| Global J. of Engng. Educ., Vol.I,
No.1 Printed in Australia |
Copyright 1997 UICEE
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on the Professional Performance of Foreign Engineers Trained in English as a Second Language* | |||
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Knowledge of a foreign/second language has always been an advantage in professional careers. Recently, it has become essential, especially in engineering due to the progressive internationalisation of the profession which has resulted in increased mobility, information exchange and enhanced employment prospects. A foreign language component is becoming a very important part of the engineering curriculum. The findings of the research into the linguistic behaviour of migrant engineers, educated in English as a foreign/second language in both their home country and Australia, revealed that adult, intermediate second-language learners, in a new, real-life social setting, revert to their native language when confronted with an unfamiliar native speaker of the target language. It is felt that the analysis is important in that it explains the frequent mismatch between competence and performance, and stresses the importance of combining both linguistic and cross-cultural aspects in preparing professionals for specific job-related situations. It also makes it clear that the amount of tuition time is a vital element for successful communication in a foreign/second language. |
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* An expanded version of a keynote address
Knowledge of a foreign/second language has always been of value across professional fields. Recently, however, the engineering profession, being one of the most crucial to a nation's economic and industrial success, has witnessed an exceptional transformation due to advancements in technology and changes in the world's political orientation. There has been a significant increase in mobility amongst engineers, with many engineering courses becoming international and engineers seeking employment/cooperation with international firms, be it in their own country or abroad.
In Australia, the supply of engineering graduates from local and overseas sources, relative to demand for their services, has always been of key interest.
As skilled migration expanded between 1987-88 and 1991-92, specific engineering fields were repeatedly listed by the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs among the select occupational groups gaining bonus points for employability; a fact which would encourage many engineers to emigrate [9]. All these factors suggest a high demand for bilingual or multilingual engineers. Not only are their professional skills of importance, but also their knowledge of foreign languages to function successfully in today's world of technology.
These increased demands put on engineers pose a very important question of what it means to train someone linguistically to function in a given field, and how we can predict people's performance in specific profession-related situations. The understanding of the amount of tuition time required to acquire a sufficient level of proficiency in a foreign/second language, enabling one to function successfully in one's profession, as well as the awareness of the factors influencing the performance in real-life situations, seem of great importance if we are to set realistic expectations. The expectations often are that a given number of hours offered in a language program will prepare one to fulfil professional tasks successfully. Often no consideration is given to the nature of the task, where the demands put on the foreign/second language learner/speaker vary depending on the task difficulty.
One of the most demanding tasks a foreign/second language learner/speaker is confronted with is an oral, face to face, spontaneous performance in an unfamiliar setting with an unfamiliar interlocutor. The ability to express oneself in a foreign/second language is crucial for job seeking, performance on the job, business, trade, further study in one's professional field etc, yet very often the performance of foreign/second language speakers is regarded as inadequate, especially by native speakers of the given language (eg employers, lecturers, business partners, language program providers) who fail to understand the difficulties faced by someone who not only has to operate in a foreign/second language, but also in a new environment.
As cultures come into more contact in the modern world (the global village), it is believed that people will become more experienced, and communicative competence, as well as intercultural understanding, will emerge naturally. Yet, as the current study proves, that increased contact alone does not lead to improved communication. As with any other area of human competence, there are elements of attitude, awareness, knowledge, skill and the amount of time which are necessary to facilitate performance and improve communication.
The cross-cultural dimension within communication - preparation for specific situations (eg oral, face to face, encounters), making explicit cultural assumptions that underpin people's behaviours - is vital in second/foreign language teaching. Thus the relationship between competence and performance, as well as language and culture, is becoming increasingly important in our curricula.
For people to communicate effectively in a given situation, meaning has to be shaped in a way that is similarly interpreted by those sharing this situation. Thus making people aware of the differences between their own and the host society's expectations, making explicit cultural assumptions that underpin people's behaviours, seem increasingly to be perceived as the teachers' responsibility.
Many people argue that it is impossible, or undesirable, to lose one's own identity, but what is both possible and of great importance in order to be able to function successfully in a new culture is an awareness that each society's established rules of how to communicate differ from one another. If we are to communicate successfully, we must do things in appropriate ways, which of course is where culture comes in.
