Selinker and Jean D’Souza on Interlanguage

Selinker in fact discusses in detail what he means by strategy of second language learning and strategy of second language communication. According to him learner strategies are culture bound to some extent. He gives the example of chanting which is used as a learning device in many traditional cultures. These strategies can be present in the conscious or subconscious level. When a learner realizes that he has no linguistic competence for handling a target language material he evolves some strategies to get through the situation. Whatever strategies he uses considerably affect his ‘surface structure of sentences underlying his Interlanguage utterances’. Since we do not have adequate information as to what these strategies might be and how they might work we can only roughly attribute the sources of his utterances to one or the other strategy.

One strategy which probably works at the conscious level may be the learners’ attempt to reduce the target language to a simpler system. For example, if the learner has adopted the strategy that all verbs are either transitive or intransitive, he may produce Interlanguage forms such as ‘I am feeling thirsty’ or ‘Don’t worry. I am hearing him’ (Selinker 1972).

Selinker quotes Coulter (1968) and says learners avoid grammatical formatives such as articles, plural forms and past tense forms as in,

‘It was Ø nice,  nice trailer, Ø big one.’

‘I have many hundred carpenter(s) my own’.

‘I was in Frankfurt when I fill(ed) application’.

All these could be the result of a learning strategy of simplification but Coulter attributes them to a communication strategy. He thinks because of past experience the learners have come to know that if they worry about grammatical processes their speech would not be fluent and hence native speakers may not have the patience to hear them through. Besides the learners also felt they did not need a form such as English plurals to communicate efficiently.

As Jean D’Souza says one cannot really draw a line between overgeneralization strategy of second language learning and second language communication. It seems to be a matter of looking at the same thing from different points of view. What actually goes on in a learners mind and how he decides to say one thing instead of the other cannot be really perceived. One can only speculate and say this is what probably happens. Unless one is able to study ones own mind very objectively while trying to learn a new language the strategies used cannot be actually stated. Even if such a study of one’s mind without any subjectivity is possible this may not be true of others for each individual has his own peculiar nature, way of learning things, way of responding to given circumstances, etc.

Selinker also talks of a subconscious strategy of second language learning which he calls ‘cue copying’. He gives the example of the /r/ sound at the end of words like ‘California’ and ‘saw’ which foreign students of English who have had teachers from the Boston regularly reproduce in their Interlanguage. But he does not state how this is different from what he calls ‘transfer of training’. While discussing transfer of training he says Serbo-Croation speakers at all levels of English proficiency have difficulty in distinguishing between he and she because their teachers and text books almost always present drills with ‘he’ and never with ‘she’. So here too the learners could be said to use the ‘copy the cue’ strategy.

Whatever the differences may be it is not very difficult to identify a few strategies and study the learner’s errors from those points of view. Selinker himself says that there could be a number of other processes in addition to these five processes mentioned by him. D ifferences of opinion cannot be avoided since what takes place in the mind of the learners when they attempt to learn a language cannot be stated with absolute certainty. Most of the efforts to understand the process of language learning are speculative and abstract. But the basic concepts behind the apparent differences of opinion appear to be the same in all cases.

All that one needs to understand is that when children are exposed to a particular language they do not learn the grammar of that language straight away. They process the input data and form certain hypotheses. They cook up their own grammar which may be called G1. If ‘G’ is the grammar of the language they are learning, they may use and discard a number of grammars like G1 and G2 before they get to ‘G’. As per their exposure they constantly test their hypotheses and keep altering it. Hence their grammar at a particular point of time is systematic and has its own rules. But it is not constant. It keeps changing in line with the exposure they receive.

Similarly for second language learning all these processes have tobe gone through. Hence the second language learners are almost in the same position as the first language learners but for the fact that they already have one language in their possession. Since our concepts and ideas are largely structured by our first language, the  first language has a lot of influence over the learning of other languages. Hence learners could be said to view the second language through their first language and arrive at a system which is midway between their first and second language. This intermediary system is given the name ’Interlanguage’ by Selinker. Other terminologies have also been used by various others to identify this system. Different factors have been considered as the most important aspect of this system and accordingly the names have been assigned.

William Nemser calls it ‘Approximative system’. This term emphasizes the transitional and dynamic nature of the system. JackRichards thinks it is the ‘Transitional competence’ while Dulay and Burt say that the learners’ system reveal their ‘Creative construction hypothesis’. Pit Corder calls it the ‘Idiosyncratic dialect’ of the learners.