Abstract:

Portuguese, French and Spanish, as romance languages, share important lexical, syntactic and morphological features. However, Portuguese and Spanish are recognized to be a sub-group in romance languages due to their typological similarities (cf. Almeida Filho, 1995; Brito et al, 2013). Acknowledging this in our previous study from the Lille 3 University, we analyzed the interference of Spanish in 380 writings of French students of Portuguese as a foreign language. The results of our analysis showed that Spanish influences are evident in the Spanish-speaking students texts. Thus, this study allows us to deepen our previous research. We now investigate whether the main romance languages intercomprehention may facilitate in some way the acquisition of Portuguese language for French students. We inaugurated then a two-years Portuguese course sensitizing a group of French students to romance languages similarities. This method aimed to make students familiar with the Portuguese, an unknown language for them so far. So, in our study we measure the influence of French and Spanish in two French students’ assumptions about Portuguese; only one of the students speaks Spanish though. We then identify how they use said languages in their writings, to compensate for the gaps they have in Portuguese. Our goal is to compare their strategies in using those languages and realize if Spanish brings real benefits to the Spanish-speaking student in contrast to the non-Spanish-speaking student. The results showed that both learners use the languages they know to formulate hypotheses about Portuguese, and one of them gave preference to the use of the foreign language (Spanish) for borrowings from the vocabulary.

Keywords:

Intercomprehension, romance languages, language acquisition.