Speaking Difficulties Encountered by EFL Learners: the case of Shupamem native speakers

This paper investigates the speaking difficulties encountered by Shupamem (a grassfield Bantu language spoken in the west region of Cameroon) native speakers in learning English as a foreign language. It is observed that despites the improvement of the teaching method and materials in the Cameroonian secondary education, many Shupamem speakers engaged in English learning do not speak accurately. Based on the data collected from selected students of Terminalein some schools of the Noun division where Shupamem is spoken, the paper posits that the main challenges these learners face are phonological and syntactic, originating from (i) the lack of asymmetry between their L1’s sound system and that of English, and (ii) the lack of a one to one correspondence between the position of some English and Shupamem sentence constituents.