Crosslinguistic Influence of the First Language: Interlingual errors in the writing of ESL Saudi learners

• 作者: Fawaz Ali Ahmed Qasem
• 来源期刊: 宏观语言学
• 学科: 文学
• 关键词: English as second language interlingual errors error analysis contrastive analysis
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（2）
• 页码范围: 105-120
• 页数: 16页
• 分类号: H31

摘要

Writing as a productive skill is challenging for the learners as it requires richlinguistic and cognitive abilities to match words with ideas well. A learner of any languageas Second Language (SL), for example English, Arabic, Chinese, or German, enters anearly, natural, and inevitable stage of making various errors in writing compositions. Theerrors could be due to dissimilar linguistic systems of the two languages (L1 and L2) or thelack of understanding the SL linguistic rules. This study focuses on investigating thefrequent and common inter-lingual errors (the negative influence) committed byArabic-speaking learners of English as Second Language (ESL). The study is based onError Analysis (EA) of the essays of a group of English major undergraduate students fromthe University of Bisha, Al-Namas, Saudi Arabia. Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH)is included to predict most of the errors in the collected samples. The findings of the studyshow that common errors in the data are interlingual (54.03%). The errors within theGrammatical Category include the misuse of tenses, dropping the subjects, dropping verb tobe-copular and word order misplacement. The majority of errors in the study are due to theinterference of L1 linguistic system including the different orthographic, phonological,morpho-syntactic components. For instance, the participants’ dropping subjects in Englishcan be attributed to the fact that Arabic as L1 and as Null Subject Language (NSL), unlikeEnglish, allows subject drop. The results also find that within the Lexical Category,preposition and article errors are the most frequent errors and that spelling errors are themost dominant errors within the Mechanics Category. The study gives some pedagogicalimplications and suggestions to avoid and minimize the interlingual errors of such type. Forinstance, teachers need to focus more on enlightening their students about the contrastive language systems from the early stage of learning ESL.