Language transfer as a learning strategy: a case study in interlanguage

This study is an attempt to show that language transfer is a notion which is still relevant in a theory of language learning, at least in a formal multilingual educational setting. The first chapter, which is the background -against which the problem of language transfer is perceived, deals mainly with the different views of errors from contrastive analysis to error analysis. The second chapter deals with the methodology used for the collection of data, the data themselves, the subjects and the setting. And finally, in the last chapter, the problems linked with a theory of language learning seen from the learner's standpoint are studied. The advantages the teacher can show from a knowledge of interlanguage theory are briefly examined too in the last part.