The inter-lingual transfer of Arabic in the English writings of Arab EFL students

ABSTRACT
This paper sheds light on the inter-lingual transfer of Arabic into English writings of Arab EFL learners that happens while learning English as a foreign language, an issue which has not received much attention. Especially, this paper highlights writing errors which consist of grammatical, syntactic, semantic and lexical errors committed by Arab EFL students in their written production because the inter-lingual transfer of Arabic into English . Moreover, this study attempts to cover the following areas :English as a foreign language in Arab countries ,a brief historical review related to inter-language which argues in favour of the use of the term “transfer” rather than “interference” since foreign language learners fall back on their first language as a creative cognitive strategy employed to solve learning and communication either this transfer was positive or negative ,inter-lingual errors , and syntactic comparative study between English and Arabic language in order to clarify and show the negative transfer from the mother tongue . Since Arabic has two varieties modern standard Arabic (MSA) and non standard Arabic (NSA),this study attempts also to answer the following questions” which Varity of Arabic students transfer from?”, and to what extent does inter-lingual transfer account for the errors in their written production? Depending on some previous studies that have been conducted on this area. It is hoped that this research paper would stimulate further interest in this field.

Keywords: Inter-language, inter-lingual, native language, target language, interference, positive and negative transfer, and inter-lingual interference.