Teaching of Portuguese to speakers of other languages: an analysis of transfers from the mother tongue into writing

Abstract

This study deals with the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese by speakers of other languages, more precisely regarding writing. The proposal was to investigate how these speakers develop the written system in the non-native language, observing possible influences of the standards of their native languages, more precisely concerning phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic aspects. The study was developed from a sample of written productions collected from immigrants, who live in the cities of Rio Grande - RS and Pato Branco - PR. Altogether, 17 informants were included in the sample, with seven native speakers of the Haitian Creole and 10 native speakers of Spanish. The analysis revealed that, in terms of phonetic and phonological aspects, both Haitians and Hispanics present changes in phonemes and accents (insertions, deletions and phoneme exchanges or accent position) in written production, and considering the morphosyntactic aspects, the changes evidenced relate to nominal and verbal agreement, prepositional regency, as well as issues of grammatical gender change.