Understanding Interlanguage: Development and Error Analysis

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 in Pedagogy

  • Interlanguage: A system with a structurally intermediate status between the native language (NL) and the target language (TL).

It falls between the TL and the NL and is based on the learner’s best attempt to provide order and structure to the linguistic stimuli surrounding them.

  • Learners succeed in establishing closer approximations to the system used by native speakers through a process of trial and error.

Brown, Douglas B. 1994


Interlanguage Defined

  • Interlanguage: Systematic knowledge of an L2 which is independent of L1 and TL.

    This term refers to: (1) a series of interlocking systems that characterize acquisition, (2) a system observed at a single stage of development, and (3) a particular L1/L2 combination.

    Selinker (1972)


Interlanguage changes constantly. Through a gradual process of trial and error, learners slowly succeed in establishing approximations to the system used by native speakers of the language.


  1. TENETS
  2. Learners construct a system of abstract rules.
  3. The language learner’s grammar is permeable.
  4. The L2 learner’s competence is transitional.
  5. Learner’s competence is variable.
  6. Interlanguage may fossilize.
  7. Language-learner language is systematic and dynamic.


Selinker’s Processes

  1. Language transfer
  2. Transfer of training
  3. Strategies of second-language learning
  4. Strategies of second language communication
  5. Overgeneralization of target linguistic material


Backsliding

The regular appearance in bilingual speech of errors that were thought to be eradicated.

Types of Feedback

  • Explicit correction
  • Recasts (rephrased)
  • Clarification request (Pardon?)
  • Elicitation (complete statement)
  • Repetition


Contrastive Analysis

  • Offered insights to teachers
  • Feasibility of comparing language and methodology
  • Empirical basis
  • Theoretical framework
  • Practical applications
  • Limited ability to predict errors
  • Aimed to avoid errors


Error Analysis

  • Comparative process
  • Informs the teacher about areas needing reinforcement and progress
  • Reveals strategies or procedures the learner is employing
  • Provides evidence of how language is learned
  • Recognizes making errors as a device the learner uses to learn
  • Identifies all possible sources of errors
  • Suggests suitable and effective teaching-learning strategies


Considerations (Errors)

  • Identification of errors (Errors: Provide feedback, systematic, not self-corrected; Mistakes: Essential part of learning, self-corrected, due to nervousness or anxiety)
  • Description of errors (Error Analysis, Overt errors, Covert errors)
  • Explanation of errors (interlingual, intralingual)
  • Errors caused by negative transfer
  • Caused by not knowing the TL well (e.g., “mans”)


Interlingual and Intralingual Errors

Interlingual: Language transfer

Intralingual: Faulty or partial learning

Types of Developmental Errors

  1. Overgeneralization
  2. Ignorance of the rules
  3. Incomplete application of rules
  4. False concept hypothesis

[Ellis’ Categories of Error: omission, addition, selection, and ordering]


Fossilization

  1. Permanent retention of non-native interlanguage forms in the learners’ developing linguistic system.

Stabilization

  1. Non-native items, structures, or subsystems in the Interlanguage grammar are not permanent.

But may eventually “destabilize” or change toward the TL norm.


“Latent language structure” depends on the success in learning the second language of the learner and the target language. Interlanguage is based on the theory that there is a “psychological structure latent in the brain” which is genetically determined and its activation depends on the achievement of learning a second language.