exploring the role of l1 transfer in learning second language: the case of farsi and spanish learners of english

Although there are lots of research conducted on second language learning, it is still one of the areas which is still remained a wonder land for researchers. first language (l1) transfer to the second language (l2) learning process if one of the factors may facilitate the learning or may be an obstacle. the aim of this study was two-fold: firstly, it intended to find if the grammar of l1 can be influential on the initial state of second language learning as long as the universal grammar is considered and secondly, it tried to find out if some similarities between language family of l1 and l2 can cause greater performance in learners' linguistic competence in comparison with the languages which do not share that much similarity. two opposing views on l1 transfer were employed: full access/full transfer (faft) and failed functional features hypothesis (fffh). two groups of elementary young learners of english, native speakers of farsi and native speakers of spanish participated in the study. the participants were consisted of 36 male and female learners, 17 native spanish speakers and 19 native farsi speakers. the sampling was purposeful sampling and the participants were primary school students in spain and iran. yle test was given to the participants in order to have a homogeneous sample. three grammatical categories were under consideration: attributive adjectives order, ordinal numbers and gender of the adjectives. the first grammatical category shares some identical rule in spanish and farsi but different in english. the second one is similar in english and spanish language system but different in farsi and the third one is the same in farsi and english but different in spanish. grammaticality judgement tests (gjts) and translation task were given to the participants to evaluate their performance in each. the analysis of the data supports full access/full transfer hypothesis and rejects fffh. moreover, there weren’t any significant difference between the performance of native spanish speakers and native farsi speakers which indicate that the family language shared similarities between l1 and l2 doesn’t play a fundamental role in l2 learning while the l1 grammar would be influential.