Assessing English writing of South Indian native Tamil students: The mediocre level requires strategic implications

Possessing language students who are skilled in creating a structured, orderly and no error-found piece of composition constitutes a hope and a wish for many EFL teachers, as they are the individuals who undergo a big problem when their students commit numerous errors in EFL writing as a result of their native language interference. This study is aimed at exploring native language influence on students� English writings as well as investigating the salient and common grammatical errors in their writing with the purpose of checking whether or not Indonesian as the students� L1 influence them when writing in English. To this end, a corpus of 22 English essays written by students is examined and the errors are then categorized according to the following aspects: grammatical, lexico-semantic, mechanics, and word order sorts of errors. In this study, mixed methods research designs are used: quantitative and qualitative. The results revealed that UNIRA students commit different sorts of errors which are chiefly on account of their native language (Indonesian) interference. The students highly rely on their L1 in stating their thoughts, even though the ranking processes revealed that their essays hold different sorts of errors, those in the grammar and the lexico-semantic statistically constitute the most serious and recurrent ones.Keywords: grammatical sentence; L1 interference; lexico-semantic; writing.

This article presents the results of a comparative analysis of two phonetic systems and the experimental data obtained in monitoring phonetic skills and phonematic hearing of Chinese students of preparatory faculty, philological faculty (bachelors), postgraduate students-philologists. Describing the dynamics of phonetic skills and phonematic hearing has practical and theoretical meaning, because it is important to identify the reason of incorrect pronunciation and find the best solution to correct it. Only theoretical (linguistic) and experimental methods in phonetic studies can reveal more objective characteristics of native (Chinese) language interference. The comparative analysis of phonetic and intonational differences of typologically different languages makes it possible to predict phonetic difficulties and accent of Chinese students speaking Russian and differentiate the objective mistakes, caused by native language interference, and individual ones. The experiment has revealed typical phonetic mistakes resulting from the linguistic features of the two languages, and subjective factors (psychological, physiological) in a certain learning environments. The purpose of the article is to show that the development of phonemic hearing in the process of studying a foreign language and the dynamics of phonetic skills are interrelated. They influence the effectiveness of studying a foreign language. So the teacher should not underestimate the role of phonetics in teaching a foreign language.

ABSTRACT: English pronunciation is difficult for most Indonesian learners. Research shows that their native language is the most influential factor in this case. Therefore, this study aimed to find out learners’ native language interference in learning English pronunciation by identifying the influence of two regional dialects (Madurese and Javanese). It also aimed to find out whether the English sounds lead to unintelligible pronunciation. The possible language contact related to Indonesian learners’ pronunciation will be one of the analyses in this study by involving 12 Indonesian learners aged 14 to 18. They were asked to pronounce selected English words and read a given passage and these data were analyzed descriptively. The findings show that their pronunciation problems vary dealing with consonant and vowel sounds, some of which lead to unintelligibility. The conclusion was that the outcome of language contact that the learners’ pronunciation is much interfered by their native language.

In terference form one language to target language is something that cannot be denied. This paper discusses about the notion of interference, interference and second or foreign language learning, interference and communication, interference and Indonesian learners and its process. In the interference, there are negative transfer that which leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language and positive transfer that makes the learning easier. Furthermore, during the language communication, native language can influence target language and the like. Thus, interference in communication can be: (1) influence of language contact experienced by bilingual or multilingual person; (2) language infiltration that influence the system to both target and native language, causing negative effect; (3) personal utterances in a narrow space as a parole effect (speech). In addition, interference to Indonesian learners can be in the area of phonology, morphology, sentence, and semantics.Keywords;Interference; Second or Foreign Language Learning; Indonesian Learner

Interference form one language to target language is something that cannot be denied. This paper discusses about the notion of interference, interference and second or foreign language learning, interference and communication, interference and Indonesian learners and its process. In the interference, there are negative transfer that which leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language and positive transfer that makes the learning easier. Furthermore, during the language communication, native language can influence target language and the like. Thus, interference in communication can be: (1) influence of language contact experienced by bilingual or multilingual person; (2) language infiltration that influence the system to both target and native language, causing negative effect; (3) personal utterances in a narrow space as a parole effect (speech). In addition, interference to Indonesian learners can be in the area of phonology, morphology, sentence, and semantics.

This study focuses on recognizing and categorizing South Indian Sign Language gestures based on different age groups through transfer learning models. Sign language serves as a natural and expressive communication method for individuals with hearing impairments. This study intends to develop deep transfer learning models, namely Inception-V3, VGG-16, and ResNet-50, to accurately identify and classify double-handed gestures in South Indian languages, like Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. A dataset comprising 30,000 images of double-handed gestures, with 10,000 images for each considered age group (1-7, 8-25, and 25 and above), is utilized to enhance and modify the models for improved classification performance. Amongst the tested models, Inception-V3 achieves the best performance with a test precision of 95.20% and validation accuracy of 92.45%, demonstrating its effectiveness in accurately categorizing images of double-handed gestures into ten different classes.

