Analysis of Yoruba Interference in Students¿ Written English

This study examines the interference of the mother tongue on the written English of secondary school students in the southwest part of Nigeria. The theoretical part of the study presents an overview among others of the role and status of English in Nigeria, the nature and characteristics of the learner language, second language errors and their significance in second language acquisition, contrastive linguistics, and error analysis. A contrastive study of English and Yoruba was carried out to ascertain the main cause of the errors that were identified with a view to diminishing or eradicating them. The empirical part of the study comprises of data analysis, discussion of the major results, conclusion, and recommendations. English texts were written by bilingual secondary school students whose mother tongue was Yoruba. The most representative errors in the corpus were identified and categorized into grammatical categories to determine the grammatical aspects of English which have the highest frequency of errors. The main aim of the investigation was to analyze, identify and categorize the ensuing errors in order to present a genuine statement regarding mother tongue interference.