Leiden University Student Repository

Tsotsou, Panagiota (2014)

Mother Tongue Interference in a Foreign Language: The Case of Greek Native Speakers Learning Turkish

Master thesis | Middle Eastern Studies (MA)

Studies have shown that many people tend to rely on linguistic structures in their mother tongue to produce responses when writing or speaking in a target language. This study attempts to detect interlingual errors —that is, the errors which are caused by mother tongue interference. Moreover, in this research an inventory was made after investigating the difficulties encountered by native speakers of Greek learning Turkish in the Department of Turkish and Modern Asian Studies at the University of Athens. Special attention is also given to studying the relation of these errors and difficulties given the fact that Greek and Turkish are structurally and typologically so different. These findings provide enough clues to conclude that the interference of the mother tongue is the major cause of errors at the early stages of language learning with only a few cases based on intralingual errors. Some recommendations have been made in the treatment of errors.

Mother tongue interference

foreign language learning

morphosyntactic errors

contrastive analysis

error analysis

interlanguage

Author

Tsotsou, Panagiota

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Turkish Studies

Supervisors

Schaaik, G.J. van

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en