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INTERLANGUAGE: FORTY YEARS LATER. ZhoaHang Han and Elaine Tarone (Eds.) . Amsterdam, the Netherlands : Benjamins , 2014. Pp. vii + 255.
Book Reviews
Interlanguage is the speech or other output of second language (L2) learners or the internal mental system that underlies this output. The term was introduced by Larry Selinker (1972) in an article that was a founding document in the field of SLA. In this book, 10 scholars trace our progress in the study of interlanguage from 1972 up to the present time.
In the Introduction, Han and Tarone note that Selinker's article did not contain a theory of interlanguage but rather presented a series of foundational questions and possible answers. These themes included what kind of data is best, the influence of the first language, fossilization, overgeneralization, and how best to explain and understand descriptive findings. Only three of these themes can be discussed here. The first is the question of what kind of data should be used to study interlanguage. Selinker (1972) was clear on the matter, stating that the only relevant data were contained in "'attempted meaningful' performance in a second language" (p. 210). Of course, a great many interlanguage studies...