Transfer of Linguistic Interference and Pedagogical Responses in Written French to Yoruba–English Multilinguals in Southwest Nigerian Colleges of Education

Earlier reports from studies of French learners in Colleges of Education in Southwest Nigeria described how linguistic interference manifests in students’ written French and how it affects the quality of that writing. This article moves from description to explanation and remediation. Drawing on the error data of 200 penultimate and final year NCE French students in eight Colleges of Education, the study employed a 150-word essay and two fill-in-the-gap grammatical tests covering agreement, articles, pronouns and verb tenses. These instruments yielded 400 interference errors, which were coded for type and source language using Mackey’s framework. Guided by Contrastive Analysis and complemented by Error Analysis and interlanguage theory, the study pursued three objectives: (1) to identify the transfer mechanisms and learning conditions associated with the observed interference errors; (2) to examine how the frequency of errors relates to their communicative severity to set instructional priorities; and (3) to propose a pedagogical framework for classroom practice, assessment and curriculum in Colleges of Education. The analysis identified five principal mechanisms: direct transfer, false-cognate and semantic transfer, overgeneralisation of partly learnt rules, structural transfer from Yoruba, and orthographic habits from English, reinforced by English-medium classroom talk and limited exposure to authentic French. English contributed across all error categories, while Yoruba interference was concentrated in sentence architecture. The findings showed that frequency and communicative severity do not coincide: orthographic errors were the most frequent (39 %), yet grammatical errors (especially auxiliary choice and agreement) and certain lexical errors (particularly false cognates) carry greater communicative weight and therefore merit higher instructional priority. Thirdly, the article advances a severity-informed contrastive framework that combines explicit three-language contrastive teaching, error-based writing instruction with specific feedback, learner metalinguistic awareness, increased authentic French input, diagnostic analytic assessment, and curriculum modules on interference. The framework treats interference both as a predictable challenge rooted in the learners’ linguistic background and as evidence of creative interlanguage development, and it calls for planned rather than incidental pedagogical responses.