Introducing Second Language Acquisition

Learning a second language has become really important as the years pass because of the necessity of being communicated, and Chilean people are aware of this. Some years ago, the Education minister Joaquin Lavin announced that the new Chile’s goal is to be a bilingual country within the next 20 years. Since that declaration, many projects have started in order to develop Chilean student’s English skills, which are listening, writing, reading and speaking. The last skill mentioned is the one in which our problem is focused on. In Chile, many students have problems when they talk in English since the mother tongue interferes in the target language.

In Chile, there is a huge gap when it comes to social classes which makes differences at the moment

Phonology is focused on the sound system and contains all its subdivisions.

It is important to keep in mind some meanings which will be present in this paper. From Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the meaning of mother tongue is related to the first language that people learn when they are children. On the other hand, the target language consists on any other language that people could learn.

There are two questions that encourage us to investigate about this topic, they are: Why do Chilean students use mother tongue rules at the moment of speaking a foreign language? And what produces the interference of L1 in L2?

It is believed that children could be afraid or unconfident at the moment of speaking in another language, it may be the reason because they make a lot of errors in their speech. The interference takes place when students try to associate some rules from their native language into the new one, because they want to connect the norms in order to make the comprehension of the new language easier. In the body of this paper, there are going to be some research about why this problem happens and how to solve

The researchers collected information and evidence to support that interference does affect the way students speak. They demonstrated that students from private schools have a medium level of interference and the same happens with subsidized schools, whereas students from state schools have a high level of interference. Alvear, Barrueto, Hernández, Lagos, López, González and Neira (2009) concluded that the mother tongue interference occurs because students do not have a high level of proficiency. Students may know about English grammar rules and vocabulary, but they do not necessarily know how to use those rules in communicative