Teaching English

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 his target language and have the same interpretation, then some, at least, of the rules needed to account for the learners’ language will be the same as those required to account for the target language. Therefore the learner’s language is a dialect in the linguistic sense: two languages which share some rules of grammar are dialects.

It is, of course, usual to apply a further non-linguistic criterion to a language in order to establish its dialect status, namely that it should be the shared behaviour of a social group, i.e. that it should constitute a langue in the Saussurean sense. In this sense the language of a learner may or may not be a dialect. For the time being, however, there should be a distinction between the dialects which are the languages of a social group (social dialects) and the dialects which are not the languages of social groups (idiosyncratic dialects). The justification for calling the latter dialects is therefore a linguistic one and not a social one. The dialect above are already adequately identified under the name idiolects. An idiolect is a personal dialect but which linguistically has the characteristic that all the rules required to account for it arre found somewhere in the set of rules of one or another social dialect. An idiolect can be said to be some sort of a mixture of dialects.

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