Talk:Interlanguage

Distinction from pidgin?

How is an interlanguage different from a pidgin? I'm doing a report on pidgins and creoles and I don't quite understand the distinction. --Nabarry 01:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

A pidgin is a means to an end - create some communication between speakers of different languages without anyone going through the trouble of learning the other language "properly". Any ad-hoc construction or expression is acceptable in the early development stages of a pidgin, as long as it is actually comprehensible to others in the same context. I.e. a pidgin will NOT strive to "become" one or the other of the two (or more) languages that are involved - as soon as the communicative goal is achieved, no further development or invention is necessary.

An interlanguage, in turn, is ultimately something that has only ONE speaker, the learner. At the very beginning of language learning, the learner has some idea of what the foreign language is like, how it works. According to these ideas, s/he produces utterances. Now some of these ideas may be correct (at least for the time being), others may be wrong - the learner will (hopefully) notice that, and at some point come up with a new and better idea of how the other language works. And so on. And that's what the interlanguage is: the developing "idea of how the other language works".

IMHO "groups of speakers of an interlanguage" is a meaningful claim only from a typological perspective - although every learner will develop their very specific, own interlanguage, we can expect that the interlanguages of native speakers of the same L1 with similar language biographies, learning the same L2, will show more similarities with each other than with the interlanguage of e.g. a native speaker of language X, or with the interlanguage of someone who boosts their learning of L2 with their knowledge about a typologically related language Y.

That any help? -- Molasaria 20:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Molasaria - I've edited part of your quote above and added it to the article. It was just such a short and well-worded description of interlanguage that I couldn't resist! Of course, I'll take it down if you don't want it there. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 05:31, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

@Nabarry, Molasaria, and Gypsyjiver: I am learning American Sign Language, and it seems like students are encouraged to initially or concurrently learn Pidgin Sign English so that they can get used to the sign modality with familiar English grammar, and then get a grip on classifiers and the rest of ASL grammar. In this context, is PSE a pidgin (as the name suggests), an interlanguage, or both? Arlo James Barnes 05:07, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Embarazada

Contributors to this article may be interested to know that the article on Embarazada (the Spanish for "pregnant" and an example of a false friend) is currently up for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Embarazada. Flapdragon 10:23, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

References

To do: Change references to Template:Harvnb and citation templates. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 04:49, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup

I have just copied a lot of content over from second language acquisition. Because of that, this article has started to look a lot more like an essay, and so I put up a cleanup template until I can get round to fixing it. If anyone wants to have a go at cleaning it up first, you are more than welcome. It needs:

• Clearer sections
• Readability editing
• More citations
• Citation checking, as a lot of them are vague.

— GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 04:54, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Revision

I recently "revised" this article as part of a school project, and so I thought I'd make use of it and actually try to revise it on Wikipedia. I didn't add much - I mostly moved some text and added a few headings, and I mean to start checking the sources. CerzaAigl (talk) 14:55, 26 December 2012 (UTC)CerzaAigl

This seems like it would have a lot in common with individual variation in second-language acquisition; I'll likely come back and figure out where it might be helpful to link over to that. More explanation of free vs systemic variation in this particular context would be appreciated.

On that topic, does anyone have more familiarity with Preston's (1996) model of variation in SLA that posits different types of factors (social, linguistic, time) interacting to affect the variant that ends up being chosen in a given instance? I came across it in a textbook called "Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition" (Geeslin and Long, 2014) that also discusses free variation as a way to test out the fitness of different forms in the target language. With more familiarity, these give way to constrained or systemic variation, and eventually faithfulness to the target - actually fairly similar to native lang acquisition when you think about it. Thoughts on whether/where to include this? --Kndouglas (talk) 05:35, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Expansion

I would like to add more basic information about how the interlanguage system functions, such as:

• Prefabricated patterns and the processes of "chunking." This phenomena occurs when L2-users incorrectly group together separate L2 speech sounds.
• Interlanguage regression, and patterns that may look like regression but are actually just steps in the L2 learning process. "Chunking" may appear as regression, but it is actually a normal step in L2 learning.

I also plan to improve/add more citations to the page as a whole.

Bibliography:

Cook, Vivian (2008). "Multi-competence: Black hole or wormhole for second language acquisition research?" In Han, Zhaohong, ed. Understanding Second Language Process. North York (ON): Multilingual Matters. ISBN: 978-1-84769-014-2.

Gass, S. & Glew, M. (2008). “Second language acquisition and bilingualism.” In Altarriba, J.; Heredia, R. R.. An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes. New York: Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN: 13:978-0-8058-5135-9.

Loewen, Shawn; Reinders, Hayo (2011). Key Concepts in Second Language Acquisition. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 46. ISBN: 978-0-230-23018-7.

