انجمن علمی زبان دانشگاه آزاد یزد

The term interlanguage was coined by Larry Selinker in 1972. Selinker stressed that one of the main features of interlanguage is that it is an autonomous or independent language system.

Previously, the assumption was that most of L2 learners' errors were caused by interference from the L1, that is, where the grammar of the L1 differs from that of the L2. This approach is called error analysis.

Thus, Spanish speakers who produced “the book new” in English were applying Spanish word order. However, by studying examples of sentences produced by L2 learners, researchers noted that some of what they produced had grammatical structures that were not found in either the learner's native language or the target language. Therefore, they deduced that learners must have some independent grammar that they relied on to produce such sentences.

Early interlanguage researchers were intrigued by these examples of an independent grammar at work in L2 learners' emerging systems and pointed to them as evidence of Noam Chomsky's claims of “universal grammar,” and of a person's innate language faculty.

Selinker claimed that the proof that interlanguage exists—the evidence of a learner's separate linguistic system—also pointed to the existence of a latent psychological structure that is activated when one begins learning a second language. During the 1970s and 1980s, interlanguage became the object of research for the newly emerging field of second-language acquisition (SLA) studies, a branch of psycholinguistics.

The interest of SLA researchers is focused on the cognitive processes involved when a person who has already acquired his or her first language attempts to acquire a second language, and by taking interlanguage as their theoretical starting point, researchers were able to generate empirical evidence about the internal mental processes of second-language learning.

 Source: SAGE REFERENCE ONLINE