Persistence of interference from L1 Arabic in written Hebrew

Henkin, Roni

doi:10.17239/l1esll-2020.20.01.15

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…Misuse of prepositions was targeted as one of the most persistent errors over two years of Hebrew studies at college (Haskel-Shaham et al, 2018). Henkin (2020) found that this domain shows high error salience, i.e., teachers identify it easily and correct it more than other errors. She attributed this high error salience, among other factors, to rigidity in prepositional use, whereas domains of a more flexible, stylistic nature, such as word order or zero-subject, are less error salient.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most recently, Henkin (2020) found support for a multiple effect approach to persistence. Localized errors of phonology, orthography, and morphology generally declined faster than syntactic errors, which persisted especially as preferences in structures that occur in L1 Hebrew, but are marked for discourse-pragmatic effects.…”

Section: Transfer Between Arabic and Hebrewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Assessing change in syntactic features of Hebrew written by native Arabic speakers: a longitudinal study

Henkin

Gafter

אבו-רביעה

2023

L1-ESLL

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Much of the theorization in Second Language Acquisition is based on findings in unrelated language dyads, with English as L1 or L2. We focus on two closely related languages, Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew is the majority language in Israel, taught in Arab minority schools mostly by L1 Arabic-speaking teachers. We explore the persistence of very common syntactic errors in Hebrew of Arab high-school students, and the correlation between persistence, interference and developmental errors. From a longitudinal corpus of Hebrew essays written by 22 Arab 11th graders, and a year later in 12th grade, the six most frequent syntactic error categories were isolated. Statistical analysis showed interference to be involved in the vast majority of the errors that also persisted most, whereas almost all the improvement over the year was in developmental errors with no interference. This contradicts a common claim that interference, initially predominant, decreases over time with relation to developmental errors. We found prepositions to be particularly problematic, especially in errors involving interference, but these were no more persistent than others. We conclude that more research on syntactic interference in the acquisition of closely related languages would benefit SLA theory, as our findings differ from many typically attested patterns.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Transfer Between Arabic and Hebrewmentioning

confidence: 99%