SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 1

The role of students’ mother tongue in the language classroom: Error Analysis of A1

Adult Learners

Alfonso H. Hernández

Universidad DaVinci

Author note

Alfonso H. Hernández is a second-term postgraduate student of the Master Degree Program at

Universidad DaVinci.

The present paper is the final project of the subject English Second Language Acquisition

Corresponding concern to the present essay should be addressed to Alfonso H. Hernández e-mail

Contact: hha_92@hotmail.com
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 2

Table of Contents

The role of students’ mother tongue in the language classroom: Error Analysis of

A1 1

Table of Contents 2

Introduction 4

Literature review 5

Transfer 5

L1 phonological transfer in L2 6

Context of the students 7

Relevant taught language 7

Error analysis 8

Use possessive adjectives 9

Use of indefinite articles and third person singular verb form for simple present

positive 10

Telling the age 11

Answering the research questions 12

Conclusion 13

References 14

Appendix A 15
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 3
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 4

Introduction

The role of first language (L1) in the acquisition of a second language (L2) has been a widely

debated topic in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), (Ionin, & Montrul, 2010). Gass

(2008) describes it as “a rocky history” throughout the course of SLA. The common assumption

is that second language learners rely to a great extent on their first language.

The present paper is based on such assumption and its aim is to account for the extent of the role

of L1 in L2 adult learners of English in early stages. For doing so, Gass (2008) assures that it is

necessary to carry out a contrastive analysis of the mother tongue and the target language in

order to ascertain differences and similarities. Therefore, this project seeks to find positive or

negative transfer from the learners’ L1 in their L2 learning process.

For the purposes of the essay and due to the characteristics of the participants and their

context I will focus on the errors students commit when trying to share personal information

about themselves and a third person. It is important to bear in mind that students have just been

introduced to the present simple structure for positive statements. Therefore, I will only consider

errors as those grammatical and lexical items which have been taught and practiced yet are being

misused for any reason. Besides, the analysis attempts to answer the following research

questions.

a) What is the role of students’ mother tongue in the language classroom?

b) How does student's mother tongue influence learning?

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 5

The present work is divided in sections. First of all, an extended revision of the literature is

presented in order to understand the concepts of transfer and to show cases in which L1 and L2

transfer is analyses form different aspects of the language. Secondly, it is described the context of

the participants, my students, their age, group profile and recently and relevant language taught

in the course. After that, it is explained the two activities from which the data was collected.

Finally, the actual analysis of the student’s errors is displayed as well as the conclusion and

answer of the research questions.

Literature review

Transfer

Transfer cannot only be from L1 to L2, in fact is has been proven to be bidirectional in some

cases. Exploring the idea that people’s L1 can influence the way L2 is produced, Hohenstein et

all (2006) studied bidirectional transfer in grammatical and lexical features of language in

Spanish speakers who speak English as L2. In such study, adult speakers showed bidirectional

lexical transfer yet only L1 to L2 grammatical transfer was presented. Moreover, it is important

to highlight that according to the competition model, (MacWhinney, 1987, 1992 in Hohenstein et

all, 2006) students have a tendency to transfer knowledge from L1 cues, which are related to

phonological, syntactic and lexical aspects of language.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 6

L1 phonological transfer in L2

In this project it is intended to display the likely negative transfer in the students’ attempts to

share and understand personal information as well as their processing of new phonemes. The

latter aspect is focused on the students’ perception of new consonant sounds as I have observed

how students tend to struggle when learning and acquiring new sounds. The question is what

might cause L1 Spanish speakers to have difficulty in acquiring certain sounds?

Laver (1994 in Hammarberg, 2001) present the concept of Aritkulationbasis. He claims that

the phonetic setting is characteristic of a particular language, it shapes its articulatory gestures. It

is on such features that the success of the acquisition of a new language will depend. Thus, the

learners should restructure their phonetic setting in order to add a new whole setting of the target

language. In the context of this project, adult Spanish speakers will be tested in order to find

possible error patterns when acquiring new sounds at an early stage of learning English as L2.

Proficiency seems to make it up for L1 transfer, then the present project will probably display

strong negative transfer from L1 to L2 as the participants are A1 language learners. Nevertheless,

transfer seems to be present even in highly proficient learners but at a different extent (See

Dussias, 2003).

