A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree "Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises".

Abstract :
This study aims at investigating errors due to Kirundi lexical interference in pupils'English compositions and what may be their causes. Since we know that English is leart as a foreign language here in Burundi, i chose better to carry out a research on interference from Kirundi into English by using questionnaires which were administered do English teachers and pupils and a written test for pupils. In order to find out the causes of this interference, a contrastive analysis between English and kirundi systems was undertaken. As we know it is said that the greater differences between two languages the more negative effects of interference are likely to be , and interference occurs when a learner does not have a perfect command of the second language he is learning.
I chose better to carry out a research on interference from Kirundi to English by using a questionnaire which was administered to English teachers and a written test for pupils. After the analysis of the data from the teacher's questionnaire and pupils' written test, the results proved that the learners of English often go back to their first language while writing a composition and make a word-for-word translation from Kirundi into English forgetting that there are some words which do not have their corresponding concepts in English. Therefore, i hope that this study will help more the teachers of English and their learners so as to avoid or reduce that problem of interference in the leaners' compositions.