Bruna Correa’s experience with Portuguese and English provides great insight into the many factors that come into play when an individual is learning a second language. According to Correa, she has utilized her first language as a template, or reference point, for the acquisition of her second language. Due to this template, learning English has not been particularly difficult for her. However, she has struggled with grammatical, social and cultural aspects of a language because of multilingual interference: the conflict that occurs in circumstances when two languages are utilized and mixed, or a second language is learned.
Growing up in Belo Horizonte, a large city in Brazil, Correa was exposed to English growing up. Not only did she take English classes in school, but she also noted that much of the propaganda and internet sources in Brazil were in English. At the age of 15, Correa moved to the United States to train at a tennis academy called IMG Bollettieri Tennis Academy. At the academy, Correa had difficulty understanding the conversational language and utilizing certain words in their correct context. Although she utilized Portuguese as her template to learn English in classrooms, she had never been exposed to English in its appropriate social setting, realizing the importance of social and cultural factors of a language in completely learning and understanding a language. These factors, along with the inherent language barrier, are major obstacles that international students face when learning English.
Correa also highlighted that she struggled with the grammatical differences between English and Portuguese, noting that English is spoken “backwards” in comparison. In Language Learning and Teaching as Social Interaction, Zhu Hua emphasizes that the identity a learner constructs in the acquisition of a second language plays an important role in the comprehension of the language (Hua 257). If the second language is similar to the first, then the matching frameworks will be advantageous for the learner. If not, the contradicting structure will impede the learner in understanding the grammar of the second language (Hua 257). When Correa was exposed to English, her expectations and identity as a Brazilian formed an interference that, for a period of time, negatively impacted her acquisition of a second language. Once she was finally able to surrender this “identity,” Correa was able to accept the grammatical differences between English and Portuguese, and learn English independent from Portuguese. Now, similar to Harry Wang, Correa struggles with an American “identity” she established that impacts her communication with her friends and family back home.
Understanding this multilingual interference in learning a second language is important because an interference of languages is also an interference of cultures. One does not exist without the other. The language specific to a country is built off of the culture that that language originates from and this was important in Correa's journey of mastering English because she needed to come to terms with how English is spoken in the United States, rather than how it was spoken in class back in her home county. For further research, one could investigate the direct relationship between cultural interference and lingual interference, and how an instructor in a foreign land could integrate these settings into the class to prevent social factors from hindering communication for a second language.
By Rocco English
(Edited by Jonathan Park)
Works Cited
Hua, Zhu. Language Learning and Teaching as a Social Interaction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Growing up in Belo Horizonte, a large city in Brazil, Correa was exposed to English growing up. Not only did she take English classes in school, but she also noted that much of the propaganda and internet sources in Brazil were in English. At the age of 15, Correa moved to the United States to train at a tennis academy called IMG Bollettieri Tennis Academy. At the academy, Correa had difficulty understanding the conversational language and utilizing certain words in their correct context. Although she utilized Portuguese as her template to learn English in classrooms, she had never been exposed to English in its appropriate social setting, realizing the importance of social and cultural factors of a language in completely learning and understanding a language. These factors, along with the inherent language barrier, are major obstacles that international students face when learning English.
Correa also highlighted that she struggled with the grammatical differences between English and Portuguese, noting that English is spoken “backwards” in comparison. In Language Learning and Teaching as Social Interaction, Zhu Hua emphasizes that the identity a learner constructs in the acquisition of a second language plays an important role in the comprehension of the language (Hua 257). If the second language is similar to the first, then the matching frameworks will be advantageous for the learner. If not, the contradicting structure will impede the learner in understanding the grammar of the second language (Hua 257). When Correa was exposed to English, her expectations and identity as a Brazilian formed an interference that, for a period of time, negatively impacted her acquisition of a second language. Once she was finally able to surrender this “identity,” Correa was able to accept the grammatical differences between English and Portuguese, and learn English independent from Portuguese. Now, similar to Harry Wang, Correa struggles with an American “identity” she established that impacts her communication with her friends and family back home.
Understanding this multilingual interference in learning a second language is important because an interference of languages is also an interference of cultures. One does not exist without the other. The language specific to a country is built off of the culture that that language originates from and this was important in Correa's journey of mastering English because she needed to come to terms with how English is spoken in the United States, rather than how it was spoken in class back in her home county. For further research, one could investigate the direct relationship between cultural interference and lingual interference, and how an instructor in a foreign land could integrate these settings into the class to prevent social factors from hindering communication for a second language.
By Rocco English
(Edited by Jonathan Park)
Works Cited
Hua, Zhu. Language Learning and Teaching as a Social Interaction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.