Mother tongue influence on target language pronunciation in Basic Intensive English I students from the Bachelor of Arts in English Teaching at the Foreign Language Department of the University of El Salvador, year 2020

The aim of this study was to determine how the mother tongue, Spanish, has an effect on the articulation and pronunciation of non-existing English phonetic consonant sounds in the target language, English. As it is already known, correct pronunciation is a sub-skill students must develop when learning a foreign language because mispronunciation affects accuracy and comprehension at the moment of expressing ideas. This research project was carried out in order to answer the question “How does the mother tongue, Spanish, influence on the articulation and pronunciation of non-existing English phonetic consonant sounds in Spanish in students from Intensive2Basic English I at the Foreign Language Department during year 2020?” In this research, three main theories were taken into account: the first one is the interlanguage theory, the second is transfer theory and the last one is the brain plasticity theory. These theories helped researchers to support the research project results. To collect the data, the instruments selected were an online questionnaire and an online interview. Those instruments were administered to 120 students from Intensive basic English I courses; afterwards, the data was analyzed and interpreted to test hypotheses, answer research questions and summarized the main findings. The result of the data analysis showed that the most difficult sub-skill was pronunciation. And also, it shows that the most difficult non-existing English phonetic consonant sounds in Spanish are: /ʒ/-/v/-/θ/-/ʃ/