Linguistic interferences in the interlanguage of native Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese as a foreign language

Abstract

This work studies how linguistic interferences occur in interlanguage in native Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese as a foreign language at a university in Sao Paulo. The analysis focuses on linguistic interferences at semantic, syntactic and orthographic levels. This study, based on interlanguage modelling of Contrastive Linguistics, aims at explaining how learners' native language influences in the writings in Portuguese as well as showing their most common linguistic interferences. By observing the typological proximity between Portuguese and Spanish, a questionnaire was administered to these learners so as to understand what they think about the process of learning a foreign language that has cross-linguistic similarity to their native language. Therefore, this paper investigates evidences of linguistic interferences in interlanguage, and the impressions of native Spanish-speaking learners about their learning process of Portuguese as a foreign language. After discussing the notion of interlanguage and analyzing the data from the questionnaire and the written compositions, it is verified that there is a significant number of linguistic interferences in the linguistic output of these native Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese even in immersion context, since Spanish, their native language, seems to influence negatively their learning of the Portuguese language.