موجز عن البحث:
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The
purpose of this paper is to shed light on the validity of the controversial data-gathering
tool Grammaticality Judgment Task on measuring the grammatical competency of
Saudi EFL learners. Despite the widespread use of GJT in SLA research, it is
surrounded by a great deal of criticism. The present paper is part of a
larger study investigating the acquisition of past verb forms by Saudi EFL
learners. Thirty-six Saudi EFL learners took part in the study and were
divided into three groups as follows: guided-planning group, semi-guided
planning group, and control group. The task used in the study consisted of
twenty test items: 10 control test items, and 10 experimental test items. The
results did not reveal significant statistical differences between the three
groups. Also, the results did not reflect the actual grammatical competency of
the participants.
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ملخص المشاركة:
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The
literature reviewed so far shows that the acquisition of past forms in
English by Saudi learners is problematic, and the vast majority of the studies
attributed the hindrance of the acquisition of past forms in L2 English to
the interference of L1 Arabic (Mazyad, 1999; Bouras, 2006; AbuRiyah, 2011;
Al-Khawalda and Al-Oliemat, n.d.). This paper aims to investigate to what
extent Arabic influence Saudi EFL learners’ choices of past forms when
reporting in English. Also, the paper sheds light on the available properties
of the native language, which is Arabic, and whether they impede or
facilitate the acquisition of the target language, which is English.
Moreover, conducting a focused contrastive analysis on the past forms between
English and Arabic to help us understand similarities and differences between
the two languages.
In
order to identify the size of the problem, two sets of data were collected
from Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT), and Picture-Cued Storytelling Task.
The two data collection tools aimed to test the participants’ receptive
knowledge and intuitive judgment on grammatically deviant and the productive
knowledge by testing their ability to produce correct past forms of English.
Thirty-six Saudi students took place in this study, and they were divided
into three groups: guided-planning group, semi-guided planning group, and
no-planning group.
A
preliminary contrastive analysis shows that English and Arabic share
grammatical similarities in the past form. However, the collected data from
Grammaticality Judgment Task and Picture-Cued Storytelling Task show that the
participants have difficulties in utilizing the past forms and in making
clear judgments on about correct or deviant sentences, although guidance has
been provided. The results confirm that the participants have difficulties in
identifying and utilizing the correct past forms in English, specifically the
progressive and perfect forms. Hence, the results give evidence on the
hindering of the acquisition of the past forms in English by Arabic-speaking
learners.
The transfer case that should occur, in
theory, is positive as similarities were found between Arabic and English in
the past forms. Therefore, the current problem of the acquisition of the past
forms in English may not be attributed to L1 interference, but rather to
educational issues.
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