The study is designed to examine the influence of mother tongue on Students performance in English language in Junior School Certificate Examination. Obviously, in design ing the oral Engl ish curricu lum for secondary schools in Nigeria, t he belief that mo ther ton gue interference negatively affects students’ speaking skills, appears to be the fundamental consideration that informs the content of the senior school certicate oral E nglish syllabus. Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (1974:26) observe that “we tend to impose our native phonological pattern on any foreign language we learn.” Based on this linguistic principle, the researcher is convinced that the possibility of Idoma learners of English being phonologically inuenced by the Idoma language cannot be disputed. Language transfer theorists believe that the lexis, grammar and phonology of the learner’s rst language impose themselves on the second language habit, thereby resulting in interference problems.
This phenomenon may impede meaning because in the face of such phonological conicts, the native speaker may nd certain utterances made by the s econd language learner unintelligible. Since the phonological systems of any two languages are never the same, however, the second language learner may take to substituting some elements of the phonological system of the second language (L2) with those of his rst language (L1).
Studies have revealed that the acquisition of the mother tongue by the child is very crucial because often times it is used as a resource for the learning of a second language.
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