Linguistics and Language Teaching. Essay

entranceway quarrel may conjure up either to the specifically human aptitude for acquiring and using labyrinthine systems of communication, or to a specific voice of such a system of complex communication. The scientific study of run-in in any of its senses is called linguals. Linguistic theory has traditionally considered infixed speakers as the only reliable source of linguistic data (Chomsky 1965).It is in that respectfore non surprising to ? nd only a limited turn of full treatment focusing on non- inbred speakers prior to the 1990s. The ? rst attempt to put(non)nativism onto the centre bushel up of linguistic inquiry by challenging current undisputed assumptions on the matter was Paikedays (1985)The autochthonous speaker is dead , in which it is argued that the native speaker exists only as a ? gment of linguists visual modality (Paikeday 1985 12). Paikeday suggested using the term pro? cient employr of a wrangle to refer to all speakers who female genital s triple-crownly work it. A few old age later, Rampton (1990) similarly proposed the term expert speaker to imply all successful practice sessionrs of a verbiage.Davies (1991, 2003) further delved into native speaker identity, and thus formulated the blusher question of whether a moment vocabulary (L2) savant dirty dog bend a native speaker of the target linguistic communication. His conclusion was that L2 learners can beat native speaker of the target linguistic communication and master the intuition, grammar, spontaneity, creativity, pragmatic control, and interpreting quality of born native speakers. Generally, face educated Malayansians of all cultural and family language background speak and move a manage.However, with the implementation of the national language policy of Bahasa Malaysia as the national language of Malaysia and as the language of instruction, (except in the cases of Chinese or Tamil medium master(a) schools), the status of slope Language in Malaysia is different from the earlier years.The English language cover a continuum from first language through assist language to a foreign language. Bahasa Malaysia is replacing English in most of its previous functions, scantily English may be expected to remain as a continuum from arcsecond language to foreign language according to the background and calling of the speaker.In Malaysia, presently the use of English is less common than in Singapore and is resemblingly to decrease steadily with the implementation of the national language policy. However, English still remains as a language of healthy importance and is still being used in various spheres of universal activity. The role of English has changed from its earlier status as the precise language of the colonial era and the decades after the secondment knowledge base War to a second language.At the moment, it is still considered as an international code to be used for diplomatic and commercial negotiations and as a language demand in many fields of tertiary study and research. Not surprisingly, the non-native English language speakers among Malaysians catch up with grammatical mistakes from time to time. These usually happened among Malaysian liberal students and yet among roughly Malaysian English teachers. 1. The transcript of a save conversation. The following excerpt is a recorded conversation among teachers and will be analysed of the mistakes do by some teachers during discussion.Our discussion was on the quality and effectuality of a programme called Program Penutur Jati or English Language instructor Development Project (ELTP). Briefly, the aim of the project is to enhance the lower primary ESL teachers ability to plan and deliver quality English lessons based on the new National English Language Curriculum in 600 schools crosswise East Malaysia. The teachers involved in discussion come from various races, heathenish groups, ages and teaching experiences. Kamel That is my opinion. I dont spot yours. Ok. president I agree . laugh Kamel But , as I said that now.I dont like that the fixture.. ok. For example aaaa as my mentor come to our school .. e very(prenominal) Monday ok.. my class pour down at golf-club oclock. 7. 30.. that mean one and half minute of arc include the preparation for my lesson, so I dont hypothesize that I have an ample time for me to prep ar the things ok . Moreover, the one hour and one and half hour is the .. for all to prepare.. the whole week non only , the one day. So I dont call that will be effective. hot seat Emmmm Kamel So chair Did you tell him to the highest degree it? Kamel Aaaaaa So far not yet. Chairperson Do you have the lot to talk around it.Kamel Because, I dont have any.. I dont have the opportunity to.. Chairperson Then, you should tell him. Kamel I was thinking. Why dont the mentors like them to be .. have expertness in teaching, so that they can come to the trainee teachers training col lege rather than Chairperson For your information, ahh Chairperson Overall, it seems to be working with you Naga The ideas (cough) is good and different he is friendly. Chairperson So.. ahh. If supposing .. You have a mentor to this.. who doesnt speak.. doesnt speak like Morrocan.Alright Naemah Yehhh Chairperson Right.. Alright, if.. Chairperson Who? Chairperson Madam Soya? She is