
direct object, albeit selecting a different verb (“get” instead of “eat”).
 In the second sentence, (s)he uses the correct past form of the verb, and the replacement of the noun
phrase “the food” by the pronoun “it” is both grammatically and discursively adequate.
 The third sentence contains the complex sequence “modal verb + auxiliary + main verb in the past
participle”. Student c) is the only one who is able to come up with the crucially necessary auxiliary
verb “have”, that is the specific item that contains the grammatical information of “perfectiveness”
that is required in the item. Of the rest of the students, some use the correct modal, but none of them
makes use of the correct auxiliary verb to form the present perfect, and so the sentences they produced
lack the semantic component of completion that is introduced via the perfective aspect. And while
student c), as all the subjects in the data, does not come up with the correct participial form of the main
verb (i.e. “eaten”), (s)he all the same produces the past form of the verb, which may be considered as
proof of her/his awareness of the need of a particular form of the verb in that construction, other than
the bare form “eat”.
 The last example shows exactly the expected answer of the item.
As we can see, student’s c) interlanguage show the closest approximation to the required target structures,
while her/his deviations from the expected forms are much more reduced than any of the other students’
answers, and, even so, the mistakes show coherence to the grammatical system of the TL.

3. Who appears to be the least advanced learner and why?


The analysis of the data leads us to conclude that the least advanced student is d). Her/his answers contain
the greatest deviations from the expected responses. Suffice it to say that, except for sentence 3, and
leaving aside the issue of the expected meaning of the item in question, all the rest of the sentences
produced by d) are ungrammatical. These are the errors that can be identified in each of this student’s
sentences:
 In the first sentence, the student is not able to produce the correct form of the main verb, namely
“wants”, and the whole rest of the expected sentence is plainly missing.
 In the second sentence, not only is the student unable to select the correct past form of the verb “eat”,
but also (s)he fails to introduce the required direct object of the verb.
 While the third sentence may seem, at first sight, not to show significant grammatical deviances, the
comparison between the expected sentence and the student’s production reveals significant
incongruities as regards meaning: The conditional element introduced by the modal “would” is
missing, as well as the idea of completion signaled by the use of the present perfect. Apart from that,
the expected internal argument of the verb “eat” is not present.
 Last but not least, sentence 4 does not show the required past form of the verb, and if the simple
present tense was accepted as an alternative answer, the sentence would all the same be incorrect,
since the verb does not show agreement with the third person singular subject.

4. What generalization can be made about the order of acquisition for learning these constructions?
Please note that you will not be able to reproduce the matrix you have for this question (in your study
materials) in the VC. You could use point form here.
If we take the data in these students’ responses as a sample of what the order of acquisition of the relevant
aspects of the TL, we may say that the items seem to be ordered in this way:
- Agreement between a third person singular subject and a verb in the simple present verb tense:
stage 1: Students don’t produce the correct form (e.g. He want)
stage 2: Students produce the correct form (e.g. He wants)
- Irregular simple past forms:
stage 1: Students produce the bare form of the verb (e.g. The dog eat)
stage 2: Students produce forms that mix the bare form with the correct irregular past form (e.g. The
dog eat-ate)
stage 3: Students produce the correct irregular form (e.g. The dog ate) 1
- Overt realization of the internal argument (direct object, in this case) of the verb “to eat”:
stage 1: The direct object is omitted in contexts in which it is required (e.g. The dog ate)
stage 2: The direct object is included (e.g. The dog ate it)
- Modal plus present perfect verb tense:
stage 1: Students produce the bare form of the main verb (e.g. The king eat)
stage 2: Students produce an incorrect modal plus the main verb in the bare form (e.g. The king will
eat)
stage 3: Students produce the correct modal plus the main verb in the bare form (e.g. The king would
eat it)
stage 4: Students produce the correct modal verb, plus the correct auxiliary and a non-bare form of the
main verb (e.g. The king would have ate it)

