The major aim of the current paper is to review and discuss three prevailing approaches to the study of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) since the middle of the twentieth century: Contrastive Analysis (CA, henceforth), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (IL). It begins with a general overview of how the CA approach was formulated and developed…

The current study responds to the call for increased dialogue among different areas of additional language research. Specifically, we bring together learner corpus research and variationist approaches to second language acquisition to advance learner corpus research in two ways: (a) by modeling interlanguage development and variability and (b) by…

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

The present study explores knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender in both comprehension and production by heritage language speakers and second language (L2) learners, with native Spanish speakers as a baseline. Most L2 research has tended to interpret morphosyntactic variability in interlanguage production, such as errors in gender agreement, as…

This study has investigated the interlanguage features in spoken language of four foreigner learners of Bangla. Data has been collected through interviews which were recorded and analyzed. The analysis of the respondents' language has been made in terms of phonetic, morphological and syntactic aspects. The language deviations may be attributed to…

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds…

Second language researchers have been studying passive unaccusative errors such as "What was happened?," but have not reached a consensus about the ultimate cause of this unique interlanguage structure. This article reviews five major accounts proposed in he literature. (Author/VWL)

Discusses linguistic competence and performance and how analyzing second language learners' errors can provide clues about their interlanguage, which is useful not only for pedagogical reasons, but also for the forwarding of general linguistic theory. (EKN)

A review of the development and interaction of research involving second language contrastive analysis, error analysis, and interlanguage demonstrates how different assumptions and theoretical preconceptions have affected the results of such research, and the degree to which the research areas have drawn on the other areas. (39 references) (CB)

A research project is discussed involving the collection of production data from writing samples of 375 adult learners of English divided equally among five language backgrounds: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish. Information is presented about three constructions: (1) subject relative clause, (2) infinitival complement on verb, and…

Reports on research into the validity of the theory of interlanguage, based on evidence of interference of the native language in Dutch students of French. (AM)

Just as learning a first language is sometimes compared to existence within the relatively sheltered world of the Garden of Eden, the process of learning a second language is viewed as analogous to survival after expulsion from the Garden into a relatively harsh world, in which the learner must come to a conscious understanding of form and meaning…

Addresses the difficulty of article acquisition by examining the perception of noun countability by native speakers of English and Japanese speakers of English, testing whether native and nonnative speakers have different perceptions of countability. Results suggest a possible link between the indefinite versus zero article suppliance by Japanese…

Examines three experimental studies deriving from contrastive analysis predictions and error analysis insights into deviances from expected target language forms. Each of these studies predate the Interlanguage hypothesis. (CB)