L1 Transfer /L1 Interference in Students’ Academic Writing (Theory).

Abstract

This paper provides a brief overview of theorizing in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Second Language Writing (SLW) regarding how writing can provide insight into how language is learned by outlining contemporary, interdisciplinary research that has emerged in this area. What proponents of integrating these two areas (SLA and SLW) argue is that research adopting more traditional ways of looking at language acquisition often fail to take into account the dynamic nature of the linguistic repertoires of multilingual speakers and developing a more nuanced understanding of the multilingual speakers themselves. Adopting assumptions related to ‘adaptive transfer’, this paper assumes that interactions between a multilingual language user’s language resources are dynamic, idiosyncratic, and culturally fluid. [3] This paper provides the theoretical framework for a corresponding paper looking at a corpus of marked forms generated from the final papers of multilingual Central Asian university students taking an EAP course.