Makalah SLA oleh mahasiswa Universitas Wijaya Kusuma Semester 6 Kelas D Greoup A

INTERLANGUAGE
By
Group A:
1. ELY K.H
2. EKO MEY W
3. MOHAMMAD SALIM
4. GINTA
5. RIA GANIS
6. FITRI
7. AMANDA
8. JEFFRY

Untuk memenuhi tugas Mata Kulia Second Language Acquisition
yang dibina oleh Bapak Drs. Amrin Batubara, M.A.


PROGRAM STUDI BAHASA INGGRIS
FAKULTAS BAHASA DAN SAINS
UNIVERSITAS WIJAYA KUSUMA
2009




INTERLANGUAGE

Introduction
Second language acquisition is the process by which people learn a second language in addition to their native language(s). The term second language is used to describe the acquisition of any language after the acquisition of the mother tongue. The language to be learned is often referred to as the "target language" or "L2", compared to the first language, "L1", referred to as the "source language". Second language acquisition may be abbreviated "SLA", or L2A, for "L2 acquisition".
Before we move further to the discussion, let us look at these three definition concerning SLA.

A. Language and Latent Structures
The idea of interlanguage is founded upon the assumption that an L2 learner, at any particular moment in his learning sequence, is using a language system which is neither the L1, nor the L2. It is a third language, with its own grammar, its own lexicon and so on. The rules used by the learner are to be found in neither his own mother tongue, nor in the Target Language. Thus, Nemser cites Serbo-Croat learners of English who will produce "What does Pat doing now?", although this construction belongs neither in English, nor in Serbo-Croat. The lesson to be learned, suggest applied linguists such as Nemser, Pitt Corder and Selinker, is that we need to understand the learner's language as a system in its own right. This is both possible, and interesting because learners tend to go through a series of interlanguages in systematic and predictable ways.
Latent structures is the concept of latent language structure ( Lenneberg,1967,especially pp. 374 – 379 ) which, according to Lenneberg,
Is an already formulated arrangement in the brain
Is the biological counterpart to universal grammar
Is transformed by the infant into the realized structure pf a particular grammar in accordance with certain maturational stages.
However, these are not guaranteed take place in language learning.


Factors that characterized influence the learners’ language use:

Language Transfer
The learner uses her own L1 as a resource. This used to be looked upon as a mistake, but it is now recognized that all learners fall back on their mother tongues, particularly in the early stages of language acquisition, and that this is a necessary process.

Intralingual Interferences
The effects of the Sociolinguistic Situation
Affective factors
Affective factors relate to the learner's emotional state and attitude toward the target language. Research on affect in language learning is still strongly influenced by Bloom's taxonomy, which describes the affective levels of receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and self-characterization through one's value system. It has also been informed in recent years by research in neurobiology and neurolinguistics.
Affective Filter Furthermore, researchers believe that language learners all possess an affective filter which affects language acquisition. If a student possesses a high filter they are less likely to engage in language learning because of shyness, concern for grammar or other factors. Students possessing a lower affective filter will be more likely to engage in learning because they are less likely to be impeded by other factors. The affective filter is an important component of second language learning.

Anxiety
Although some continue to propose that a low level of anxiety may be helpful, studies have almost unanimously shown that anxiety damages students' prospects for successful learning. Anxiety is often related to a sense of threat to the learner's self-concept in the learning situation, for example if a learner fears being ridiculed for a mistake.

Personality Factors
Second language acquisition is defined as the learning and adopting of a language that is not your native language. Once you have acquired a foreign language, you have mastered that language.
Second language acquisition may be more difficult for some people due to certain social factors. One highly studied social factor impeding language development is the issue of extraverts versus introverts.
Studies have shown that extraverts (or unreserved and outgoing people) acquire a second language better than introverts (or shy people).
One particular study done by Naiman reflected this point. The subjects were 72 Canadian high school students from grades 8, 10 and 12 who were studying French as a second language.
Naiman gave them all questionnaires to establish their psychological profiles, which also included a French listening test and imitation test. He found that approximately 70% of the students with the higher grades (B or higher) would consider themselves extraverts.
Extraverts will be willing to try to communicate even if they are not sure they will succeed. Two scientists, Kinginger and Farrell, conducted interviews with U.S. students after their study abroad program in France in 2003. They found that many of the students would avoid interaction with the native speakers at all costs, while others jumped at the opportunity to speak the language. Those who avoided interaction were typically quiet, reserved people, (or introverts).
Logically, fear will cause students not to try and advance their skills, especially when they feel they are under pressure. Just the lack of practice will make introverts less likely to fully acquire the second language.
The modality to expose to the L2 and the modality of production
The age of the learners
It is commonly believed that children are better suited to learn a second language than are adults. However, general second language research has failed to support the Critical Period Hypothesis in its strong form, which argues that full language acquisition is impossible beyond a certain age
The instability of the learners’ linguistic system
The effects of the inherent difficulty of the particular item being learned.


