Final+Paper

FIRST DRAFT

Red: Thaís Blue: Gabriel

INTRODUCTION: Nowadays, we live in a globalized society which urges the knowledge of a foreign language, specially English. In the process of learning a second language, the learner creates an Interlanguage, which is a type of language that has features of both the target and the native languages. Also under the influence of his/hers native language, the learner makes some mistakes which are considered to be normal during that process. In this paper, we are going to show how those mistakes are connected to the learner’s first language. In addition to that, we will show how to identify common patterns of mistakes and also how to use them to facilitate the teaching, and therefore the learning process.

FIRST PARAGRAPH - In the process of learning a second language, the learner makes some mistakes that are considered normal during that process. Those mistakes are directly related to the native language. For instance, some patterns can be observed amongst all brazilian learners of English. As shown in the article "The acquisition of English root modality by non-native speakers" by Deise Dutra, some Portuguese learners of English were analized as they constructed sentences which should either ask or offer help to someone. It was observed that beginner's level's students tend to ommit the preposition "to" after the word "need", as the following example extracted from the chapter 5: "you need make a diet". It happens because in their first language, which is portuguese, it is not required to use a preposition after the verb "precisa", which means "need". In addition to that, Brazilian learners of English may also have difficulties when it comes to pronouncing words from a written text correctly. This is because, in Portuguese, it is relatively easy to know how to pronounce a word by looking at it, being phonological and also having a number of diacritical marks. In the other hand, English pronunciation and spelling, are very different from eachother. (Gimson & Cruttenden, 1994).

SECOND PARAGRAPH- Identifying patterns of mistakes according to the native language of the learner, facilitates the work of teachers as they are able to predict the possible errors and come up with alternatives to overcome these errors. For instace, in the example showed above, when English teachers are teaching Portuguese learners they should emphasize that after the verb "need" they must use the preposition "to". Also as in the example above, knowing that the spelling of English is not similar to its pronunciation, as opposed to Porguese, teachers should enphasize that fact.

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

1)GIMSON, A.C. & Cruttenden, A. ,Gimson’s Pronunciation of English pp77, London: Edward Arnold (1994)

2)DUTRA, Deise. The acquisition of English root modality by non-native speakers. Phd dissertation (1998)