Variability in Interlanguage Use: A Study of Style‐shifting in Morphology and Syntax

It has been claimed that as second langue learners perform different tasks at a single point in time, their production of some grammatical, morphological, and phonological forms will vary in a predictable manner. This article reports a study on the English language use of native speakers of Arabic and Japanese in three task conditions: completing a written grammar test, participating in an oral interview, and narrating a story to a listener Results of the study provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the utterances of second language learners show systematic variability in some morphological and grammatical forms, a variability related to task. The study shows that the performance of second language learners on a written grammar test varies from their performance when attempting to communicate orally, in some cases, grammatical accuracy is much better in spontaneous oral communication than in scores on a written grammar test The study shows that more than two styles arc evidenced when learners perform more than two tasks, and that when those tasks are ordered in terms of degree of attention to language form required, the styles produced by learners in response to those tasks may be ranged along a continuous dimension.