Marina Grilli (São Paolo) p.58-80
2021 Issue 03
Abstract
This study aims to go one step forward in understanding the influence the first foreign language has on the second foreign language learned by the same person. It investigates the influence of English on learning the past tenses of verbs in German in a group of second-term undergraduate students of German at the University of São Paulo who already had some experience of studying English. Data collection took place by administering a questionnaire and test of the English skills of the participants, followed by three other written activities, all executed in the classroom. A first quantitative analysis focused both on the informants’ knowledge level of the verb forms of the past in English and on their successes and failures in activities containing verb forms of the past in German. The qualitative analysis of some selected participants’ performance showed that the best performance in all activities was obtained by the informant who, despite previous experience of studying English, had no solid knowledge of the language. However, the informants with an intermediate level of English knowledge obtained quite different results, which revealed the importance of not generalizing about German learners with English language skills as if they were all the same standard.