INTRODUCTION TO SERIES ON INTERLANGUAGE SYNTAX

Patsy M. Lightbown Concordia University

Three papers on interlanguage syntax were presented at the 17th Annual TESOL Convention in Toronto (March 1983), in the TESOL Research Interest Group’s State-of-the-Art forum. Each taking a different perspective, William Rutherford, Susan Gass, and Roger Andersen sought to provide a review of research on interlanguage syntax and to point to future directions for that research. These three papers will appear in consecutive issues of Language Learning, beginning with the paper by Susan Gass in this issue. As I was the coordinator of that TESOL forum and had the privilege of introducing the papers there, I have been asked to provide a brief introduction to them here.

Researchers in second language acquisition frequently remind their readers that their field of study is a very new one. Most of us date its beginnings around the end of the 1960s with the publication in 1967 of Corder’s landmark paper “The Significance of Learners’ Errors” and Selinker’s 1972 article whose title gave a name to what it is we investigate: “1 nterlanguage. ”

For various reasons, little ofthe interlanguage research of the early 1970s focussed on syntax. A number of studies focussed on morphology; some on phonology; a few on lexicon. It is only in the past few years that syntax has come to be a major area of study. Thus it may seem premature to attempt to review the field in a “state of the art” forum. However, the rapid growth of this area of study makes it not only not premature but indeed quite timely. It is important to provide researchers-as well as teachers and materials writers who consult research-with an overview of the current research for two reasons: (1) The growth of interlanguage syntax research is so rapid that only the specialists can keep up with the developments by reading every new study, and (2) even the specialists need to pause and take stock of the state of the art before carrying out new research if there is to be some orderly progress toward a theory of interlanguage syntax.

In her paper in this issue, Susan Gass reviews the literature on “transfer”-one of the oldest bases for an explanation of interlanguage

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product and process-and “language universals”-one of the most recent. She concludes her paper with a discussion of current research on the hypothesized interaction between these major factors in the development of interlanguage syntax.

In the September issue, William Rutherford points out how views of what language is have determined how different researchers have described and then attempted to explain interlanguage syntax and its development. In particular, views of language structure as independent of meaning and discourse context led to limited descriptions. More recent research has increased the scope of both description and proposed explanations.

In the December issue, Roger Andersen looks at interlanguage from his perspective as an analyst of pidgins and Creoles, reflecting on common characteristics of these language forms and learner languages. He summarizes some previous research in terms of his proposal for a “one-to- one principle” whereby interlanguages tend toward single, invariant form- to-meaning relationships.

The three papers will be a valuable “roadmap” for helping us determine where we are in the study of interlanguage syntax (how far we’ve come) and in pointing out the various routes we may now need to follow (how far we have yet to travel) to reach our objective: an understanding of the processes involved in the development of a second language.

REFERENCES

Corder, S.P. 1967. The significance of learners’ errors. IRAL 5 : 161-169. Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. I R A L 10:209-23 1.