A Case Study on Oral Corpus: The Use of Mother Tongue in Class by Brazilian Teachers of Spanish as Foreign Language

AbstractOn the features of the upcoming languages, some recent empirical research (Durão and Andrade, 2010) estimated that Spanish and Portuguese share approximately 85% of the lexicon in several semantic fields. Other authors such as Almeida Filho (1995) claim that among romance languages, Portuguese and Spanish are the ones that have most affinity. In consequence, by reason of the similarity (morphological, syntactic, semantic and phonetic phonological), there are no Luso-pupils considered as “beginners” in Spanish (Carmolinga, 1997). It occurs because they normally have acquired the ability to understand part of the language, spoken or writing. On the other hand, and, paradoxically, one of the greatest difficulties for such students is to overcome the existing similarities in the two languages, which facilitate the interference from the mother tongue in the L2.It is not always easy, even in very high levels of knowledge of the foreign language, to get rid of some specific aspects of the mother tongue. In the case of Spanish teachers we have to add the concern by the influence that the L1 interference in their speech can be affected in the student's learning. For that reason, this study that is part of a doctoral thesis investigation attempts to find out if in the speech of the population analysed - Brazilian teachers of Spanish as a foreign language - there are signs of influence from the mother tongue. The work is supported by corpus linguistics. The collection of data is done through the recording and transcript of classes and audio interviews, which constitute the oral corpus (Du Bois, 1991)