NEGATIVE TRANSFER IN THE LEARNING OF ENGLISH CONSONANTS.

We, Indians are not the native speakers of English language. In India most of the social groups have their own mother tongue belonging to one family, while the second language. English belongs to an entirely different family-the Indo European family. Malayalam , belonging to the Dravidian group of languages has vast dissimilarities with English. Any use of a language begins with its spoken sounds. There will be occasions when the child easily and conveniently assumes that a particular sound of English is identical with a similar sound in his mother tongue and that results in the negative transfer.In most of the classrooms, phonetics or the study of speech sounds is reduced to a mental activity though the subject is considered to be physical. The total neglect of one’s mother tongue will result in the faulty pronunciation of words. The main reason behind this problem is giving little importance to the place and manner of articulation of the sounds. My paper investigates the place and manner of articulation of the sounds and the mother tongue interference.