THE ROLE OF THE FIRST LANGUAGE

The chapter showed that the first language has great influence on the way students acquire
the second language. In fact, there are many arguments of researchers on this issue. The
significant role of L1 is explained with the connection of behaviorism. Habits and errors,
particularly, are of the factors that affect students ways of acquiring L2. Firstly, habits make
learners receive and proccess L2 through imitation or reinforcement in their learning.
Secondly, interference is considered the factor lead to errors because of habits in learning L1.
In particular, proactice inhibition which is one of the obstacles of language learning has
shown the influence on the learners. In deed, learners have the habits of expressing and
transferring from their mother tongue into the new language which sometimes causes troubles
for their learning afterwards. With the reseaches on the Contrastive Analysis, predicted errors
come form L1 may be eleminated in an appropriate way. Thanks to the two small branches of
Contrastive Analysis which are Psychological analysis and Linguistic analysis, teachers have
been guided on how to have suitable methods to the teaching of L2 effectively without being
influenced by L1. However, few researches showed that Contrastive Analysis was not
applicable to some cases to an extent.
In my view, I agree with the information provided in this chapter that habit-formation in L1
may cause difficulties for learners in acquiring L2. In fact, many of my students have made
mistakes in learning to produce sentences in English because most of them interprete
sentences from L1 to L2 in Vietnamese translation without paying attention to other elements
of L2. Moreover, their pronunciation may be the same as the way they pronounce in their L1.
For example, students may not differentiate the difference between /i/ and /i:/ in their
production of these two words which are seat/si:t/ and sit/sit/. In most cases, they
pronounce the same as the sound /i/ in Vietnamses. Furthermore, I could not agree more with
the point that errors are made because of non-learning but not wrong acquiring. In deed,
when children learn L2 at the beginning, they will not understand the essence of the L2 that
they have learned until they are equipped with other factors of language. Instead of that, they
may get familiar with the way people deal with foreign languages in reality. I myself find this
chapter meaningful in the way that it has broaden my mind to other horizons so that I may
have a deeper understanding on my real teaching for kids and adults at the moment. In
addition, I may understand the obstabcles of learning L2 and have solutions to the problems
students have met during their learning.