Adult English Learners Interlanguage Analysis

Interlanguage refers to the separateness of a second language learner's system, a system that has a structurally intermediate status between the native and the target languages, which leads to a whole new era of second language research and teaching and presents a significant breakthrough from the shackles of the contrastive analysis hypothesis. The most obvious approach to analyzing interlanguage is to study the speech and writing of learners, and the study of which is largely the study of the errors of the learners. The author of this thesis just attempts to probe into the source of the errors and mistakes from a cognitive and psychological perspective on the basis of Kellerman's theory of"psychotypology","prototypicality"and another basic and important theory: markedness theory.Since the interlanguage is a gradual process of successive approximation to the target language, the author focuses on the cases of learners who begin to learn certain language items, trying to analyze the interlanguage in light of psychotypology, prototypicality, and markedness theory.In order to verify and validate the framework, the author analyzes the interlanguage in terms of some syntactic structures in context of Chinese adult learners learning English as L2. The framework is supported by the analysis: (1) In respect of some linguistic property, if the psychotypology of the adult English learners in terms of the L1 and L2 is distant or big, they will commit errors instead of mistakes, or they will avoid the errors (underproduction). (2) In respect of some linguistic property, if the psychotypology of the adult English learners in terms of the L1 and L2 is near or small, with the fact that the L1 is marked and L2 is unmarked, there will be the least mistakes, even none in the adult English learner's interlanguage. (3) In respect of some linguistic property, if the psychotypology of the adult English learners in terms of the L1 and L2 is near or small, with the fact that L1 is unmarked and L2 is marked, mistakes will take place in the adult English learner's interlanguage.