Not to Teach but Give Insights: Corpus-based Approach in Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Russian Cross-linguistic Error Correction

Foreign language learners make mechanical errors caused by cross-linguistic influence. It comes from trying to extract information from a native language (L1) and apply it in a second or foreign language (L2/FL). There are not many didactic materials proposing a set of techniques that train the skills to keep L1 and L2/FL apart and help students to reduce cross- linguistic errors. In alternative to a traditional rule-based teaching, a corpus-based approach provides a framework for exploring online corpora to give insights into authentic language use. The paper describes the types of errors caused by cross-linguistic Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Russian influence, and illustrates how some monolingual and bilingual online corpora may be rich sources for raising learner's awareness to face such linguistic obstacles.