Exploratory case studies of native language interference with target language usage

Have you ever felt that sometimes your knowledge of first or native language interferes when you are learning a second language?

YES or NO

What makes you say yes? What makes you say no?

The second language learning environment consists of everything the learners hears and sees in that particular language. (e.g.: exchanges in public places, daily conversation, reading written materials, classroom activities etc.) Regardless of the environments being mentioned above, the goal of learning a target language is to achieve mastery.

(Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982 and Ellis, 1984) Learners begin the task of learning a second language from point zero (or close to it) and eventually amass sufficient quantities to demonstrate a particular level of proficiency through the steady process of accumulating the mastered entities (structures) of the target language. In reality, second language learners appear to accumulate those structures of the target language. However, they tend to demonstrate difficulty in organising them into appropriate and coherent structures. This situation raises an essentially critical question; what kinds of language do second language learners produce in speaking and writing?

What is the effect of each of the noted areas of difficulty on interpretation of meaning by a native speaker of English?

3 (L2) native speaking teachers were asked to interpret the participants written texts without showing them the sequential sets of pictures used for eliciting those written responses.
They were asked to rate the texts in terms of their semantic and syntactic acceptability on a scale of 1 (poor), 2 ( average) and 3 (good). [The result is shown in Table 7 on page 28 of the journal you have received]

As shown in the respective table, Text 1 and Text 2 of all 4 participants were given similar ratings by the 3 native speaker teachers.
Table 7 enlightens us with a pair of results:
The type of writing that each of the 4 learners produced in Text 1 and Text 2 were of similar level. Both texts were well-understood by the native speaker teachers despite the errors found in them.

Ultimately, the result provide the answer to the research question.

At the accessed level of a learners second language proficiency, the L2 text does not have to be syntactically correct (by target language standards) for its meaning to be understood regardless of whatever syntactical errors that a target language learner produces in it.