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Error resistance: towards an empirical pedagogy

Teachers College, Columbia University and Birkbeck College, University of London

Larry Selinker

Teachers College, Columbia University and Birkbeck College, University of London

A serious empirical pedagogy would have interlanguage analysis central to pedagogical decision-making.We look here at error resistance in light of interlanguage theory, specifically the Multiple Effects Principle (MEP henceforth; Selinker and Lakshmanan, 1992), which predicts that when language transfer works in tandem with one or more second language acquisition processes, there is a greater tendency for interlanguage structures to stabilize, leading to possible fossilization in spite of repeated pedagogical intervention. There is also an important pedagogical corollary attached to the MEP, which is described below. In this article we focus on one particular instance of a persistent interlanguage structure that emerges from a longitudinal case study of Thai-Norwegian interlanguage, an interlanguage which, to our knowledge, has not been discussed in the literature before. Such a study is important in that most SLA results relate to English as source or target language, and the resulting conclusions are thus highly limited in both theoretical and practical terms. We present findings from several different empirical perspectives including the subject’s introspective account as ‘secondary data’, which serve to confirm the pedagogical usefulness of the MEP insofar as two processes dominated by L1 typological influence can be seen to underlie the persistence and resistance of the structure in question, with ‘transfer-of-training’ conspiring with language transfer to stabilize the structure. Thus, evidence from the study suggests that, in terms of implications for teaching, an MEP-inspired analysis of multiple factors could be significant in the elaboration of pedagogical strategies which may prevent or delay fossilization in cases where explicit negative evidence by the teacher seems to have had no effect.

Language Teaching Research, Vol. 3, No. 3, 248-275 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/136216889900300304


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