Questões de Concursos Prefeitura de Itatiba SP

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Speakers of different languages have different sounds. Thus, as there is no equivalent in English for the ‘click’ in the South African language Xhosa, English speakers find it difficult to produce. British speakers mangle French vowels because they are not the same as the English ones. Japanese speakers, on the other hand, do not have different phonemes for /l/ and /r/ and so have difficulty differentiating between them.

Whereas in some languages there seems to be a close relationship between sounds and spelling, in English this is often not the case. The sound /ʌ/, for example, can be realized in a number of different spellings (e.g. won, young, funny, flood). The letters ou, on the other hand, can be pronounced in a number of different ways (e.g. enough, through, though, and even journey). A lot depends on the sounds that come before or after them, but the fact remains that we spell some sounds in a variety of different ways, and we have a variety of different sounds for the same spelling.

(Jeremy Harmer. The practice of English language teaching, 2007)

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In the literature on language learning, one particular process has commonly been singled out for explication: transfer. The term describes the carryover of previous performance or knowledge to subsequent learning. Positive transfer occurs when the prior knowledge benefits the learning task; negative transfer, or interference, occurs when previous performance disrupts the performance of a second task.

It has been common in second language teaching to stress the role of interference. This is of course not surprising, as native language interference is surely the most immediately noticeable source of error among second language learners. The saliency of interference is strong. For example, a French native speaker might say in English, “I am in New York since January,” a perfectly logical transfer of the French sentence “Je suis a New York depuis Janvier.” Because of the negative transfer of the French verb form to English, the French system has, in this case, interfered with the person’s production of a correct English form.

It is exceedingly important to remember, however, that the native language of a second language learner is often positively transferred, in which case the learner benefits from the facilitating effects of the first language. In the above sentence, for example, the correct one-to-one word order correspondence, the personal pronoun, and the preposition have been positively transferred from French to English. We often mistakenly overlook the facilitating effects of the native language in our appetite for analyzing errors in the second language and for overstressing the interfering effects of the first language.

(Douglas Brown. Principles of language learning and teaching, 2000. Adaptado)