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Post by Alex Rios on Sept 19, 2016 14:01:01 GMT
"When asked if it was all right, a student of mine told me “until here it’s good” when he really meant “so far so good”. This is a case of transfer at the semantic level." Interestingly,I'd like to share an activity I did with a group of upper-intermediate students not only in order to raise awareness of semantic differences, but also to make them ponder what the best language choices are when we know we will mostly be communicating with non-native speakers of English rather than native ones. My students often ask questions such as How do you say “encher linguiça”? “Encher o saco”? or “Encher a cara”? So I asked them to write a Brazilian expression such as those on paper. Even though I was working with adults, I monitored to ensure no bad words or offensive ideas would be part of the activity. Then I asked students to fold the slips of paper and collected their ideas. Later, I told learners to work in pairs, finding out good translations for the expressions, as well as examples. I advised them to look them up at www.englishexperts.com.br, www.teclasap.com.br, english4brazil.com, or www.inglesnapontadalingua.com.br, and to choose the most generic definitions. Next, learners randomly got the expressions and started to work. Finally, they mingled explaining the expressions and learning others. It took us some 15 minutes, but it was worthy. Learners realised how English and Portuguese work semantically differently, and how important it is to choose the appropriate words/ expressions to be understood by a higher number of people. Thanks a lot for your contribution, Carol! I've already visited the websites you mentioned above, and they are really food for thought. What I can share by now is an experience I had regarding those expressions that has nothing to do with Portuguese, besides the meaning. Since technology provided us with WhatsApp groups, I often ask them there how would they say a certain expression in English. After a couple of literal versions to English, I post a sentence the expression in use. It's fun to see how L1 based we are. I remember once when I asked them how to say "Dar uma de João sem braço", and the first option was "to act as John armless", instead of "to turn a blind eye". |
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Post by Liliane Carvalhaes on Sept 19, 2016 14:44:43 GMT
When Grosjean's (2010) claims that "among the disadvantages, one that is mentioned the most is that it makes you stand out from others when you want to blend in. If the society you live in is not positively inclined toward the group you belong to, an accent can have a negative effect on the way you are perceived and treated." Well, I really do not agree with that in some parts. During the years I lived in US I´ve never had a situtation where my accent was a problem. At least for me. I never thought about it as a major issue but I beleive that at some point someone might have experienced a discriminatory situation due to his or her accent. When I was learning English in US I had an American teacher who used to say:" Do not worry about your accent. It´s your charm." Since then I looked foward and never thought about it.
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Post by Liliane Carvalhaes on Sept 19, 2016 15:39:29 GMT
Me desculpem...esse post acima foi no forum errado. Sorry.
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Post by Liliane Carvalhaes on Sept 19, 2016 15:47:02 GMT
My conclusion is that tranfer can occur in any situation when someone does not have a native-level command of a language, as when translating into a second language.It´s a natural process and I beleive it affects everyone who is learning a second language. The only objection is that,with time, learners must stopp doing it at some point preferable when they already master the second language chosen by them.
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Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante
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Post by Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante on Sept 19, 2016 17:53:25 GMT
An example of how misleading the seek of an exact translation from Portuguese to English that has been very recurrent is when students get confused about the use of "your" instead of "his" and "her" for possessive adjectives in formal sentences. Also, just like the speaker in the video mentioned how pronunciation of French Canadian and Spanish speakers' first languages interfere in the pronunciation, it's very difficult for some of the students to pronunce the sound of 'th' in 'three', pronuncing it such as in 'tree'. Also, because Brazilian Portuguese is mainly a vowel language, it's very hard for them not to make the epenthesis in 'speak', with and sound in the beginning.
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Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante
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Post by Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante on Sept 19, 2016 18:07:30 GMT
Hi, everyone! As Vivian said, this example "I have eleven years old!" is very common. They say 'I have eleven years old" or simply "I have eleven years". They have problems in these constructions: "I am student' instead of "I am a student" or "She not play volleyball" instead of "She doesn't play volleyball." Another problem is related to the pronunciation of the 'ch' and 'th' sounds. These sounds are replaced by others. The students have serious problems to pronounce them. Hello, Águida, this has been a very recurrent case for me. I am teaching only beginners at the school I am working right now, since they offer only a 2-year course here, so I have been teaching this lesson of numbers and age quite frequently these days. This way, when they ask about the sentences used to say the age, they get very confused for not using "have" in this sentence. Cheers, Yuri. |
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Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante
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Post by Yuri Wenceslau Fioravante on Sept 19, 2016 18:10:27 GMT
Hello everybody! As I can see the pronounce of "TH" sound is so difficult for the students.They always associate them with "S","D" or "F" the most of the time.In my opinnion this sound is so hard to learn because they don't exist in Portuguese.Another problem is the vowel "I" with long and short sounds like the words "SEAT" or "SIT".The same phoneme in the L1 and in L2 such as "STAR" English and "ESTAR" Portuguese is a common pronunciation mistake too. Hello, Márcia! I see that I have gone through the same examples as you did, I guess we were influenced by the video, right? lol Well, the only thing you pointed out that I haven't is about the confusion caused by minimum pairs as you mentioned. Some students of mine have been pronuncing "English curse" instead of "English course", what I find quite lexically funny. Cheers, Yuri. |
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Renata Soares Veloso
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Post by Renata Soares Veloso on Sept 19, 2016 18:28:09 GMT
Something students often struggle with is the pronunciation of some verbs in the past tense such as stopped; it's difficuld for them to see the "e" there and not pronounce it. And some interesting lexical transfers such as "to stay sick", "to have sure", "to have reason" and so on.
