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Next in the series of articles on Language Interference
Learners employ a wide variety of strategies when they speak or write English. These include, among others, avoiding constructions and words they are unsure of, overusing those they are confident about, and taking rules of English they have learnt and applying them in areas where they do not correctly apply (over-generalizing). But the strategy which we have concentrated on in this series of articles, is that of consciously or unconsciously resorting to features of the mother tongue when speaking or writing a foreign language. In previous issues we have been looking at what can happen when a learner who has grown up with one vast body of vocabulary encounters and tries to get to grips with a language which has another, often deceptively similar, vocabulary. Cognates, false friends, pseudo-anglicisms and loan words have provided evidence of the role that the mother tongues of learners of English can play in the English those learners produce. We have seen that similarities between words in different languages can lead to false assumptions about shared meaning and entice the learner into sometimes perilous traps. When this happens the errors made are attributable to 'negative transfer', or 'interference'. Language interference can also be seen at work in other areas of language production, beyond the choice of words made by the learner. In the introduction to their book Learner English, Michael Swan and Bernard Smith point out that just as the English of a non-native speaker will almost always bear some hint of the accent of their mother tongue, so that we can recognise and talk about someone having a German accent or a French accent, so too, 'vocabulary, syntax, discourse structure, handwriting and all other aspects of language use are likely to some extent to carry a mother-tongue "accent'''. To what extent, then, can this 'accent' be traced in the errors made by learners of English? Since German starts all the days of the week and months of the year with a capital letter, a German learner of English is far less likely to write Monday or January with a lower case initial letter than a French learner of English, as in French these words have a lower case. Conversely, since German starts all nouns with a capital letter, the German learner's English is more likely than the French learner's to be peppered with extraneous capital letters. In some cases, where a German learner of English has learnt that they should not use capital letters with all nouns as they do in their mother-tongue, they might, of course, take this rule too far and omit capital letters in the comparatively rare cases where they are needed. This is a simple example of how a learner's linguistic habits can be carried across from their mother tongue to the new language they are learning, or, indeed, how newly-learnt rules can be over-applied. The area of spelling involves similar risk factors. Cognate words present spelling traps which it is very easy for the learner to fall into. Cognates of English comfortable are spelt with an 'n' rather than an 'm' in many European languages - French confortable, Italian confortevole, Spanish confortable, for example, and the ensuing spelling mistake is fairly predictable. On the other hand, in Danish, the cognate is spelt komfortabel, so different spelling errors can be predicted. Of course, non-native speakers are not the only people to have difficulties with spelling in English, and not all spelling errors can be attributed to language interference. But it is interesting to note that a list of the most commonly misspelled words of English native speakers will have only a small overlap with a similar list of common non-native-speaker spelling errors. Compare the lists provided by Vivian Cook at the link given below. Equally, lists of common English spelling errors for learners with different mother tongues will give a very different picture of the problems English spelling poses for learners with different mother tongues. Here, the mother-tongue-specific 'accent' can be heard. For example, Japanese learners, because Japanese does not distinguish between the sounds 'r' and 'l', not only say, but also write ad-rib, froppy disc, grobal, familiality, and ram (for lamb). But language interference in learning English spelling is not restricted to problems of pronunciation being carried over into spelling. Unlike many languages - Spanish, for example - English does not have a high correspondence between sound and spelling. For learners in whose mother tongue this correspondence is greater, it is harder to grasp some of the complexities of English spelling. The vowel sounds of letters 'e' and 'i' are often confused (e.g. dicided, devided), and this and these are often confused because the sound-distinction is unclear to learners. Spanish speakers will often reduce a double consonant to a single one, as in their mother tongue, hence atention, oportunity, diferent. Spanish speakers are also, like most learners with closely related mother tongues, likely to assume spelling correspondence between cognates between their mother tongue and English, leading to errors like introduccion and especial (for special). Other learners whose mother tongues do not feature clusters of consonants (two or more consonants grouped together, as in friend or government) will interpose an extra vowel (governement), miss out one of the consonants (goverment) or rearrange the vowels and consonants available into a configuration which feels more natural to them (firend), based on their mother tongue. As with all