Week 6: Learning English, They Find Hard

This week, the survey was sent out in the BASIS newsletter! I am now patiently waiting for responses to come in. Also, unfortunately Stanford Language Center doesn't allow outsiders to audit classes, so I'm counting on San Jose State International Gateway now! They said they are going to contact specific professors to see which classes I am able to attend. Can't wait!

I have also been doing a lot more research about language interference (or language transfer), which is the proper term for basically what I'm studying in the project. Language interference has been interpreted in different ways by many researchers, usually depending on what specific field of psychology or linguistics they are a part of. However, the general meaning is the application of knowledge from one's first language or mother tongue to a acquisition of another language. This can affect many aspects of language acquisition, but it is most troublesome in grammar.

Between English and South and East Asian languages, a huge cause of language interference for those who are first starting to learn English is topic/subject prominence. Most South and East Asian languages like Hindi and Chinese are topic prominent, meaning the topic of a sentence usually goes in the beginning of a sentence. On the other hand, most European languages like English are subject prominent, meaning the subject of a sentence goes in the beginning. When I first read about topic and subject prominence, my first thought was "Aren't topic and subject basically the same thing?" If you're not a linguist, you might think the same thing right now. However, it is best explained through examples:

• English: "I like this apple"

• Hindi: "मेरे को यी सेप पसंद है" (mere ko yee sep pasand hai) -- literally translated to "For me, I this apple like"

• Mandarin: "这个苹果我喜欢” (zhe ge ping guo wo xi huan) -- literally translated to "This apple, I like"

• English: "He did not see this movie"

• Hindi: "उसेने मूवी नाहीं देखीं" (usene moovee naaheen dekheen) -- literally translated to "He this movie no seen"

• Mandarin: "这歌电影他没看” (zhe ge dian ying ta mei kan) -- literally translated to “This movie, he not see"

As you can see, in English we tend to put the subject of the sentence first, while in Hindi and Mandarin, the object is often or always put in the beginning.

DISCLAIMER: While this problem seems very plausible, in Mandarin, many people also structure their sentences using subject prominence, so prominence as language interference is not always a problem. I myself use subject prominence while speaking Mandarin.

Either way, this is definitely something I would like to test out myself with new ELLs, but one problem would definitely to find Indian and Chinese people to do this with because most of them have been learning English since primary school in India and China.