Writing Errors: A Study of the Writing Ability of Arab Learners of Academic English and Arabic at University

While the mastery of writing for specific purposes, in both Arabic and English, is crucial at Jordan University of Science and Technology (hereafter JUST), many problems still face our students. The same appears to be the case in other Arab countries. Accordingly, the central aims of this paper are to investigate writing skills in the two languages involved, English and Arabic, and to see whether there is an association between poor writing across languages. Data were collected from 150 students (chosen randomly) who wrote about the same topic in English and Arabic. Scripts were assessed respectively by ELT specialists and Arabists. The study confirms that poor writing in English correlates with similar deficiencies in the mother tongue. Thus the common assumption in ELT, that all learners are fully competent in their first language skills, is unfounded, as is much of the criticism of ELT programmes for speakers of Arabic, based on poor writing skills in English. The findings of this paper can be extended to other learners of English who speak Arabic as a first language and English as a foreign or second language.