from where? Others Bulgaria.. (together) Chairperson Bulgaria? Does she have the accent? Chairperson What do you think? Do you think 2. Common grammatical mistakes and errors by non-native English speakers. The types of errors can be reason into two descriptive and surface structures. Descriptive errors include noun phrase, verb phrase and complex sentence. While surface structure errors include omission, addition, misinformation, misordering and blends.After analysing the recorded conversation, there are few mistakes or errors make by Mr. Kamel during the said discussion. a. The use of unmarked forms instead of marked forms is far more frequent, as can be seen in the examples as follows. * I dont know yours. * I dont know about you. * .. as I said just now. * .. as I have said just now. One feasible cause of these errors is merely interlingual errors which is the proceeds of get under ones skin knife influences Saya tak tahu awak punya and seperti yang saya kata tadi. respectively.In his term, A Role for the Mother Tongue in Language Transfer in Language Learning, Professor Corder (1981) reinvestigated the phenomenon and questions the term canalize. He suggests that catch play influence as a soggy and broader term to refer to what has most commonly been called enthrall. Corder says that since most studies of error were made on the basis of the performance of learners in formal situations where it appears that errors related to yield lingua are more frequent, it was inseparable that an explanation of the phenomenon was of considerable refer to the applied lin guistic.It was out of this concern that the whole industry of contrastive studies arose. He also claims that as far as the acquisition of syntactic intimacy is concerned, no process appropriately called intercession takes place, if by that we mean that the mother tongue actually inhibits, prevents, or makes more difficult the acquisition of some feature of the target language. The term interference is now most very much used to mean what is no more than the presence in the learners performance in the target language of mother-tongue-like features which are ludicrous according to the rules of the target language.b. Obviously. Mr. Kamel has the problem in pronouncing certain members particularly in the pronunciation of the initial sound of common words like the, there, then and that. It is also the middle consonant sound in flight and the final sound of bathe. These sounds are formed with the tongue tip laughingstock the upper front teeth. The initial sound of that and the fin al sound of twain are both voiceless dental. This problem arises because Mr Kamels tongue is not merely touches the teeth. Thus, his pronunciation of these particular words are incorrect.Besides, difficulty in phonology can caused by mother tongue interference. Eltrug (1984) affirmed that mother tongue interference can contribute to a large number of pronunciation errors made by students. An English sound does exist in the native language, but not as separate phonemes. This simply agent the first language speakers do not perceive it as a distinct sound that makes difference to pith. For example The sound /? / does exist in Malay, but whether the vowel is long or short does not make any difference in meaning.For instance, the English phonemes/? / and /i/ differ very much in meaning as in the words will and live, sheep and ship. The great amount of vocabulary of English authentically makes the second language learner suffer in reading. There is a lot of words unknown and the most confusing point is even the second language learner know the meaning but they cant really understand the meaning of the whole sentence. It is because an English word gives different impressions in different situations. This makes things so confusing about the meaning of the word.Grammatical interference is defined as the first language influencing the second in terms of word order, use of pronouns and determinants, tense and mood. Interference at a lexical level provides for the borrowing of words from one language and converting them to sound more natural in another and orthographic interference includes the spelling of one language altering another. In Malay grammar, it does not require one to have any form of specifyr in front of instruments like computer, mild, internet.English grammar, however, requires the instruments mentioned above (computer, piano, internet) to be preceded by determiners and if incomplete a possessive determiner nor a demonstrative determiner is used, t he use of either a definite article or an indefinite article is necessary. Thus, the ungrammatical sentences in could be the result of interference of the cultural transfer from Malay language structure on English. Erroneous form temper form She plays piano while I sing. Malay Dia bermain piano sementara saya menyanyi. She plays the piano while I sing She stay at home.Malay Dia tinggal di rumah She girdle at home. Table 1 Examples of interference from the learners first language. c. Subjects also exhibited errors in subject-verb agreement as is shown in the examples as follows * Every Monday, my class start at nine oclock. * Every Monday, my class starts at nine oclock. The omission of -s can be attributed to the concomitant that Bahasa Malaysia does not