Linguistics and Language Teaching. Essay Example for Free

Linguistics and Language Teaching. EssayIntroduction Language may refer either to the specific completelyy human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication. The scientific con of language in any of its senses is called linguistics. Linguistic theory has traditionally considered intrinsic declaimer units as the besides reliable source of linguistic data (Chomsky 1965).It is therefore non surprising to ? nd only a limited number of works focusing on non-native speakers prior to the 1990s. The ?rst attempt to put(non)nativism onto the centre stage of linguistic inquiry by challenging current undisputed assumptions on the matter was Paikedays (1985)The native speaker is dead , in which it is argued that the native speaker exists only as a ? gment of linguists imagination (Paikeday 1985 12). Paikeday suggested using the term pro? cient designr of a language to refer to all speakers who can successfully use it. A few years later, Rampton (1990) similarly proposed the term expert speaker to include all successful users of a language.Davies (1991, 2003) further delved into native speaker identity, and thus formulated the key question of whether a bet on language (L2) learner can become a native speaker of the buns language. His last was that L2 learners can become native speaker of the target language and master the intuition, grammar, spontaneity, creativity, pragmatic control, and interpreting quality of born native speakers. Generally, side of meat educated Malayansians of all ethnic and family language background speak and move alike.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 primary schools), the status of position Language in Malaysia is different from the earlier years.The English language cove red a continuum from first language through molybdenum language to a foreign language. Bahasa Malaysia is replacing English in most of its previous functions, but English may be expected to remain as a continuum from second language to foreign language according to the background and occupation of the speaker.In Malaysia, presently the use of English is less common than in Singapore and is likely to decrease steadily with the implementation of the national language policy. However, English still remains as a language of considerable importance and is still being used in various spheres of everyday activity. The role of English has changed from its earlier status as the precise language of the colonial era and the decades after(prenominal) the Second World War to a second language.At the moment, it is still considered as an international engrave to be used for diplomatic and commercial negotiations and as a language necessary in many fields of tertiary study and research. Not surp risingly, the non-native English language speakers among Malaysians make grammatical mistakes from time to time. These usually happened among Malaysian adult students and even among some Malaysian English teachers. 1. The transcript of a recorded conversation. The pursual excerpt is a recorded conversation among teachers and will be analysed of the mistakes made by some teachers during word.Our discussion was on the quality and effectiveness of a design called Program Penutur Jati or English Language Teacher Development Project (ELTP). Briefly, the aim of the project is to enhance the lower primary ESL teachers ability to plan and pass quality English lessons based on the new National English Language Curriculum in 600 schools across East Malaysia. The teachers involved in discussion come from various races, ethnic groups, ages and dogma experiences. Kamel That is my opinion. I dont know yours. Ok. Chairperson I agree . laugh Kamel But , as I said just now.I dont like that t he fixture.. ok. For example aaaa as my mentor come to our school .. every Monday ok.. my class start at nightclub oclock. 7. 30.. that mean i and half hour include the preparation for my lesson, so I dont speculate that I welcome an ample time for me to prepargon the things ok . Moreover, the iodin hour and one and half hour is the .. for all to prepare.. the whole week not only , the one day. So I dont think that will be effective. Chairperson Emmmm Kamel So Chairperson Did you tell him about it? Kamel Aaaaaa So far not yet. Chairperson Do you have the chance to talk about it.Kamel Because, I dont have any.. I dont have the fortune to.. Chairperson Then, you should tell him. Kamel I was thinking. Why dont the mentors like them to be .. have qualification in teaching, so that they can come to the trainee teachers teach college rather than Chairperson For your information, ahh Chairperson Overall, it seems to be working with you Naga The ideas (cough) is good and dif ferent 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 demerits by non-native English speakers. The types of errors can be categorised into two descriptive and surface structures. Descriptive errors include noun phrase, verb phrase and complex sentence. epoch surface structure errors include omission, addition, misinformation, mis reciteing and blends.After analysing the recorded conversation, there are few mistakes or errors made by Mr. Kamel during the said discussion. a. The use of unmarked forms sort of of marked forms is far more frequent, as can be seen in the examples as follows. * I dont know yours. * I dont know about yo u. * .. as I said just now. * .. as I have said just now. One possible cause of these errors is only if interlingual errors which is the bequeath of generate applauder influences Saya tak tahu awak punya and seperti yang saya kata tadi. respectively.In his article, A Role for the Mother Tongue in Language Transfer in Language Learning, prof Corder (1981) reinvestigated the phenomenon and questions the term transfer. He suggests that mother saliva influence as a neutral and broader term to refer to what has most commonly been called transfer. 