Our role as language teachers is thus to make the differences explicit and show/teach the ways of managing the differences to one's advantage. Often learners resist; initially they are unwilling to change/modify their set ways. Comments often made by them in reference to, for instance, the way in which job interviews are conducted in Australia, are, but why do I have to play the game? Why is it that the half hour of an oral interview means more than five years of my university course? According to the students, their qualifications should speak for themselves. With step by step tuition, the learners realise that they are not being deprived of what they value, but they are gaining something new. They realise that often the best way is to comply, otherwise you lose. So the old saying: When in Rome do as the Romans do carries a lot of weight.
As already pointed out, one of the most difficult tasks foreign/second language speakers are confronted with is an oral, face to face, interaction. There the mismatch between competence and performance is most pronounced, being induced by the setting and the interlocutor.
In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to the way in which the accuracy of learner language (or interlanguage [IL]) varies, following Tarone's claim that:
As second-language acquisition researchers, I believe we have not paid enough attention to one of the inherent characteristics of language; in its use in human interaction, it varies with the subtlest shifts of situation, just as the chameleon changes colour as its surroundings change [17].
Research has established that interlanguage varies in a number of ways, and attempts have been made to discover and explain the underlying causes of this variability. Studies on IL variation, as reported by Tarone, seem to have provided evidence for four general causes of learner language variation [18] [19]:
All of these factors may have a variable effect on a learner's use of related phonological and syntactic structures.
Various theories have been proposed to account for this phenomenon. These theories may be divided into two general types. The first one consists of what Tarone calls inner processing theories, which draw upon insights and research in various areas of psychology [18]. Thus this theory seeks to explain variation primarily as the result of psycholinguistic processes of various kinds. The second type, called sociolinguistic and discourse theories, attempts to relate variation to social and functional causes. Thus the cause of interlanguage variation in this group of theories is related to such external social factors as the identity of the interlocutor, the familiarity of setting, the topic of discussion, the social norms typical of the given discourse situation, the communicative pressure placed on the speaker to perform, or the linguistic forms and their functions in discourse.
According to Beebe and Giles, social-psychological models of IL variation, such as those derived from Speech Accommodation Theory, posit factors such as the interlocutor, the topic of discourse and the social norms activated in the speech situation as true causes of variability in IL [3]. Advocates of these social psychological theories argue, like Bell, that the ultimate cause of variation in language is the interlocutor [4].
The number of studies focusing on the influence of social variables, like interlocutor, on IL variability is relatively small. It is felt that the need for detailed analysis of the effects of a new, real-life situation, as opposed to a familiar one, on learners' performance is of great importance. Firstly, such knowledge is essential for second language acquisition and teaching. Secondly, it is important for the development and use of assessment and evaluation techniques. Finally, it might assist foreign/second language tuition providers, as well as employers, in their policy or employment planning.
In order to address the issue of the demands that spontaneous, real-life interview-type situations put on the foreign/second language speakers, a study of six language learners' performance in a specific field-related situation was conducted.
This paper presents the results of this research into the linguistic behaviour of adult second language learners in an oral interview situation. It focuses on the significant variation in their performance that can be ascribed to the familiarity of setting/interlocutor. It then establishes the possible major category/ies of errors induced by the familiarity factor. Finally, it discusses the interlanguage variability and its implications for second/foreign language teaching and preparing professionals for specific situations (eg finding a job), where the awareness of cross-cultural factors is as important as the linguistic proficiency itself.
The study reported in this paper was designed to investigate the linguistic behaviour of adult second language learners in an oral interview situation. With all other factors held constant, the only variable that might account for the occurrence of performance variability was that of the familiarity of setting and interlocutor. That is why the study was designed in such a way as to compare the subjects' performance at Time 1, in a familiar setting with a familiar interlocutor, with Time 2, in an unfamiliar setting with an interlocutor unknown to the learners.
The study had two aims:
The subjects in this study were six ESL learners (one female, five male) enrolled in an intermediate English course at Springvale Adult Migrant Education Centre (AMEC), Melbourne, Australia.
