A syntactic analysis of Arabic language interference in the written English of Saudi female college students

This study investigated the syntactic errors of the English Noun Phrase (NP) committed by Saudi female students at Princess Noura University. The purpose of the study was to investigate Arabic interference in learning English as a Foreign Language writing. An overview of related literature confirmed the existence of many prior studies finding that Arabic structures interfered in one-way or another with students’ English writing. An error analysis (EA) was conducted on 178 student essays based on James’ (2013) model, supplemented by a comparative analysis between Arabic and English to find the sources of interlanguage errors. The EA identified, described, classified, and explained errors through a process that included a comparison between interlanguage and intralanguage errors and a detailed classification of errors into the main NP categories and subcategories. A questionnaire was administered to English teachers to find if there was an influence of those errors on text comprehensibility. The results revealed that: correct NPs were more frequent than incorrect NPs; interlanguage errors were more frequent than intralanguage ones; that interlanguage errors were most frequent in Articles, Pronouns, Nouns, and Prepositions; and the sources of NP errors were related to the structural differences between Arabic and English. Finally, the results revealed that most frequent errors did not have a noticeable influence on text comprehensibility.