Some Unresolved Issues in an ELT New Media Age: Towards Building an Interlanguage Semantics

Abstract

On May 10, 2011, students from Professor ZhaoHong Han’s Advanced Second Language Acquisition (SLA) class in Spring 2011 had the honor of attending an invited seminar in which Professor Larry Selinker, was the honorary speaker. A well-respected researcher who helped found the field of SLA with his Interlanguage Hypothesis 40 years ago, Professor Selinker has persistently sought to advance the research space vis-a-vis the second language (L2) learner’s developing system. His conception of interlanguage fossilization, in particular, has been a fundamental impetus for many existing strands of SLA research, including L2 learnability and teachability, as well as ultimate attainment.

Keywords

• Second language acquisition
• Semantics
• Interlanguage
• Language learning
• Education
• Study of language
• Teaching language
• Applied linguistics
• Foreign speakers
• L2
• SLA