No Thumbnail Available
The use of the present perfect by French-, Italian-, and Spanish-speaking learners of English: A corpus-based error analysis
Files
Deprez_50601400_2019.pdf
UCLouvain restricted access - Adobe PDF
- 1.25 MB
Details
- Supervisors
- Faculty
- Degree label
- Abstract
- Learning an additional language to one’s mother tongue is an exercise that most human beings engage in at least once in their lives. In addition, the value of this subject is always increasing in the globalised world in which we are currently living. The reasons for starting and the results obtained are multiple, however, some characteristics are consistent despite distinct circumstances. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to compare the production of certain groups of learners of a target language, here, English, having a different characteristic, here, their mother tongue. In doing so, we seek to determine whether this characteristic is a determining factor in learning a second language. The transfer of an element of the mother tongue to the target language is a strategy that is widely used but whose importance is controversial for some linguists. In order to verify the significance of the impact that this phenomenon can have on a learner of a second language, this study analyses the use of the present perfect in English by students with different mother tongues, namely French, Italian and Spanish. The choice of these languages is no coincidence since even if they have the same origin, i.e. Latin, each of them has a particular verbal system more or less distant to that of English. This attribute will also verify the assumption that the closer two languages are, the easier it will be for learners to acquire the other. The data used in this analysis were extracted from a corpus called ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English) gathering essays written by university students.