Thank you, CRHeck (talk) 01:10, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Update: Proposed additions, bold = new:

Copied and pasted from Interlanguage#Other factors (Bold = new additions):

Suggested new title for this section: Stages of Development

Individuals learning a second language may not always hear spoken L2 words as separate units (Cite Gass). Some words might blend together and become a single unit in the learner's L2 system. The blended words are called "prefabricated patterns" or "chunks." These chunks are often not immediately obvious to the learner or anyone that listens to them speak, but may be noticed as the learner's L2 system becomes more developed and they use the chunk in a context where it does not apply. For example, if an English learner hears sentences beginning with "do you," they may associate it with being an indicator of a question but not as two separate words. To them, the word is "doyou." They may happen to say "What do you doing?" instead of "What are you doing?" Eventually the learner will learn to break the chunk up in to its component words and use them correctly.

When learners experience significant restructuring in their L2 systems, they sometimes show a U-shaped learning pattern. For instance, Lightbown (1983) showed that a group of English language learners moved, over time, from accurate usage of the “-ing” present progressive morpheme, to incorrectly omitting it, and finally, back to correct usage. Occasionally the period of incorrect usage is seen as a learning regression (Cite Gass). However, it is likely that the initial correct usage of the morpheme was accidental. It can be theorized that the learner first acquired the “-ing” form as a "chunk" from a whole word, second, lost control of this form as their knowledge system was disrupted by expanding understandings of the tense and aspect systems of English, and third, returned to correct usage upon gaining greater control of these linguistic characteristics and forms. These data provide evidence that learners were initially producing output based on rote memory of individual words containing the present progressive "-ing" morpheme. However, in the second stage their systems contained the rule that they should use the bare infinitive form to express present action, without a separate rule for the use of “-ing.” Finally, they learned the rule for appropriate use of "ing" . The "chunking" method enables a learner to practice speaking their L2 before they correctly break the chunk up in to its component parts. According to Interlanguage theory, this seeming progression and regression of language learning is an important and positive manifestation of the learner's internal understanding of the grammar of the target language.

Copied and pasted from Interlanguage#Linguistic universals (Bold = new additions):

Research on universal grammar (UG) has had a significant effect on SLA theory. In particular, scholarship in the interlanguage tradition has sought to show that learner languages conform to UG at all stages of development (Cite VanPatten). A number of studies have supported this claim, although the evolving state of UG theory makes any firm conclusions difficult.^{[citation needed]}

Interlanguage UG differs from native UG in that interlanguage UGs greatly vary in mental representations from one L2-user to another (Cite VanPatten). This variability arises from differing relative influences on the interlanguage UG, such as existing L1 knowledge and UG constraints. An example of a UG constraint is an "island constraint," where the wh-phrase in a question has a finite number of possible positions. Island constraints are based on the concept that there are certain syntactical domains within a sentence that act as phrase boundaries. It is theorized that the same constraints that act on a native UG are also often present in an interlanguage UG.

CRHeck (talk) 04:04, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Go live

CRHeck I think it is time to go live with your additions. Make the changes on the main article and this might draw the attention of anyone watching this page. Your changes look both appropriate and adequately cited. One additional suggestion I would make is to go through the article and alter the APA style citations that are currently being used, and translate these into the Wikipedia format. There are a small number of citations and so I think that would be okay. Why you're doing that you may want to consider the quality of those citations according to Wikipedia standards. If in your preparation of this article any other appropriate or more recent citations these would also make good additions. Marentette (talk) 23:13, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

I made some editorial changes throughout but have these comments/suggestions:

• Can you remove the APA style citations in favour of the more typical footnote form?
• The section "stages of development" doesn't necessarily describe stages, but this may be the language used in the research. I see the phrase is used in the fossilizaton section. If it is used inthe research, then leave it, but if this was your phrase, consider whether it is appropriate.
• second paragraph of Stages section "correct usage of the morpheme was accidental". Do you mean accidental or was it used as an unanalysed part of a whole word. That is, it isn't yet a chunk? Then in the overgen phase, the chunk is identified and gets used everywhere, including where it doesn't belong, as a result of rigorously applying the rule and ignoring the exceptions, and in the third phase the exceptions are identified and handled appropriately. This works if the reason "ing" for example, might be omitted is because of the application of an L1 rule for progressive in the middle phase. Nevertheless, my suggestion is that the start of the process would not be accurately called accidental, but rather unanalysed. If this meshes with Lightbown and your reading, the section needs a reread for accuracy.
• I simplified the order and sequence paragraph, though I'll admit I'd prefer to delete the whole thing.
• versus creoles and pidgins seems redundant to me. I've simplified

Good work here. Marentette (talk) 03:34, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

1. Removed Lightbown APA-style citation.

2. In the source the section is called "stages of development" so I think I will keep it.

3. Reworded the "-ing" paragraph for clarity, without having to say "accidental."

4. Deleted "order and sequence" part.

5. Thank you for paring down creoles and pidgins, I had not really looked at that area.

6. Found a source on systematic variation, so I added some examples there and fixed the "citation needed" phoneme sentence.

Thank you, CRHeck (talk) 16:09, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

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