TRANSFER IN ORAL EXERCISES FROM THIRD SEMESTER STUDENT-TEACHERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (EFL)

ABSTRACT This descriptive-exploratory study was carried out within three groups of undergraduate students who were undertaking their third semester in a Colombian foreign languages teaching program over a six-month period. During this time, relevant information was collected from a recording sample in English as a foreign language and from two surveys, after a metalinguistic theoretical and practical work led by a teacher of a phonetics and phonology course. The aim in using the first instrument was to identify the transfer cases from mother tongue in the oral production of the foreign language students. The second instrument was intended to explore the perceptions that learners had on the theoretical and contrastive exercise and on their oral productions self-assessment. Results revealed that students perceived L2 phonological system as being far too different from that of their mother tongue; they also unveiled that this fact exerts interference over their oral production originating errors and that beyond the linguistic domain, there are mistakes in learners' self-regulation process.