Investigating the impact of mother tongue on learners’ achievement while learning English

Abstract

Language is an important phenomenon without which the process of education in the classroom cannot be achieved. Hence, the idea of language interference is being widely raised and discussed mainly in the foreign language classroom. Learners in their English language study use their first language as a tool to learn the target one. The present work is designed to investigate the impact of mother tongue on EFL students’ achievement at the English language department of Mohamed Boudiaf University of M’sila. This research seeks to provide sufficient information about the outcome resulting from the use of mother tongue in classroom. Accordingly, this research has been carried through a questionnaire administrated to forty five master one students of linguistics and to six teachers in the English division to examine the objective of the study. However, it was concluded that many students from the sample are unable to express and interact with their professors because they face difficulties owing to the first language interference. The data analysis revealed that mother tongue influences the students’ performance in English language learning either positively or negatively and that there are other factors contributing to student’s poor performance, therefore, it has been noticed that students often rely on their mother tongue(Arabic). So students should be taught how to think in the target language to avoid passive transfer. Obviously, the findings would guide us to suggest recommendations that may help students to improve their level in English learning.