Competency in First Language: Does It Affect the Quality of Second Language Writing

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the effect of the Arab EFL learners’ competence in writing of their L1 on the quality of their L2 compositions. Forty eight (48) Saudi English major native speakers of Arabic were chosen as study subjects (Ss); all were full time students at the Department of Languages and Translation, Taibah University, Saudi Arabia. These subjects were divided into four groups according to English and Arabic proficiency tests: (1) LB, Lower-competence in Arabic and Biggners or lower-proficiency in English; (2) LI, Lower-competence in Arabic and Intermediate or higher-proficiency in English; (3) HB, Higher-competence in Arabic and Biggners or lower-proficiency in English; (4) HI, Higher-competence in Arabic and Intermediate or higher-proficiency in English. In order to fulfil the study objectives, two types of writing processes were implemented: (1) writing in Arabic then translating into the L2 (English); (2) composing directly in the L2. The results showed that higher-competence in Arabic has a significant positive effect on the overall performance of the students' writings in English. HI students significantly performed better than LI students in both writing tasks (direct vs. translation). The task of writing first in Arabic then translating into English (translation task) had a positive effect on the content of the compositions written by our students of this study particularly HI group. With respect to the length of compositions, students in all four groups wrote significantly longer texts through translation and used more complex sentences in terms of words per T-unit in their translations. Higher-competence in Arabic has shown positive effect on the length of the compositions these students wrote whether in the direct writing or translation tasks. HB and HI significantly wrote longer compositions than LB and LI did. With respect to the quantity of errors, the study shows that, overall, more errors occurred in translation than in direct writing, and error type was a significant factor: awkward forms were more frequent, lexical choice errors were next in frequency, and transition errors were relatively infrequent. This tendency to produce more awkward forms in the students' translation version correlates positively with increased syntactic complexity. This may be related to the findings that increased prediction resulting from attempts at more complex integrative thinking by L2 writers leads to more problems in terms of clarity at the syntactic level.

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