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

Abstract

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.