The common characteristics of the six subjects were that they were all in their twenties, all speakers of the same first language (Polish), and all new arrivals to Australia (period of residence up to one year).
Five of them were university graduates (engineers holding MSc degrees in Geology, Electrical and Electronics Engineering respectively), one was a technician in a related field (Electrical Engineering). The engineers had all had between 4 to 8 years of prior formal (school-based) instruction in English back in Poland, while the technician commenced learning English upon his arrival in Australia. He had been here the longest (a full year), and at the time of the study had already had close to one year of formal ESL instruction. This was much longer than that of the other subjects, whose ESL instruction period ranged from 3 to 6 months. Four of the engineers did English as a Foreign Language in the course of their secondary and tertiary education in Poland (total 8 years). One did German in high school (4 years) and English (4 years) at university. They all also did one year of Russian as part of their tertiary education in their home country. Only one of the subjects, the technician, did only Russian at high school (2 years) as his prior foreign language exposure.
All six subjects involved in the experiment went through a selection process which comprised language assessment and needs and educational background analysis, before being placed in an English for Overseas Professionals type of course. They all attended the same class of 15 hours per week for about six months viz Term 3 and 4 of 1992. The course was taught by the current investigator, a native speaker of the subjects' first language (L1). It was a class of about 20 learners of various nationalities, hence the medium of instruction was only English.
The aim of the course was to prepare the learners for entry into a Tertiary and Further Education (TAFE) college, or Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), for a higher, more specialised level of tuition viz English for Academic Purposes, English for Occupational Purposes, or English for Engineers. The entry to a college is based on a formal language assessment with both oral and written components. The oral part consists of a face to face interview, while the major part of the written component is a structure test.
Subjects had been exposed to teaching based on a communicative syllabus. All the grammar material used in the course stressed contextualisation. As there was no prescribed curriculum, the course content was negotiated with the learners, taking into account their perceived needs as well as the TAFE entry requirements. The course participants saw the need, most of all, in raising their accuracy standards in terms of grammatical correctness. Thus the course combined highly form-focused instruction with a more communicative approach incorporating simulated real-life tasks.
Since the aim was to describe the oral performance of the subjects in communicative rather than formal terms, an oral interview was chosen as the data-eliciting technique. As for the method of data collection, all interviews were tape recorded. In each case, the recording was made on a one to one basis. The same subjects were interviewed twice. The topic of the interview, as well as the structure and the order in which the topic was introduced, were the same on both occasions. The interview consisted of 6 parts and was structured in such a way as to elicit a variety of speech patterns: manifestations of specific types of surface structures in certain syntactic domains. Questions were designed to encourage a large proportion of affirmative, descriptive answers, as well as negative and interrogative constructions.
The interviews were approximately half an hour in length each. They were conducted fully in English by native speakers, then transcribed and analysed. The interviews were conducted in two different settings, by two different interviewers. The two rounds of interviews were four days apart. One day before the second round of interviews, one 45 minute session was spent on discussing interview strategies, followed by another 45 minute session with interview simulated tasks. There was no grammar input for these tasks. Thus the method of data collection was taped discourse. Also, retrospective/secondary data was gathered from the subjects by getting them to listen to the recordings of themselves and comment on how they felt about the interaction.
The familiarity of the setting/interlocutor factor was the only variable that differed, all other factors were kept constant for the two rounds of interviews. The first round of interviews took place at school, hence in a familiar setting, and was conducted by the school careers counsellor, a female, former ESL-teacher who the learners knew well, had talked to before both in class and on an individual basis. The taped school-based interviews were the second round of counselling interviews, which are part of the course. The way the counselling is organised at Springvale AMEC is as follows: at the beginning of the course (second or third week), the counsellor does an hour session in the classroom with the whole class. The session is then followed by individual, face-to-face, interviews in which the counsellor spends about half an hour with each student, trying to work out their future career options. In this sense, the taped interviews were authentic and appropriate to the occasion. Beforehand, the learners were consulted regarding the taping and the purpose was explained. The tape-recorder, small and voice-activated, was found unobtrusive, as the learners' retrospective comments revealed. During the interview, the subjects later reported, they were so preoccupied with the task, so important for their future, that the machine seemed secondary. Besides, all the learners in this particular class were used to being taped, as tape-recorded tasks were introduced very early in the course and done on a regular basis throughout. All six interviews with the counsellor were conducted over two consecutive days.
