effects of first language on second language writing-a preliminary contrastive rhetoric study of farsi and english

to explore the idea the investingation proposed, aimed at finding whether the performances of the population of iranians students studying english in an efl context are consistent in l1 and l2 writing taks and whether there is a cross-linguistic transfer in this respect. in this regard the subjects were instructed to write four compositions-two in english and two in farsi-which consisted of an argumentative and a narrative task in each language. these compositions were then rated by three readers according to efl composition profile (jacobs, et. al, 1981), as an objective scale in which five components are weighed according to their approximate importance of written composition the statistical package for social sciences (spss) was then used for the process of data analysis. the results confirment that such a correlation exists and is significant the finding also indicated that the differences in performing l1 and l2 writing tasks could not be due to change there was a systematic defference which pointed in the direction of transfer from l1 to l2. however, the results should be interpreted carefully. as hatch and farhadi (1982) put it, when we have a small number of subjects and a small number of observations, we need large differences to produce significant results (p. 132). thus, although the study provided ground for rejecting both hypotheses, the differences between t-observed and t-critical were not very large to make strong claims. the same thing is true for the correlation ceofficient which was only moderately significant in one occasion but highly significant on others.