Resumen:
The present study analyzes the linguistic interferences found in the oral speech of fifth and sixth semester students of the program of Modern Languages, English and French, from Universidad del Cauca at Santander de Quilichao, from the Quantitative Approach perspective, and using an structured interview as the tool to collect data. The study aimed at showing the kind of interferences present when students tried to communicate effectively in the L2, in this case, English as a foreign language.
The first chapters refer to how the researchers got interested in this topic, and continue with the conceptual and the theoretical frameworks. The authors selected by the researchers to base their study were Pit Corder and Raquel Mayordomo. Corder proposes the concepts and differentiation of the terms “mistake” and “error”, and interference, and the fundamental role they play in the students´ foreign language learning process. Mayordomo proposes the classification of the mistakes into five levels: morphological, syntactic, semantic, lexical, and phonetic-phonological.
The researchers just considered four of these levels and integrated them into two: the morpho-syntactic level and the lexical-semantic level. After this, the study explains the methodology and the tool used in the study, as well as the findings and their interpretation. The study concludes with some observations of the researchers and their suggestions for further research.