The author examines the phenomenon of linguistic interference at different levels of language from the perspective of Spanish and English. The aim of the research is to determine the similarities and differences in the manifestation of interference depending on the individual's native and second language. The author studies the classification of speech errors resulting from interference in terms of their frequency of occurrence. The article demonstrates existing research on the topic and conducts an analysis of the speech of English and Spanish speakers to identify patterns of interference depending on the speaker's native language. Using interviews with American singer Becky G and Colombian singer Karol G, the author analyzes instances of interference and concludes that there is a relationship between the interviewee's native language and the errors they make as a result of language contacts. The article provides examples of phonetic, grammatical, and lexical interference. The research involved methods of observation, comparison, as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis. The scientific novelty of the research lies in identifying specific patterns of interference based on the contacting languages. As a result of this research, conclusions have been drawn about the relationship between the frequency of speech errors due to the speaker's native language interference. The study proposes the necessity of considering the phenomenon of interference within the framework of a specific language pair. An answer has been obtained to the question of whether interference always manifests more significantly at the phonetic level of language. The author attempts to trace the relationship between the manifestation of interference and the specific language pair of the speaker. A comparative analysis of speech fragments from individuals with different language pairs has been conducted. A tendency for interference to occur depending on the speaker's native language in the context of English and Spanish has been identified.

Objectives Lupus is a classical systemic autoimmune disease with genetics as one of the well known causative factors for the disease pathogenesis. Toll-like receptors are the major pattern recognition receptors associated with innate immunity and also act as an interface with the adaptive immunity. Genetic polymorphisms in genes encoding TLRs were implicated in the development of infections, malignancies and autoimmune diseases. TLR9 is a member of TLR family, and recognizes the CpG DNA motifs of pathogens. Though the incidence rate of lupus in Asians was reported to be low (30 - 50/100,000 population), poor disease prognosis due to higher incidence of renal complications and aggressive disease worsens the scenario. The ability of TLR9 to detect and elicit an immune response against double-stranded DNA makes TLR9 a relevant factor to be tested for its association with the clinical and serological phenotypes of lupus. However, lack of relevant genetic data on normative frequencies of the TLR9 (rs187084) polymorphism may serve as a constraint to derive the sample size to conduct case control association studies. Hence this study was conducted to establish the normative frequency of TLR9 (rs187084) polymorphism in Indian Tamils. Materials and methods The TLR9 (rs187084) polymorphism was screened in South Indian Tamils ( n = 208) by PCR-RFLP. Results and discussion We observed a higher occurrence of the mutant allele (65%) in South Indian Tamils. No gender disparity with respect to the mutant allele frequency was observed. The higher incidence of mutant allele in both genders suggests that this population had undergone a genetic selection pressure as an evolutionary genetic measure to withstand the prevailing endemic infections like TB and malaria. Though the enhanced expression of TLR9 was protective against infections, it may also influence the development of autoimmune diseases. Conclusion The higher incidence of theTLR9 (rs187084) over-expression mutation in Indian Tamils is suggestive of a genetic adaptation or selection pressure to withstand the prevailing endemic infectious and parasitic diseases. However, this genetic adaptation poses a greater risk to develop autoimmune diseases like SLE etc through complex gene environment interactions. The normative frequency of the TLR9 (rs187084) polymorphism established in our population could now be used to define the sample size for future case control studies.

Native language identification (NLI)—the task of automatically identifying the native language (L1) of persons based on their writings in the second language (L2)—is based on the hypothesis that characteristics of L1 will surface and interfere in the production of texts in L2 to the extent that L1 is identifiable. We present an in-depth investigation of features that model a variety of linguistic phenomena potentially involved in native language interference in the context of the NLI task: the languages’ structuring of information through punctuation usage, emotion expression in language, and similarities of form with the L1 vocabulary through the use of anglicized words, cognates, and other misspellings. The results of experiments with different combinations of features in a variety of settings allow us to quantify the native language interference value of these linguistic phenomena and show how robust they are in cross-corpus experiments and with respect to proficiency in L2. These experiments provide a deeper insight into the NLI task, showing how native language interference explains the gap between baseline, corpus-independent features, and the state of the art that relies on features/representations that cover (indiscriminately) a variety of linguistic phenomena.

The research we report here is intended to build an understanding of several well-known yet poorly comprehended problems relating to phonemic contrasts in the learning of L2 pronunciation. The competing influences of similarity and difference between native and target language sound systems, in particular, are central to this understanding, which we believe show that L2 phonology is a highly abstract enterprise parallel to the phonologies of primary languages, rather than - as has been assumed - a mere imitation of the target language’s pronunciations. We identify three interesting learning situations which involve the target language’s having different phonemic contrasts from the native language. In the first situation, the native language has neither of two sounds which contrast in the target language; in the second situation, the native language includes just one of two sounds which contrast in the target language. And in the third situation, the native language has both of the sounds in question but shows no contrast between them, i.e., a phoneme of the native language has two (or more) allophones that categorize as separate phonemes in the target language.

