Learning English and Mother Tongue

8/10/2019 Learning English and Mother Tongue

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Learning English and Mother Tongue (Arabic) Interference

The interference of the mother tongue has always been a

major problem in teaching and learning English as a foreign

language. I particularly refer here to the trace left by

someone's native language upon the foreign language they

are acquiring. Thus, the

Frenchman who says, I am here since yesterday, is imposing

a French grammatical usage on English.

Egyptian students who learn English as a foreign language

often make lexical, semantic and phonological errorsbecause of the interference of their native language

(Arabic). I will survey here, as briefly as possible, the most

common errors I have observed

during my work as an EFL teacher in Egyptian public and

private schools.

Arabic speaking students often resort to redundancy when

writing compositions and essays. They usually cannot avoid

using redundant patterns. The following sentences are just

a few common examples of redundancy.



* Mona lives alone by herself.

* The problem is very serious in the nature of it.

* The boss advanced forward the date of the

meeting.

In the previous examples, the words alone, in the nature of

it and forward are redundant. It is , of course, the duty of

the teacher to explain to his students that simple, direct

and non-redundantsentences are preferred to complicated, indirect and

redundant ones. Students should be aware of the

unnecessary information that has to be omitted. Therefore,

instead of saying, repeat again two

twins etc., students should say repeat twins respectively.

Another area of difficulty is related to using prepositions.

Arabic peaking students sometimes use prepositions where

they are not supposed to. When writing, they would

normally use affect on enjoy with or by etc. because such



verbs normally take prepositions in Arabic (phrasal verbs).

Moreover, they often make errors in choosing the correct

preposition. They tend to say ashamed from composed

from object on blame on where of, of, to and for should be

used respectively.

Students also tend to use before nouns which are not

normally preceded by this definite article, such as names of

most diseases and many other nouns. The reason for this is

that in Arabic such nouns are usually preceded by the

definite article. Notice the

following examples:

My father suffers from the diabetes.

He was filled with the sadness.

He studies the music.

He left at the twilight.

The use of run-on sentences (i.e. sentences which are



incorrectly connected) is also common in compositions and

essays written by Arabic speaking students. Look at the

following examples:

We waited a long time, he didn't turn up.

My uncle and his family lived in the capital I knew I

could stay with them.

Teachers should be able to help their students avoid run-on

sentences by using appropriate connecting words orpunctuation.

Other syntactical errors occur in using adjectives. The fact

that in Arabic, adjectives follow nouns makes it difficult forlearners of English to put adjectives in their proper place.

Therefore, students are likely to make errors such as the

following:



Tourists come to Egypt to enjoy the weather beautiful.

Men and women enjoy rights equal.

This is a book very interesting.

Arabic speaking students - affected by their mother tongue -

tend to make a syntactical error by using an adjective plus a

noun derived from the main verb instead of using an

adverb, thus imposing an Arabic grammatical usage on

English. The following examples

make this point clear:

The temperature rose a sharp rise (instead of: The

temperature rose sharply).

The singer performed a wonderful performance (insteadof: The singer performed wonderfully).

The prices have increased a gradual increase (instead

of: The prices have increased gradually).



Through intensive practice and using varied examples, such

errors are likely to disappear. Teachers should attract their

students attention to the correct sentence order in English.

The subject pronoun you in English is used is used to refer

to the person (singular) or to the person being spoken to,

and it has a separate plural form only in the reflexive

(yourself, yourselves). In

Arabic, the second person pronoun has various forms

depending on whether we are speaking to one person, two

people or more than two, and also depending on whether

we are speaking to males or females. Therefore, Arabicspeaking students tend to use you incorrectly when just one

person is being spoken to, e.g. You has caused me a lot of

trouble.

Another difficulty faced by Arabic speaking students is

related to the use of countable and uncountable nouns.

Many uncountable nouns in English such as information

money damage housework homework etc. are countable in

Arabic. Consequently, students often add an s to these

uncountable nouns and use plural instead of singular



forms of verbs. Following are some examples:

The informations I received were useful.

Housewives do a lot of houseworks.

The storm caused great damages.

The absence of certain English sounds in Arabic like /p/ and

/v/ causes real phonological problems for Egyptian students

who usually find it difficult to pronounce words containing

such sounds. Thus words like park and van are likely to be

pronounced bark and fan. This detrimentally affectslanguage learning and it particularly impeded developing

listening and speaking skills. These difficulties are

by no means insurmountable. Through giving students

sufficient practice and drills and exposing them to intensive

listening activities, teachers can attain good results,

One last area of difficulty for Arabic speaking learners of

English is related to lexico-semantic usage. Certain words

that have distinctive meanings in English, like special and

private have only one



equivalent in Arabic. Students, therefore, are likely to say:

My brother went to a special hospital.

This is a very private occasion.

For the same reason, words like economic/economical

historic/historical barrister/solicitor are often

confused and misused in Arabic.

To sum up, Arabic speaking students should be aware of the

fact that English and Arabic are quite different languages. Ifstudents are taught how to think in English and avoid doing

a mental translation, their learning will be greatly

enhanced. Teachers certainly

have a great role to play in the process of acquainting and

familiarizing their students with the language areas that are

likely to hinder their language acquisition. We are badly inneed of more

research into this area.

References:



J. A. Bright and G.P. McGregor, 1982. Teaching English

as a Second Language. Longman Group Limited.

Myrna Knepler, 1990. Grammar with a Purpose. Heinle &

Heinle.

Randolph Quirk and Sydney Greenbaum. 1985. A

University Grammar of English. Longman Group Limited.

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Learning English and Mother Tongue