Facilitation and interference of native sounds in foreign language

FACILITATION AND INTERFERENCE OF

NATIVE SOUNDS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION

Prepared by Mamajonova Shahnoza

Language interference and facilitation is one of the major problems in teaching and learning. The phenomenon sometimes

makes the learners to find difficulties in having a “good” performance in the target language. For example, some of the

learners are quite difficult to avoid the interference and facilitation of their mother tongues habits when they are speaking

the English. This sometimes leads them into the “foreign accent” and even “errors” when pronouncing certain English sounds.

The interference does not only lead the learner into difficulties in pronouncing the segmental sounds of English (vowels and

consonants), but also the supra-segmental ones as well. They are not only in term of the phonetic/phonological aspects of the

language, but also lexical and grammatical aspects.In language learning the mother tongue (L1) and the target language (L2)

come into contact as a result of which many cases of the transference of the elements of L1 to L2 may be observed.These

transferences are given a common term “interference”. Language interference or transfer is one of linguistic phenomena that

commonly occurs in the context of ESL/EFL learning. It is considered as the result of the incorrect usage of the grammatical

patterns of the target language. It is characterized by the use of the old rules of the native language to account for the rules of

the target language language;i.e., the learner uses the L1 rules while speaking and writing in target language. This phenomenon

appears because of the influence of the mother tongue of native language on English. There is interference when a learner

uses one of the linguistic elements of the native language to act in English. This might occurs largely if the learner has a

limited knowledge in the English language.