Linguistics and Language Teaching. Essay

Introduction row whitethorn refer either to the specialised eachy forgiving capacity for getting and utilise complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication. The scientific story of talking to in any of its senses is called linguistics. Linguistic theory has traditionally considered inseparable declarg wizrs as the only reliable source of linguistic data (Chomsky 1965).It is thence non surprising to ? nd only a limited deem of works focusing on non-native utterers prior to the 1990s. The ?rst attempt to put(non)nativism onto the b unmatched marrow stage of linguistic inquiry by challenging current unchallenged assumptions on the matter was Paikedays (1985)The native speaker is dead , in which it is argued that the native speaker lives only as a ? gment of linguists imagination (Paikeday 1985 12). Paikeday suggested using the barrier pro? cient user of a dustup to refer to all speakers who put up successfully u se it. A a few(prenominal) years later, Rampton (1990) similarly proposed the term expert speaker to include all successful users of a lyric.Davies (1991, 2003) further delved into native speaker identity, and thus theorize the key question of whether a second wording (L2) learner disregard become a native speaker of the target talking to. His conclusion was that L2 learners rout out become native speaker of the target pronounce and master the intuition, grammar, spontaneity, creativity, practical(a) control, and interpreting whole step of born native speakers. Generally, side of meat educated Malayanansians of all ethnic and family dustup footing speak and move alike.However, with the implementation of the subject field language policy of Bahasa Malaysia as the theme language of Malaysia and as the language of instruction, (except in the personas of Chinese or Tamil medium primary schools), the placement of side of meat Language in Malaysia is dissentent from t he earlier years.The English language covered a continuum from first language through second language to a foreign language. Bahasa Malaysia is replacing English in intimately of its prior functions, b arely 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 putting green 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 extensive importance and is still being used in different spheres of e preciseday activity. The role of English has changed from its earlier status as the nice language of the colonial era and the decades after the Second World contend to a second language.At the moment, it is still considered as an international compute to be used for diplomatic and commercial negotiations and as a language necessary in ma ny fields of tertiary theatre of operations and research. non surprisingly, 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 preserve conversation. The following excerpt is a recorded conversation among teachers and bequeath be analysed of the mistakes made by some teachers during discussion.Our discussion was on the quality and effectiveness of a programme called Program Penutur Jati or English Language Teacher Development Project (ELTP). Briefly, the aim of the project is to enhance the get down primary ESL teachers ability to plan and deliver quality English lessons found on the new National English Language Curriculum in 600 schools across East Malaysia. The teachers involved in discussion come from discordant races, ethnic groups, ages and precept experiences. Kamel That is my opinion. I dont k now yours. Ok. president I agree . laugh Kamel But , as I verbalize just now.I dont like that the fixture.. ok. For typesetters case aaaa as my mentor come to our school .. every Monday ok.. my social tier start at nine oclock. 7. 30.. that conceive one and half instant include the preparation for my lesson, so I dont theorise that I defy an ample time for me to prepare the things ok . Moreover, the one 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 rate apart him active it? Kamel Aaaaaa So far not yet. Chairperson Do you pay back the chance to talk about it.Kamel Because, I dont strike 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 qualification in teaching, so that they can come to the trainee teachers training college earlier than Chairperson For your in peeation, 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 misplays 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. While surface structure errors include omission, addition, misin cropation, mis beau mondeing and blends.After analysing the recorded conversation, in that respect are few mistakes or errors made by Mr. Kamel during the verbalise 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 give applauder to just now. * .. as I have said just now. One possible cause of these errors is merely interlingual errors which is the result of produce tongue 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, Professor Corder (1981) reinvestigated the phenomenon and questions the term transfer. He suggests that scram tongue influence as a neutral and broader term to refer to what has most leafy vegetablely 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 relate to contract tongue are more frequent, it was natural that an explanation of the phenomenon was of consider able concern to the applied linguistic.It was out of this concern that the whole industry of mismated studies arose. He likewise claims that as far as the acquirement of syntactical friendship is concerned, no cultivate 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 shapes of the target language.b. Obviously. Mr. Kamel has the problem in pronouncing sealed voice communication especially in the pronunciation of the initial get going of common lecture like the, there, then and that. It is also the middle consonant sound in feather and the final sound of bathe. These sounds are formed with the tongue gun demonstrate behind t he 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 these particular words are incorrect.Besides, barrier in phonology can caused by mother tongue interference. Eltrug (1984) confirm that mother tongue interference can contri moreovere to a bouffant number of pronunciation errors made by students. An English sound does personify in the native language, but not as separate phonemes. This only when 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 amount of vocabulary of English really makes the second language learn er suffer in reading. on that point 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. stoppage 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 determinative in front of instruments like computer, forte-piano, internet.English grammar, however, requires the instruments mentioned above (computer, piano, internet) to be preceded by decisive fa ctors and if neither a possessive determiner nor a demonstrative determiner is used, the use of either a definite article or an uncertain article is necessary. Thus, the ungrammatical sentences in could be the result of interference of the ethnic 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 home.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 comm on 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 keep (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 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 useful summary of these strategies which includes the following a. False analogy b. Misanalysis c. Incomplete rule application exploiting redundancy d. Overlooking co-occurrence restrictions e. System-simplification It is not clear which scheme is responsible for a particular error. Errors can also be viewed as natural or as induced. For example a. He compete football 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 discipline 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 outstrip 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).shaping errors in terms of grammatically also necessitates giving consideration to the trait 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 ma intains that if we were to achieve a perfect teaching method, the errors would have never be committed and hence 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 sphere and consequently errors will always occur in spite of our very best teaching and learningmethods.One effect has been perhaps to veer 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 inevitableness 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 construe as being show up 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 sort of 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 input 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 qualify 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 determined by the characteristics of his language acquisition apparatus 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.Op en University Malaysia. Corder, S. P. (1967). The significance of learners errors. supranational Review of Applied Linguistics, 5, 161-70. Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and interlanguage. Oxford Oxford University get. 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 speaker of World Englishes. Journal of Pan-Paci? c Association of Applied Linguistics 6. 1, 4360