interlanguage

Interlanguage is a concept addressed in this weeks' readings that really interests me. Perhaps it's because I feel I've spent so much time speaking my own interlanguage between English and Spanish - a language with aspirations of becoming real Spanish someday but still markedly influenced by my command of my L1 (English).

Seville-Troike defines 'interlanguage' as: "intermediate states/interim grammars of learner's language as it moves toward the target L2 language). One of the most interesting aspects of interlanguage that I learned is that research has shown that interlanguage developmental levels, among ALL L2 learners, are generally the same. There are three levels - Nominal Utterance Organization (NUO), Infinite Utterance Organization (IUO), and Finite Utterance Organization (FUO). The first level, NUO, consists of "unconnected naming of subjects and objects". Seville-Troike explains that this level often uses few, if any verbs. It is possible that there would be adverbs or adjectives, however. The second level, IUO, includes verbs - but the verbs are are in the infinitive form, which means they don't define time. Finally, in the third level, FUO, grammatical morphemes are added and the verb becomes finite.

However, after I read this, I thought to myself, "well, in my own language-learning experience, I feel that I can speak full sentences and conjugate my verbs, but I still mess up - a lot." Seville-Troike offered an explanation for this a bit later when he states, "More L1 transfer occurs as learners increase their L2 resoures and produce more complicated utterances".

I think that I sometimes mistakenly assume that L1 and L2 learning is completely different. While there are many differences, and much research has been done to compare those differences, in some ways, it seems that this process for L2 learners is very similar to that of L1 learners. In the Lightbrown/Spada reading that we did, there was discussion of language learning in early childhood. I thought the research results from Roger Brown's study were extremely interesting. They did a longitudinal study and found that "fourteen grammatical morphemes were acquired in a remarkably similar sequence" (3). The list began with progressives and included the plural '-s', past tense, possessives, articles, and present tense verbs, just to name a few. I thought the order of this acquisition was just so interesting and was amazed that researchers were able to see consistency. While children do acquire these grammatical morphemes at different ages, they are often in the same order.

As I looked at that list further, and reflected back upon past Spanish classes, I felt like the order that L1 learners acquire these morphemes is similar to the order in which they are taught informal learning environments. However, it is interesting that the third person singular simple present is toward the bottom of the list, because the simple present is taught as a whole, without distinction of first- or third- person, in most formal classes before the past or the future is taught. Ultimately, the question becomes, "Can we compare L1 learning with L2 learning and find consistencies?" and I think we can, but only to an extent.