Negative Transfer from Arabic as a Major Reason for the Errors Made by Arabic Learners in their Written Production in English as a Second Language

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of negative transfer from Arabic as the most dominant influential factor among other possible factors that negatively affect Arabic learners resulting in them making errors in their written production in English as a second language. To perform this investigation, the author has collected and analysed 15 texts written by Arabic students enrolled in Grades 7, 8, and 9 of a lower secondary school. Since this study aims to investigate the Arabic influence on Arabic students' written production, the author has decided to focus on the errors which seem to be most problematic and relevant to the aims of the study. These chosen errors are analysed to determine if the negative transfer from Arabic is the most dominant influential factor among other possible factors that negatively affect Arabic learners resulting in them making errors in their written production in English. Although the available corpus is small, the study also aims to investigate if there are any differences in the number of specific errors made in this limited number of texts produced by students enrolled in different school grades.The findings show that these students made a lot of errors in different linguistic categories. 175 errors are the total chosen errors which seemed to be the most problematic and relevant to the aims of this study. 133 of these seem to have been made due to the negative transfer from Arabic. The rest of the errors (42) appear to be the ones caused by either the negative transfer from Swedish or the incorrect use of linguistic rules in the target language itself. The findings of this study also show that the error frequency is the lowest in the texts produced by the students in Grade 9, although the corpus was relatively small to make such a comparison.