AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH LEARNER SPEECH

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Abstract
Samples of English speech were collected from fifteen adult native Spanish speakers and fifteen adult native Japanese speakers who were at an ‘intermediate’ proficiency level in English. An analysis of the data revealed recurring patterns of speech, or variants, in the subjects’ data. The distribution of these variants indicated that the subjects did not possess a coherent learner language and that individual learner idiolects existed which were composed of subsets of variants. The variants reflected common efforts on the part of the learners to simplify the target language either by shortening sentence structure, overgeneralizing verb morphology or omitting functors such as articles and auxiliaries. A universal process of simplification in language learning was postulated to account for the recurrence of the same variants in different learner idiolects. This study shows that any theory of second language acquisition must recognize that learners employ a simplification process.

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