Fabian Müller 
Linguistic interference between L1 dialects and L2 [PDF ebook] 
An investigation with 14-15 year old teenagers

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Didactics for the subject English – Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 3, 0, Karlsruhe University of Education, course: Applied linguistics &TEFL, language: English, abstract: ‘In present – day societies it is rare to find someone who speaks only one language; most people around the globe know and use several languages in their daily lives. Within this context, the mother tongue might have influence on the L2.’
This academic paper is about the interference between German as L1 and English as L2 within a group 14-15 year-old teenagers. The main goal is to exemplify, whether the children’s original dialects have any interference on their foreign language approach. It was tried to find participants, whose dialects give good examples for the region, they live in. Before the test and its results are described, some general information about L1 influences on L2 will be given.
Because the children, who participated in the test, were on a language trip to England while the test was taken, the basis for the research to this paper is the Recieved Pronuciation, although some of the students might have been in contact with other varieties of English before. To achieve more comparability, their English was only compared to the RP standard.
A difficulty during the research was to distingiush between varieties caused by their mother tongue and such caused by generell troubles in pronunciation. Therefore, the main focus was put on clear examples, such as voiced and devoiced sounds, aspiration and the [w, r] – sounds. All those examples can be looked at to find language interference between L1 and L2, whereas the θ/ð] – sound , which was analysed as well has to be looked at carefully. Many learners of English might have problems pronouncing that sound, but these problems are not neccessarily caused be their L1 dialect, but can be caused by the generell absence of the [θ/ð] – sound in the German language as their mother tongue.
There were different situations created in the test to find out, how students react, when they are just asked to read something out compared to the situation, when they have to speak freely and also, how their pronunciation changes, when they are asked to remember something and then repeat it after a few moments. The main reason, why those different situations were created, was that students might focus less on pronunciation, the more their attention is lead to something else. The more they are distracted, the more intuitive they react and the more they react intuitive, the more their original dialect is supposed to come out.