Focusing on interlinguistic development in preservice English language teacher-training at pedagogical universities

Abstract

The objective of this article is to raise teacher trainers’ concern for the nature of interlinguistic development in trainees, in relation to the metalinguistic and interlinguistic capacities they have to form for their future pedagogical performance as foreign language teachers.  The authors briefly reviewed the roles of contrastive analysis and error analysis and some of the partial dissatisfactions of many practitioners with these theories; therefore, they remarked the need for one which offers a wider view of learners´ developing system, the interlanguage (IL) and its systematic analysis. Theoretical and empirical methods were used, a cross-sectional study was carried out from which sample utterances of IL analysis were presented to determine the error sources in teachers of English in preparation, type of error and possible causes, in order to plan appropriate teaching and remediation tasks. As partial conclusions of the investigation a group of methodological procedures were proposed to contribute to a more efficient interlinguistic development of students in the pre-service English language teacher training course.