Talk:Interlanguage

How is an interlanguage different from a pidgin? I'm doing a report on pidgins and creoles and I don't quite understand the distinction.

Nabarry 01:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

A pidgin is a means to an end - create some communication between speakers of different languages without anyone going through the trouble of learning the other language "properly". Any ad-hoc construction or expression is acceptable in the early development stages of a pidgin, as long as it is actually comprehensible to others in the same context. I.e. a pidgin will NOT strive to "become" one or the other of the two (or more) languages that are involved - as soon as the communicative goal is achieved, no further development or invention is necessary.

An interlanguage, in turn, is ultimately something that has only ONE speaker, the learner. At the very beginning of language learning, the learner has some idea of what the foreign language is like, how it works. According to these ideas, s/he produces utterances. Now some of these ideas may be correct (at least for the time being), others may be wrong - the learner will (hopefully) notice that, and at some point come up with a new and better idea of how the other language works. And so on. And that's what the interlanguage is: the developing "idea of how the other language works".

IMHO "groups of speakers of an interlanguage" is a meaningful claim only from a typologocial perspective - although every learner will develop their very specific, own interlanguage, we can expect that the interlanguages of native speakers of the same L1 with similar language biographies, learning the same L2, will show more similarities with each other than with the interlanguage of e.g. a native speaker of language X, or with the interlanguage of someone who boosts their learning of L2 with their knowledge about a typologically related language Y.

That any help? -- Molasaria 20:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Molasaria - I've edited part of your quote above and added it to the article. It was just such a short and well-worded description of interlanguage that I couldn't resist! Of course, I'll take it down if you don't want it there. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 05:31, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Embarazada

Contributors to this article may be interested to know that the article on Embarazada (the Spanish for "pregnant" and an example of a false friend) is currently up for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Embarazada. Flapdragon 10:23, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

References

To do: Change references to Template:Harvnb and citation templates. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 04:49, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup

I have just copied a lot of content over from second language acquisition. Because of that, this article has started to look a lot more like an essay, and so I put up a cleanup template until I can get round to fixing it. If anyone wants to have a go at cleaning it up first, you are more than welcome. It needs:

• Clearer sections
• Readability editing
• More citations
• Citation checking, as a lot of them are vague.

— GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 04:54, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Revision

I recently "revised" this article as part of a school project, and so I thought I'd make use of it and actually try to revise it on Wikipedia. I didn't add much - I mostly moved some text and added a few headings, and I mean to start checking the sources. CerzaAigl (talk) 14:55, 26 December 2012 (UTC)CerzaAigl

This seems like it would have a lot in common with individual variation in second-language acquisition; I'll likely come back and figure out where it might be helpful to link over to that. More explanation of free vs systemic variation in this particular context would be appreciated. On that topic, does anyone have more familiarity with Preston's (1996) model of variation in SLA that posits different types of factors (social, linguistic, time) interacting to affect the variant that ends up being chosen in a given instance? I came across it in a textbook called "Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition" (Geeslin and Long, 2014) that also discusses free variation as a way to test out the fitness of different forms in the target language. With more familiarity, these give way to constrained or systemic variation, and eventually faithfulness to the target - actually fairly similar to native lang acquisition when you think about it. Thoughts on whether/where to include this? Kndouglas (talk) 05:35, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Expansion

I would like to add more basic information about how the interlanguage system functions, such as:

- Prefabricated patterns and the processes of "chunking." This phenomena occurs when L2-users incorrectly group together separate L2 speech sounds.

- Interlanguage regression, and patterns that may look like regression but are actually just steps in the L2 learning process. "Chunking" may appear as regression, but it is actually a normal step in L2 learning.

I also plan to improve/add more citations to the page as a whole.

Bibliography:

Cook, Vivian (2008). "Multi-competence: Black hole or wormhole for second language acquisition research?" In Han, Zhaohong, ed. Understanding Second Language Process. North York (ON): Multilingual Matters. ISBN: 978-1-84769-014-2.

Gass, S. & Glew, M. (2008). “Second language acquisition and bilingualism.” In Altarriba, J.; Heredia, R. R.. An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes. New York: Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN: 13:978-0-8058-5135-9.

Loewen, Shawn; Reinders, Hayo (2011). Key Concepts in Second Language Acquisition. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 46. ISBN: 978-0-230-23018-7.

Thank you, CRHeck (talk) 01:10, 18 October 2015 (UTC)