The identification and analysis of interference between languages in contact has traditionally been a central aspect of the study of bilingualism. The intrusion of features of one language into another in the speech of bilinguals has been studied at the levels of phonology, morphology and syntax. The systems of the contact languages themselves have sometimes been contrasted, and an important outcome of contrastive studies has been the notion that they allow for prediction of the difficulties involved in acquiring a second language.
Those elements that are similar to the native (learner’s) native language will be simple for him, and those areas that are different will be difficult. In the last two decades language teaching has derived considerable impetus from the application of contrastive studies. Perhaps the least questioned and least questionable application of linguistics is the contribution of contrastive analysis. Especially in the teaching of languages for which no considerable and systematic teaching experience is available, contrastive analysis can highlight and predict the difficulties of the pupils.
Studies of second language acquisition, however, have tended to imply that contrastive analysis may be most predictive at the level of phonology, and least predictive at the syntactic level. A recent study of Spanish-English bilingualism, for example, state that many people assume, following logic that is easy to understand, that the errors made by bilinguals are caused by their mixing Spanish and English. One of the most important conclusions is that interference from Spanish is not a major factor in the way bilinguals construct sentences and use the language.
There are several types of errors, observed in the acquisition of English as a second language, which do not derive from transfers from another language. Excluded from discussion are what may be called interlanguage errors; that is, errors caused by the interference of the learner’s mother tongue. A different class of errors are represented by sentences such as did he comed, what you are doing, he coming from Israel, make him to do it, I can to speak French. Errors of this nature are frequent, regardless of the learner’s language background. They may be called intralingual and developmental errors. Rather than reflecting the learner’s inability to separate two languages, intralingual and developmental errors reflect the learner’s competence at a particular stage, and illustrate some of the general characteristics of language acquisition. Their origins are found within the structure of
English itself, and through reference to the strategy by which a second language is acquired and taught. By studying intralingual and developmental errors within the framework of a theory of second language learning, and through examining typical cases of the teaching of the forms from which the learners are derived, it may be possible to see the way towards teaching procedures that take account of the learner’s strategy for acquiring a second language.
An examination of the errors suggests that intralingual errors are those which reflect the general characteristics of rule learning, such as faulty generalization, incomplete application of rules, and failure to learn conditions under which rules apply. Developmental errors illustrate the learner attempting to build up hypotheses about the English language from his limited experience of it in the classroom or textbook.
