Communication Strategies In Chapter 5, communication strategies were defined and relat learning styles. Learners obviously use production strategies in 0 enhance getting their messages across, but at times these techniques themselves become a soure work for the well done of our country” While it exhibited a nice little twi of humor, the sentence had an incorrect approximation of the word w fare. Likewise, ce ¢, circumlocution, false cognates (from Tarot 1981), and prefabricated patterns all be sources of error. STAGES OF LEARNER LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT ‘There are many different ways to describe the progression of learners’ lin- guistic development as their attempts at production successively approxi- | mate the target language system. Indeed, learners are so variable in t acquisition of a second language that stages of development defy desc tion. Borrowing some insights from an earlier model proposed by (2973), I have found it useful to think in terms of four stages, b: observations of what the learner does in terms of errors alone. ‘The first is “presystematic? in which the learner is only there a some ae eae toa particularback from someone ee At this | lize-too fast, allowing minor errors to sli Lamendella 1979). It should be made clear that the four stages of systematicity 0 above do not describe a learner's total second language system. find it hard to assert, for example, that a learner is in an emergent : globally, for all of the linguistic subsystems of language. One might or fourth stage when it com: these stages, which are based on erro olinguistic, functional, pragm gi ich are ae Al competence of the second language learner. Finally, we need to remember that production errors alone are inade: asures of overall competence, They happen to be s sof s language learners’ interlanguage and present us with grist for error-analysis mills, but correct utterances warrant our attention and, especially in the teaching-learning process, deserve pos- e reinforcement. VARIABILITY IN LEARNER LANGUAGE you be tempted to assume that all learner language is orderly « tematic, a caveat is in order. A great deal of attention has been gi variability of interlanguage development Bayley & Preston 199 1990; Tarone 1988; Ellis 1987; Littlewood 1981). Just as a language vacillate between expressions like “It has to. be you; learners also exhibit variation, sometimes within ‘acceptable norms, sometimes not. Some variability ip pines by what Gatbonton atcha Sh