A Longitudinal Study On Written Interlanguage Of English Majors

The present study aims to examine the characteristics of written interlanguage development of English majors over four years. It is a quantitative study based on three self-constructed corpora of students' compositions in examinations.Interlanguage is a peculiar and interim language system of second language learners. It is a developing language system which is also permeable, dynamic and systematic. The study of interlanguage can reveal the characteristics of second language acquisition and development of language-learner language.The most effective way to study interlanguage is to analyze learners' written or spoken output. The development of corpus linguistics and the build-up of large-sized corpora in the 1960s have provided a new approach to interlanguage research. Since the 1980s, domestic corpora have been built up and have helped to shift the research approach from non-data to empirical studies. The previous researches mainly centered on error analysis and the acquisition of specific linguistic elements. As far as the research methodology is concerned most previous studies were cross-sectional. Longitudinal studies on interlanguage development were very few.The present study conducted a longitudinal research on compositions of 77 English majors who were enrolled in Nanjing Agricultural University in 2002. Due to the accessibility to valid materials, compositions were collected from the final examinations of Integrative English Course in the 1^st semester of Grade 1 and Grade 3, and the integrative competence test in Grade 4 with the exception of Grade 2. They constituted three corpora. Each corpus was analyzed in terms of lexical variation, lexical frequency profiles, syntactic maturity or complexity and latent discourse coherence. The results show that there were significant changes in these three linguistic dimensions, but their changes followed different patterns. From Grade 1 to Grade 3, lexical and syntactic competence of the English majors developed significantly, but in Grade 4 their lexical competence began to backslide and their syntactic competence stagnated. The latent discourse coherence did not change significantly from Grade 1 to Grade 3, but it progressed significantly in Grade 4. It is concluded that in the case of the English major students in Nanjing Agricultural University, the development of interlanguage is dynamic, but the development pattern is not linear. The vocabulary acquisition is less stable than the syntactic acquisition. There is a stagnancy, or 'plateau' in vocabulary learning after Grade 3. By contrast, the latent discourse coherence competence developed without the influence of the ups and downs of lexical and syntactic competence.Suggestions are put forward based on the results: the school should provide some bilingual selective courses, in combination with the traditional English major courses to ensure sufficient target language input; the students should be encouraged to make full use of diverse English resources to keep constant exposure to target language. Students should have more practice in writing to enhance the output of target language and composition be included in the examinations in each semester. Some courses which can help to train logical thinking should be offered in the first two years of university to improve their logical thinking as early as possible.