A Study On The Impairment Of Interlanguage Grammar

In the process of language acquisition, interlanguage has been developed. It is a relatively systematic transition from the initial knowledge of a language to native proficiency, and often regarded as an unstable set of language characteristics produced by learners. Current researches on interlanguage in second language acquisition (SLA) have focused particularly on the failure of second language (L2) learners to produce verbal inflectional morphology associated with functional categories. According to Selinker (1972), about ninety-five percent of learners cannot eventually reach the level of a normal target language, that is to say, the majority of them cannot drive their interlanguage to the terminal of the continuum.Within the framework of the Minimalist Program, there are two major accounts of non-target-like use of L2 morphology: the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) which holds that L2 functional properties will in principle be present in the interlanguage grammar and the Impaired Representation Hypothesis (IRH) which has it that L2 knowledge of functional categories associated with the feature strength is permanently impaired in the interlanguage system. This article re-examines the impairment/unimpairment debate of interlanguage system in the light of empirical data from the author's investigations of 90 Chinese learners who are learning English as a second language. Four parameters of functional categories have been examined: pro-drop parameter, head-direction parameter, finite/non-finite parameter and tense-agreement parameter. One-way ANOV and SPSS are used as tools in this investigation to process and analyze the data. Through the analysis and discussion of the relevant data, evidence have been obtained to support the MSIH instead of the IRH. At the end of the article, some suggestions for language teaching are put forward.