Language Transfer Revisited. The Global English Perspective and its Pedagogic Implications.

The aim of this study is to reflect on the nature of language transfer (LT) and verify to what extent this phenomenon might be considered not only as a typical feature of learning English as a foreign language (EFL), but also as a constituent aspect of today’s development of English as a global language (EGL).Given that there is a similarity between the ‘errors’ produced by students of EFL and the ‘deviant forms’ that characterise EGL , and assuming that the non-native speaker’s mother tongue plays a very important role in the acquisition of English, the intent of this research is to reconsider the role of LT and show that there seems to be a convergence between the process of learning English in an educational context and the emergence of a novel variety of English as the world’s lingua franca. A corpus of ‘errors’ produced by Italian University students in their written exams has been collected and analysed in order to shed light on the occurrence of LT even at an advanced level. Considering the learners’ output from a phraseological point of view, the occurrence of LT basically represents a deviation from the ‘idiom principle’ (Sinclair 1991: 110-114), as students sometimes tend to transfer Italian lexical phrases into English, avoiding standard collocations and colligations, as well as standard syntactic constructs. In conclusion, this study shows that LT reveals the students’ tendency to express their socio-linguistic identity as non-native speakers, therefore it should be integrated in studies on EGL as a psycholinguistic process that characterizes the contact of English with the non-native speaker’s mother tongue and culture. This, however, poses a problem about the pedagogic implications of this phenomenon as regards the acceptability of the learner’s ‘deviant forms’. An open reflection on this point is proposed at the end of this chapter.