ABSTRACT
This work is a study on the mother tongue influence on English of L1 speakers of Igbo. The research aims at identifying the challenges L1 speakers of Igbo face when speaking English as L2. The motivation for this work is the observation made concerning speech errors by Igbo L1 speakers when they speak English as L2. The theoretical framework for the analysis is contrastive analysis.
Contrastive analysis is a systematic study of comparison between two languages: the native language (L1) and the target or second language (L2).
The data was gathered from two L1 speakers who speak English as their L2, the method of data collection was the direct interview method . This study showed that the mother tongue plays an important role in influencing the native speaker’s speech when speaking the second language.
During the course of the study, it was found out that the voiced and voiceless dental fricative [θ] and [ð] in English language does not exist in the sound system of the Igbo language and this makes many Igbo speakers substitute the voiced and voiceless plosives [t] and [d].
The Igbo L1s speakers of English are faced with the challenge of substituting the approximant with the lateral approximant [r] and [l] for each other anywhere they are found in English word.
The Igbo L1 speakers find it difficult to differentiate between the vowel [ʌ] with [ɔ].
