Interlanguage fossilization is a crucial dilemma that foreign language learners may fall in. The problem of the present study is shown clearly in the answers of Iraqi students of Master of Arts in the College of Education for Women University of Baghdad. In spite of all the previous years of studying English language, some still have the problem…

Error analysis of the informal conversations (in both the interlanguage [IL] and native language) of two native Vietnamese speakers gave limited support to the hypothesis that a universal preference for the open syllable is a shaping force in IL phonology that is independent of the process of native language transfer. (Author/CB)

A learner's awareness of success, failure, and error potential encountered in free speech in a second language was studied with three subjects. The speech of adult learners of English as a Second Language was recorded and replayed to the subjects, who were asked to listen to their utterances and to recall the mental experience that surrounded each…

The formation of relative clauses in the work of 48 Italian high school students of English as a foreign language who performed a variety of written and oral tasks is analyzed. Results indicate that markedness can be a valid predictor of interlanguage but that it can also constrain intertask variability. (CB)

Examines how second-language learners compensate for their target language deficiency in communication using the One to One Principle of interlanguage communication. Results indicate that target language aspects not adhering to one-to-one mapping between semantic and surface elements are problematic to the learners and are seemingly acquired late.…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of interlanguage development in Japanese adult learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in acquisition-poor environments. A total of 353 subjects were divided into 9 groups based on their level of English proficiency and tested to determine: (1) what types of errors Japanese adult ESL…

Contrastive analysis is viewed as an interlinguistic, bidirectional phenomenon which is concerned with both the form and function of language. As such, contrastive analysis must view language psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically as a system to be both described and acquired. Due to the need for a psychological component in the analysis,…

Studies the acquisition of timing control by Australians enrolled in first-year Japanese. Instrumental techniques are used to observe segment duration and pitch patterns in the speech production of learners and native speakers. Results indicate the learners can control timing, but their phonetic realization differs from that of native speakers.…

Data collected from both native and non-native speakers' linguistic performances in five request and seven apology situations revealed a systematic difference in length of utterance in speech acts by non-native speakers as compared to native speakers. Deviation from native norms of utterance length can cause pragmatic failure in several ways.…

A study investigated Koreans' use and misuse of the English passive, from a pragmatic perspective, with attention to the possible source of errors. Subjects were 200 college students at two universities in Korea who were English majors or minors or taking English as an elective course, divided equally between sophomores and juniors. The subjects…

A review of the literature on child language reveals little research on overgeneralization in the speech of the bilingual child. Questions arise regarding (1) the existence of interlingual overgeneralizations, and (2) the possibility that monolingual deviations and bilingual code switching might be forms of overgeneralization. Because a model for…

This study focused on linguistic analyses used in the PIF Project (Project in Error Analysis, Interlanguage Studies and Contrastive Linguistics), an ongoing study of learner language and a project in foreign language pedagogy. For the project, 120 Danish learners of English were divided into 12 groups representing different Danish educational…

The language learner is activated by exposure to primary linguistic data in the target language, categorizes that data and deduces from it a system of rules or hypotheses. When the language acquisition process is successful, as is virtually always the case in first language acquisition, the learner's rule system corresponds to that of the speech…