The Effect of Arabic Verbal and Nominal Clauses on the Writing of English Composition by the Iraqi EFL Learners at the University Level

Abstract

This paper tackles specifically the influence of the linguistic interference phenomena of the first language, Arabic, on the Iraqi EFL learners' writings. English nominal clauses have been considered and any phonological and semantic interferences have been excluded. Randomly, 50 subjects from students of the Department of English, University of Mosul, have been chosen. It has been hypothesized that the phenomenon of interference does exist heavily in students' writings and at all grammatical levels. The study is limited to the analysis of students' writings. The study aims at standing on linguistic interference phenomenon of the first language on the foreign language syntactic structure specially on students' writings. Actually, it tries to identify the differences and/or the similarities of both languages. It tries to specify the students' awareness of the syntactic structures and to lessen the errors committed. The analysis depends on the syntactic order of SVO concerning the written sentences following Quirk et al model (1985). The study will increase the students' knowledge of the syntactic structures of both languages in order to overcome any difficulty raised in the learning /teaching contexts.