2. Language Transfer in efl writings:

In recent years, a great focus was centered on the writing skills among many others due to the fact that it is very important in academic studies inside and outside our national educational institutions. One of the main problems found in writing is the use of their mother tongue expressions and structures while writing in English.

In 1966, Kaplan stated in his Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIII-XIV that "speakers of Arabic employ rhetorical organizations based on their respective languages when they compose in English" (p: 156). This means that Arabic speakers integrate "rhetoric" patterns from their mother tongue into their English writing. This interrelatedness of L1 and L2 is not specific to Arab students, many studies which had been previously done in this field, showed that EFL learners commit some interlingual errors because they depend heavily on their L1 in the sense that they think in their native language and that they translate their ideas into the L2 or the foreign language they are using. As Richards & Renandya (2002:303) claim in their book Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice; “there is no doubt that writing is the most difficult skill for L2 learners to master. The difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these notions into legible text”. Writing includes many elements such as the choice of appropriate vocabulary items and grammatical structures and due to the lack of proficiency in the use of L2 structures and words in context of their free text writings, most intermediate B1 students fail at writing error-free texts and they join some L2 writing or grammar courses with the expectations of becoming more proficient writers in the L2.

3. Language Transfer at the level of Syntax:

Richards, Platt & Platt (1992) in his book Dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics considers learner’s errors as an act of borrowing or using specific patterns or structures from their mother tongue while expressing meanings using the vocabulary and the limited structures they already knew about the L2 or FL especially at an early stage of their learning process. The influence of learners’ mother tongue interference leads to many errors.

1. Subject- Verb agreement:

In many languages there is an agreement between the verb and the subject. So, if the subject is singular, the verb must be singular; if the subject is plural, the verb must be plural. Diane Nicholls suggests in her online article "Stringing Words Together: Language interference at sentence level" that "although agreement between the subject and verb of a sentence might seem as if it should follow a very simple rule", make learners tend to make agreement errors very often. The way English, for example, conforms to the subject verb agreement in plural differs from the way the subject verb agreement in plural is implied in other languages. As the students acquire new rules in the target language commit many errors before actually acquire the rule efficiently.