Contrastive Analysis of Interlanguage Features of an Arab English as a Second Language (ESL) Speaker

Abstract

This study was an attempt to analyze a collection of data from a second language speaker of English. The data was collected through an interview with an informant, who was an Arab male student in his first year of graduate studies at an American university. The interview lasted about 15 minutes and was recorded in English. The purpose of the interview was to pinpoint the utterances, phrases, or dialogues that contained interlanguage features and explain why those forms might exist. The interlanguage utterances were categorized by topic depending on the type of feature produced. The groups were classified in the following manner: the use of the 3rd person singular -s, the use of the plural -s, and the use of articles. These forms were then analyzed by considering the possible underlying rule for each feature and developing a pattern by comparing each feature to its correct counterpart. The resulting patterns revealed two main reasons for interlanguage data: attributions to the informant’s native language and particular sentence structures in English. The study concludes with suggested future experiments and investigations of the most noticeable interlanguage features as well as suggestions for English language instructors and general teaching practices.