Abstract:

The present research tries to investigate whether there is any indicative relationship between writing and reading, in English, with translating from L1 to L2. The teaching of foreign languages, especially English, is greatly based on the mother tongue as primary vehicle of instruction feature both in teacher-formation at pedagogical meetings as well as in the Algerian classrooms. This is evidenced by the information obtained though interview to teachers, observation of English students during class sessions and the textbooks prepared by some national authors. This research tries also to examine the effects of the excessive use of Arabic on writing and/or the reading skills of the English Language learners at the University of Mascara (Algeria). To this end, a test including both reading and writing was administered to first year and second year students. The descriptive and inferential statistics confirmed that there is a significant relationship between writing and reading in English since students make constatly reference to their mother tongue with L1 translation. This is maily due to their previous educational experiences which have modeled their learning style. Most learners tend to go toward facility. This practice not only results in some psycholinguistic constraints affecting the accurate and fluent language production, but also originates time consumming on the part of the learners and/or the teachers. The study concludes that L1 role in L2 teaching dilemma in foreign language pedagogy is still far from having been resolved, one thing is clear: excessive translation from and to the native language hampers greatly the outcomes of the instructional process – reading and writing. However, it was observed that writing, rather than reading makes a stronger contribution to L1-L2 translation of the students.

Keywords:

Reading, Writing, Translation, Mother tongue, Foreign language, accuracy, fluency.