The current study aimed at investigating the salient syntactic and semantic errors made by Jordanian English foreign language learners as writing in English. Writing poses a great challenge for both native and non-native speakers of English, since writing involves employing most language sub-systems such as grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation. A total of 30 Jordanian English foreign language learners participated in the study. The participants were instructed to write a composition of no more than one hundred and fifty words on a selected topic. Essays were collected and analyzed statistically to obtain the needed results. The results of the study displayed that syntactic errors produced by the participants were varied, in that eleven types of syntactic errors were committed as follows; verb-tense, agreement, auxiliary, conjunctions, word order, resumptive pronouns, null-subject, double-subject, superlative, comparative and possessive pronouns. Amongst syntactic errors, verb tense errors were the most frequent with 33%. The results additionally revealed that two types of semantic errors were made; errors at sentence level and errors at word level. Errors at word level outstripped by far errors at sentence level, scoring respectively 82% and 18%. It can be concluded that the syntactic and semantic knowledge of Jordanian learners of English is still insufficient.

The study aims at shedding light on pragmatic failure committed by Jordanian learners of English when producing some language functions in light of two variables; gender and power. The sample of the study consists of 30 undergraduate students at Amman Arab University majoring in English language and translation. The data was collected through a completion test including four items representing four language functions: accepting compliment, asking for permission, expressing congratulation and expressing condolence. Each one of the four items consists of three situations; where the addressee is male, where the addressee is female and where the addressee is someone in power. The findings of the study revealed that the tested students showed good level of communicative competence. This success is attributed to the use of common (refers to the familiarity and commonality of the expressions) and neutral (i.e. they are not gender or status based expressions) expressions by students when responding to the test items. The pragmatic failure committed by students refer to lack of linguistic competence (i,e, pragnalinguistic failure), socio-cultural differences and pragmatic transfer (i.e. sociopragmatic failure)

The current research paper attempted at investigating the use of prepositions of standard, prepositions of possession and prepositions of accompaniment by some Jordanian learners of English. A total of 53 Jordanian English Majors participated in the study from the department of English language at Princess Alia University College. In collecting the needed data for the purpose of the study, the researchers employed fifteen items of a multiple choice test. The results of the study showed that Jordanian learners of English encountered moderate difficulty in learning the three aforesaid usages of prepositions. This difficulty is ascribed mainly to first language interference more than intralingual interference. It was also found that prepositions of standard are the most difficult to learn by the participants, followed by prepositions of accompaniment and prepositions of possession respectively.

Causative-inchoative construction is a pair of verbs discussing the same notion, which is a state of change with a different form for each verb. It has been noted that causative-inchoative alternation constitutes a learnability problem for Arab EFL learners and very few studies addressed this language form among Arab learners and more specifically Jordanian learners of English. The present study is an attempt to measure the perception and production of English causative-inchoative alternations by learners whose native language is Arabic. In collecting the required data for the study, grammaticality judgement and correction task was used. A total of 24 Jordanian English majors partook in the study. Having analyzed the data statistically, the study results depicted that comprehending and producing causative and inchoative constructions by Jordanian English majors is not an easy task. It was also found that causative structures are more readily to acquire than their inchoative counterparts. More precisely, it could be argued that Jordanian learners of English acquire the causative form earlier than the inchoative form. Finally, the results revealed that language transfer is the driving force of acquiring causative-inchoative structures, where a great deal of errors can be traced back to Arabic. The study arrived at the conclusion that the participants have a weak competence of causative-inchoative forms which is best exhibited in their responses to the items of grammaticality judgement task. This conclusion could be attributed to the fact that Arabic and English vary greatly with respect to encoding causative-inchoative forms.

This study aims to identify the purposes of passive construction in political news reports. The study also examines how the use of passive voice affects readers' attitudes towards political issues. The use of passive voice can lead to ambiguity, affecting the clarity of meaning by hiding the identity of the doer of the action. However, being vague about the doer of the action is primarily deliberate in political news to serve particular purposes. To collect data, the researchers refer to three newspapers, namely The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Some articles discussing political issues were carefully chosen from those newspapers. The analysis of the results reveals that the passive voice is used in the selected political news reports to fulfill four main purposes; first, when the journalist emphasizes the action rather than the doer of the action, he omits by phrase, replacing it with marginal information. Second, when the subject of the sentence is the core of the discussion, the journalist ends the passive sentence with by phrase. Third, passive construction is used when political news writers avoid assigning responsibility to anybody. Fourth, the passive is used in political reports with modal auxiliaries when the writers want to express their opinion clearly about what is possible, necessary, or prohibited. The analysis of results also reveals that the use of passive voice can contribute actively to changing the attitudes and views of the recipients.