This research explored the most common writing errors of Science and Arts students of the Foundation year program at a Saudi University that hinder them from achieving their course goals, learning outcomes and becoming efficient writers. The importance of this research stems from the fact that, it is a comparative study that shows the differences…

Native speakers of Arabic face a number of problems in their attempt to acquire the English language. One of these problems is encountered in their attempt to use English articles. According to earlier studies, learning English articles by students whose mother-tongue is Arabic is one of the most frequent and significant difficulties Arab learners…

The objective of this study is to investigate the common errors of L2 learners in a Turkish university setting where they have to learn L2 and pass a B1 level exam in order to be faculty students. The study aims at identifying what types of errors the learners do, what the possible determining factors at the background are and how they can…

Making errors is a natural process of language learning. As in all kind of learning, language learning also involves making errors. Research has shown that even in the first language acquisition process, children make countless errors. Similarly, adult learners of English will inevitably make errors until they have mastered the rules of target…

The craziness of English spelling has undeniably perplexed learners, especially in an EFL context as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In these situations, among other obstacles, learners also have to tackle the perpetual and unavoidable problem of MT interference. Sadly, this perplexity takes the shape of a real problem in the language classroom…

Interlanguage fossilization is a crucial dilemma that foreign language learners may fall in. The problem of the present study is shown clearly in the answers of Iraqi students of Master of Arts in the College of Education for Women University of Baghdad. In spite of all the previous years of studying English language, some still have the problem…

When learning English, learners might face a challenging task in mastering pronunciation due to differences in both languages such as sound-to-letter correspondence, size of phoneme inventory, allophonic realization of sounds, place and manner of articulation, among others. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review both theoretical and…

Three profoundly deaf individuals undertook a low-frequency backward lexical translation task (French/English), where morphological structure was manipulated and orthographic distance between test items was measured. Conditions included monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose French morphological structure…

In today's world, educational contexts are getting increasingly multicultural. Although EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes in Turkey were mostly composed of Turkish students a decade ago, today students from any part of the world are brought together within the frame of various student exchange programs. In Turkish EFL contexts, students…

This research investigated on the first language interference in learning the English language among three cultural groups -- the Ilocano, the Ibanag, and the Itawes. The subject of the study were sixty sophomore students from the College of Education and the College of Business Entrepreneurship, and Accountancy who are officially enrolled at…

Negative transfer is a difficulty for Arabic-speaking students of English. This study juxtaposes eight categories of Arabic-to-English transfer errors with equivalent and near-equivalent errors in Arabic. It compares their error gravity as rated by teachers and students to discover whether there are any differences between teacher and student…

This study aims to investigate the most common types of linguistic errors and their frequency occurrence in compositions written by forty (40) non-English major Libyan students at the pre-intermediate level in Language Centre at Omar EL-Mukhtar University, EL-Beida, Libya. A corpus of 40 compositions was collected from a sample of 40 students in…

Studies of second language learning have revealed a connection between first language transfer and errors in second language production. This paper describes an action research study carried out among Chilean university students studying English as part of their degree programmes. The study focuses on common lexical errors made by Chilean…

The present study aimed at finding whether L1 Turkish caused interference errors on Turkish EFL learners' spoken English discourse. Whether English proficiency level had any effect on the number of errors learners made was further investigated. The participants were given the chance to choose one of the two alternative topics to speak about. The…

This study examines second language activation in Arabic-English bilinguals for whom Arabic was the first language. Modeling its design on Colome (2001), the research compared processing in a picture-phoneme matching task for Arabic-English bilinguals tested in the United States or in Saudi Arabia to determine whether activation of English…