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Post by Anna Myotin Grant on Sept 19, 2016 19:01:37 GMT
Hello! I have had experiences teaching English to portuguese speaking students or English to speakers of other languages. I will speak of my experience teaching portuguese speaking students.
According to the video you carry all your linguistic baggage- transfer for the L1. So speakers of portuguese tend to use /d/, in place of the sound /ð/, a word such as the or that, would be uttered like /da/ or /dat/. I have noticed that my brazilian students have a great difficulty in pronuncing that and the /θ/ sound.
They also tend to have a great difficulty in distinguishing these pair of words: Leave and live/ eat and it/sleep and slip/. They tend not to recognize what are long or short vowels, so they pronounce these words exactly the same. I tell them sometimes that this can sometimes affect intelligibility, or it can be rude, like when my young students mistake the pronounciation of cook, with an open /o/.
Thank you guys for sharing your experiences!
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Post by Túlio Santos on Sept 19, 2016 19:34:33 GMT
Hi there!
I've seen many different sets of tranfers while teaching English. Some examples are:
At the phonological level:
* Epenthesis in words like "Sport", "FaCEbook", "toP"
* Palatalization in words like "nerD", "sporT", "wanT"
- In many cases, palatalization comes together with epenthesis > "IsporTCHI"
At the semantic level:
* (as mentioned above:) HAVE __ YEARS OLD
* very x many x much
At the syntactic level:
* word order (adjective + noun; adverbs of frequency)
* sentences without subject ("Is hot today.")
There many others I could think of, but these are the ones that came to my mind today.
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Post by Anna Myotin Grant on Sept 19, 2016 21:21:58 GMT
I have been thinking about words which the pronounciation is somewhat close to each other and so poses problem to the second language speaker, and I remembered some cases, when my mum, who is brazilian would say to my dad "where are the keys, and pronounce it kiss" and then he would give here a kiss and she wouldn´t understand anything. Also, I like to use my mum as an example because she as a brazilian speaker can´t pronounce the l in world, and this comes out as word, and I have seen this difficulty in many of my students, who are also speakers of brazilian portuguese.
The example I have brought to you professors and colleagues, about the word "quérri", a term used in the computer game dota 2 which comes from carry and in the game means someone who is a querri, carries the team on their shoulders has proven to be very interesting to try to illustrate these influences of the first language. So in caryy, the two rs in the middle of the word has the sound of flap in english, but becomes the sound /h/ in hotel in quérri . Since in portuguese when there are two "r" together in the middle of a word such as "barriga", "churrasco", "corrupto" this sound is always a strong r. So when borrowing carry from english, some linguistic baggage from portuguese seem to have interfered in the process.
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Post by ariadne on Sept 19, 2016 23:32:47 GMT
An important feature bilinguals usually transfer from their native language to other language(s) they speak is the word stress, we can notice it very clearly when listening to Japanese people talking in English, they tend to put the stress of the words on the last syllable as it is a main feature of their native language. For us Brazilians, the main mistake concerning word stress we tend to commit when speaking English is on latim derived words found in English that are very similar, sometimes equal, on writing to Portuguese words. Unfortunately putting the stress of a word into the wrong syllable can affect intelligibility greatly, specially when we are talking to English native speakers who do not have Knowledge of Portuguese language or Latim and is not used to talking to many Brazilians, whom mighty commit the same mistakes.
Another transference we do from our native language into English is related to meaning, there are many false friend words in English that students usually take as having the same meaning but often have a very different one, most of these false friends comes from Latim as well, an exemple is the word pretend, students often believe it means having the intention of doing something instead of meaning something irreal or fake for instance.
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Post by Aristeo on Sept 20, 2016 1:27:30 GMT
Thinking about common mistakes commited by english learners, the first example that comes to my mind is the preposition before the word "home". I have already seen many times people saying " I am going to home" or "I have to go to home". It is clear they make this mistakes because in Portuguese language the preposition is indispensable in this situation.
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Post by Patricia Correa on Sept 20, 2016 1:35:39 GMT
One of the most common mistakes made by beginner students is the age: How old are you? Because they tend to translate the sentence to portuguese, so It sounds awkward to them. So, the response to the question is also strange for brazilian students: I am 20 instead of I have 20 years.hav
Another example is the verbal combination: have breakfast, have lunch...etc. Students want to say : eat lunch or breakfast. It is difficult for them to understand how the languages work differently and "have breakfast" instead of "eat breakfast" is not possible.
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Post by Vanessa Brasil on Sept 20, 2016 1:42:52 GMT
The video and the discussion reminded me of a very common mistake Brazilians commit when learning English:
In Portuguese, the sentence "Após sair do estacionamento, ele foi para sua casa" makes complete sense, as we can infer that "sua casa" is a third person possessive and the man went to his own house. It's very common to see Brazilians use "your house" instead of "his house" in the same sentence, translating 'seu/sua' only as 'your'.
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