3. Report:

I've done a small research on my Linguaphone students to justify my opinion that most of the B1 Syrian students' mistakes while they are in their B1 stage of learning stage of learning is due to their Arabic interference within their English writings at the level of syntax and semantics.

1. The Syntactic level:

Syntactically speaking, Syrian students tend to make errors when they use certain structures in the L2.

1. Passive Voice:

After checking the student's writings of some sentences in English, I have noticed a lot of problems with the use of the passive voice. Here are some examples of the use of some errors found in the use of the passive voice:

*Smoking can be caused many serious illnesses.

يُسبِبُ التدخين العديد من الامراض

This student used the passive tense mistakenly due to the inflections found in Arabic and their absence in the English structure.

Other students committed a different mistake while using this structure which is the absence of the auxiliary verb before the past participle in the passive voice structure just like the following example:

*The habit which called smoking

العادة التي تُدعى التدخين

In the Arabic structure we don't have any auxiliary verb used and for the students who didn't remember the formula for making the passive voice, they resorted to the Arabic structure and translated it word for word.

2. Subject- Verb agreement:

* It encourage smokers to smoke.

تشجع المدخنون للتدخين

Students don't have in their mother tongue any change in the verb form except the one that denotes the subject pronoun they are using for each sentence and that's probably the reason behind their mistakes concerning deleting the s that goes with the third-person singular subjects.

3. Word Order:

* How we can stop smoking?

كيف يمكننا ايقاف التدخين؟

Syrian students don't have any subject- verb inversion in their Arabic language while making the question form and such interlingual gaps cause serious problems that Syrian students largely encounter while writing.

4. Prepositions:

Many people die from smoking.

الكثير من الناس يموتون من التدخين

Arabic and English use prepositions differently. Due to translation, many students revert back to Arabic and translate most prepositions word for word. Instead of using "of" as they should have in the previous example, they translated "من" to from.

2. Semantic level:

Semantically speaking, due to the lack of the English input the Syrian students are exposed to, they tend to use certain kinds of phrases or words mistakenly just because they are trying to translate their thoughts and ideas word for word without considering the cultural and the contextual differences between Arabic (L1) and English (L2). There are many examples that demonstrate this idea.

Since many years ago

منذ عدة سنين مضت

The student used the word "since" because he translated the idea of "منذ" into English without thinking of the English grammar rules about "since" expressing a state that started in the past and continues in the present which contradicts the grammar rule suggested by "ago" which says that the situation started and ended in the past. However, the student's lack of knowledge of the semantic connotation of the word "ago" made him commit such mistake.

Hiba has a white heart

تملك هبة قلبا أبيض

The student in this example translated the surface meaning of her ideas coming from her L1 word for word without considering the differences between the Arabic and the English cultures. Her lack of cultural and contextual use of the word "white" in English made her use the word confusingly to mean a tender kind heart.

She doesn't have enough culture.

لا تملك من الثقافة ما يكفي

The student used the word "culture" meaning general knowledge when it really means the beliefs, values, attitudes, religion, and traditions of a certain community or a group of people which is totally different from the intended meaning but due to his lack of contextual knowledge of the use of the word "culture", he thought it would be just the same.

Such examples are typical to B1 Syrian students while writing and trying to convey their ideas in English. Such errors happen due to their mother tongue interference in the sense of syntax and semantics.