Teaching English as the second language

There were several challenges the teachers in Malaysia encountered in teaching the second language to the learners. First and foremost, pupils in schools tend to use their mother tongue’s grammatical structure in the English language. According to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the mother tongue language strongly influences the way we think and view the world (Paul Kay et al., 2005). It is inevitable that in learning a second language, transference often happens and learners tend to perceive the content in their second language from the viewpoint of the first language (Yule, 2010). Therefore, Malaysian pupils tend to apply the same concept when writing or speaking in English.
Nor Hashimah, Norshimah and Kesumawati (2008) further supported this argument with the findings that 60% of the total errors made by pupils are attributed to the morphological and syntactical differences between the Malay language and English. In respect to this context, we can say that the linguistics differences is one of the major factors influencing students’ inability to successfully acquire English literacy. A study by Clarke, P.K (2005) revealed that many errors were caused by a lack of correspondence of the learner’s mother tongue to that of the target language. Errors arose when learners tried to translate from the native language to the target language. In the light of this, it would not be wrong to say that the different structures between the native language and English can contribute to pupils’ difficulty in using the language appropriately.