The Influence of L1 in ESL Learners’ Writing

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic review of relevant published studies on the influence of L1 on ESL students’ writing from the year 2004 until 2021. This systematic review attempts to address two research questions; i.e. what are the effects caused by the interference of students' L1 language and what are the remedies to overcome such errors in writing. In order to do so, 15 single studies were chosen from multiple academic platforms. These studies were systematically reviewed and the findings revealed that the learners' L1 language interferes with the second language acquisition in terms of causing them to commit redundancy reduction errors, transfer of rules, and other substance errors. The transfer of rules included lexical and syntactical errors. The findings also cleared some misconceptions on the overgeneralization concept that falls under both categories of intralingual and interlingual interference. As for the solution for this issue, the method of focusing on error-prone areas, application of contrastive analysis in pedagogy and integration of grammar-translation method for low proficiency students were extracted from the past studies.