Beyond the “Native Speaker” Ideal of Interlanguage Theory

As a learner of English myself, I have always been intrigued by how we learn languages, and learning about various theories has been an interesting journey that prompted me to reflect on my personal path of acquiring English.

Recently, I encountered a particularly fascinating theory: The Interlanguage theory, introduced by Larry Selinker (1972). One of its main concepts is fossilization – getting permanently stuck at a certain level – and according to Selinker (1972), about 95% of learners experience it.

Learning this fact created a sense of contradiction in my mind. If the theory’s key concept is achieving native-like proficiency, doesn’t it create a paradox? That Selinker defined success by a goal that most people would never be able to achieve?

It is as if he was saying that we all need to get from point A (our first language) to point B (our target language), but specific cognitive mechanisms will most likely stop us from arriving. Framed this way, the theory sounds demoralizing, labelling 95% of learners as unsuccessful while cherishing the “native speaker” as the ultimate goal – a concept later critically named the “Native Speaker Fallacy” (Phillipson, 1992).

Modern critique of Interlanguage theory focuses exactly on this: that the “native speaker” was chosen as the final goal, and that this is prejudiced, as it ignores the unique strengths of bilinguals and multilinguals.

But then I started thinking: was Selinker the one who actually set that goal?

Back in the 1970s, the primary motivation for learning English was often to achieve a level of mastery as close to a native speaker's as possible. Perhaps Selinker was simply describing what he observed, and setting that goal was not his personal invention but a reflection of the ambitions of thousands of learners. The native speaker was a stable, observable benchmark against which progress could be measured.

We can still debate the reasons for choosing the native speaker as the destination of the learning journey and all the implications this has for the theory and future research in language acquisition. However, we cannot deny that Interlanguage theory was the first to document the psychological processes that occur in the learner’s mind, which on one hand help them move toward their goal, and on the other, prevent them from fully reaching it (Selinker, 1972).

Even criticizing this theory eventually forced researchers to seek alternatives, which in turn helped new concepts emerge, such as English as a Lingua Franca (Jenkins, 2000) and communicative effectiveness.

I think if we shift our focus from the goal of Interlanguage theory and its emphasis on “nativeness”, we can see the beauty in how this theory describes the unique journey every learner undergoes while creating a complex, functional, and entirely their own language system.

 

References:

Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford University Press.

Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press.

Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 10(1-4), 209–232.

 

AI tools (DeepSeek) were used for checking grammar, punctuation and creating the APA layout; all content was researched and composed by the author.