A Reassessment of the Influence of Igbo Segmentals and Their Implications on the Teaching and Learning of English Sounds

Abstract

This paper reassessed the influence of Igbo segmentals on the teaching and learning of English sounds in the University of Nigeria Nsukka. It aimed to determine the extent to which phonological interference in Igbo language has negatively influenced the teaching and learning of the English phonemes. The study was anchored on Lado’s (1957) theory of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH). The data for study were elicited from a ten-item questionnaire which was randomly distributed to 50 First Year students of the Department of English, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Again, the findings of previous researches were utilized to contrastively augment the primary data. Using both simple percentage system and Lado’s framework, the data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results showed that the recommendations of previous researches were yet to be fully implemented because there are still cases of language transfer at the level of phonology, particularly, the segmental level. Thus a good number of suggestions and recommendations were made to alleviate the problem.