PRIOR LANGUAGE LEARNING: AN ADVANTAGE WHEN LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE?

摘要

International students are seriously disadvantaged by having to learn a foreign language through thernmedium of another imperfectly mastered foreign language. The frequency and type of errors made inrnwritten texts by Australian students whose mother tongue is English with a comparable cohort ofrnChinese students whose mother tongue is a dialect of Chinese and who lack a near-native level ofrncompetence in English, are examined to assess this. The frequency and type of syntactic errors arerncompared for the two cohorts of students. The data are derived from the written components of the endrnof the year test administered to first year students of Japanese at one of Melbourne's universities. Therntexts are analysed within the framework of interlingual interference, intralingual interference,rndevelopmental and induced categories.