Mother tongues in ELE class in Gabon

The works carried out on the problem of mother tongues in the ELE classroom share the same epistemological position: the mother tongues of the learners have a negative influence on the learning of the target language. Through this book, we add our voice to the debate with a phonetic-phonological study. The contrastive analysis of the phonetic-phonological systems of Spanish and two mother tongues (Inzebi and Yipunu) has highlighted the existence of certain phonological similarities between the languages. From these results, we can understand, as the survey data proved, that the prior knowledge of the mother tongues by the learners provides them with articulatory predispositions for the phonic perception of Spanish.