The second round of interviews took place 4 days after the school-based ones and was conducted by a male interlocutor, again a native speaker of English, but this time a person without any ESL teaching experience, a person unknown to the learners. The subjects were interviewed in a new setting (university-based) by a course coordinator of the Electrical Engineering Department of RMIT. The interviews were again conducted over two days, for approximately half an hour each. Once again, the taped interviews were appropriate to the occasion as the learners were genuinely interested in further courses. Retrospective analysis showed that the learners took the interview very seriously as they considered RMIT to be one of the potential venues of their future study or employment.
It was decided that a number of c-units would be used for the purposes of this study. This would yield quantitative data for the application of statistical analysis.
A c-unit was defined, following Long's definition, as:
a T-unit or isolated phrase not accompanied by a verb, but which has communicative value (eg elliptical answers to questions) [12].
Fifty c-units were selected at random from each interview. The number of c-units within each part of the interview was calculated in percentages to obtain an even distribution of c-units throughout the interview. Part 1 of the interview, although also tape-recorded, was not used for the purposes of this analysis as it was meant to create an informal atmosphere and in this way put the subjects at ease. Single word YES/NO responses, as well as false starts, were also eliminated as they were of no significance for the purposes of this study. Where the subjects corrected themselves, the corrected version of the response was used. Since there is an absence in Polish of articles, it was decided not to take them into consideration in the study, as the perceived high number might skew the results.
Surface structure errors in the c-units obtained from each interview were analysed for both intra and interlingual errors. Selinker's error taxonomy was employed, thus yielding the following error categories: language transfer, overgeneralisation, simplification, communication based and teaching induced errors [14].
Since it was felt important to clearly differentiate between intralingual and interlingual errors, all errors that were obvious reflections of the learner's native language, and which occurred systematically across all six subjects' performance, were classified as interlingual errors to avoid overlap and rule out any ambiguity. To identify interlingual errors, the grammatical forms of the learners' phrase or sentence were translated into the learners' first language to see if similarities exist. Thus interlingual errors have been defined here as target language errors that reflect native language structure. In this way, five error categories were established as the basis for the analysis.
First, the number of errors within each of the five error categories was calculated for each subject at Time 1 and Time 2 independently. Then the statistical analysis of Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks Test was performed to compare the scores obtained in each category, at each Time, to establish if there was a significant difference in the subjects' performance between Time 1 and Time 2.
Raw data (see Table 1 and Table 2) indicates that:
In order to assess the statistical significance of the results, the analysis of data has been performed with Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks Test. It revealed that L1 errors was the only category where the difference between Time 1 and Time 2 was significant, with Wilcoxon's T = 0 (N = 6, p 0.05, two-tailed).
Data analysis carried out in this study, independently for Time 1 and Time 2, revealed that out of the five error categories, L1 and simplification errors constituted the major source of the learners' interlanguage errors within each of the two interview situations. This finding coincides with that of Arabski, who looked at the Polish-English IL of three groups of Polish learners: beginning high school, advanced high school, and beginning university [1]. Although Arabski's domain of discourse was that of classroom written IL concerning a particular topic, not an oral interview-based performance as employed in the present study, the findings were similar. The same types of errors are shown in Arabski, such as NL transfer, over-generalisation, and simplification. Transfer is shown to exist as the major source of errors.
The findings of this study reveal that in an unfamiliar setting, in an oral interview situation with an unknown interlocutor, adult intermediate ESL learners revert to their native language. The comparison of learners' performance at Time 1 and Time 2 showed that out of the five error categories as used in the current study, only one, viz Language Transfer, rose significantly. Thus it is claimed that L1 transfer is of paramount importance in interlanguage performance of second-language learners. This claim supports that of Selinker, who says:
The IL Hypothesis, as I currently see it, states that in attempting to express meanings in an L2, and in attempting to interact verbally with native, as well as with other non-native, speakers of that L2, at least the following occur: (1) People create a (partly) separate linguistic system. (2) In that system interlingual identifications and language transfer are central [15].
