The identification and analysis of interference between languages in contact has traditionally been a central aspect of the study of bilingualism. The intrusion of features of one language into another in the speech of bilinguals has been studied at the levels of phonology, morphology and syntax. The systems of the contact languages themselves have sometimes been contrasted, and an important outcome of contrastive studies has been the notion that they allow for prediction of the difficulties involved in acquiring a second language.

Those elements that are similar to the native (learner’s) native language will be simple for him, and those areas that are different will be difficult. In the last two decades language teaching has derived considerable impetus from the application of contrastive studies. Perhaps the least questioned and least questionable application of linguistics is the contribution of contrastive analysis. Especially in the teaching of languages for which no considerable and systematic teaching experience is available, contrastive analysis can highlight and predict the difficulties of the pupils.

Studies of second language acquisition, however, have tended to imply that contrastive analysis may be most predictive at the level of phonology, and least predictive at the syntactic level. A recent study of Spanish-English bilingualism, for example, state that many people assume, following logic that is easy to Read more detail… →

In the case of idiosyncratic dialects, some of the rules required to account for the dialect are not members of the set of rules of any social dialect; they are peculiar to the language of that speaker. All idiosyncratic dialects have this characteristic in common that some of the rules required to account for them are particular to an individual. This has, of course, the result that some of their sentences are not readily interpretable, since the ability to interpret a sentence depends in part upon the knowledge of the conventions underlying that sentence. The sentences of an idiolect do not therefore present the same problems of interpretation since somewhere there is a member of that social group who shares the conventions with the speaker.

It is in the nature of idiosyncratic dialects that they are normally unstable. The reason for this is obvious. The object of speech is normally to communicate, i.e. to be understood. If understanding is only partial, then a speaker has a motive to bring his bahaviour into line with conventions of some social group, if he is able. This instability accounts for part of the difficulty experienced by the linguist in describing idiosyncratic dialects. The data on which a description is made is fragmentary. This means that the usual verification procedures required in the construction of a projective grammar are not readily available.

The other difficulty the linguist experiences is that of placing an interpretation on Read more detail… →

What has come to be known as Error Analysis has to do with the investigation of the language of second language learners. It takes the point of view that the language of such a learner, or perhaps certain groupings of learners, is a special sort of dialect. This is based on two considerations: firstly, any spontaneous speech intended by the speaker to communicate is meaningful, in the sense that it is systematic, regular and, consequently is, in principle, describable in terms of a set of rules, i.e. it has a grammar. The spontaneous speech of the second language learner is language and has a grammar.

Secondly, since a number of sentences of that language are isomorphous with some of the sentences of Read more detail… →

This section deals with the methodology of error analyses, particularly as it is applied to the analysis of the adult learner’s syntax in a second language. Corder presents a model based on a distinction between an idiosyncratic dialect (the learner’s personal, unstable, developing grammar) and a social dialect (the target language which is the dialect of a social group). He illustrates the possible realtioships between the learner’s idiosyncratic dialect and the target social dialect, and compares these with a number of other X dialect/social dialect relationships, such as that evidence in a piece of poetry, in the speech of a young child, or in the speech of an aphasic. Corder attributes greater importance to the relationship mother tongue/learner’s dialect than others might; it does however acknowledge that there are other variables involved.

Richards, while acknowledging the influence of the mother tongue on the learner’s language, documents a number of other common features of the learner’s dialect, often ignored in discussions of learner’s errors. These are referred to as intralingual and developmental errors and reflect the general characteristics of rule learning, such as overgeneralization, incomplete application of target language rules, failure to learn conditions under which rules apply, and the development of false concepts. Some of these are seen to be reinforced by common teaching procedures. Jain sees the learner’s language as manifesting a general learning strategy to simplify the syntax of the language he is learning. He suggests that the motivation to add new rules to one’s idiosyncratic dialect may decline, once a degree of proficiency has been achieved for the language to function adequately as an operational tool, abd illustrates the concept of overgeneralization as a learning strategy. Jain is concerned with reconstructing the learner’s interlanguage, when hypothesis testing has largely stopped.

When we know much about language, it will make us to be successful in teaching of a second language. However, the gap between a child acquiring his first language and a child learning a second language, at a time when he already possesses language, is likely to be so big that any direct application of our knowledge is difficult, the more so because our knowledge in the first place is still extremely shaky. Read more detail… →

A major issue in the field of the CA hypothesis is the difference between children and adults in language acquisition. Symptoms of traumatic aphasia (direct, structural and local interference with neurophysiological processes of language) that occur under age 13 are reversible, whereas those that occur after 13 are not. Non-deaf children of Read more detail… →