Abstract. The Dirichlet problem is considered for a quasilinear singularly perturbed parabolic convection-diffusion equation on a rectangular domain. For this problem classical finite difference (nonlinear) schemes on piecewise uniform meshes condensing in the boundary layer converge ε-uniformly at a rate that is at best first-order. Using a Richardson extrapolation technique, we construct an improved (nonlinear) scheme that is ε-uniformly convergent at the, where N and N0 define the number of nodes in the spatial and time meshes, respectively. This nonlinear scheme is used in the construction of a linearized scheme where at each time level the nonlinear term is evaluated using the computed solution from the previous time level. Furthermore, using the linearized and nonlinear improved schemes, we construct a linearized improved Richardson scheme that converges ε-uniformly at the rate O((N −1 ln N ) 2 + N −q 0 ), where q ≥ 2.