The subjects' proficiency in English was assessed at the time of the experiment at level 1+ on the ASLPR scale, which is only Survival Proficiency. Thus the reliance on their native language can be attributed to their inadequate L2 proficiency. It seems then, that conditions that exert pressures on the learners to produce or communicate in the second language, before an adequate proficiency has been acquired, encourage use of the first language as an aid in communication. L1 then serves as a facilitating mechanism, one that helps cope with the demands of the task. Taylor argues that more advanced learners know much more about the target language and can more often make analogies on the basis of that information [20]. Since less advanced learners have less such knowledge, they will, by Taylor's analysis, tend to draw more on their native language (or some other source language) for analogies that appear relevant.
Elicitation task has a little-discussed, but extremely important influence on a learner's verbal performance. The proportion of interlingual errors changes with the elicitation task, translation in particular [7].
Translation tasks increase the L2 learners' reliance on first language structures. Oral performance in an unfamiliar physical environment with an unfamiliar interlocutor exhibits the same tendency as the translation tasks, viz induces the L1 influence on the L2 learners' spontaneous production, as the findings of the present study show.
Most of the learners' interlingual errors in this study revolve around the misuse of word order, tense, mood, morphology and employment of literal translations from Polish. Both the syntactic and lexical inadequacies in L2 are compensated by translation equivalents or even direct borrowing from their L1. Thus previous knowledge is used to solve immediate problems and facilitate interaction in L2. Dulay et al claim that:
bilingual speakers commonly learn to use a set of interlinguistic rules of creative borrowing during an act of communication. Such creative borrowing provides an additional linguistic resource on which bilinguals may draw to enhance their communication [7].
This view is supported by Sajavaara, who claims that:
the gaps in the lexicon make it impossible for the learner to utilise the inferencing systems which are normally activated by lexical key elements, and he has to resort to pragmatic information related to his mother-tongue or look for translation equivalents for L1 structures [13].
Moreover, L2 learners, in a situation where spontaneous production is required, have no time to focus on structures or the choice of vocabulary; the paramount objective is to get the meaning across. They seem to utilise whatever means and resources they may find immediately accessible in a given situation to aid communication. What appears to be readily available is the learners' prior, well-established knowledge. Making inferences from the language system that has been fully formed is shown to be the learners' way of coping with the demands of the task. Context of situation in which the interaction occurs, (face to face interview), does not allow the learners to analyse the responses, or always make proper inferences. Performance pressure and its spontaneity result in utilising the immediate, the first choice, as long as it satisfies the communication requirements. Thus the learners are less concerned with the syntactic well-formedness of a sentence than with its being an adequate expression of their intentions. As Jordens puts it:
syntactic errors attributable to syntactic rules used inconsistently within the incremental production process are initially caused by the fact that sentence production is content-oriented. So if attention is used for cognitive and thematic processing, there is less control over syntactic well-formedness [10].
The L2 learners, in a situation where spontaneous production is required, have no time to pay attention to form; the objective is to convey the intended meaning. That is why if the proficiency level in the second language is inadequate, and if the learners feel constrained by a new setting, new interlocutor, they automatically fall back on the system that is immediately accessible, drawing upon whatever aids and resources they may have.
In their model of IL variability, Bialystok and Sharwood-Smith make a clear distinction between the second-language learners' knowledge of the language and their ability to use, or control that knowledge in communicative performance [5]. They claim that under the pressure of speaking in a conversation where one needs to have efficient and rapid access to the rule, one may not have the control processes to be able to use that rule in the time available. The findings of this study revealed that the lack of mastery over the control mechanism makes the L2 learners seek alternative solutions. L2 learners already have an internalised and automatised language system on which they can rely viz their L1. Sharwood-Smith states:
where the language learner does have the relevant type of competence but still has insufficient control over it, it is then hypothesised that he or she recruits native language (or other) competence to achieve whatever communicative goal he or she had in mind [16].
