Pit Corder

Stephen Pit Corder (1918–1990) was a British applied linguist, long associated with the University of Edinburgh, whose short 1967 paper "The Significance of Learners' Errors" is generally taken as the founding document of modern SLA as a discipline distinct from foreign language teaching.

Corder's move was to reframe learner error. Where contrastive analysis had treated errors as interference symptoms to be stamped out, Corder argued they were windows onto the internal system the learner was building — evidence of an active, rule-forming mind rather than a defective copy of the target language. He also drew the durable distinction between input (what is available in the environment) and intake (what the learner actually absorbs), a distinction every later input-based SLA model has worked with.

Career

• Long career at the University of Edinburgh, Department of Applied Linguistics
• Central figure in the first generation of British applied linguistics
• Supervised and influenced many of the first SLA researchers
• Died in 1990

Published Work

• Corder, S. P. (1967). "The significance of learners' errors." IRAL, 5(4).
• Introducing Applied Linguistics (1973)
• Error Analysis and Interlanguage (1981)

Influence

• Founding figure of SLA as a discipline
• The input/intake distinction remains standard vocabulary in SLA
• His reframing of error as data, not defect, underwrites all subsequent work on interlanguage and error analysis