Difficulties In Learning English Language Analysis

This paragraph highlights the lexical, morphosyntactic and phonetic difficulties faced by Spanish speakers as they learn English. We have collected the most common variations often made by students, often without being aware of it. Committing mistakes when learning a language is part of learning of every student, however the discovery of such errors can lead to lack of motivation, anxiety or fear to continue learning English. Therefore, it is equally important to identify the errors, to learn how to correct them and work to identify the needs and abilities of each student or oneself.

3.3.1 Lexical errors

Due to the influence of the shared Latin with English and Spanish, we can find many cognates and false-friends, which we will talk more

Words like “advice” often cause confusion because of the resemblance to the Spanish word “aviso”, but it really means "advice". Another example of a false friend is the English word “argument”, which means “discusión” in Spanish, not “argumento”. In English we can find a variety of multi-word verbs, the phrasal verbs. The verb run can have a variety of prepositions and thus form different words, for example, run away, run over, run after. This can cause difficulty to memorize them and use them. Learners who lack phrasal verbs in their mother tongue (such as French-speaking or Spanish-speaking students) tend to avoid using phrasal verbs in English. The most common errors made by learners when using phrasal verbs are semantic errors, reflecting an incomplete understanding of the meaning of phrasal verbs. Learners sometimes make syntactic errors involving transitive phrasal verbs being used intransitively, and vice

It is not significant to distinguish the length of the vowel between words. In contrasts with English, which has 12 pure vowel sounds and 8 diphthongs. The length of the vowel sound plays an important role. This demonstrates, therefore, that Spanish learners may have great difficulty in producing or even perceiving the various English vowel sounds. There are words that imply the difficulty of distinguishing sounds in words such as ship/sheep, taught/tot, fool/full or cart/cat/cut.

If we pause to observe other problems when it comes to pronounce English we see that: the Spanish learners have difficulty in pronouncing strong final consonants ending in "t" as cart, in "th" as teeth or over-pronunce the "ed". Likewise, they commit errors at the beginning of words starting with "s" as school or Spanish, adding an "e" before the "s" or the confusion of the pronunciation of "v" with the Spanish "b".

4. COGNATES AND FALSE COGNATES

In this chapter we will present the concept of cognate and false cognate. Because there is no unique accepted meaning, we will resort to various definitions and classifications. The presence of these concepts are related to the way a student learns a language, in our case we will focus on how false cognates affect a Spanish student who wants to learn