Interference between Filipino and English prepositions: A comparative analysis of male and female Filipino bilingual learners in the World Englishes paradigm in the Philippine setting (original) (raw)

Following Ellis ' (1997) interference framework and Selinker's (1972) interlanguage hypothesis in light of Kachru's (1985) concentric circle, the present study aimed at establishing the common errors in the preposition in written narratives, identify the difference in the rate of preponderance of preposition errors of language learners who acquired English as either their first or second language, and determine the compensation strategies used in English to Filipino and vice versa. This paper employed an explorative-descriptive design with 40 secondary students from Reedley International School (10 males and 10 females) and Sta. Isabel College (10 males and 10 females). In carrying out the study, two wordless picture story sequences as used by Shapiro and Hudson (1991 was adopted. Findings show that participants from Sta. Isabel College participants recorded more incorrect English prepositions which are predominantly incurred by females as compared with the Reedley International's list which appears to be consistent with the incorrect Filipino prepositions. As regards the preponderance of preposition errors, the data revealed a 3.2 mean across the twenty narratives. The same mean shows for the occurrences of incorrect preposition use. In terms of the compensations strategies, the participants used overgeneralization, elaboration, simplification, and contextualization. The study concluded that the evidence of interference among Filipino bilinguals was not as high as expected due to the minimal use of compensation strategies and the mistakes recorded were purely ungrammatical and not a transfer issue within the syntactic surface.