Using a Translation Corpus to Teach English to Native Speakers of Portuguese

Working with Portuguese learners of English has brought to my attention aconsiderable number of errors of English which have to do with my students´ priorknowledge of Portuguese. Identifying those errors and interpreting them in the light of contrastive linguistics can help indicating ways in which a Portuguese–Englishtranslation corpus can be harnessed to prepare English as a second language teachingmaterials for native speakers of Portuguese. This paper reports on a few typicalexamples of Portuguese-English crosslinguistic influence and explains how they can beused as a key to extracting from a Portuguese-English translation corpus comparablefacts of linguistic performance which are particularly relevant to Portuguese learners of English