ABSTRACT

    This work investigates how the Interference of English Grammatical Structure affects Reading Comprehension Structure of Standard Spanish.

     A number of findings which emerged from the data in this study were: First, reading comprehension in Spanish is correlated with the English language interference; that is, students with low interference had higher scores in reading comprehension in Spanish. This finding is supported by the negative correlations in Table VI.

    When interference is analyzed by type of structure, certain types of structures such as, morpheme change, or the appearance of an extra word seem to cause more problems than others. The results in Table XII show that two of the syntactic structures account for most of the variance in interference while lexical change does not account for much of the difference.

    These results are suggestive rather than definite since the initial question related to interference in general and the students were not tested for numerous examples of each kind of structure. This analysis also showed that proficiency in oral English is present in the oral readers proving once more that ability in one language does not impair ability in the other, on the contrary it may indeed be an asset.

    The results in Table VII demonstrate that there was a significant negative correlation between total comprehension and interference on verbs and additional parts-of the speech (one extra word). Thus, lower reading comprehension in Spanish is partially associated with high interference on verbs and additional parts of the speech (one extra word), and high comprehension is associated with low interference on verbs and additional parts of the speech (one extra word).

    It was also found that there was a negative correlation between inter­ference on specific English language grammatical structures and their corresponding grammatical structures in Spanish reading comprehension. In addition to the relationship of specific grammatical structures and corres­ponding structures in reading comprehension, there were also negative correlations between total comprehension and interference on specific grammatical structures.

 

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