Exploring Cultural Barriers in EFL Arab Learners’ Writing

Every language is rooted in the culture of its speaking community which makes learning a foreign language especially challenging if the culture of the native language and the target language are too distant such as the case of English for Algerian learners. The present paper spotlights cultural difference between Arabic-speaking and English-speaking communities examining the impact of such cultural barriers on Arab EFL learners’ writing as written texts and the ways they are used vary according to cultural groups. For this purpose a case study of 16 EFL students from the University of Tlemcen (Algeria) was undertaken. Contrastive rhetoric was used to explain many problems identified in students’ English compositions. Relying on a qualitative data analysis, the results indicated that culturally bound differences related to some linguistic factors such as alphabet, letters, way of writing, word patterns and grammar, as well as some rhetorical and syntactic styles namely coordination, subordination and metaphorical styles were responsible for a large potential for errors and difficulties faced by Algerian EFL university students when producing written English. This paper closes with a set of pedagogical implications which encourage the use of contrastive rhetoric as a tool to understand cultural differences both in teacher education and writing instruction. Techniques and strategies are proposed to help reduce cultural barriers and build bridges between the writing patterns of the two languages in order to achieve successful communication between members of different societies in this era of globalization.