To what extent and in what situations would a first language positively or negatively affect the learning of a second language?
If the first and second language come from the same language family, there could be some positive language transfer. For example, German is the parent language of English. So many German words are spelled almost the same as those in English (i.e., hous in German means house in English.) However, if the the first and second language come from different language families, there could be a lot of negative language transfer. For example, the word order in Japanese is SOV “I game went”, but the word order in English is SVO “I went game.” In this case, the Japanese speaker who is trying to learn to learn English might transfer the word order from Japanese into English.
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