The Acquisition of Prepositional Phrases Among Arab Learners of EFL

Introduction

Language e acquisition and learning involve understanding as well as mastery of what constitutes its grammar. Learning a new language requires mild attention of several grammatical aspects and their origin. The relationship between these aspects reveals, and the interesting correlation between the two distinct styles and allows learners to adapt quickly with the new version. However, in acquiring the second language, learners need to pay much attention to a preposition and their correct use.

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Impressive, regardless of the mother tongue of a person, dealing with prepositions in the English language is remarkably the most outrageous thing to deal with as far as English as learners of Foreign Language (EFL). This usually happens because most EFL learners tend to relate the El prepositions with the ones in their mother tongue (Rizwan, Akhtar & Sohail, 2017). Lack of one to one mapping and the difference in the number of preposition between the languages is the main cause. Conversely, due to the high idiomatic relationship in the EL prepositional usage, specifically with prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs and, English prepositions' nuances in the natural manner of using such approaches make it difficult for EFL learners to bring a comprehensive relationship (Rizwan, Akhtar & Sohail, 2017). As a result, the most native EL speakers who are not sure of the proper form of usage of language and their proposition tend to find the whole process hard to go through especially in attempts to face the difference with a clear concept.

Moreover, the experience of a foreign language has been met with challenges which are associated with inference. Inference refers to the negative influence which the mother language, L1 has on the performance of the word being targeted. Research shows that the acquisition of the second language has a passive relationship with the acknowledgment of their linguistic influence which makes them be easily transferred. However, when the foreign language teacher decides to share his or her L1 with the students who have been foreign language learners, distinctive transfer errors is usually evident in a more natural way. This is a common issue between ESL learners and the author (Al-Bayati, 2013). The problem is evident in most Arabic learners who have significant differences in their L1 and the ESL.

The Arabic Prepositional System

There are several differences between the Arabic preposition and English. First, Arabic preposition is less in number as compared to their English counterpart thus making the learning and acquisition extremely challenging (Al-Bayati, 2013). The English language has approximately one hundred prepositions which differ significantly in certain aspects, whereas the number of Arabic prepositions is about twenty. Similarly, acquiring the second language among the Arabic learners becomes a challenge become of the possibility of groupings in the English preposition into both simple and complex forms while in Arabic there are no such classifications.

Moreover, most English propositions are not considered as a preposition with the Arabic language but instead portrayed as adverbs such as beneath, below, as down and over among others.

Common Grammatical Errors in Second Language Acquisition

Second language acquisition among the Arabic learner to develop a coherent relationship with the differences which exist between the L1 and the language they intend to learn. Many errors cause massive stalemate during acquisition and learning the second language. Notably, the common errors that are made by the Arabic learners in attempts to acquire the Second Language are related to articles, agreement ad propositions.

Notably, the agreement has approximately eighty errors and is based on the Arabic verbs agreement with their person, gender and number with the subject. Most Arab students find it extremely hard to distinguish between common errors (Al-Bayati, 2013). Similarly, the agreement between the adverbs or adjectives and the nouns which they modify reveals other types of agreement error. In English, significant few articles portray noun number which they change, thereby making it hard to create a comprehensive relationship between the nouns and their adjectival counterparts.

Article Errors

In English, most abstract words which refer to the attribute, ideas or qualities do not require articles while referring to the attribute or the concept which is common to everything or everybody. However, in Arabic, the abstract words are preceded by definite articles which are equivalent to "the" in English. As a result, this error which pertains to the misuse of English makes it difficult for the Arabic learner to have complete interrelations with the new language (Tahaineh, 2016). For instance, most students usually write the following while trying to bring the relationship to a unified whole.

Prepositional Errors

The position of the preposition is a great difficulty for most ESL learners due to the existence of various English prepositions that have similar functions. Prepositions such as 'in,' 'on' and 'at' when used in a sentence indicate place and usage with subtle differences (Johansson, 2017). As a result, most ESL learners are not sure of the right preposition to use specific sentences. Occasionally, they compare such sentences with the Arabic prepositions in English and end up with massive contrasting issues (Albirini, Saadah & Alhawary, 2019). Prepositions do not have a unified correlation especially when two different languages are used in making a comparison. On Arabic preposition can be translated in several forms in the English usage thereby making the translations to have errors; halting the process.

References

Al-Bayati, W. A. W. T. (2013). Errors made by Iraqi EFL undergraduates in the use of prepositions. Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov, Series IV: Philology & Cultural Studies, (1), 41-56.

Albirini, A., Saadah, E., & Alhawary, M. T. (2019). L1 and L2 transfer to L3 in L3 and L2 learners of Standard Arabic. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.

Johansson, B. (2017). The Use of English Prepositions in Swedish Schools: A survey study on language transfer effects on Swedish EFL learners in a Swedish upper secondary school.

Rizwan, M., Akhtar, S., & Sohail, W. (2017). An Analysis of Preposition (Idiomatic Phrases, Prepositional Phrases, and Zero Prepositions) Detection Errors in the Writing of Graduate ESL Learners of Pakistan. Global Journal of Human-Social Science Research.

Tahaineh, Y. S. (2016). Arab EFL university students' errors in the use of prepositions. Modern Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(6), 76-112.