This theory of learning was challenged both by Chomskys attack on behaviourism (see his famous review of B.SkinnersVer balLearning in 1959) and also by research on Li acquisition, which showed that children did not seem to learn their mother tongue as a set ofhabits but rather seemed to construct mentalrules, which often bore no resemblance to those manifest in their caretakers speech.This challenge to the received opinion of the day created the necessary climate for the empirical study of L2 acquisition.Were learners errors the result of Li transfer? Did L2 learners, like L1 learners, construct unique mental rules? These were questions that could only be answered by looking at learner language.
Second, many L2 researchers were directly concerned with language pedagogy.The prevailing methods of the day were the audiolingual method and the oral/situational approach.(See Richards and Rogers 1986.) Both of these emphasized tightly structuring the input to the learner and controlling output in order to minimize errors.It was noted, however, that children were successfulin acquiring their mother tongue without such a structured learningenvironment.Also, many L2 learners, children and adults, seemed to be very successful in learning an L2 in natural settings.Newmark (1966), in a seminal paper, argued that L2 learning in the classroom would proceed more efficiently if teachers stopped interfering in the learning process.But how did L2 learners learn in natural settings? What strategies did they use? What made some learners more successful than others? Again, these were questions that invited empirical enquiry.Many of the early studies in SLA research investigated L2 learners m naturalistic or mixed settings, motivated in part by the desire to find what experiences worked for them, so that suitable copies could be introduced into the language classroom.
This, then, constitutes the background to the study of learner Ianguage.It should be clear that, although the empirical studies were primarilydescriptive in nature, they were not atheoretical.In the late ig60s and 1970s a growing consensus was reached that behaviourist theories of L2 learning were inadequate.L2.learners, like L1 learners, were credited with a built-in-syllabus (Corder 1967), which guided their progress.Selinker (1969, 1972)coined the term interlanguage to refer to the special mental grammars that learners constructed during the course of their development.Interlanguage theory credited learners with playing an active role in constructing these grammars.
It treated their behaviour, including their errors, as rule-governed.The language they produced, therefore, reflected the strategies they used to construct provisional grammatical rules (i.e.rules which they subsequently revised).The research that we will now consider helped to shape interlanguage theory and,in many cases, was influenced by it.Thus, although the main concern of this section is the description oflearner language, some attention to theory is inevitable.Interlanguage theory is considered more fully in Chapter 9.
