Mother-Tongue Influence on the Spoken English of ESL Students in Upper West Region Ghana (Published)
This paper examines the influence of Dagaare on the spoken English of Senior High School (SHS) students in the Upper West Region, Ghana whose mother tongue is Dagaare. Using the case study design, the article examines how pervasive the phenomenon is among Dagaare speakers of the English language among Senior High School students in the Upper West Region specifically and Ghana as a whole. Dagaare is in a language contact situation with the English language where the latter is the official language in Ghana. This study shows that Dagaare interferes with the spoken English of SHS students who have Dagaare as their L1 because of transfer of Dagaare linguistic features into English. This is premised on their assumption that Dagaare and English have the same speech sounds. The researcher recommends among others that the speech sounds of Ghanaian languages like Dagaare and English must be taught deliberately in order for learners of English as a second language to know their differences in order not to interchange them.
Keywords: Dagaaba, Dagaare, Dagao, Interference, articulators, contact situation, speech sounds and English as a second language.