ARABIC STUDENTS’ GRAMMATICAL INTERFERENCE IN ENGLISH WRITING: EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of Omani Arabic on the students’ English writing performance. A total of 35 participants at the University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Oman were randomly selected and their final exam papers were analyzed for syntactic errors. The findings reveal 379 errors categorized under five main types: subject – verb agreement, omission of sentence parts, word order deviation, wrong sentence fragmentation, double use of specifiers or modifiers. The analysis indicates that multiple errors can be attributed to negative transfer from Arabic, where structural and syntactic rules differ from English.