InterLanguage

INTERLANGUAGE PRESENTATION
BY Jose Luis Lozada Barón, Martha Patiño.

Interlanguage is an emerging linguistic system that has been developed by a learner of a second language who has not become fully proficient YET, but it is only approximating the target language, preserving features of the mother-tongue.
We often see that people make mistakes when they are learning a second language, then we should consider the meaning of “mistake” or “error” because in interlanguage these are normal processes in order to acquire a second language.
We have some definitions for what an error is:
 An act that through ignorance, deficiency, or accident departs from or fails to achieve what should be done.
 An error is something that you have done which is considered to be incorrect or wrong, or which should not have been done.
 A mistake.

The features of different errors in acquiring a second language may mean something totally different.
• L2-learners’ errors are not random: students do not know the L2 but, lack of knowledge is not only the responsible.
• L2-learners’ errors reflect learners’ systematic knowledge of grammar: they already have a data from their first language so they do know how grammar works.
• L2-learners’ errors are informative data that we can use to probe into sophisticated linguistic hypotheses and predictions: Our brains are adapted to build and create new terms based on how grammar works in our first language.
Learners have a mental representation of grammatical knowledge at every stage of the acquisition process (Selinker 1972). That is why errors are evidence of hypotheses being tested and are part of a complete mental development and learners acquire some aspects of the L2 grammar through similar stages, regardless of their L1. L1 transfer is not the only process in L2 acquisition

However interlanguage works in different ways depending on the age. For children who are less than 7 years old are more perceptive to learn a second language due to the fact their brains haven’t had too much contact with their first language compared to an adult person whose mental processes make him/her to think in their first language to speak or produce the language he/she is trying to learn.

This brings us to this question: “when do we know we speak an L2?” It seems to be no answer what we say is that we are not going to be able to speak a second language as well as natives do because there will be ,in most of the cases, something that shows that L2 is not our first language.

So to avoid the idea of we can’t learn or going far beyond in the acquisition of an L2 we must prepare ourselves everyday, improving every of the skills in a language, then we won’t be so easy to get stuck or fossilized according to Selinker who says: “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”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mc Laughlin, Barry (1987). Theories of second language learning.

Selinker, Larry (1972), “INTERLANGUAGE".