The Effect of “Pattern Practice in Translation” on Developing Persian Speaking Arabic Students’ Writing Skill

Writing in a second language is usually considered as the last yet the most challenging skill to be learned. Similarly, learning to write in Arabic seems to have its own complications due to its unique grammar and sentence structures; hence, the present study attempted to investigate the effect of ‘Pattern Practice’ on developing Arabic students’ writing skill. However, pattern practice was not in the form of traditional mechanical drilling of the Arabic structures; instead, the learners participated in some awareness raising sessions including practicing the already identified and underlined structures of the texts through translating the similar structures from Persian into English. The present study attempted to answer the fundamental question of whether translation pattern practice had the potential to develop writing proficiency and reduce the learners’ errors when writing in Arabic as their L2. Writing errors were classified as grammatical, lexical and spelling. The study, hence, tried to identify the effect of practice on all such errors.The sample including 34 available Persian speaking students from Yazd University majoring in Arabic language and literature were selected and randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group. A proficiency test was given to ensure the groups’ homogeneity before the study started. Then, during the whole semester, both groups received several short Arabic stories. Arabic sentence structures, vocabulary and spelling of the stories were discussed in each class. However, the experimental group had the chance to rehearse sentence patterns through translation pattern practice. The results obtained at the end of the semester revealed a significant difference between the frequencies of the errors in their writing samples. In other words, the participants of the experimental group had significantly fewer structure and lexical errors, but the difference between the frequencies of spelling errors was not significant. The findings suggest that ‘Pattern Practice’ had the potential to improve the learners’ interlanguage and enhance their writing ability.It can be concluded that in awareness raising sessions of reading and analyzing the texts, learners noticed how the structures worked, and further translation practice followed by corrective feedback led to deeper retention of the structures. Therefore, the target translation practice can be identified as an efficient strategy on reducing the learners’ writing errors especially when writing Arabic sentences. The results had pedagogical implications for Arabic teachers when developing writing skill in universities and language institutes.