B. Fossilization

Fossilization is the process whereby the learner creates a cessation of interlanguage learning, thus stopping the interlanguage from developing, it is hypothesized, in a permanent way. The argument is that no adult can hope to ever speak a second language in such a way that s/he is indistinguishable from native speakers of that language. (Selinker, 1996)
Development ceases, and even serious conscious efforts to change are often fruitless. Brief changes are sometimes observed, but they do not 'take'. The learner backslides to the stable state (Bley-Vroman, 1989:47-49)

C. Five Central Processes

Language transfer - the learner uses her own L1 as a resource. This used to be looked upon as a mistake, but it is now recognized that all learners fall back on their mother tongues, particularly in the early stages of language acquisition, and that this is a necessary process.
Let us look more closely at transfer. It can have several different effects :
a) Negative transfer
Until the morpheme studies of Dulay and Burt, it was often assumed that most errors were derived from transfer of the L1 to the L2 - this was referred to as interference. It is now no longer clear where errors derive from. As we have seen, Dulay and Burt believe that the majority of errors are not based on transfer. However, it is not always a simple matter to decide whether an error is L1 based or not.
For example, when French speakers use 'have -en' forms in inappropriate settings, is it because of overgeneralization, a developmental error, or an interference error based on the Passé Composé?
Indeed, it is not always easy to decide whether an error has occurred at all. Take again the case of the 'have -en' forms. A French speaker learning English may use the form in the correct setting, but actually derive it from the French Passé Composé - he has done the right thing, but for the wrong reasons. Has an error actually occurred? How would we know?
Consider this dialogue, derived from :
A : I (look for) Bob. You (see?) him.
B : Yes, I (see) him half an hour ago
A French learner might produce
A : I'm looking for Bob. You have seen him?
B : Yes. I have seen him half an hour ago.
If speakers of different mother tongues do, in fact, make different mistakes, and if these mistakes do appear to be related to structures in the mother tongue, then it would seem reasonable to speak of 'interference errors
At the level of phonology, this certainly appears to be the case
There are typical accents, and it is comparatively easy to distinguish between the English pronunciation of, say, a German L1 speaker, a French L1 speaker or a Japanese.
However, even here, there appear to be rules that are target language specific - progress through to full acquisition of the 'th' appears to follow a fairly regular pattern, which is similar to that of an English child learning her L1.

b) Positive transfer
· Not all effects of language transfer are negative - indeed, we may consider that without some language transfer, there would be no second language learning. We have seen that, in the cases of Genie and Chelsea, it is very difficult to master a language after the age of 11 or 12 years of age, unless one already has a mother-tongue to fall back on. It may be that younger children are able to pick up an L2 without reference to their L1, but for adolescents and adults, the mother tongue is a major resource for language learning.
· Where languages are historically and linguistically related to each other, the positive effects of transfer may be obvious. French-speaking learners of English and English speaking learners of French quickly come to realise that they share an enormous amount of vocabulary, for example - there are far more 'Vrais Amis' than there are 'Faux amis', and it makes sense to take advantage of this.
· For Japanese speakers learning Chinese, there is a great advantage when it comes to studying the written language in the fact that the Japanese ideographs are based upon the Chinese. This saves considerable time.
However, the Chomskian perspective has lead specialists in SLA to believe that there are deeper levels at which the L1 may aid in language learning. If all languages are fundamentally the same, then it makes a lot of sense to use the rules of the mother-tongue as initial hypotheses about the rules of the L2. We will come back to this point in a later lecture, when considering implicational hierarchies.
We must conclude that - The teacher who tries to forbid his students from having recourse to their L1 may be doing them a disservice, for L1 can, in fact be extremely helpful.

2. Overgeneralization - the learner uses an L2 rule in situations in which a native speaker would not. This can occur at a number of levels
thus at the phonetic level, for example, learners of English, after having learnt to master the English 'r', may take to placing it at the end of words, whereas in RP it is not pronounced.
at the grammatical level, a learner in the early stages may use nothing but the present tense. Later, there may be extensive, non-native use of 'be - ing' forms of the verb.
at the lexical level - learners tend to use base terms and to stretch them - thus a 'goose' might be referred to as a 'chicken', or a teaspoon may be a 'little spoon'.
at the level of discourse, lexical items and expressions may be used in inappropriate social contexts. Someone learning French as an L2, and who has been staying with a friendly family with teenagers may find themselves using the 'tu' form to strangers, members of the CRS and so on.

