Approaches to Language

February 2010

To say that native-like competence is necessary we have
to see in which context the language is going to be
used. Somebody can have a native-like competence, but at
a basic level, which would still enable the person to
develop a conversation or do whatever he she intends to
and this is very common in the business world.  Many
people are learning English and other languages through
software programs such as Rosetta Stone and being able
to achieve their goals, whichever it is. It might be for
travelling, project research, ESP or any other reason.
The thing is the most you try to sound like your model
in the target language or even if you lived in another
country for some time, you might sound native-like, but
one might not have full language competence. What do you
think? Gilmara Bezerra

Errors and mistakes have been vastly discussed here and
it seems that the main focus is on grammar, which is
what happens in most cases in our classes.  This week I
worked with writing with my 3rd grade group.  Those kids
have a great difficulty to understand past tense verbs,
especially the irregular ones. I had one Arabic kid that
even after editing his work, the verb “write” was always
“writed”. Now, this happened after the review of use of
past tenses. What I want to say is that this could
really be an error, even though he applied it correctly
in complete gaps in past tense sentences, but he could
not use it on its own when writing a paragraph about an
event that took place at school. That student probably
didn’t have the ownership of making his rules and how to
apply them and not repeat the same errors or mistakes.
And how about vocabulary errors? It is common to hear
that I committed a mistake instead of I made a mistake
and we check with students the right way they always
relate to the language transfer or similarities
beforehand discussed in this debate. To make the
students take advantage of this I would suggest a review
on the use of false cognates and an activity using
thesaurus to expand the vocabulary and knowledge on
right use of phrasal verbs as well. Gilmara Bezerra

Teachers have to be aware of this process so that they
will be able to plan their lessons accordingly. It is
frustrating to plan a lesson that we think is wonderful
and when we put it into practice it completely doesn't
work. Did we plan for the students or for ourselves? So,
being aware of the issues in this subject is essential
for the teacher, especially for the ones with
mixed-ability students. The implications are many , but
if the teacher deals with interlanguage himself or has
some extent of fossilized structure, I mean does not
have a real understanding of what he/she is teaching,
the teaching and learning might not be very effective.
We also have to pay special attention to the use of
overgeneralization. In many cases we think that the
students understood what what was taught,but when
assessing we see that the language was not properly
used, which is very common when teaching perfect tenses.
Gilmara Bezerra
I think that feedback is very important at all means in
language learning and especially when meaning
improvement of the target language. We can give feedback
by illustrating how the language instructions work or
using an informal assessment or even by providing
students with work samples that they have to figure out
what is wrong and explain how to correct it. This way,
students might be able to find explanation to their own
fossilized structures and move to another step in
developing interlanguage making it more meaningful for
their comprehension.

Gilmara Bezerra
Are we seeing interlanguage as something pro or against
language learning? In my viewpoint, I see  it as very
positive and I think that error correction has to be
worked with carefully so that we don't guide the
students to create another "interlanguage" of what we
are trying to make clear.

Gilmara Bezerra
I think it is very important to pay attention to how our
students are using their interlanguage. We know we
create our own rules to "verify" our comprehension on
some contents and so do our students. We are constantly
double checking the meanings, as we talked about that in
the use of translation, but here, it seems that
interlanguage has more to do with structures than to
vocabulary itself.

However, we might not interrupt instruction to correct
the use of interlanguage. We can take notes and work
with the students individually or even prepare an
activity that is going to be a review for the whole
class that is going to focus on the fossilized
structure. Our "mental grammar" will be able to identify
the interlanguage  students are using and maybe benefit
from this strategy as well.

  What do you think?   Gilmara Bezerra

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