Native Language Interference and its Implications in English Language Teaching in National Schools

Abstract

Many of the errors that are made by pupils learning English as a second language or a foreign language stem from native or first language or L1 interference. The phenomenon of native language interference is the result of a psychological process in which the pupil transfers his intuitive knowledge of the system of his own language to the system that obtains in the target language. This transfer results in the pupil’s producing sentences, spoken or written, in the target language which are non-grammatical or ‘deviant’. Naively, we tend to interpret this phenomenon in terms of the expression that the pupil ‘translates literally’.