‘Interlanguage transfer’: A study through stimulated recall about Spanish-speaking students who transfer elements from English in order to learn German

Abstract

"This thesis reports a qualitative study of interlanguage transfer. This study was carried out at a public university in a faculty of modern languages in the city of Puebla. The main purpose of my research was to study the phenomenon of transfer from one foreign language to another, in order to investigate if the previous knowledge of the participants’ L2 let the learning of another subsequent language depending on their closeness. The research data were collected through participants’ written productions and stimulated recall interviews that were applied to 7 students who belonged to early German levels: beginners or A1. The research found that the genetic relatedness and language closeness maintains features in common among languages which are highly associable and transferable. Thus providing students an advantage for learning when they apply that previous knowledge as a learning strategy, too. Finally it was interesting to find that almost all the participants involved indicated that they could make associations between their L2 (e.g., English) and the third language they aimed to learn (e.g., German); but also English was part of their German learning because they were similar in some way."