Larry Selinker’s 1972 “interlanguage hypothesis” draws on Chomsky’s universal grammar to argue that adult learners of a second language do not simply imitate the foreign language as they hear it nor do they reproduce the logic of their native language in the target language. Rather, they are speakers of their own “interlanguage,” an autonomous transitional formation that follows its own rules. If, as Selinker argued, what we think of as “errors” are, in fact, hypotheses about how “languaging” works, the inter-linguistic subjectivity that students can acquire in a modern language classroom amounts to a critical distance from language and from its ideological work. This talk asks what the interlanguage hypothesis can do for the social justice oriented, 21st-century classroom. What would a foreign language classroom in which “linguistic competence” is no loer the main objective look like? How can “interlanguage” help create a learning environment centered at once on language, critical practice, and social justice?
 

Serena Bassi is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Italian Studies at Hamilton College. She obtained her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick, UK. She was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cardiff University and a Yale Translation Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. Serena has published in a variety of interdisciplinary journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Translation Studies, gender/sexuality/Italy, and Modern Languages Open. She is also the co-founder of the Transnational Italian Studies Working Group.