This study examines the effect of enhanced input of lexical chunks on the performance of Arabic-speaking English learners’ writings. Lexical chunks, containing their forms, meanings, and functions, stored and recovered as a single component in brains, may alleviate language processing problems and increase language proficiency. The research examines if enhancing exposure to lexical chunks might advance foreign language learners’ writing in Saudi Arabia. The study attempts to find an answer to the following question: What is the potential impact of rich input of lexical chunks on Arabic-speaking learners of English e-mail writing competence? A total of 34 female university students were divided into two groups and given a pre-test and post-test in which they wrote and composed e-mails in English. The experimental group was then exposed to a treatment (i.e., extensive exposure to lexical chunks available via an e-mail phrase bank). After eight weeks of treatment, the experimental group outperformed the control group on the post-treatment test. The results demonstrate that learners with more lexical chunks are more likely to perform better and vice versa. The results indicate that the experimental group had a favorable attitude about lexical chunks through the e-mail phrase bank. The results suggest that abundant input of lexical chunks aids in improving learners’ writing performance. The findings also suggest that increased input of lexical chunks may lessen the potential negative transfer of the mother language, therefore refining writing in terms of collocations, grammatical structures, and discourse coherence.

Nowadays children are highly exposed to video games. The number of hours that children spend playing digital games has rapidly increased throughout the COVID-19 lockdown. A survey was conducted in this study to determine whether playing online video games has an impact on English proficiency and whether online gaming positively contributes to foreign language development. A total of 62 parents of online video gamers (42 males, 20 females) aged between 5 and 13 years responded to a variety of questions on the number and quality of their children's disclosure to digital games. The findings point to considerable progress and suggest that online games have a significant influence on foreign language development. Areas of the greatest improvements were lexicon and speaking. Going deeper, the findings suggest that extended exposure to online video games during the COVID-19 lockdown played a big part in mitigating anxiety and enhancing confidence and motivation toward learning the target language. The findings demonstrate that online video games offer a positive stimulating authentic environment, which plays a vital role in mastering the target language effectively.

Empirical evidence suggests that the first language (L1) has a fundamental role in the second language (L2) development, especially at the lexical level. Studies of L2 development have reported a relationship between negative L1 transfer and L2 poor comprehension. It is evident that cross-linguistic transfer might also take place during the course of third language (L3) development and that the impact may be from L1. At the lexico-semantic level, this study examines onomatopoeia as a property of L3 acquisition that requires Arabic learners of Chinese to identify some new lexicons with meanings and functions that might not exist in their L1. Given that onomatopoeia, in general, is often not taught sufficiently and explicitly in many language classroom contexts across the world, the purpose of the current study is to determine the extent to which transfer from L1 influence L3 comprehension and to establish the conditions in which L1 was the prevailing impact. A total of 45 Arabic native speakers were asked to translate a number of Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeic expressions (n = 20) into Arabic. The findings suggest that Arabic learners find Mandarin Chinese onomatopoeic expressions, that neither have Arabic nor English direct counterparts, significantly challenging. The study concludes that enhancing awareness of lexical transfer through a focused consideration of the common difficulties seems crucial for L3 learners to attain comprehensive mastery.

Recent research has shown that learners demonstrate huge variability in second language (L2) end-state attainment. While some L2 learners attain native-like command, others only attain an undeveloped command and some stuck in between. It is also assumed that early learners often surpass owing to Lenneberg’s Critical Period Hypothesis (1967) that proposes that early onset often advance L2 development. This study investigates the extent to which, age is associated with mastering the target language among late versus early Arabic-English bilinguals. Specifically, this study concerns itself with the issue of how Arabic-English bilinguals typically perceive the right ordering of multiple consecutive adjectives (e.g., the small yellow bird). A considerable amount of literature has established that L2 learners encounter challenges in mastering the right sequence of adjectives, particularly when there are several adjectives modifying a single noun. To determine how Arabic-learners of English perceive English descriptive adjective orderings, this study observes whether an earlier age of first contact with English enhances the learners’ accuracy and the reaction time. To test this assumption, the intuitions of two groups of early (n=8) vs. late (n=8) Arabic-English bilinguals in the United Kingdom (i.e. Leeds) were compared for English descriptive adjective ordering preferences through a Speeded Acceptability Judgment Task (SAJT). The participants were requested to show their ordering preferences for a couple of multi-adjective strings (n=16). The findings suggested that early Arabic-English bilinguals significantly outperformed late Arabic-English bilinguals in terms of exhibiting native-like ordering preferences. The study concludes that early exposure is more likely to facilitate mastering the target system and that it generally accelerates L2 development. This study also concludes that accuracy and response time may reflect the L2 development. The study suggests a number of pedogeological implications for teaching and learning an L2.

This paper reports on an experimental study addressing second language acquisition of English quantifiers by Arabic speakers. Due to several differences found between Arabic and English regarding types, meanings and functions of quantifiers, Arabic learners encounter challenges in mastering them properly. Unlike English, Arabic does not make lots of distinctions among the different meanings that each quantifier might bear; using the same quantifier to bear two or several meanings at the same time. Arabic, for instance, does not differentiate between countable and non-countable nouns using the same modifier in contrast to English. According to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2005, 2009; Choi & Lardiere, 2006), second language (L2) speakers must successfully reassemble existing features of their first language (L1) into the L2 feature-based sets in order to accommodate the L2 grammar. The researcher tests the validity of this prediction for the L2 acquisition of English quantifiers, which requires Arabic learners of English to remap semantic concepts of quantity onto new and different morpholexical configurations. Data from 40 L1 Arabic learners of English at different levels of proficiency and 20 native speakers who completed a picture/sentence matching task suggest that only the meanings which require different and new semantics-morphology remapping is difficult.