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, most-ly by L1 Arabic-speaking teachers. Active acquisition of Hebrew accelerates in the immersion conditions 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 graded 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 period studied. This corroborates a multiple effect approach to persistence. Localized errors of phonolo-gy, orthography, and morphology generally declined faster than syntactic errors, which persisted espe-cially in structures that occur in L1 Hebrew, marked for discourse-pragmatic effects.