The teaching of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) in Nigeria, a predominantly English-speaking and multilingual environment comes with sundry interferences both at written and oral levels. This study highlights the persistence of morph syntactic and morph semantic errors in students’ written productions, mainly resulting from negative transfers from English and Yoruba. The objectives of this study are to identify forms of linguistic interferences in written productions; describe types of the morph syntactical errors identified, assess sources of those errors and analyze their impacts on the quality of written expression. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach based on questionnaires and the analysis of a corpus of written productions from 72 students drawn from the two universities concerned. The findings reveal a high rate of morphological errors (agreement, verb conjugation, plurals), syntactic errors (word order, pronouns, verb constructions), and morph semantic errors (false cognates, lexical confusion), largely influenced by English and Yoruba. The study recommends a contrastive teaching approach, strengthened writing practice, and targeted remedial strategies. It therefore makes a significant pedagogical and sociolinguistic contribution to improving the teaching of FFL in Nigeria, emphasizing the importance of systematically addressing linguistic interference in order to enhance students’ written proficiency.
GBADEGESIN et al. (Fri,) studied this question.