Writing Strategies of Tunisian MA History Students

Writing is difficult to master for foreign language learners. In the Tunisian context, English is a foreign language with French as a second language and Standard Arabic as a first language. Despite learning English for at least eleven years, first year Tunisian MA history students still find writing paragraphs in English difficult. To explore the challenges which first year Tunisian MA history students face in writing in English, an experiment in which they are asked to produce a short paragraph about a content specific topic is carried out. The present paper shows that even advanced learners studying History make various grammar and vocabulary errors reflecting their writing strategies. These errors are attributed, among other reasons, to various psycholinguistic phenomena, including negative transfer, borrowing, overextension of analogy, avoidance, overgeneralization, inadequate contextual use of grammatical forms, etc.