SYNTACTIC INTERFERENCE OF MOTHER TONGUE ON SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: A STUDY OF THE TIV AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE

This study explored the syntactic interference of Tiv learners of English as their second language. The aim of the study was to ascertain the syntactic interference encountered by Tiv learners of English as their second language. Some of the objectives include to; distinguish Tiv syntactic structures differ from that of English language and identify areas of syntactic interference of Tiv learners of English. The study used the contrastive analysis theory of linguistics of Lado as its theoretical framework. The study adopted the survey design and the data for the study were gotten oral interview, systematic observation and documentation. The random sampling technique was used. The findings showed that the Tiv language as a mother tongue interfere syntactically with the English language. The syntactic interference result from overgeneralization of the mother tongue rules, errors as a result of Tiv English instead of Standard Nigerian English, subjective case and objective case interference, absence of plural marker ‘-s’, past tense marker ‘ed’ and wrong usage of some expression in Tiv. The findings also added that the syntactic structure of both Tiv and English languages differ. These differences include; the absence of articles and determiners in Tiv structures, the misplacement of objective case instead of subjective case. Also in Tiv structures unlike English, morpheme markers are absent and this definitely posses a challenge to Tiv learners of English as they turn to directly transfer such structures within Tiv to English. The findings revealed that such syntactic interference can be minimized in the two languages include; teachers who are involved in bilingual studies especially in Tiv and English should know the syntactic differences that exists between the two languages and there should be grammatical awareness of the sentence structure of Tiv and English. The study concluded that there should be an advocacy for the promotion of our indigenous (Tiv) to Nigerians over English. The study therefore, recommended that bilingual teachers should ensure learners are aware of the syntactic differences between Tiv and English through explicit instruction.