I am currently studying a Bilingual Ed degree in Spain and I am supposed to choose five authors that have made an important impact on verbal behaviourism, interlanguage, DAL, psycholinguistics, fossilization.

I have chosen Chomsky, Skinner, Bley-Vroman, Ellis, Lenneberg…but I feel like this may be a mistake if I am supposed to defend that they are have helped the study of linguistics with the aforementioned concepts. What about Selinker? Any disagreements? Is there anyone that is soooo important in this field that I should not leave out?
thanks

It is amazing to be in the mix of your readers, coming from various perspectives.

I was fortunate to have found you while trying to discern the stages of interlanguage. I have a final coming up and like most, the guide is ambiguous.

With your discourse and other studies (including available text) I believe, “by Job. I ‘ave it!” Thanx :*)

I wonder how it applies to situation like McKale’s with several L1 level languages and one or more previously learned additional languages. I bet the stages get more confused (or possibly more compressed).

However, with enough people, I think it should still be possible to talk about gaps in knowledge and/or similarities that are caused by source/target combination of languages. It is not something that could have been reliably looked at before(due to small class sizes), but with internet based training, there is an opportunity to segment the students into still sizable groups however complex the common criterias are.

Interlanguage is not just a concept wherein learners go through stages of language acquisition. It is a separate language system between the first and second languages which a learner goes throuh. It has five processes, according to Selinker. The knowledge of this intermediary language and the processes that the learner goes through while learning the language is important because it will help the teacher in preventing errors or helping out the students in correcting their errors.

Fossilization, on the other hand is not the state wherein the learner becomes unable to learn new things. S/he will be able to learn but not use it properly because some structures or use of the language has become fossilized within the learner. But it does not mean that the learner does not know the correct structure. Again, with the knowledge of fossilization, the teacher will know how to prevent it, enabling the learner to progress in language learning.

At least, as a language major, this is my understanding of these terms.

I see that this page is very old, but I wanted to clarify/add something about the term “interlanguage”, as the first poster said “I cannot see any need for the term interlanguage. Why don’t they just call it, “the stages of learning?” Although, it doesn’t seem to me that stages can be defined. Every learner will be in a different place. One will know A but not B and the other one will know B but not A. So, it’s not like you can just progress through each “stage.” The teacher cannot say, “Aha! He knows B so I don’t need to teach him A.” and this is not at all what the term “interlanguage” means.

Interlanguage (and this is in my own words, so forgive the laymans) is basically the language that each individual uses in their mind to connect two (or more) languages. Its the way in which the learner of an L2 formats that TL (target language) into their brain to help learn/remember/etc the L2, and is usually used coinciding with their L1. It is interlanguage because usually it is not just your L1 or L2, but rather your own made-up set of rules, formatted specifically by & for you. It is “inter” because it is “between” (more or less) the two languages. For example, I speak English & Spanish, and have studied Russian, Italian, & Arabic, and my “interlanguage method” in order to retain as much of whichever TL as possible, is to continuously compare the languages to each other.

Well, I hope that was helpful, rather than harmful, to whoever may read this page after me.

And to tell some truth, some tutors and experts are debatting about it and they earn respect because at least someone cares to give the stages and processes of learning a bit of an academic realm. Any other opinion against this, I respect. But as a teacher in a Polithecnic School for Engineering, with louds of experts in computers and statistics buzz around, I am happy to be able to show some scientific nomenclature on the subject “language learning”
Thank you

I suspect I am fairly high up because not too many people write about computational linguistics and interlanguage, them being two schools of thought usually in disagreement.

Also, most of those who do write, don’t link to each other, which gives them a low rank in search-engines. Hopefully, that will change, as I had troubles finding anything interesting on the topic when I did the searches myself.