Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MA(ELT), 2009-10
Name of the course: Second Language Acquisition.
Submitted to:
By
Sumaiya Akhtar Tulip
Institute of Modern Languages
University of Dhaka.
Introduction:
This paper explores how an 'interlanguage' develops and how this development
is revealed in various feature. The subject is consisted of one Korean teacher
who is teaching at Institute of Modern Languages, University of Dhaka. The
subject has a lot of exposures to Bangla and seems a little nervous while being
interviewed. The requirement of this interview is to answer the questions
preferably in Bangla to see how her 'interlanguage' skills are developed. The
interviewers and the interviewee make a heterogeneous group as the
competence levels (Bangla language) are not same in this context.
Procedure:
Objective:
The aim of this paper is to find out the features of 'interlanguage' in Sadia's L2
(Bangla) speaking. It will also discuss how the errors/ mistakes made by her can
be analyzed and labeled by 'systematic' or 'non systematic' variability in terms of
'performance variability'.
What is an 'interlanguage' ? :
The term 'interlanguage' was introduced by Selinker in 1969 (Jowitt, 52), and was
subsequently given a working definition by him as a separate linguistic system,
the existence of which we are compelled to hypothesize based upon the
observed output which results from the second language learner’s attempted
production of the target language. The conscious mental activities of the leaner
at rationalizing, analyzing and resolving similarities and differences between L1
and L2 result in the adoption of a form of the target language which bears
semblance to L2 but at the same time fail to be totally L1 or L2.
The main features of interlanguage which will be used in the diagnosing systems
are :
What is variability? :
When L2 learners get new inputs from the Target language, he tries to apply
those rules and inputs into communication and sometimes make some mistakes.
These inappropriate forms are named as 'variability'. There are two kinds of
variabilities in interlanguage:
Systematic variable:
If the errors made by L2 learners can be categorized under any heading like
phonological, syntactical or morphological, then it can be called 'systematic
variable'. Systematic variability can be divided into two sub categories:
Analysis:
The analysis of Sadia's utterances shows that the errors, produced by her, are
easy to categorize under three headings i.e.
1. phonological
2. morphological
3. syntactical
Phonological:
• Stress: In Bangla the native speakers don't use any stress in their
utterances. But as the L2 learner speaks she produces unusual stress. i.e.
"Kichchu", "Abong", etc.
Morphological:
Syntactical:
So these are some categorical problems which are very prominent in Sadia's
interlanguage Bangla. She is still a long way to go to acquire the accuracy.
And as the problems are easy to categorize so it can be said her errors are
'systematic variables'. Some 'non-systematic' variables are also found but
they are not so prominent. i.e. she makes some wrong pronunciations of
English words; odmission(admission), will(oil), loaning(learning) which can be
categorized as 'free variables'. And most of the time she hesitates to collocate
the words because of the presence of well learned Bengali student which is
her 'performance variable' but it has not been an important part of this study.
General assumption:
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