All in all, it is not certain that low or high proficiency will determine the level of positive or

negative transfer from language to the other. It is also the language phonetic and lexical

“settings” that could impact L2 acquisition and production. Just as Hammarberg (2001) states, a
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 7

speaker’s languages can be apart from one another but they can also be mixed, furthermore, they

can influence each other. Therefore, it is important to continually contrast the students L1 and L2

in order to identify patterns and areas that will be difficult or easy to learn, (Gass, 2008).

Context of the students

The present analysis of errors was based on data taken from a group of young adults. Their

age range from 19 to 26 years, except for two students who are 41 and 43 years old. They just

started studying online English as a second language, we have been having classes for the last 3

months, at the time the data was collected. This is the first course out of twelve levels, it is an A1

level course. Most of them seem to have not too many problems understanding basic

instructions and commands and try to speak in English as much as possible.

About the affective aspects, most of them appear to be motivated to learn as they all need the

target language for better academic and professional opportunities. They are participative and

enthusiastic and reflect it in the way they interact with each other and with the teacher.

Relevant taught language

Errors are understood as (Brown, 2000, p. 205) “direct manifestations of a system with which

a learner is operating at the time”. This means that students reflect the language they have

mastered or at least the knowledge they have been taught and they are in process of acquiring it.

By the end of the course the students are supposed to reach the A1 level of English, the students

have already taught some basic grammar and vocabulary in the last three months, some

highlights include, the use verb “to be”, definite and general article, possessive adjectives,
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 8

present simple for positive statements, vocabulary about school objects, the house and the family.

It is important to mention that the course also aims to develop the communicative competence by

teaching and fostering language functions. For example, we have already practiced how to order

and pay food in a café, how to talk about one’s home and family and how to share personal

information.

Data collection

The errors to be analyzed were collected from in-class activities, no particular activity was

designed for the students to reveal any kind of error. The errors listed and analyzed below are

natural occurrences of the students interlanguage. The first activity is called “A cool person in

my family” in which the students had to talk share personal information of members of their

family. Such activity was submitted to a platform as a short written composition.

The second activity was a speaking activity in which the students had to introduce each other,

this was incidentally carried out as two new students joined the group that day. Extracts of the

students’ participation were transcribed and analyzed below. The link for the complete section of

the class is attached in appendix A.

Error analysis

Studying how a second language is acquired is quite a challenging endeavor as it is not

directly observable so the researcher or teacher must draw on certain instruments to infer verbal

or non verbal response (Brown, 2000). The present analysis makes use of both, written and

spoken extract of the students participation in the class.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 9

Use possessive adjectives

The students in the present A1 level course tend to commit certain mistakes which might

mean that they all are currently at a certain preliminary stage of language acquisition in which

error of the kind are common. They all have a tendency to use the possessive adjective your to

substitute the rest of the adjectives as it can be seen in the following extract.

My favorite person in my family is my mother Maricruz, she is work person in the

pharmacy, she is lovely and nice, is person love this world, has been the mom more
incredible, it's an example to follow for me, she talk on you life in the field and
histories on you adolescence, she is my mother the person more cool and fascinating
in my family.
Act. 1 Vianney

While the students has no problems using the possessive adjective for the first person

singular, she is not able to express possession of a third person, even though she has already been

taught such lexical knowledge, she is still not ready for expressing the concept correctly.

Similarly in the second activity in which they had to introduce a classmate and talk about their

hobbies and passion the following students said:

“He likes to play the guitar and see your friends”

Act. 2 Jessica min 6:20
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 10

Jessica is trying to express possession of a third person singular by wrongly coalescing the

possessive adjective your. The reason for this might be that in Spanish, which is the students’ L1,

the possessive adjective for the second and third person singular is the same. Therefore, the

present errors might be the result of negative transfer from the L1.

Use of indefinite articles and third person singular verb form for simple present positive

The flowing type of errors are extremely common during the initial stages, at least from my

experience. They are the lack of conjugation in the present simple tense and the omission of

indefinite articles when talking about job titles and occupation.These can be shown in the

following extracts from the students in-class participation.

“He love basket”

Act 2 Jessica min 6:12
“She pass time with her friends”
Act 2 Ale min 7:30
As it can bee seen, both students haven not mastered the active use of the correct form of the

verb in the predicate. In the case of Ale, the influence of negative transfer is not only at

grammatical leve; but at the lexical level as well. This can be observed in the wrong collocation

of the verb “to pass the time with friends” which is a more natural collocation in Spanish. It is

also important to highlight that they have already practiced enough the use of such grammatical

rules. In other words, they sometimes do it correctly or try to use other communication strategies.

