BATTLING MOTHER TONGUE TRANSFE.

We all know that prevention is better than cure. Still when we correct compositions teeming with Greek structure, it is rather late to start from the beginning. So we need to repair the damage done by mother tongue interference or shall I say transfer? Most of the mistakes a teacher corrects in a composition are there simply because the student wrote his composition thinking in Greek and translating it into English. How does a student learn to write in L2, in our case English, without being influenced by L1, in our case, Greek? If students had acquired  the foreign language unconsciously they would little by little have developed those skills that would allow them to express themselves in English without mother tongue transfer.  When the fossilized habit of automated translation has set in, reminding students not to translate Greek words into English renders few results.  One needs to turn to other methods and this article will illustrate how I tackle this problem.