3. Transfer of Training – is a process which is quite different from language transfer and from over-generalization of TL rules. This becomes problem when textbooks and teachers in this interlingual situation almost always present drills with certain grammatical features only. In other words, the fossilizable items, rules, and sub-systems happen in training procedures.
For example: A teacher who drills his students by using “He” as a substitution of “Dia” in Bahasa Indonesia, without using “She” frequently then his students would keep using “He” regardless the 3rd person is female/male.

4. Strategies of L2 Learning
The effective use of strategies has been shown to be critical to successful language learning, so much so that Canale and Swain (1980) included "strategic competence" among the four components of communicative competence. Research here has also shown significant pedagogical effects. This has given rise to "strategies-based instruction."
Strategies are commonly divided into learning strategies and communicative strategies, although there are other ways of categorizing them. Learning strategies are techniques used to improve learning, such as mnemonics or using a dictionary. Learners (and native speakers) use communicative strategies to get meaning across even when they lack access to the correct language: for example, by using pro-forms like "thing", or non-linguistic means such as mime. Communicative strategies may not have any direct bearing on learning, and some strategies such as avoidance (not using a form with which one is uncomfortable) may actually hinder learning.
Learners from different cultures use strategies in different ways, as a research tradition led by Rebecca Oxford has demonstrated. Related to this are differences in strategy use between male and female learners. Numerous studies have shown that female learners typically use strategies more widely and intensively than males; this may be related to the statistical advantage which female learners enjoy in language learning.
Simplification - both syntactic and semantic - the learner uses speech that resembles that of very young children or of pidgins. This may be either because they cannot, in fact, as yet produce the target forms, or because they do not feel sure of them.. For example: He sleeps now.
Avoidance - Where certain structures are very different from L1, students may simply avoid using them. Schachter (1974) found that Chinese and Japanese learners of L2 English made less errors in the use of relative clauses than did Persian or Arabic learners - but this was because they tried to use them less often. This is because Persian and Arabic relative clauses are structured in a similar way to English ones, while the two Oriental languages treat them in a very different way.
For example: the Indonesian learners tend to avoid passive voice when learning English.
It is difficult to know when a student is using avoidance as a strategy - he must show some evidence that he knows of the structure that he is avoiding, and it must also be so that a normal speaker of the target language would have used the structure in that situation.
Kellerman distinguishes 3 types of avoidance :
* Learner can anticipate that there is a problem, and has some idea of what the correct form is like.
* Learner knows the target form well, but believes that it would be too difficult to use in the circumstances in which he finds himself - free-flowing conversation, for example.
* Learner knows how to use the target form, but will not do so because it breaks a personal rule of behaviour - ready use of 'tu' form by person coming from a culture where formality is highly valued.
Overuse - This may be a concomitant of avoidance. Students will use the forms that they know rather than try out the ones that they are not sure of. It may also reflect cultural differences - thus Olshtain (1983) found that American college students, learning Hebrew in Israel, were much more likely to use direct expressions of apology than were native speakers. This also seems to be true of English speakers of French

5. Strategies of L2 communication
A communication strategy due to the past experience of the speaker which has shown him that if he thinks about grammatical processes while attempting to express in English meanings which he already has, then his speech will be hesitant and disconnected, leading native speakers to be impatient with him.
Learners (and native speakers) use communicative strategies to get meaning across even when they lack access to the correct language: for example, by using pro-forms like "thing", or non-linguistic means such as mime. Communicative strategies may not have any direct bearing on learning, and some strategies such as avoidance (not using a form with which one is uncomfortable) may actually hinder learning.
For example:
It was ø nice horse,ø brown one
(lack of articles)
I have many hundred house ø my own
(lack of plural forms)

D. Questions – Answers

1. What is meant by interlanguage? How does it influence the learners’ ability in learning L2?
It is the assumption that an L2 learner, at any particular moment in his learning sequence, is using a language system which is neither the L1, nor the L2. It is a third language, with its own grammar, its own lexicon and so on.
The obvious influence can be seen through the five central processes.


2. What is meant by fossilization?
Fossilization is the process whereby the learner creates a cessation of interlanguage learning, thus stopping the interlanguage from developing

That's all

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