Influence of Mother tongue interference on b1 Syrian Students learning English at the level of Syntax and Semantics Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Literature Review

1. Mother tongue interference in L2

2. The case of writing in English within Syria

1. English as a foreign language

2. Language Transfer in EFL writings

3. Language Transfer at the level of Syntax

   1. Subject- Verb agreement

   2. Word-order

   3. Prepositions

4. Language Transfer at the level of Semantics

3. Report

1. The Syntactic level

1. Passive Voice

2. Subject- Verb agreement

3. Word Order

4. Prepositions

2. Semantic level

4. Conclusion

5. Bibliography

1. Introduction:

In this research paper, I am going to investigate the reasons related to mother tongue interference behind most of the Syrian students' mistakes of the B1 level of English learning while writing at the syntactic and the semantic level.

2. Literature Review:

1. Mother tongue interference in L2:

Lado, R. (1957) in his book Linguistics across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for language teachers talks about students trying to acquire a foreign language, they found some features of it that are "quite easy and others extremely difficult". He considers the elements similar to their mother tongue will be "easy" for them, while those elements which are different will be "difficult". This is similar to the idea of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis which regards errors in the second language as a result of the differences between the first and the second language structures. Gass and Selinker's book Language Transfer in Language Learning (1992) states that comparative studies between the first and the second languages are one important preliminary step to understanding language transfer.

"Transfer is the influence of the first language (L1) on the second one (L2)". More specifically, "learners may retain something from their L1 […] to aid in coping with new challenges (Jarvis and Odlin 2000: 573). In the process of learning any second language, "learners regularly produce utterances in […] writing which judged by the rules of the second language are erroneous, or ill-formed". Such attitude "to errors was that they were an indication of the difficulties" meaning that the learners had "certain aspects of the language, which could be explained by the persistence of the habits of the mother tongue and their transfer to the new language" (Lado, 1957). The results of this interference were errors that most of the learners commit in their first stage of learning and this is clearly evident in their writings. Lado emphasizes this point when he states: “we can predict and describe the patterns that will cause difficulty by comparing systematically the language […] to be learned with the native language […] of the student” (Lado, 1957, p. vii).

2. The case of writing in English within Syria:

1. English as a foreign language:

Writing is a very complex activity that foreign learners (including Syrian learners) tend to acquire and they spend a lot of time trying to become proficient enough to perform it correctly conforming to the English syntactical and semantical rules. EFL teachers (English Foreign Language teachers) tend to observe that mother tongue interference as the main reason behind most of the mistakes that students commit while writing their assigned topics. Having English only as a foreign language without any authentic input where the students might use their language in real life situations and acquire the language naturally makes it a problem for EFL teachers to teach their students how to write a grammatically correct sentences based on the limited input of the English language students have while using their English in class.