The Effect of the Mother Tongue Interference on EFL Learners’ Written Production

Abstract

The issue of language interference has become more and more popular, especially in foreign language classroom. English as a foreign language learners used their first language as a tool to learn the target one. Thus, achieving a satisfactory level in English writing is the primary objective of both teachers and students. However, the majority of first year students are unable to reach this objective, because they commit different errors when writing. The current study aims at identifying the impact of first language among first year university students’ writing at the Department of English; Abdelhamid Ibn Badis, university of Mostaganem, in order to answer the research question; how does the mother tongue affect first year students’ writing?, and confirm or reject the hypothesis; the mother tongue interference affect students’ writing negatively. For that purpose,the mixed methods were adopted; data were gathered via two questionnaires administered to 25 students and 15 teachers of written expression module at The English Department, in order to survey their opinions about the influence of the mother tongue on English writing, in addition to fourteen (14) short paragraphs that have been collected for an errors analysis. The tools have been used to confirm the results obtained in this study. The results have shown that first year EFL students commit different types of errors, due to two reasons which are interlingual and intralingual. However, most of the errors occur in the learners’ productionsare mainly due to their mother tongue (Arabic) interference. On the light of thisresult, the earlier stated hypothesis is successfully confirmed.