Volume 55, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Interlanguage 45 years on: New Directions, Guest Editors: Leah Roberts and Norbert Vanek

Interlanguage is a concept that is manifest in any trajectory of language change in a learner: typical first language, second language or language disorder. To understand those trajectories we need a rich psychological model of what creates them. This paper applies one such model–Sharwood Smith and Truscott’s Modular On-Line Growth and Use of Language model (MOGUL)–to childhood developmental language disorders, and suggests that the model’s components of language processing and their interaction shed significant light on why children with a wide range of different language disorders exhibit the language behaviours that are the characteristic of their diagnoses. Following a brief summary of the MOGUL model, the paper explores the impact on language development of differences in sensori-motor input, in the functioning of the various modules and the interfaces between them, and in the storage and activation of memory. Like Relevance Theory, with which the paper makes a direct connection, MOGUL encourages one to take a view of developmental language disorder as emerging from the same set of psychological resources as typical development (first or second) but as being the result of adjustments to, or compensations for, differences in how the various modules function and connect with each other.

Spontaneous language learning both in children learning their mother tongue and in adults learning a second language shows that language development proceeds in a stage-wise manner. Given that a developmental stage is defined as a coherent linguistic system, utterances of language learners can be accounted for in terms of what (Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10. 209–231) referred to with the term Interlanguage. This paper is a study on the early interlanguage systems of children learning Dutch and German as their mother tongue. The present child learner systems, so it is claimed, are coherent lexical systems based on types of verb-argument structure that are either agentive (as in Dutch: kannie bal pakke ‘cannot ball get’, or German: mag nich nase putzen ‘like not nose clean’) or non-agentive (as in Dutch: popje valt bijna ‘doll falls nearly’, or in German: ente fällt ‘duck falls’). At this lexical stage, functional morphology (e. g. morphological finiteness, tense), function words (e. g. auxiliary verbs, determiners) and word order variation are absent. For these typically developing children, both in Dutch and in German, it is claimed that developmental progress is driven by the acquisition of the formal properties of topicalization. It is, furthermore, argued that this feature seems to serve as the driving force in the instantiation of the functional, i. e. informational linguistic properties of the target-language system.

The term interlanguage can be used to refer both to the object of investigation, i. e. learners’ L2 competences as instantiated in their linguistic productions, or to an approach to investigating such competences and describing such productions. In this second sense, it has major implications for both research and teaching, as it involves treating learners’ utterances as being based on separate linguistic systems, which need to be described in their own right, with no reference to other languages, including the L2. The didactic consequences of the interlanguage approach include, among other things, a different attitude towards errors, greater learners’ autonomy and a focus on linguistic experimentation and hypotheses-testing. The article reports on a project that applied these principles in some Italian primary schools. Pupils worked in groups to produce long, complex and well-organized written texts retelling a silent movie. Data collected at the beginning and end of the school year reveal that these experimental classes outperformed control classes on a number of dimensions, including group cohesion and motivation, text quality assessed with rating scales, and objective measures like text length, number of idea units, use of punctuation and cohesive devices. It is argued that interlanguage analysis and the interlanguage approach should become an integral part of teacher training in all areas of language education.

This paper reports work-to-date on a particular practical context, applying one approach to interlanguage, the discourse domains approach, merged with the rhetorical-grammatical approach, involving both language and content. The context is an MA course for teacher residents placed in urban schools, and their English language learners (ELLs) in math and science classes, providing content area teachers the linguistic support they need to teach the language of their content, and thus the content itself. We were interested in how exactly learners’ interlanguage creation interacts with their understanding of scientific concepts. We primarily look at the rhetorical function “definition,” with discourse level semantic choices, and attendant grammar, with ELL data gathered by the teacher residents. Correct definitions in expected grammatical form point to an understanding of the scientific concept within the discourse domain, providing evidence that the science or mathematics content has been understood by the student. In our data analysis, we concentrated on the semantics and grammar of this rhetorical function, but other functions kept intruding, especially “classification”. Cross-language transfer appears not to be a factor, but cross-domain transfer is. Finally, we discuss how the marriage of this view of interlanguage with safe rule rhetorical/grammatical functions can better support teacher preparation, especially given how challenging teaching ELLs is for content area teachers.