Spanish teenagers’ acquisition of english as a foreign language: a focus on L1 influence

Abstract

The main objective of this dissertation is to examine specific L1 transfer errors from three different groups of secondary school learners of English as a foreign language, as well as to determine the general view of students towards the English education at school and the language learning itself so that we may understand better the source of their errors. The importance of our empirical study lays on the fact that a greater amount of teaching material could hopefully originate, aimed to make students aware of their errors and help them to improve their learning process. From exhaustive research, an overview on the topic of errors and transfer errors in foreign language learning will be provided with prominent examples for relating them to our findings. Regarding instruments used to conduct our experiment included first a twelve-item questionnaire with multiple choice answers from which we have collected learners' opinions and second a test which consisted of a writing task from which we have takenthe major data on L1 influence errors. Besides, quantitative results in percentages are presented; these findings are divided in three parts depending on our initial objectives. This dissertation will conclude with its limitations, general contributions and final suggestions for further investigation.