The impact of L1 ınterference on foreign language writing: A contrastive error analysis

Abstract

In today's world, educational contexts are getting increasingly multicultural. Although EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes in Turkey were mostly composed of Turkish students a decade ago, today students from any part of the world are brought together within the frame of various student exchange programs. In Turkish EFL contexts, students coming from Middle Eastern countries make up a huge part of classes (Özer, 2016). The objective of the current study is to examine L1 negative interference errors of Turkish and Arabic EFL learners. Accordingly, 30 B1 (Intermediate) EFL students' written assignments were examined and divided into categories. Besides, this study makes a comparative analysis of Turkish and Arabic EFL learners' grammatical and lexical errors within the frame of L1 negative transfer. When the results of the Mann-Whitney U test are analyzed, it is understood that Turkish and Arabic students' grammatical interference exam scores differ statistically (p <0.05). When the total amount of errors is analyzed, Turkish students' grammar errors (n=164) stem from, majority of which are articles, preposition and tense errors, respectively as 18.82%, 17.65% and 11.76 whilst Arabic students make a huge part of their errors (n=352) on capitalization, punctuation and tenses/articles, respectively as 16.19%, 15.06%, and 12.78%. In the frame of the lexical category, Turkish students performed 48 lexical errors, the majority of which are spelling and collocation errors. On the other hand, Arabic students committed 96 lexical errors in total, the majority of which are spelling errors (60.4%) while 15.5% of the errors are wrong word choice. In general, lexical errors were fewer than grammatical errors.

Phonological Errors and L1 Interference: A Case Study of Jordanian Learners of English as a Foreign Language

“…Participants' first language seems to interfere not only in the spoken form of L2 but also in the written one. In a study conducted by Kazazoglu (2020), first language negative interference was examined through the analysis of errors made by Turkish and Arab learners of English as a foreign language. The author analyzed 30 written assignments to detect grammatical and lexical errors.…”

Cognitive Awareness of the EFL Learner of Contrastive Linguistics Between English and Arabic: A Case Study

“…Learning an L2 can pose a challenge to EFL learners, especially those of lower proficiency levels where errors are an inevitable part of the L2 learning process (Kaweera, 2013). This is in addition to the fact that many of those errors committed are linked to negative interference and interlingual errors (Al-Khresheh, 2016; Kazazoğlu, 2020).…”

“How the Furby Coming is…”: Interference of First Language and Culture in Thai EFL Learners’ Paragraph Writing

“…Many studies on L2 or English language learners' productions in both speaking and writing (e.g., Jaiprasong & Pongpairoj, 2020;Kazazoğlu, 2020;Kerz & Weichmann, 2015;Saito, Trofimovich, & Issacs, 2015) have revealed interference of L1 or learners' native languages and cultures. With the more degrees of differences between L1 languages and cultures and those of L2, the higher degrees of interference exhibit in the productions.…”

“…Positive transfers of the learners' L1 language facilitate L2 acquisition and learning while that of negative transfers impacts the learners' mastery of their L2 (Bardovi-Harlig & Sprouse, 2017). The focus of previous studies on L1 language interference (e.g., Kazazoğlu, 2020;Watcharapunyawong & Usaha, 2013) has weighed more on negative transfers as English language learning challenges. Apart from the notion of L1 language interference, several scholars (e.g., Dita, 2009;İnceçay, 2015;Simpson, 2000) have investigated a great deal on L2 learners' cultural interference in formal writing tasks, such as abstract, explanatory, persuasive, or academic paragraph writings, entailing strict genres and expected English patterns as the learners' writing products.…”