5. Tests of this type are designed primarily to elicit spontaneous utterances in a controlled setting.
What limitations are there in doing order of acquisition analysis based on data of this sort?
The difficulties in trying to ascertain the order of acquisition in tests like this are derived from the fact
that the eliciting of spontaneous responses may bring about a range of answers broader than those
anticipated. Therefore, the data collected may not be simply classified to reflect a truly generalizable set
of elements to be classified into an order-of-acquisition sequence.
Apart from that, if the study is only synchronic, there is a chance of misanalyzing students responses that
fail to show the expected TL form due to the proposed “U-shaped” development of IL, along the lines of
Lightbown’s (1985) and Larsen-Freeman’s (1997) proposals, and so the analyst may consider that the
students are in an earlier IL stage than the one they are actually in.
In addition, the test environment may cause students to be nervous and inhibited, and so the answers they
produce may lead to incorrect conclusions.
Task 3

● Native Language: Mexican Spanish.


● Target Language: English.
1
● Background Information: Adult male.
● Data Source: Tape-recorded spontaneous speech.
DATA:
Following are examples of this subject's use of negatives:
1. No write. 10. Me no comin.
2. No like it. 11. No in town.
3. I me no speaka too much Englee, eh? 12. No cheese.
4. Me no like stay in the house. 13. No now.
5. No es correct. 14. No American.
6. I no like tortilla. 15. The operation ya no good.
7. You no go Calexico? 16. No money.
8. My brother no go to school. 17. Maybe no good for me.
9. No, ya no work.

QUESTIONS:
1. Describe this learner's knowledge of English negation.
This is a clear example of communicative competence. The learner is an adult male, having a spontaneous
conversation with another person, possibly in the street. The learner’s mother tongue is Spanish. We don’t
know the mother tongue of the interlocutor but we know that the conversation is being carried out in
English.
To develop this activity, we are going to focus on sentence structure, specifically in the use of the
negation structure that this English learner makes during the time that the tape is recording this
conversation.
To have a visual reference of the learner mistakes, we are going to classify the sentences that this learner
produces, by following the taxonomy developed by Tarone (1980) as follows:

Avoidance (of -Me no like stay in the house.


specific linguistic Avoidance of linguistic features - I no like tortilla.
features) - Me no like stay in the house

Approximation (trying to paraphrase in


No, ya no work.
order to get a closer understanding of
Paraphrase The operation ya no good
what the interlocutor says)
(repeating in
other words) -me no comin
Word coinage (inventing words)
- I me no speaka too much Englee, eh?

Conscious Literal translation (from L1 to L2) -no write


transfer -no like it
-my brother no go to school
-no money
-no in town
-no now
- no American
- Maybe no good for me.
- No cheese
- You no go Calexico?

Language switch (resorting to L1 or other


No es correct
L2)

As we can see from the data table above, this subject is essentially making three kinds of mistakes:
1) The learner is simplifying the language –both syntactically and semantically– by avoiding certain
linguistic features that he considers difficult or he is not aware of. He never uses the auxiliary “do” or
“don’t”. The learner uses speech that resembles that of very young children or pidgins. This may be
either because he cannot, in fact, as yet produce the target forms, or because he does not feel sure of
them.
2) He invents or resorts to the mother tongue, when he doesn’t know the word in L2.
3) He translates from L1 to L2 literally.
After having analyzed the use this learner makes of the negation in English, we can conclude several
aspects from this study;
First of all, the learner seems not to have followed any kind of instruction in second language; therefore,
he is not aware of the use of the auxiliary form in English.
Secondly, the learner is maybe a newcomer or his interaction with English-speaking people has been very
limited.
Thirdly, the learner uses his mother tongue, Spanish, as a base for the interaction in English. He produces
questions and negative statements in the same way that he will do it if he were speaking in Spanish.
All in all we can deem these data as a case of negative transfer from the mother tongue (L1). The
interference with the L1 prevents the subject from striving to come up with the right solution in the L2.
However, despite all the grammar mistakes and structure mistakes present in the conversation, the goal of
communication defined as a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create
shared understanding has been achieved in this conversation at a basic level.
We can conclude by adding that the L1 does affect the course of IL development; but this influence is not
always predictable. As we can see from the example, the learner presents features of pidginization and
fossilisation. However, we cannot predict how this subject will evolve in the future because the variables
that account for the success in learning a second language are numerous and diverse.

