Interference of First Language in Second Language Acquisition: Considering the Cases of Rohingya Teachers in Bangladesh

Abstract

As a Language Trainer, I worked in Cox’s bazar in an international organization called Mercy Refugees House and my responsibility was to train the Rohingya camp school teachers in English Language. Moreover, all the teachers are graduate from Myanmar and I discovered some issues while training them. Furthermore, I personally observed the teachers for over two years while conducting one by one interview sessions. Since the geniuses of the two languages, viz. Bangla, i.e. Rohingya language is a dialect of Bengali, L1, and English, L2 is in many ways different externally, and because English is important in the national context –mainly as a language for national discourse, higher studies, business, and administration – the present study was considered worthwhile as it aims to gauge the extent to which L1, i.e. mother-tongue or Bangla interferes with the learning of English in the context of Bengali. When English is taught in Bangladesh’s Bangla medium schools as L2, the teachers confront some major problems that hinder their learning of L2. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the linguistic zones where the interferences occur and also determine the extent of encroachment/cohabitation of these two languages. It is assumed that questions or items loaded with selected components  (a mismatch between L1 and L2) are expected to be relatively difficult for a learner. In the present study, questions with differential loadings or mismatches have been identified and the nature of the difficulties of the items faced by teachers has been proved. The aim while constructing the questionnaire was to locate the areas of supposed mismatch between the epiphenomenal parameters of LI and L2 and to find out the nature of actual classroom interaction: The following suppositions were made: Agreement, Word order, Passivation, Tense, Tautology, Selection Restrictions, Supplesion or internal change, Yes-No Questions and WH-Questions. Keeping in mind areas of mismatch or difficulty and components stated before, a suitable psychometric model (Item Response Theory) was adopted to measure the learning achievement and component effect, Nunan (1988). This paper tries to discover the areas of first language interferences of the Rohingya school teachers. This is a study on a group of Rohingya School teachers on writing errors focusing to find out the influence of their first language on their writing at teaching in the school level- (article, preposition, tense, sentence structure, etc.)