Interlinguistic influencies on Francophone learners of Catalan as an additional language: linguistic description as a formative tool

Abstract

The study of interlinguistic influences on learners of Catalan as an additional language (AL), understood as didactic opportunities, has received little attention so far. In this paper we analyze: (a) in what respects significant negative interlinguistic influences occur, especially when they can affect communication, in texts written by Francophone students learning Catalan at the B1 level of the CEFR; (b) what training needs arise from the interference detected, and (c) we consider the possibility of helping these learners by encouraging metalinguistic reflection and taking advantage of the proximity of the two Romance languages. The research, based on corpus analysis, error labelling and statistical treatment of the data, has shown that it is necessary for these students to focus on metalinguistic awareness, in particular the correlations of the past and deixis, as well as the specific use of certain discourse connectors, lexical errors caused by calques, and the construction of the plural in nouns and adjectives.