2. At this same time, this non-native speaker produced many examples of "I don't know". Does this
alter your hypothesis about the pattern described in question 1? If so, how?
If the non-native speaker under scrutiny has been producing the negative form correctly during this
conversation, our hypothesis certainly needs to be revised. As this is the case, we can establish a new
hypothesis stating that the learner is consciously noticing the gap. In Schmidt and Frota (1986) words
“one of the advantages of a conscious notice-the-gap principle is that it provides a way to include a role
for correction”.
This affirmation leads us to the term restructuring, which Ellis (1997) describes as the “process by which
learners reorganize their interlanguage in the light of new evidence about the target language”. In
Batstone’s (1994) words “Restructuring is dependent on plentiful opportunities for re-noticing, so that
re-noticing acts as a kind of gateway to restructuring, the one facilitating the other”.
However, IL development is not linear, but characterized by U-shaped development. This means that the
learner goes back and forth from old conjectures to new conjectures. This U-shaped growth concept
focuses on the fact that certain behavior may appear, disappear and then reappear over time. In this case,
this U-shaped development can be enhanced by cross-linguistic influence between L1 and L2.
To test our hypothesis, it will be necessary a continuous follow-up of the student’s IL development over
time, providing the learner with new opportunities of communication and interaction.

Conclusion
An interlanguage is not static but rather it is a dynamic system, following a developmental continuum that
shows increasing complexity. During the process of learning a second language, learners make numerous
errors due to several factors, such as language interference, linguistic errors, syntactic deviance, transfer
of training, and the strategies that a learner chooses to use during a communicative interaction may be
about variation in her performance.
Interlanguage is the result of the natural process of learning a new language. Interference between the L1
and the TL can be negative as well as positive. Not only does the L1 play a fundamental role in the
development of IL, but there’s also a plethora of intervening factors at stake, such as the students’ internal
mechanisms to learn a language, their latent psychological structure, the way the language is being taught
by teachers and the kind of strategies they are able to apply to deal with conversational problems in
second language due to his/her limited knowledge of the second language.
In order to help our students to enhance their IL in the classroom and consequently prevent our students’
interlanguage from being fossilizated we must analyze the way we are teaching the language and the way
our students are learning. This means, instruction must be designed to create opportunities in the
classroom to raise student’s awareness of their own errors and formulate strategies to help our students to
target those errors by noticing them. Once we have raised our learners’ consciousness, the new input and
feedback must help our students to reformulating and restructuring their interlanguage to bring it as close
as it can be from L2.
References

Batstone, R. (1994) Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, H. D. (1994) Teaching by Principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. San


Francisco State University: Prentice Hall Regents.
Ellis, R. (1995) The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, R. (1997): Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jain, M. P. (1974) "Error analysis: source, cause and significance", in J. Richards Error Analysis.
Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. Harlow, Essex: Longman.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (1997) “Chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition” Applied


Linguistics, 18/2: 141-165.

Lightbown, P. M. (1985) Great expectations: Second language acquisition research and classroom
teaching. Applied Linguistics, 6, 173-89.

Lightbown, P. M. (1985) Input and acquisition for second-language learners in and out of classrooms.
Applied Linguistics, 6(3), 263.

Richards, J. C. (1971) "Error analysis and second language strategies". Language Sciences, 17: 12-22.

Richards, J. C. (1974) Error Analysis. Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. Harlow, Essex:
Longman.

Richards, J.; Platt, J. & Weber, H. (1986) Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. London: Longman.

Selinker, L. (1972) “Interlanguage”. IRAL, 10, (3), 209-231.

Schmidt, R. W., & Frota, S. N. (1986) "Developing Basic Conversational Ability in a Case Study of an
Adult Learner of Portuguese". In R. Day (Ed.) Talking to Learn: Conversation in Second Language
Acquisition (pp. 237-319). Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Tarone, E. (1980) "Communication strategies, foreigner talk, and repair in interlanguage". Language
Learning, 30: 417-431.

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