Abstract:
Written expression is regarded as one of the most important skills
which a student has to master. Nevertheless, this cannot be done
unless he or she has a proper and perfect understanding of
sentence
structures. Mother tongue is considered to be one of the most
important factors that affect learners’ writings in the language
they need to learn. Language learning relies primarily on the early
acquired system of mother tongue which may facilitate or
complicate a second language learning process depending on how
similar or different the two languages systems are.
Through our observation of the writings of some learners, it
appeared that they had problems in forming French sentences
and making errors in its structures due to the effect of their
mother tongue, Arabic language.
The aim of this study is to identify the causes that lead to
university learners’ errors in sentences structures of the language
{French}, so as to help them to resolve and overcome. In order to
arrive at the results of this study, we have given a group of
student a text in Arabic to translate into French language. We
have used a statistical and analytical approach to calculate the
amount of errors students produce and the extent to which
mother tongue impacts their writings. The results we have
concluded show that, students’ errors in sentences structures in
French is the output of the differences between the two
languages {Arabic and French} in terms of sentence structure
and the order of its elements.
We have recommended the work which would illustrate the
differences between the two languages by giving them training to
complement the theoretical side of learning such as French-French
translation sentences.
