Mother tongue interference in English writing among Tamil school students
Writing is considered one of the most challenging language skills that students need to acquire. In Malaysia’s vernacular schools, students encounter several challenges as they need to write in variety of languages: their mother tongue, Malay and English. The students’ mother tongue can interfere...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2021
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/16419/1/41741-149876-2-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/16419/ https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1372 |
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| Institution: | Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Writing is considered one of the most challenging language skills that students need to acquire.
In Malaysia’s vernacular schools, students encounter several challenges as they need to write
in variety of languages: their mother tongue, Malay and English. The students’ mother tongue
can interfere when writing in English due to the difference of structures between these
languages. This paper aims to explore this issue further by examining how the Tamil language
in particular influences its young native speakers’ writing of English essays. For the purpose
of this study, 30 writing samples of Year 5 students from a Tamil school were studied in terms
of structure, vocabulary usage, and spelling. Errors committed in the essays were identified,
categorized and scrutinized. The findings reveal that the main issues in the students’ writings
are related to grammar, direct translation of the Tamil language, vocabulary and spelling. While
we need to understand why and how mother tongue interference affects their writing, it is
crucial to curb these writing issues at the primary school level so that such errors can be
minimized as they will be doing higher levels of writing. The findings of the study suggest that
students need to recognise the differences between their first language (L1) and the English
language and learn to understand the different features and structures of the languages in order
to write communicative and correct sentences. |
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