Translation Elicitation Techniques and Mother-Tongue Interference: Any Significant Connection? (original) (raw)

1999

Abstract

This paper is based on a research project carried out at the University of Bahrain the purpose of which was to examine the validity of Dulay, Burt and Krashen's Hypothesis that the use of translation as an elicitation technique in FL/SL research artificially increases the L2 learner's reliance on the MT, and accordingly, the proportion of interference errors (1982:258). In order to examine the validity of this assumption, two elicitation tasks were constructed, one a translation of Arabic sentences into English and the other a series of English sentences with blanks for the students to fill with the definite article the, if necessary. In both tasks, the subjects' interference errors in the use of the English definite article were examined in order to find out whether or not interference errors in the translation task significantly outnumbered those in the blank-filling task. The subjects were 60 Arabic-speaking university students at different language levels, but with f...

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