Abdullah Ahmad M Alfaifi
Department of English, College of Science and Arts, King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh, Saudi Arabia
Mohammad Saleem
Department of English, College of Science and Arts, King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh, Saudi Arabia
Mother-tongue/L1 influence/interference in the learning process of a foreign/second language is quite common. Mother-tongue influence theory was quite popular in academia in the early twentieth century till the1950s, and fell out of favor in the 1960s, being replaced by the Interlanguage theory. However, the former has once again gained popularity as more scholars have come to accept that L1 does interfere in learning a foreign/second language, especially if learners are of mature age, and if there is little commonality between L1 and L2. L1 interference in L2 learning is usually referred to as “transfer,” which may be negative or positive. Negative transfer is assumed to hinder L2 learning. In the present study, the hypothesis that negative transfer impedes L2 learners’ proficiency development has been tested in a small-scale experiment conducted with Saudi first year university learners. The study provides evidence for the existence of negative transfer in the spoken English of these students. Bearing in mind the idea of L1 interference, due to dissimilarities between Arabic and English, this study was conducted with a focus on a few syntactic structures in Hijazi Arabic (HA) that are found to have clear echo in the English sentences of the participants, namely young adult Saudi EFL learners.
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