Positive aspects of interlinguistic infl uences in the process of L2 acquisition

The processes that take place in the mind of a multilingual person during the second language acquisition are mostly shrouded in mystery. We can only observe traces of these processes manifesting themselves in the interpenetration of two or more linguistic systems. The current study aims to recognize how the knowledge of L1, in this case Spanish, influences on the acquisition and usage of the target language – Portuguese (L2), and how to take advantage of the interferences to make the L2 learners succeed. The possibility of linguistic influences grows with each acquired language. There are also important contributing factors such as a degree of similarity between the languages, a level of proficiency in each of them, and the manner and time of a language acquisition. During the Portuguese course at the Spanish Philology, we can observe such phenomena as: code switching or total displacement, hybrids, false friends, multi-word units calquing, and morphogrammatical transfer. Although one of the factors that affects the L2 acquisition is the level of proficiency, the students hardly take advantage of their mother tongue, selecting the language typologically closer to Portuguese, Spanish. The students use the previously acquired knowledge to create analogies that should be considered as an intermediate step in the acquisition of L2, not as something negative, but rather a means for providing a starting point for the analysis of error which, consequently, leads to improvement.4111191278Studia Romanica Posnaniensi