Analysis of student language production

¶ … Student Language Production

Difficulties with English for native French speakers

Compared with other foreign languages, English and French share some notable similarities. French is an Indo-European language and part of the Romance family, along with Spanish and Italian, and English has borrowed liberally from all of the Romance languages. "The English language was strongly influenced by the introduction of French at the time of the Norman invasion of Britain in the 11th century. As a result the two languages share many grammatical features and contain many cognates," as well as share the same a 26 letter alphabet (Vu 2008). Many English words are derived from French and unofficial French slang has incorporated many American English idoyms, like le Big Mac.

However, in terms of phonology, "there are some notable differences in the sound systems of the two languages that can cause French learners problems of comprehension and speech production," such as sounds that do not exist in French but exist in English (Vu 2008). "The tip of the tongue is not used in speaking French, so "learners often have problems with words containing the letters th (/? / / o/), such as then, think and clothes" (Vu 2008). The / h / sound does not exist in French, so French speakers may often forget to make the sound, as in the example "Ave you 'eard about 'arry? Or they may overcompensate by pronouncing the / h / in words like hour (Vu 2008). More generalized errors that occur amongst ESL speakers are spelling errors due to the "frequent lack of correspondence between the pronunciation of English words and their spelling" and unpredictable stress patterns of English words. French word stress is regular, in contrast to French. English also has more vowel reduction or swallowing of word syllables, which can give a distinct sound to English spoken by a native French speaker (Vu 2008). When speaking, the French place their stress at end of each rhythmic group while English is much more irregular in stress patterns. In English there is a stressed syllable in each word, stressed syllable in each word, as well as a stressed place on every important word (Differences between French and English, 2009, About.com). Having English sound 'stressed' correctly is often a challenge for French speakers.

Compared with some other languages, French and English have fairly similar grammatical structures. Both languages, for example, have auxiliary verbs, participles, active/passive voice, past/present/future tenses. But "there are frequent occasions when French uses a different tense to convey a particular meaning than English. Some common examples are the following faulty sentences: I have played tennis yesterday. I can't play now. I do my homework. I live in London since last year. I will tell you as soon as I will know" (Vu 2008).