The Interference of Mother Tongue - Part 1

Greeting, fellas!

It's kinda unexpected for me to write another post in this blog, but I'd like to continue my blog progression (especially for college tasks) by adding more reviews​ and probably some other contents to this blog.

As for today, I'll write down a review or to be exact, personal view and reasons why I chose this particular journal regarding English education field. This is the first task about journal review in my class and I've found one interesting journal about English learner. It's not about how English learner use their knowledge of English in producing language, rather it's about how innate aspect of English learner affects​ their language production, especially speech production.

Title: 

The Interference of Mother Tongue/Native Language 

in One’s English Language Speech Production

Author:

Ashairi Suliman 

(Research Scholar, Faculty of Education, 

National University of Malaysia (UKM))

ISSN: 

2278-4012

Volume:3, Issue:3, July 2014

Reason:

One of the reason why I decided​ to learn about this journal is, in Indonesia, most English learner tend to force themselves to produce English language just like a native English speaker produce the language, while in fact there are some aspects that interfere with language production of non-native English speaker. Even for native English speaker, there are dialects and accents which affect the way their produce language, which means one's ability to produce language is different with other's.

In short, some aspects such as dialects, accents and mother tongue also affects one's ability to produce language, that's why native and non-native English speaker have differences in the way they produce language. Sometime, these aspects interfere with language production (especially if English is not their first language) because their mother tongue didn't have the same way to produce one speech sound, et cetera. Although modern English allows us to speak freely without worrying about pronunciation, it's always good to learn how to produce the correct speech sound and such, but, don't sweat it.

This journal seems to study innate aspects such as mother tongue interference in speech production of non-native English speaker, giving us insight about how each languages have its own uniqueness which affects another languages production (in this case, English language). The study happened in Malaysia which use Melayu as their first language and English as their second language. The data have been collected from 2 rural areas​ in Sarawak.

Introduction (from the journal):

Malaysian students are made up of many ethnic groups, and the three biggest are the Malays, Chinese and Indians (Manan & Shamsudin, 2012). Due to its diversity of cultures, Malaysia owns variety of languages used and spoken in daily communication. Since each ethnicity has their own mother tongue or native language, there is a need for one language to be the medium of communication, which could ease the interaction among the society members. Post-independence Malaysia saw a need to develop Bahasa Melayu as the national language as it was the language of the largest ethnic group and also the language of unity among the diverse races (Chan & Abdullah, 2007). Thus, Bahasa Melayu is the national language of the country while English becomes the second language in Malaysia. And it is essential to note that language is critical for cognitive development because it provides a way to express ideas and ask questions, the categories and concepts for thinking, and the links between the past and the future (Woolfolk, 2010).