The Role of First Language Interference in the English Writing of German ESL Students

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics - English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, language: English, abstract: When reading papers written by ESL students, English composition teachers are often confronted with a multitude of different non-standard forms that they commonly refer to as "errors." Just as the errors committed by native speakers of English, these errors found in ESL writing can have several different sources that cannot always be identified easily. One such source of error in ESL writing is the interference of the student's first language (L1), whose rules and structures may be transferred to the second language (L2) in order to communicate certain ideas when the student has not yet acquired the L2 rules necessary to do this (Krashen, "Acquisition and Learning" 21).