Persistence of interference from L1 Arabic in written Hebrew

Abstract

As the official and predominant public language in Israel, Hebrew is taught in Arab minority schools, mostly by L1 Arabic-speaking teachers. Active acquisition of Hebrew accelerates in the immersion condi- tions of high education. I explore the persistence of very common interference errors in various linguistic domains, as established by teachers’ written corrective feedback, and the correlation between persis- tence, error salience and a general learner effect. From a corpus of 56 Hebrew essays written by 9th graders, 11th graders and undergraduate students in southern Israel, the 14 most frequent interference errors were isolated and incorporated in a compiled test essay, which was then given to 13 L1 Arabic-speaking teachers of Hebrew to correct. The salience of each item was established by the percentage of teachers correcting it; each was also gra ded for its status as a general learners’ error. Statistical analysis showed a significant correlation between each of these two measures and persistence over the time pe- riod studied. This corroborates a multiple effect approach to persistence. Localized errors of phonology, orthography, and morphology generally declined faster than syntactic errors, which persisted especially in structures that occur in L1 Hebrew, marked for discourse-pragmatic effects.