A influência da língua materna nos erros ortográficos de vogais no aprendizado de inglês por falantes de português

Abstract

This work aimed to investigate the influence of the mother tongue on vowel spelling errors, when produced in the initial phase of writing by Brazilian students learning English as a foreign language. With the development of this study, the aim was to contribute to the teaching of English as a foreign language. In order for the objectives of this research to be achieved, data from subjects who had Portuguese as their mother tongue and were in the initial phase of learning the English language were analyzed. The research sample consisted of writing data from 40 students of English as a foreign language, native speakers literate in Portuguese, seventeen students in the seventh year of elementary school and twenty three in the ninth year. The data analyzed were extracted from a dictation created specifically for the research, which contains seven minimal pairs with the phonemes to be tested, covering all English vowels. The results obtained show that the phonology and spelling of the mother tongue influence the process of learning English spelling, which is in line with other reviewed researches (Sousa and Tomé, 2010; Alves & Silva Júnior, 2015; Ortiz Alvares, 2002; Rombaldi 2017; Rombaldi, Miranda, Damiani 2012). The school year variable proved to be relevant to the study as the incidence of errors decreases in the ninth year compared to the seventh. The strategies employed by the students reveal anchoring in the phoneme-grapheme relationships of the mother tongue, which present more transparent relationships, and the results point to the effect of word frequency on errors and successes. By focusing on the orthographic acquisition of vowels in English as a FL (foreign language), we intended to contribute to the understanding of processes underlying the acquisition of vowel spellings, which are notably complex.