Transitional Competence

Jack C. Richards (1971) refers to the learner’s competence at a particular time, as the transitional competence. He says that the learner’s competence at a particular stage is full of what he calls as intralingual or developmental errors. These errors illustrate some of the characteristics of language acquisition. The learner’s competence is transitional because it keeps changing as long as the learner tries to improve his competence. If he stops learning his competence at a particular stage becomes his final grammatical competence.

Intralingual errors are not caused by the learner’s inability to separate two languages. “Their origins are found within the structure of English itself and through reference to the strategy by which a second language is acquired and taught”. These errors are systematic and are not caused by memory lapses. fatigue and the like. These errors occur repeatedly “from one year to the next with any group of learners” (Richards1971). Developmental errors are cau sed because of the learners’ efforts to build up hypothesis about the language from his limited experience in the classroom. Richards classifies these errors under various heads like, overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules and false concepts hypothesized.

Richards thinks that an analysis of the learner’s developmental errors should help us to examine our teaching materials and make them more effective. The language learning assumptions behind material preparation and teaching practices could be changed, if we understand how a language is acquired. According to Richards, many teaching practices are based on the notion that the learner will reproduce exactly whatever is presented in his textbook or whatever is taught in the classroom. But often this does not happen. If a systematic study of the learners’ errors is undertaken, we could know the learning strategies used by the learner and the generalizations formed by him. This should be studied along with the teaching materials and techniques of presentation through which the learner attempts to learn the language.

As Richards rightly points out the learner uses his own strategies to learn a language, which may be independent of the teaching methods. Teachers have often been annoyed at the learners committing errors, in spite of repeated instructions. They just fail to understand why their learners produce deviant forms when the right forms have been drilled again and again. They don’t realize that a learner cannot be forced to learn anything by an external syllabus, because he has his own internal syllabus. With this internal syllabus he tries to build up a system of the target language for himself, through generalizations. As Pit Corder observes, a list of items in the syllabus only represent what is ‘available for going in’. What actually goes in depends on what the learners is ready to take in

Richards is also right in saying that many of the course materials based on a contrastive approach to language teaching put undue emphasis on points of contrast. This leads to an unnatural use of English. If the learners’ exposure is limited to the confines of the classroom and the textbooks he is likely to form generalizations based on these materials. Hence his competence will surely reflect a lot of deviant and inappropriate use of target language structures. Richards cites an instance, that is, the use of Present Continuous tense in an unnatural way found in many of the course books. These books give more importance to the continuous form because it is not present in the mother tongue of the learner.

A nother important point, which Richards makes, is about the way items are graded and presented in many course books. According to him the learners find it difficult to perceive the difference between two contrasting elements presented together in synonymous contexts. He rightly suggests that these items should be presented at different times in different contexts which are non-synonymous. He also suggests transformation exercises based on contrasts should be avoided. It is not difficult to perceive that Richard’s suggestions make a lot of sense. But course writers need to have native-like competence in the language to foresee the conflicts that the learners might face. In most of the places where English is taught as a second language the materials are prepared by those who do not understand the problems of the learners because their knowledge in the fields of linguistics and methodology is very superficial.

Within the limitations of the resources we have we should try to help the learners to improve their competence. This we can do if we try to “take account of the structural and developmental conflicts that can come about in language learning” (Richards 1971).  Richards is right in saying that course writers and classroom teachers should avoid presenting conflicting structures at the same time. But some amount of conflict between the newly presented item and the one that precedes it is bound to be there.  Errors cannot be completely avoided. Without generalization speedy and efficient language learning is almost impossible. What we possibly can do is to minimize confusion in the minds of our learners as far as possible. If we find a certain set of learners commit errors repeatedly and if the particular error can be traced back to the textbook or method of presentation in the class we could try to rearrange the items and present them in different contexts and at different times.