Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Transfer in Writing

This research aims to study through syntactic error analysis the interference of Arabic as the first language in the English writings of some Moroccan students. For this purpose empirical data is collected from 114 paragraphs written by EFL university students. In terms of this research the students were asked to write a paragraph of about 200 words on one of four suggested topics (cf. appendix). To achieve its purpose the present paper is to investigate the syntactic transfer by contrasting two main views entailing this linguistic phenomenon. The first one is Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998 2005) which argues that L1 transfer does not play any important role in L2 learning. The second view is the Full Transfer/Full Access Model (Schwartz and Spouse 1994 p. 317-368; 1996 p. 40-72) which supports the existence of a full interlingual transfer.