“She study [the student immediately changes the form] […] she is a nutrition
student”.
Act 2 Jiset min 8:25
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 11

About the common lack of indefinite articles to express what they do for a living, the reason

is apparently the interference of the L1. In Spanish it is not necessary or optional to use such

article when talk gin about others’s occupation. These are the students’ extracts.

“He is engineer of information systems”

Act 2. Vianney min 12:23
Others as well committed the same mistake:
“She is good student”
Act 2. Juan C min 11:46

Telling the age

The last type of error has to do with a clearer intrusion of the L1, this can easily be reflected

in the way students attempt to express their age. See the following extracts from activity 1.

My family be conformed for Nohemi´s, she is my mother, she have 45 years old,
she is cheerful and little angry, my father is Jorge, he have 46 years old, they are had
me and my sister karen´s, she is mom she have one daugether,my niece is very
naughty and funny. There are my little family.
The following is a picture of another student evidence for the same activity.
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 12

It is quite evident how students rely on the L1 when trying to tell their age. Such common

error might be the result of the transferred structure in Spanish. In the L1 students are used to the

notion of “having the years” while in English is confusing at first to understand the idea of

“being certain years old”.

Answering the research questions

Brown (2000) posits that errors reflect the interlanguage competence of the learner. He

describes errors and mistakes as windows through which one could catch a glimpse at the

language acquisition processes. The present analysis seeks to answer how L1 influence learning

and to understand the role of the mother tongue in the classroom. Even though, the collected

samples may not determine strong impact of the L1 when learning the L2, it is explicit how

Spanish seems to affect students accuracy. It is due to time constraints that the analysis could not

cover other type or errors found during the collection of data yet the selected samples displayed

negative transfer in the lexical and gramatical aspects of the L2.

The role of the mother tongue in the classroom seems to be a tool of which the student make

use to firstly structure ideas in their mind in order to finally write them or utter them. The

Spanish language seems to serve a tool for self-monitoring basic syntactic structure for the

students. This is to say, they seem to assure the ideas make sense in Spanish first so they can

express them in the L2.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 13

Conclusion

It is undoubtedly true that the errors displayed in the present essay appear to evidence strong

negative transfer from the L1. Students at this early stage feel more confident relying more on

the L1 and transfer structures and strategies not to loose the commutation flow. However, this

means that “the transfer of strategies form one language to another may result in inappropriate or

nonconventional speech” (Pinto, 2007, p. 135). Nonetheless, it is of utmost importance to

remark that not all errors are attributable to the L1 (Brown, 2000). Other errors may be the result

of wrong misconceptions of the L2 and even from student’s own learning styles. Besides, it is

important not loose track of the main goal of error analysis, which is to plan, predict and design

strategies for the students to overcome and tackle such issues with the language.
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 14

References

Brown, H.D. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Longman: White Plains,

New York, USA.

Dussias, P. E. (2003). Syntactic ambiguity resolution in L2 learners: Some effects of bilinguality

on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 529-557.

Gass, S. M., & Selinker, L. (2008). Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course.

Hammarberg, B. (2001). Roles of L1 and L2 in L3 production and acquisition.

Hohenstein, J., Eisenberg, A., & Naigles, L. (2006). Is he floating across or crossing afloat?

Cross-influence of L1 and L2 in Spanish-English bilingual adults. Bilingualism, 9(3), 249.

Ionin, T., & Montrul, S. (2010). The role of L1 transfer in the interpretation of articles with

definite plurals in L2 English. Language learning, 60(4), 877-925.

Morrison, G. S. (2009). L1-Spanish Speakers’ Acquisition of the English/i/—//Contrast II:

Perception of Vowel Inherent Spectral Change1. Language and Speech, 52(4), 437-462.

Pinto, D., & Raschio, R. (2007). A comparative study of requests in heritage speaker Spanish, L1

Spanish, and L1 English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(2), 135-155.

Yoshii, M. (2006). L1 and L2 glosses: Their effects on incidental vocabulary learning. Language

Learning & Technology, 10(3), 85-101.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 15

Appendix A

Link for the whole class audio in google drive

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-4ihCYypcU30VALuhpYJ9RkqjgvH6FqQ/view?usp=sharing