TRANSFER ERRORS IN ONLINE LANGUAGE LEARNING COMMUNITIES BY LEARNERS OF SPANISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (SFL)

ABSTRACT

Online language learning communities provide free of charge space to practice writing in the target language, where students can post their experience and/or various stories. This type of writing is created in an unconstrained context, characterized by the naturalness of how these texts are written, without direct intervention of formal in-class instruction. This could reflect a real state of the target language and, on account of this fact, the influence of the first language could be evidenced due to the spontaneous environment provided by an online learning community. In this context, this study presents the results of a descriptive study based on the error analysis from a corpus of 400 texts written by 80 Spanish learners from different communities. The objective is to determine what the most common transfer errors are in this type of learning environment. The subjects were native speakers of English and German who declared having a B1 level in Spanish. The results show that the most frequent transfer errors are: 1) errors due to interference of grammatical structure (e.g. omission or addition of grammar categories), 2) errors related to the interference of syntactic structures and functions, and 3) morphological and graphic errors. This research provides a new perspective on the transfer phenomenon in an environment mediatized by technology and written production in SFL.

Keywords:
Learning communities; transfer errors; learner corpus