Interlanguage and Interregnum

Abstract

Editorial Interlanguage and Interregnum ... in the making of constructs relevant to a theory of second language learning, one would be completely justified in hypothesizing, perhaps even compelled to hypothesize, the existence of a separate linguistic system based on the observable output which results from a learner's attempted production of a TL norm. This linguistic system we will call interlanguage (IL). Larry Selinker (1972) Interlanguage It is now a good twenty years since the concept of interlanguage became a part of the everyday vocabulary of second language acquisition research. Indeed, the notion had a profound effect on applied linguists' understanding of what it means to learn an additional language, because it recast the nonnative speaker as an intelligent human being struggling to identify and create a systematic representation of a new language and led to the abandonment of the view which had cast the nonnative speaker as a rather dunce-like producer of error and deviant utterances, despite instruction, exposure, and practice. The concept of interlanguage also contributed to explanations for why most learners of languages failed to achieve target language proficiency and why a good deal of pedagogy was inhibiting rather than facilitating learners' development of a coherently organized approximation of the target language. Ultimately, the recognition that systematicity could be found at any second language proficiency level, no matter how basic, moved second language acquisition research closer to research being done on first language psycholinguistics and pidgins and Creoles, as well as in cognitive science, and opened the way for contrastive analysis and error analysis to reinvent themselves as interlanguage research. Issues in Applied Linguistics ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 3 No. © Regents of the University of California