Linguistic transfer in English as a foreign language in a single free writing task in Polish students with and without dyslexia

Abstract

The aim of our study was to examine the spelling, grammar, syntax, and lexicon skills in learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a free writing task of Polish students with and without dyslexia. We wanted to identify the potential linguistic transfer difficulties. We assumed that these difficulties would result from the deficient phonological skills, which is characteristic of dyslexia, and from language interference. 72 students with and 78 without dyslexia wrote a short text in English. We found that Polish secondary and junior secondary school students with dyslexia, as compared to the participants without dyslexia, made more spelling errors in the EFL free writing task. They, however, wrote equally long texts that did not differ in terms of grammar (including missing words), syntactic, and lexical errors. We found that 16-year-old native speakers of a semi-transparent Polish, having studied an opaque English for, on average, 8 years, were able to produce coherent compositions. However, they included errors that resulted from a negative linguistic transfer between Native Language and FL.