Contrastive Analysis, Transfer Analysis, Error Analysis, and Interlanguage are methods used for second language learning investigation. They constitute evolutionary phases in the attempt to understand and explain the nature of the target language learners’ performance. Each theory has its own view, especially in the attitude toward learners’ errors and the explanatory hypotheses regarding the sources of errors. They also appear to have one goal, that is, an attempt to facilitate the process of target language learning or teaching by studying learners’ errors. They are complement to one another; they constitute four phases with one goal. Contrastive analisis aims to provide teachers and/or textbook writers with information that can be utilized in the preparation of instructional materials, the planning of courses, and the development of classroom techniques. Contranstive studies are carried out in order to describe the differences between learners’ native language amd the target language. They believe that it is on these differences that the learning difficulties lie, consequently errors exist. Transfer analysis is a new lebel given to contrastive analysis. Other sister terms are language transfer and crosslinguistic influence . This is an analytical tool which constitutes a sub discipline within error analysis. Its basic assumption is that certain errors in learner performance are the result of native language transfer. Error Analisis disproves the predictions of theory lying behind the comparison of native language and target language. It is an experimental technique for validating the theory of transfer. Its goal is to find out something about the psycholinguistic process of language learning. It enables us to draw a certain conclusions about the strategies used by the learner in his learning process. Interlanguage is a popular term to refer to learners’ versions of the target language. It usually contains elements of both the learners’ native language and target language. Interlanguage is resulted from the learner’s attempts to produce the target language construction. In other words, it is the product of the second language learning process.

According to the language transfer theory, it is assumed that the learner’s mother tongue (MT) will positively or negatively affect his learning a foreign language in second language acquisition (SLA). When there are differences between his (MT) and target language (TL), the learner’s mother tongue and target language are similar, the native language will actively aid foreign language in learning that is in case of similarities between the native language and target language, the transfer functions positively, while in case of differences, it functions negatively.The mother negative language transfer in acquiring a foreign language is seemingly inevitable. Since the differences between the learners’ MT and TL will interfere with the target language learning. On the basis of the theories of contrastive analysis, transfer analysis and translation theories, this paper is an attempt to find out the phenomena of mother language’s negative transfer in English learning by means of Chinese-English translation, with the purpose of showing how the Chinese learners of English are negatively influenced by their mother tongue knowledge in learning English. The author will collect the data of Chinese-English translation from the fresh men and analyze the reasons. At last, the author will make suggestions for teachers and learners according to the mistakes the subjects made.

Second language acquisition is the process by which people develop proficiency of a second or foreign language. Native language may unavoidably play a function in this process. In this thesis, the author discusses the results of the study on the influence of language transfer on the communicative competence in second language acquisition process from the perspective of listening, speaking, reading and writing with the hope of providing theoretical and practical help for second language teaching and learning. This paper is about the achievement of "The research into the second language acquisition process from the perspective of Chinese transfer" subsidized by Education Department of Jilin Province. D.H. Hymes, an American sociolinguist, believes that the nature of a language is its social communicative function.

The article is dedicated to the study of phonetic characteristics of Canadian Ukrainians' speech of three age group representatives, who dwell in Alberta and Manitoba provincies, The study of Canadian variant of English has aroused great interest among linguists. Due attention has been paid to vowel system, its allophone variation, nevertheless prosodic system hasn't been studied thoroughly. None has been said about phonetic peculiarities of regional variants of English in Canada, in particular phonetic features of Canadian Ukrainians' speech behavior haven't got scientific qualification. The population of Canada is devided into three large groups: Anglophones – Canadian whose native language is English; French speaking Canadians and allophones, whose native language is not English. According to Canadian media sources than million Ukrainians live in Canada. Their speech peculiarities hasn't been investigated yet. This phonetic research makes an attempt to study phonetic variation on both segmental and prosodic levels and to reveal differentiating features, typical for Canadians' of Ukrainian origin speech. The conducted research allowed to single out the most specific features which expose the originality of Ukrainian origin Canadian's speech. The most frequent prosodic interferent features in the speech of the analysed informants are the following: sloping character of Falling and Rising nuclear tone, smooth melodic contur, prevalence of wavy Head. Differentiating vowel features in the speech of various age group Canadians are: diphtongization of short vowel phonemes, front articulation of back vowels, absence of short-long vowel opposition. Such phonetic peculiarities of Canadian's speech behavior are the result of native (Ukrainian) language interference. Most vividly these interfering features are expressed in the speech of more than 55 years old age group. Thus, speech behavior of a person is formed in childhood and is preservel in the speech during the whole period of life.

Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic-phonetic models in more proficient listeners.Significance Statement Behavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent.