Some categories of interference : a contrastive approach

This thesis examines certain aspects of the interference from mother tongue English in the learning of French as a second language. A corpus of errors was selected from the written compositions and translations of first- to fourth-year university students. Those errors whose source was deemed to be interference from English were classified under the general headings of lexicon, syntax and morphology. Further sub-divisions were made to try to account for as many types of error as possible, but the data did not cover all the areas of grammar where interference might occur. An attempt was then made to explain the source of the interference, based on a contrastive analysis of the given structures in both languages. It was found that the greatest variety of errors occurred in the morphology section, whereas the greatest number of errors were either lexical or syntactical. The thesis emphasizes the fact that the mother tongue is often a source of interference in second language learning, that differences and similarities between language structures should be pointed out in the classroom, and that some areas of language teaching may be better taught if based on a contrastive grammar of the source and target languages