Investigating Efl Students’ First Language Impact On Their Use Of English Lexical Collocations In Writing

Résumé: Learning English (or pretty much any other language) entails learning its different skills which include speaking, listening, reading and writing with the latter being one of the most challenging if not the most challenging skill of all the others. First-year English majors at Oum El Bouaghi University were noticed to "involve" their mother tongue in terms of using some "unnatural" word combinations when writing in English. This study attempts to shed light on one particular difficulty that students face in writing that is the negative transfer of some lexical collocations from students' native language. To this end, 62 paragraphs written by first-year students were collected and analyzed to see if they turn to their mother tongue when tasked with a written assignment. With 45 first-language interference errors comprising 63,35 % of the total 71 errors committed, it is now confirmed that L1 interference lexical collocation errors not only occur in students' writing endeavors, but could also be a majority as compared to other types of errors. Since the mother tongue influence is one of the issues they usually come across in their language learning, EFL students are urged to read more (as well as listen) and immerse themselves fully in English so they would get used to its different structures and would not need to refer back to their mother tongue every time they face problems regarding proper English language use.

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