An Investigation into L1 Interference in EFL Students' Writing: Case Study: Al-Baha University, College of Arts & Humanities

This study attempts to identify the interference of L1 in L2 writing among third year of students at the foreign languages, college of Arts & Humanities Al-Baha University. The study adopted a descriptive analytical approach. The study additionally endeavours to identify, classify, and analyse grammatical errors made by the students. Research questions and their results are presented and discussed in order to achieve this goal. The participants were provided with a text to write about within 60 minutes. Based on the study, the students made 235 grammatical errors, with subcategories such as tenses errors (153) and articles (82) serving as examples. When it came to tenses errors, verb agreement errors occurred the most frequently (97%)%, whereas wrong tenses formation errors (56) were made by the respondents (%). The research shows problems in the articles, including subcategories, omitted articles (37), added articles (29), and wrong article selections (16). The primary causes of these kinds of errors in research are represented by L1 interference. Incorrect sentences resulted from the subjects' straight translation of Arabic terms into their English equivalents. According to the study, students should be required to pay more attention to their writing and reading because doing so will help them become more proficient in the English language and prevent them from making grammatical errors in the specified subcategories.