The analysis of this study, based on the comparison of the learners' performance in two different settings, as already pointed out, revealed a significant difference in their use of the first language. The unfamiliar setting, the new interlocutor, combined with the inadequacy of the linguistic repertoire and the pressure to perform, induced reliance on the learners' L1 to be able to cope with the demands of the task of such great magnitude.
The findings of the present study are contrary to the claim by Dulay et al, who claim that:
The great majority of the grammatical errors found in the language output of L2 learners is similar to those made by L1 learners of the target language rather than to the structure of the L2 learner's mother tongue. Although adults tend to exhibit more mother tongue influence in their errors than do children, adult errors that reflect L1 structure also occur in small proportions [7].
Beebe points out that the results of their research are far from conclusive if such factors as learning contexts and experimental design are taken into consideration [2]. Since qualitatively different kinds of language are elicited under different conditions, first language transfer might appear under one set of conditions but not under another.
This study revealed that learner language in a spontaneous, real-life situation is susceptible to such social factors as the familiarity/formality of setting and interlocutor, and exhibits learners' reliance on their native language to facilitate the demands of the task at hand. Thus the role the second-language learners' L1 plays in the oral IL performance seems of great importance in investigating the variability phenomenon.
Interlanguage variability has been shown to play an important role in SLA. Its implications for the related fields viz language teaching and students' performance in specific profession related situations, are not to be ignored.
Foreign/second-language teachers should be well aware of the variability phenomenon. They should know what to expect from learners in terms of language proficiency attainment and the amount of time needed for its mastery. This awareness should be reflected in the methodology. Dickerson argues that:
The knowledge that the learner operates from a variable interlanguage system should be of practical value to the providers of language programs in such areas as the amount of time required for successful foreign/second language acquisition, realistic performance expectations, and the evaluation of student progress [6].
Thus the providers of foreign/second-language tuition should be aware of the variability phenomenon occurring in learners' performance, understand its possible causes, and take it into account when setting up language courses.
Moreover, successful performance in specific situations, eg job interviews, does not depend only on language, but also on the use of appropriate cross-cultural strategies to manipulate it. The job interview is one of the most culture-specific speech events, a highly conventionalised routine demanding a great degree of shared knowledge and experience. Judgements at interviews are based on how comfortable the interviewee makes the interviewer feel.
Australian interviewers expect not only reasonable length of responses, but also the relevance, highlighting aspects of the applicant's experience that would attract positive evaluation. Often foreign applicants are reluctant to talk about themselves on the grounds that it requires a positive evaluation of their own abilities and would be boastful. It is not done in their cultures. In many cultures it is a virtue to remain humble and reserved and not to ask too many questions. In our students' cultures, such an evaluation should come from others, and the only acceptable way of claiming abilities is to give evidence of them in practice. Listing one's qualities and abilities in not the done thing. Hence the answers tend to be very brief and global, insufficient information is given, there is no contextualisation, the responses are repetitious, full of pauses, false starts; under pressure, as shown in the above mentioned study, students revert to the interview responses appropriate to their own cultures. Stress lowers one's ability to perform. Linguistic competence is grossly reduced, suggesting a level of inadequacy. We witness the situation of mismatch between competence and performance. Thus awareness and explicit instruction are vital for the students to understand the importance of cultural differences and adopt new ways of doing things to their own advantage. Ellis points out that:
a classroom learner may be successful in performing a specific linguistic feature accurately in the context of a controlled practice exercise, but fail to do so in a more communicative language use [8].
The important question then is whether we can predict how students will perform when faced with real communicative situations. It would be erroneous to assume that the demonstration of proficiency in one situation indicates proficiency in other situations.
It is felt that research into SLA can make a considerable contribution to the development of empirically-derived criteria for language use - in such situations as oral job interviews - which reflect the inherent variability and intersubjectivity of language use.
