ABSTRACT

The role of the native language has had a rocky history during the course of second language acquisition research. This subfield of SLA has come to be known as language transfer. As we will see in this chapter, much of the history of this central concept has been tied in with the varying theoretical perspectives on SLA. The acceptance and/or rejection of language transfer as a viable concept has been related to the acceptance or rejection of the specific theory with which it has been associated.