Task-bound Variability In Interlanguage

Interlanguage refers to an interim language system constructed by second languagelearners between the mother tongue and the target language. It continuously moves close tothe target language with constant consummation. It gradually became an important issue inthe field of second language acquisition since Selinker (1972) first proposed it in 197~ inhis paper Interlanguage. The inherent variability of language-learner language has beenfrequently commented on, and not surprisingly, has attracted considerable attention fromresearchers. Yet there has been a hot debate between non-variationists and variationistsregarding the issue whether second language acquisition research should incorporate theexploration of interlanguage variability. We are in favor of variationist view thatinterlanguage variability is intimately linked to changes in learners' language over time.Interlanguage variability can provide us information about the way in which performance invarious social contexts can have effects on interlanguage use and the overall developmentof interlanguage. Thus the exploration of interlanguage variability not only provides aclearer understanding of interlanguage itself, but also unveils features and properties of theprocess of second language acquisition so as to improve language teaching.Task-related interlanguage variability began to arouse researchers' interest in 1 970s.And at that time most studies regarding this phenomenon were conducted in an incidentalmaimer. Since 1 980s, researchers started to carry out some studies with the specific purposeof testing hypotheses about task-related interlanguage variability. Those studies haveestablished the influence of the main factor: attention to language form, on interlanguagevariability. Yet the number of this kind of studies is still relatively small, as such notsufficient to make it clear why different types of tasks can result in interlanguage variability.In China, the research field of task-related interlanguage variability remains a virgin land.Thus our experiment in this dissertation serves as a preliminary attempt to explore this fieldin order to unveil the properties of the second language acquisition process of the L2learners whose mother language is Chinese. Our experiment has adopted LabovianAbstract65framework and aimed to investigate the accuracy of simple past tense forms of Englishverbs in three different tasks, the accuracy orders of irregular past and regular past and thesex difference of the performance of the same language forms in different tasks.The whole dissertation is made up of the following five chapters:Chapter One gives a brief introduction of the research background, aim andarrangements of this dissertation.Chapter .T\vo introduces the definitions of interlanguage and two categorization ofinterlanguage variability respectively proposed by Ellis (1985a) and Bialystok &Sharwood-Smith (1985). Then two groups of theories are recommended to account forinterlanguage variability: "inner processing theories" and "sociolinguistic theories". Theformer group of theories attempts to explain interlanguage variability from thepsychological perspective while the latter from broader social contexts. These two groupsof theories possess their own advantages and disadvantages, and supplement in theirrespective performance. Both of them provide insights for clarifying interlanguagevariability from different perspectives.Chapter Three reviews the exploration of interlanguage variability regardingsystematic and non-systematic variability and comments on the studies. From the review, itcan be seen that a variety of factors, such as linguistic context, different types of tasks,psychological processing factors, and language function etc may cause interlanguagevariability. Yet most of the st...