This study has examined the surface structure errors in the production of adult second-language learners on an oral task (face-to-face interview) in two different settings, with two different interlocutors. It was found that social/situational factors such as familiarity/formality of situation can significantly influence variation in interlanguage. The findings revealed that an unfamiliar, real-life situation elicited significantly higher proportion of language transfer errors than the same task performed in a familiar environment. It was found that the proportion of intralingual errors viz overgeneralisation, simplification, communication based and teaching induced errors did not increase from Time 1 to Time 2 due to the familiarity of setting/interlocutor factor. Thus it was argued that adult, intermediate second-language learners in real-life social situations, when confronted with an unfamiliar native speaker of the target language, fall back on their previous knowledge (L1). This reliance on prior learning to facilitate task demands seems of great importance in understanding second-language acquisition and the variability phenomenon in IL production. Interlanguage variability has considerable implications for both second-language teaching, as well as setting realistic expectations of learners' performance in real-life situations.
It was concluded that this analysis supports Selinker's claim that:
The question of the principled role of the NL in the SLA process is one that was central to CA, bilingualism and EA, and has become once again central to SLA, to theoretical and empirical work in understanding the creation by learners of IL. [15]
It also supports Kohn's claim that:
Today there is no doubt that, despite its sometimes irritatingly elusive character, transfer is one of the major factors shaping the learner's interlanguage competence and performance. Its occurrence depends on specific combinations of linguistic, developmental and socio-psychological factors: transfer can occur, and when it does we should be prepared to account for it adequately [11].
It is felt that the analysis presented here is important in that it explains the frequent mismatch between competence and performance, stresses the importance of combining both language and culture in preparing professionals for specific job-related encounters, and makes it clear that the amount of tuition time is a vital element for successful foreign/second language communication. It provides empirical data to make native speakers of a given language aware of the problem when dealing with foreign students/job-seekers/employees, as well as focuses foreign/second language teachers on the necessity of providing extensive practice for students in the under stress functioning.
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4. Bell, A., Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13, 145-204 (1984).
5. Bialystok, E. and Sharwood-Smith, M., Interlanguage is not a state of mind. Applied Linguistics, 6, 2, 101-117 (1985).
6. Dickerson, L.J., The learner's interlanguage as a system of variable rules. TESOL Quarterly 9, 4, 401-407 (1975).
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8. Ellis, R., Second language acquisition and language pedagogy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters (1992).
9. Hawthorne, L., Labour Market Barriers for Immigrant Engineers in Australia. Canberra: BIPR (1994).
10. Jordens, P., Production rules in interlanguage: evidence from case errors in L2 German. In: Kellerman, E. and Sharwood-Smith M., (Eds) Cross-linguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford, Pergamon Press (1986)
11. Kellerman, E. and Sharwood-Smith M., (Eds) Cross-linguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford, Pergamon Press (1986)
12. Long, M., Measuring classroom language change. MS, University of Hawaii (1991).
13. Sajavaara, K., Transfer and second language speech processing. In: Kellerman, E. and Sharwood-Smith M., (Eds) Cross-linguistic influence in second language acquisition. Oxford, Pergamon Press (1986).
14. Selinker, L., Interlanguage. IRAL, 10, 3, 209-31 (1972).
15. Selinker, L., Rediscovering interlanguage. London: Longman (1992).
16. Sharwood-Smith, M., Input from within: Utrech research into cross-linguistic influence in formal language learning environments. In: Dechert, H.W. (Ed), Current trends in European second language acquisition research. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 219-229 (1990).
17. Tarone, E., Interlanguage as chameleon. Language Learning, 29, 1, 181-191 (1979).
18. Tarone, E., Variation in Interlanguage. London: Edward Arnold (1988).
19. Tarone, E., Accounting for style-shifting in interlanguage. In: Gass, S., Madden, C., Preston, D., and Selinker, L., (Eds), Variation in second language acquisition, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters: 2, 13-21 (1989).
20. Taylor, B., The use of overgeneralisation and transfer learning strategies by elementary and intermediate students of ESL. Language Learning 25, 1, 73-107 (1975).
Figure 1: Time 1 and Time 2 raw data.
The raw data is presented graphically in Figure 1.
Maintained by Shi Tao - 17 February, 1998. Tele: 61-3-9905 5575
