The Influence of Mother Tongue in Foreign Language Writing

This research investigates the influence of mother tongue (L1) in foreign language (FL) writing. The purpose of this study was to test two research questions: (1) what are students' attitudes toward the involvement of L1 writing strategies in FL writing; (2) Do students transfer L1 writing strategies to English writing positively or negatively? Why? This paper presents quantitative and qualitative research conducted with instruments such as: a questionnaire, four experiments and five writing strategies checklists. The paper has to do only with students whose mother tongue is Albanian. The participants involved in this study composed different genres of paragraphs in their L1 and FL. The findings suggest that students' attitudes toward the involvement of their L1 in FL writing were mostly negative. When asked to work on special tasks involving translation, these tasks were not preferred by these students compared to the direct mode. However, when writing directly in English, they often unconsciously reverted to (or were thinking in) Albanian. Thus making space for substratum transfer, which was both positive and negative.