M. Mar Galindo-Merino

La incorporación del nivel pragmático a la investigación sobre los procesos de transferencia en la adquisición de segundas lenguas

From its birth, research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has always studied the transfer of linguistic elements from the mother tongue to the target language shown by non-native speakers. Due to its presence in the learning of a second language, transfer has been tackled from a wide range of perspectives along the last fifty years, but its pragmatic dimension has been recognized recently, encouraging nowadays the development of this field. This article aims to describe the process of transfer by covering the research about it, from the first studies taking this element into account through the later ones, that include the analysis of pragmatic transfer. We now revise the main literature as regards linguistic and pragmatic transfer in the Englishspeaking tradition as well as in Spain. Specifically, we approach the role of transfer in the learning of a L2, focusing on the arrival of Pragmatics to the teaching of foreign languages in general and to the studies about transfer in SLA in particular. We finish with some thoughts about the handling of pragmatic transfer in the second language classroom.