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 mother tongue are more frequent, it was natural that an explanation of the phenomenon was of considerable take to the applied linguistic.It was out of this concern that the whole industry of contrastive studies arose. He similarly claims that as far as the acquisition of syntacti c knowledge is concerned, no exhibit appropriately called interference 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 often 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 incorrect according to the rules of the target language.b. Obviously. Mr. Kamel has the problem in pronouncing certain words especially in the pronunciation of the initial run short of common words like the, there, then and that. It is also the middle consonant intelligent in feather and the final audio of bathe. These sounds are formed with the tongue tip behind the upper front teeth. The initial sound of that and the final sound of both are both voiceless dental. This problem arises because Mr Kamels tongue is not merely touches the teeth. Thus, his pronunciation of thes e 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 means the first language speakers do not perceive it as a distinct sound that makes difference to meaning. 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 leave and live, sheep and ship. The great make sense of vocabulary of English really makes the second language learner suffer in reading. There is a lot of words unknown and the most enigmatic 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 En glish 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 starting 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 clincher in front of instruments like computer, piano, internet.English grammar, however, requires the instruments mentioned above (computer, piano, internet) to be preceded by determiners and if neither a possessive determiner nor a demonstrative determiner is used, the 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 cultu ral transfer from Malay language structure on English. Erroneous form Correct form She plays piano while I sing. Malay Dia bermain piano sementara saya menyanyi. She plays the piano while I sing She stay at berth.Malay Dia tinggal di rumah She stays 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 fact that Bahasa Malaysia does not require verbs to agree with subjects. However, the ending free form is generalised for all persons to make the skill 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 t wo factors such as proto-typicality and language distance (Kellerman, 1979). Malay learners of English commonly make errors in controvert sentences. For example Adryna no coming today. Adryna tak datang hari ini. Such errors are common in pre-verbal negation using no, the same negative construction as in their L1.In order to determine whether transfer is the cause for the occurrence 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 helpful summary of these strategies which includes the following a. False analogy b. Mis compendium c. Incomplete rule application exploiting redundancy d. Overlooking co-occurrence restrictions e. System-simplification It is not clear which strategy is responsible for a particular error. Errors can also be viewed as natural or as induced. For example a. He played football yesterday.b. He goed home at six. c. He drinked milk. d. He eated dinner. e. He sleeped at e ight. 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 articulate ways to assist learners to overcome their problems in language learning. It is difficult to decide whether grammatically or acceptability should serve 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 context to the distinction between 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 perfect 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 philosophy of the second school is that we live in an imperfect world and consequently errors will always occur in spite of our very best teaching and learningmethods.One effect has been perhaps to shift the emphasis away from a preoccupation with teaching towards a study of learning. The differences between 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. Brown 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 prefera bly 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 stimulant 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 necessarily bound it for the status of input, for the reason that input is what goes in, not what is available for going in, and we may reasonably suppose that it is the learner who controls this input. This may well be unyielding 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 Review of Applied Linguistics, 5, 161-70. Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and interlanguage. Oxford Oxford University Pr ess. 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 daybook 44. 2, 97101. Davies, A. (1991). The native speaker in applied linguistics . Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press. Davies, A. (2003). The native speaker of World Englishes. Journal of Pan-Paci? c Association of Applied Linguistics 6. 1, 4360