require verbs to agree with subjects. However, the ending free form is verbalize for all persons to make the learning task easier and this is a common intralingual made by people with diverse native languages like Mr Kamel .3. Causes and sources of errors and mistakes Interlingual errors are the result of mother tongue influences. Learners transfer/borrow some forms but not others due to two factors such as proto-typicality and language distance (Kellerman, 1979). Malay learners of English commonly make errors in negative sentences. For example Adryna no coming today. Adryna tak datang hari ini. Such errors are common in pre-verbal negation using no, the uniform negative construction as in their L1.In order to determine whether transfer is the cause for the accompaniment of errors, James (1998), demonstrates that learners with a particular L1 make an error that those with a different L1 do not. He provides a serviceable summary of these strategies which includes the following a. False analogy b. Misanalysis c. Incomplete rule employment exploiting redundancy d. Overlooking co-occurrence restrictions e. System-simplification It is not clear which strategy is prudent for a particular error. Errors can also be viewed as natural or as induced. For example a. He played football game yesterday.b. He goed home at six. c. He drinked milk. d. He eated dinner. e. He sleeped at eight. Conclusion To conclude, learners errors are a part of the learners language learning process. Hence, teachers should not penalise students for the errors they made. Instead, teachers should note those errors and devise ways to assist learners to overcome their problems in language learning. It is difficult to decide whether grammatically or acceptability should act as the criterion for error analysis. If grammatically is chosen, an error can be defined as breach of the rule of the code (Corder, 1967).Defining errors in terms of grammatically also necessitates giving consideration to the distinction mingled with overt and covert error In the field of methodology, there are two schools of thought with regard to learners error. Firstly, the school which maintains that if we were to achieve a stainless teaching method, the errors would have never be committed and therefore the occurrence of errors is merely a sign of inadequacy in our teaching techniques. The doctrine of the second school is that we live in an imperfect world and because errors will always occur in spite of our very best(p) teaching and learning methods.One effect has been perhaps to shift the stress away from a preoccupation with teaching towards a study of learning. The differences amidst the two are clearly defined that the learning of the mother tongue is natural, whereas, we all know that there is no such inevitability about the learning of a second language that the learning of the mother tongue is part of the whole maturational process of the child, whilst learning a second language normally begins only after the maturational process is complete.A childs incorrect utterances can be interpreted as being evidence that he is in the process of acquiring language and the errors provide these evidences. B rown and Frazer (1964), point out that the best evidence a child possesses construction rules is the occurrence of systematic errors, since when the child speaks correctly, it is quite possible that he is only repeating something that he has heard. In the case of the second language learner, it is known that we do know some knowledge of what the infix has been which we call as the syllabus.The simple fact of presenting a certain linguistic form to a learner in the classroom does not unavoidably qualify it for the status of input, for the reason that input is what goes in, not what is on hand(predicate) for going in, and we may reasonably suppose that it is the learner who controls this input. This may substantially be determined by the characteristics of his language acquisition mechanism and not by those of the syllabus. References Mariam Mohd Nor, Abdul Halim Ibrahim, Shubbiah, R (2008). OUM-Linguistics and Language Teaching. Seri Kembangan, Selangor.Open University Malaysia. Corder, S. P. (1967). The significance of learners errors. International surveil of Applied Linguistics, 5, 161-70. Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and interlanguage. Oxford Oxford University Press. Ames, C. (1998). Errors in language learning and use Exploring error analysis. London Longman. Kellerman, E. (1979). Transfer and non-transfer Where are we now? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2 37-57. Eltrug, N. S. (1984). Analysis of the Arab Learners Errors in Pronunciation of English Utterances in Isolation and Context.Ph. D Dissertation. The University of Kansas. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax . Cambridge, MA MIT Press Paikeday, T. (1985). The native speaker is dead Toronto Paikeday Publishing. Rampton, M. B. H. (1990). Displacing the native speaker Expertise, af? liation, and inheritance. ELT Journal 44. 2, 97101. Davies, A. (1991). The native speaker in applied linguistics . Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press. Davies, A. (2003). The native spea ker of World Englishes. Journal of Pan-Paci? c Association of Applied Linguistics 6. 1, 4360