The Department of Languages and Humanities in Education
invites you to a talk by
Dr Cathy Benson
University of Edinburgh
Monday, 2 November 2015
17:00 - 19:00
Francis Ebejer Hall - Lecture Theatre 2 (LT2)
“The influence of a second language on the acquisition of a third language”
The debate as to how, why and to what extent a learner’s first language (L1), or indeed any other previously learned language, influences their learning of a new foreign language (FL) has continued for decades, and the phenomenon is now acknowledged to be more complex than was originally proposed by the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. I will discuss various approaches to this debate, before reporting on my own research into the acquisition of Portuguese by native speakers of English with previous knowledge of Spanish.