Yorùbá and French determiners: Implication for French language teaching and learning in Nigeria

Abstract

French language is a second foreign language in Nigeria and most learners of the language come across it at the level of secondary school and tertiary institution. This is not the case with many Nigerian languages, especially the major ones. They are taught and
learnt from the primary school through the secondary school to the tertiaryinstitution. Native speakers of these languages encounter great difficulties in learning French usually as a result of ‘mother tongue interference’. The difficulties are intensified by the fact of the
time of introduction of the language. To facilitate and improve teaching and learning of the language by native speakers of the Yorùbá language, this paper adopts the tenets of contrastive analyisis to resolve difficulties that could arise as a result of the differeces between the determiners (particularly, definite and indefinite articles) in the two languages.