areas of language interference, spelling is an area in which the less similar the mother tongue and English are to each other the less likely it is that errors are attributable to the influence of the mother tongue. Nouns in English divide into two basic types: countable nouns and uncountable, or mass, nouns. Countable nouns are those which refer to individual entities which can be counted, such as coins, fingers and buildings. Uncountable nouns are those which refer to mass entities or to notions, which cannot be counted, such as money or laughter. These two types of noun have distinct grammatical behaviours. Countable nouns must have an article; you cannot say 'coin is made of silver'. Uncountable nouns can stand alone without an article; you can say 'laughter is contagious'. While both types can take the definite article 'the', only countable nouns can take the indefinite article 'a' (e.g. a coin, but not a money). Countable nouns have a plural form, whereas uncountable nouns do not; you can say coins but you cannot say laughters. Problems arise, when a learner starts to learn a new language and discovers that, rather than being a quality which is inherent in the things denoted by the nouns themselves, countability is something which is written into a language and what is countable in one language can be uncountable in another. If the learner assumes that the same countability applies to a word in English as in their mother tongue, interference errors will be made. Advice is an uncountable noun in English. You cannot say an advice (you have to say 'a piece of advice' as though it is a mass entity that has to be carved up, like bread), and you cannot say advices. But in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Bantu, Korean, and many other languages, the word for the concept of advice is countable. It is easy to see, then, why so many learners of English say 'he gave me a good advice' or 'his advices were useful', for example. In fact, when it comes to countability, English is often the exception, running counter to the trend in other languages, leaving learners mystified and making mistakes. Other words which are uncountable in English but often countable in other languages include: information, news, luggage, furniture, weather, equipment, work, and money. The learner who only learns the noun and does not also learn the countability and attendant grammatical behaviour of the noun, will always make themselves understood, but their English will be incorrect. Cross-linguistic differences in countability are the source of such foreign-sounding statements as 'what a lovely weather', 'the money are in my pocket' and 'I have to do my homeworks'. Variable nouns in English have both a plural and a singular form which differ from each other, most often by the addition or subtraction of an 's', though there are, of course, many irregular variable nouns. Invariable nouns in English come in different forms. Some have only a singular form, as is the case with uncountable nouns like furniture and the names of some academic subjects, games and diseases, e.g. mathematics, darts and measles, which look misleadingly like plurals. Others have only a plural form in English, whereas their counterparts in other languages may have singular forms. For example, many objects which are made up of two hinged or joined parts and are symmetrical, such as scissors, scales, secateurs and trousers, have only a plural form in English. To refer to these nouns in the singular, you have to use 'a pair of' or 'some'. If the learner assumes that the number of these nouns is the same in English as in their mother tongue invalid noun forms, like trouser, and incorrect verb-noun and determiner-noun agreement errors, as in 'this trouser is too small' will result. This is all the more confusing since in languages where nouns of this type have been borrowed from English, they are usually given a singular form, regardless of their status in the language they were borrowed from. Similarly, some nouns in English, like sheep, aircraft and offspring have the same form in both the singular and the plural, with only context to help with their interpretation. The learner who has not sufficiently learnt these facts may rely on the assumption that these nouns behave in the same way as they do in their mother tongue. It is clear that learning the English word for something is only the very first hurdle the learner must overcome in the learning process. Even once the different words or meanings have been grasped and False Friend errors avoided, errors resulting from interference in the areas of spelling, noun countability and number still lurk, waiting to be made, and often are. Learners need to be encouraged to look beyond the definitions in dictionaries to the details of countability, number and grammatical behaviour given in the dictionary labels and example sentences and to learn these along with the meanings. Fortunately, the errors under discussion here are unlikely ever to be a barrier to understanding or a cause of misunderstanding, as False Friends often are, but they may affect a learner's confidence or reduce their chances of passing an exam. Vivian Cook provides a wealth of information on English spelling and learners' spelling errors at: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/wstopics.htm Learner English: A teacher's guide to interference and other problems, Eds. Michael Swan & Bernard Smith (CUP, 2001) In the final part of the series, I will take a look at how language interference can often result in errors of grammar and sentence structure. |
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