ANALYZING THE INFLUENCE OF L1 URDU SYNTAX ON ESL ACADEMIC WRITING ERRORS

Abstract

The current research investigates how the mother tongue, Urdu, has affected the writing of the students as a Second Language (English) among a group of undergraduate students in the universities of Punjab, Pakistan. A bigger sample of essays gathered at 12 universities were formed, and a purposive subsample of 155 under graduate subjects who had declared Urdu as their mother tongue were separated. 16 error categories were formed, these categories were taken from International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). Error analysis of all essays were done from the Chat GPT using the model of o3 mini high. Main aim was to use it as a preliminary annotation instrument to find any possible sites of error present in the essays. A comprehensive analysis was conducted to see, the identified errors were due to Urdu mother tongue or not. The findings indicate that constructions of nouns and nominals (omission of articles, unidiomatic postpositions phrases) and formal mistakes (spelling rules, absence of vowels) have the greatest error rate, and the number two is taken by errors in verb agreement and tense-aspect changes. There is also widespread cross-linguistic influence in the discourselevel features, namely, the excessive use of causal connectors that reflect the Urdu ki wajah se (due to) and repetitive chains of conjunctions. These results confirm contrastive analysis projections and show that fossilization can be early in low-input ESL environments. The research suggests introducing brief focused contrastive lessons in the courses on academic writing. This would assist in averting fossilization and enhancing accuracy of undergraduate pupils who speak Urdu.