Transfer in L2 english: the role of diglossia in Saudi Arabia
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This study explored the role of Arabic diglossia in the language production of Saudi learners of English as a second language, specifically in regard to the effect context formality has on the rate of negative transfer of certain morphosyntactic structures from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi Arabic (SA). Similar to other varieties of Arabic diglossia, in Saudi diglossia, MSA is used in formal settings whereas SA is reserved for informal everyday conversations. In this experiment, spoken data from open conversations with 40 adult intermediate Saudi learners of English was gathered using four different role-play scenarios (two formal and two informal). Three categories of transfer errors were targeted: six errors originating exclusively from MSA (MSA category), six traceable to SA (SA category), and eleven attributable to structures shared by both MSA and SA (SHARED category). ☐ The results reveal that context formality had a significant effect on the degree to which Saudi ESL learners transferred from MSA and SA in different conversational settings. Specifically, participants produced a significantly higher rate of MSA transfer errors in the formal than in the informal condition but a significantly higher rate of SA transfer errors in the informal than the formal condition. These results suggest that Saudi learners of L2 English allow the relative formality of the diglossic varieties of Arabic they possess to serve as a frame of reference for responding to context formality in the L2, as evidenced in their transfer behavior in formal and informal scenarios. ☐ Moreover, the rate of transfer errors attributable to both MSA and SA (i.e., the SHARED errors) was not significantly different between the formal versus informal contexts. This outcome suggests that context formality had no predicable effect on the frequency of such errors in different conversational situations. This can be ascribed to the fact that, regardless of which variety of Arabic is activated in the mind of the Saudi learner of English in these role-play scenarios, the resulting transfer error would be the same.
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Keywords
Language production, Modern Standard Arabic, Saudi learner