Mother Tongue Influence (MTI) is the influence of a first spoken language on a learner’s new language. For example, most Indians communicate in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu with Hindi as their primary communication language. Therefore, whenever Indians try to learn a new language like English, Spanish, German, etc. they often make pronunciation, grammar, fluency, and other mistakes. But there are many methods to remove MTI, which include the following:
Improve Your Pronunciation
Pronunciation is the most vital part of any language, mostly while learning spoken English. The best way to improve pronunciation skills is to practice with a partner or join an English speaking course. During the class, the trainer would take you through different activities, sound models, articulation methods, and repetition. Such practices would enable you to pronounce the words better. On the other hand, you can also improve pronunciation through self-learning activities like reading words prescribed in the Oxford dictionary.
Regular Speaking
Another habit of improving language communication and removing MTI is by speaking in it regularly with a person. Often the major problem with regular communication is finding a partner. However, the best way to resolve this is to ask a fluent friend or use it as a native language. Talking over the phone can improve skills, but it also has a significant drawback. You wouldn’t know whether your friend has the same level of language knowledge and can guide you through your common doubts.
Also, it would become a favor to ask a friend to improve by communication skills training for employees. The best way to overcome all these issues is to join a group class or an online English communication course. Doing so would provide you with a trainer willing to enhance your vocabulary, pronunciation, fluency, and other spoken English skills. Regular practice with an experienced trainer would help you become confident, avoid common word usage mistakes, and overcome your fear of public speaking.
Enhance Intonations and Rhythms
Speaking with wrong English intonations and rhythms makes the speaker hard to understand. It could lead to significant communication problems like hesitation, word repetition, etc. during interviews, interpersonal talks, meetings, and events. People often don’t learn about their intonation and rhythm mistakes because they frequently communicate with the same group. The best method to enhance intonation and rhythm skills is to join a regular speaking course, read aloud, listen to English audio, and watch videos. In addition to this, mimic dialogues of movies and TV shows can prove helpful. It is a common practice done by all actors. It helps to learn the different ways of speaking the same word in Australian, Canadian, American, and British English.
Learn Grammar Basics
In addition to pronunciation, fluency, intonations, rhythms, and regular speaking, you should learn English grammar basics. It involves tenses, verbs, nouns, sentence formations, articles, pronouns, active and passive voice, comparatives, synonyms, antonyms, etc. Doing so would provide you the knowledge about correcting your mistakes while speaking, listening, reading, and writing in the language. It would also drastically help you to overcome your MTI.
