The Effect of Mother Tongue Interference on Speaking Skill . “The case of third year pupils at Ben Amour Ibrahim Middle School”

Abstract

The present study aims to shed light on the first language interference issue and to investigate the effect of mother language use on the foreign language learner’s speaking skill. E.F.L learners think in Arabic when they use English that is why their English sounds like Arabic. Since speaking a foreign language is the student’s aim in E.F.L classrooms , the importance is given to elimit the problem of Arabic interference in speaking English as a foreign language. Therefore, we hypothesize that if Arabic learners are aware of socio_cultural and socio_linguistics differences between the mother tongue and target language , this will reduce the interference of the mother tongue. Throught this study , we want to investigate how far does the native language affect the student’s speaking achievement in E.F.L classrooms at Ben Amour Ibrahim Middle School and there by propose solutions to this phenomenon. To accomplish this study , we have designed a questionnaire which was administrated to the third year pupils Middle school and E.F.L teachers. After the analysis of the data collected and the results obtained from the questionnaire we have arrived to confirm the hypothesis of this research and we have tried to put forward some pedagogical recommendation as appropriate remedies that would eventually help learners to cope with the interference of their native language while using the target language.