English Language Teaching in its Social Context

18 ROSAMOND MITCHELL AND FLORENCE MYLESSystematicity and variability in L2 learningWhen the utterances produced by L2 lcarners are examined and comparcd with targetlanguage norms, they are often condemned as full of crrors or mistakes. Traditionally,language teachers have often viewed thcse errors as the result of carelessness or lack ofconcentration on the part of learners. If only learners would try harder, surely theirproductions could accurately reflcct the TL rulcs which they had been taught! In the midtwentiethccntury, under the influence of behaviourist learning theory, errors were oftenviewed as the result of ‘bad habits’, which could be eradicated if only learners did enoughrote learning and pattern drilling using target language modcls.One of the big lessons which has been lcarned from the research of recent decades isthat though learners’ L2 Utterances may be deviant by comparison with target languagenorms, they are by no means lacking in y am. Errors and mistakes are patterned, and thoughsome regular errors are due to the influence of the first language, this is by no means true ofall of them, or even of a majority of them. Instead, there is a good deal of evidence thatlearners work their way through a number of developmental stages, from very primitive anddeviant versions of the L2, to progressively morc elaborate and target-like versions. Just likefully proficient users of a language, their language productions can be described by a set ofunderlying rules; thcse interim rules have their own integrity and are not just inadequatelyapplied versions of theTL rules.A clear example, which has been studied for a range of target languages, has to do withthe formation of negative sentences. It has commonly been found that learners start off bytacking a negative particle of some kind on to the end of an utterance (no you are playinghere); next, they learn to insert a basic negative particle into the verb phrase (Mariananot coming today); and finally, they learn to manipulate modifications to auxiliaries andother details of negation morphology, in line with the full TL rules for negation ( I can’t playthat one) (examples from Ellis 1994, p. 100).This kind of data has commonly been interpretedto show that, at least as far as key parts of the L2 grammar are conccrned, learners’ developmentfollows a common route, even if the rate at which learners actually travel along thiscommon route may be very different.This ysternaticity in the language produced by L2 learners is of course paralleled in theearly stages through which first language learners also pass in a highly regular manner.Towel1and Hawkins identify it as one of the key features which L2 lcarning theories are requiredto explain (1 994, p. 5).However, learner language (or interlanguage, as it is commonly called) is not onlycharacterized by systematicity. Learner language systems are presumably -indeed, hopefully- unstable and in course of change; certainly, they arc characterized also by high degrees ofvariability (Towell and Hawkins 1994, p. 5). Most obviously, learners’ utterances seem to varyfrom moment to moment, in the types of‘errors’ which are made, and learners seem liableto switch between a rangc of correct and incorrect forms over lengthy periods of time. Awell-known example offered by Ellis involves a child learner of English as L2 who scemedto produce the utterances no look my card, don’t look my card interchangeably ovcr an extcndedperiod (1 985). Myles et al. (1 998) have produced similar data from a classroom learner’sFrench as L2, who variably produced forms such as non animal, je n’ai pas de animal withinthe same 20 minutes or so (to say that he did not have a pet; thc correctTL form should beje n’ai pas d’animal). Here, in contrast to the underlying systcmaticity earlier claimcd for thedevelopment of rules of negation, we see performance varying quite substantially frommoment to momcnt.Like systematicity, variability is also found in child language tlcvelopment. However, thevariability found among L2 learners is undoubtedly more ‘extreme’ than that found forI