The Use of Overgeneralization and Transfer Learning Strategies by Elementary and Intermediate Students of Esl1

An orally administered test requiring the written English translation of eighty Spanish sentences was administered to twenty native Spanish speaking students of English as a second language at the elementary and intermediate levels. A taxonomy of twenty error types was designed to analyze the errors in the Auxiliary (Aux) and Verb Phrase (VP) of the translations. The error types were categorized into errors of overgeneralization, transfer, translation, indeterminate origin, and errors not considered. The results indicated that the errors made by the elementary and intermediate students were not qualitatively different. However, the subjects' reliance on the stategies of overgeneralization and transfer was found to be qualitatively different. The elementary subjects' reliance on the transfer strategy was found to be significantly higher than that of the intermediate subjects; the intermediate subjects' reliance on the overgeneralization stategy was found to be significantly higher than that of the elementary subjects. These findings appear to be consistent with a theory which considers second language acquisition to be an actively creative process dependent upon a student's ability to assimilate and subsume new information into already existing cognitive structures. The overgeneralization and transfer learning strategies appear to be two distinctly different linguistic manifestations of one psychological process: reliance on prior learning to facilitate new learning. The results also tend to confirm the weakness of a transfer‐based theory of errors and require an explanation which takes into account not only interference from within the target language inself, but also the learner's cognitive characteristics and his resulting learning strategies.