Étude des interférences intralinguistiques en FLE: l'impact des homographes et des pronoms sur l'apprentissage des compléments et articles définis à Osun State University-Nigeria

Abstract

Study of Intralinguistic Interference in FLE: The Impact of Homographs and Pronouns on the Learning of Complements and Definite Articles at Osun State University-Nigeria

Linguistic interference is a psycholinguistic phenomenon which slows down the learning process of the target language due to the existing similarities between it (L2) and the one already acquired (L1). Many research works have been carried out on linguistic transfer and interference. However, among those works, only a significant few have underscored the intra-linguistic interference as a trap associated with understanding the homographs, personal pronoun complements and definite articles in the class of French as a foreign language FLE. Therefore, this paper evaluates the grammatical implications that the distinctions between le, la, la les as personal pronoun complements and definite articles in Allah n’est pas obligé by Ahmadou Kourouma have on Anglophone French learners. The theoretical framework adopted to foreground our claims is linguistic transfer and interference. Percentage (%) is the scale used to interpret their performance while data are analysed based on textual analysis. The text is purposively selected to situate our analysis in the context of a postcolonial Francophone African literary text whose learning is always complicated among Anglophone and Yorubaphone French learners. Five questions were asked to evaluate the language skills of the seventy-five (75) third-year students at Osun State University across twenty corpora drawn from the work. The morpho-phonetic similarities between the definite articles and the personal pronoun complement inhibit the comprehension of instructional materials. In conclusion, contextual interpretation and more rigorous study of the grammatical subject matters are suggested to both teachers and learners, respectively, to eliminate the confusion associated with the teaching and learning of the homographs. To significantly improve academic performance among non-French-speaking learners, authorities should implement the pragmatic interventions outlined in this article, involving teaching professionals and learners alike.