The development of an interlanguage An analysis of a Chinese student’s English writing

Abstract

This study analyzed the morphosyntactic errors in six English writing samples, from different genres, by one 13-year-old Chinese immigrant student learning English as his second language in Grade 6. The analysis was conducted according to Dulay, Burt, and Krashen’s (1982) surface strategy taxonomy. The results revealed that the top eight most commonly occurring types of the learner’s morphosyntactic errors were: (1) misformation of verbs, (2) misordering of words, (3) omission of articles, (4) omission of verbs, (5) omission of conjunctions, (6) misformation of sentences (run-on), (7) omission of prepositions, and (8) misformation of plural noun agreement. The sources of these errors can be categorized into what Richards (1974) characterized as (a) interlingual errors, and (b) intralingual and developmental errors. The interlingual errors reflect the learner’s inappropriate application of knowledge of his or her first language (L1), while the intralingual and developmental errors show the learner’s inadequate knowledge of grammatical rules of his or her second language (L2). This study further found that the pattern of occurrences of the researched learner’s morphosyntactic errors was actually systematic and logical, possibly reflecting his construction of what Selinker (1972) described as an “interlanguage,” a new language system that is related to but also distinct from both the learner’s L1 and L2.