A Review of EFL Arab Learners’ Language: Pitfalls and Pedagogical Implications

Abstract

Nonetheless, that there are distinguished, qualified, specialized and experienced teachers; in addition to good overall designing and planning; comprehensive and purposive curriculum, integrated textbooks, but the achievement is still below the expectations of all who are concerned with English language teaching in the Arab world. The current study is set out to review kinds of pitfalls encountered by EFL Arab Learners at the tertiary level in the use of the most three problematic syntactic/semantic sub-categories: prepositions, articles and discourse markers, respectively, in their written and oral discourse. The aim is twofold, by reviewing the empirical studies conducted in the last two decades, the study seeks to probe, introduce and report first: the most common kinds of pitfalls Arab undergraduates face in learning English as a foreign/second language. Second: to reveal possible sources and causes lie behind these pitfalls and what insights and pedagogical implications might be offered. Pitfalls were discussed, conclusions had been drawn, implications and future directions were provided at the end. This is followed by practical suggestions to minimize the occurrence of pitfalls in their formal English.

A Linguistic Analysis on Errors Committed by Jordanian EFL Undergraduate Students: A Case of News Headlines in Jordanian Newspapers

“…To say it differently, L1 interference affects L2 learning and practicing, leading to committing errors of such a kind. Supporting this idea is Tahaineh (2014) who concluded that the majority of ESL/EFL Arab students made enormous errors in using the articles in English due to the interference of their L1. An additional reason behind this error could be linked to what is called intra-lingual transfer, more specifically; incomplete application of a rule.…”

Arab EFL Learners’ Writing Errors: A Contrastive Error Analysis Study

“…The great number of prepositions, along with their dissimilar meaning in both Arabic in English, can be an obstacle for EFL learners to learn this item of the language. For instance, learners tend to translate the Arabic preposition system into English which results in making errors in the use of the English prepositions (Mourssi & Al Hilali, 2015;Tahaineh, 2014). In addition, English and Arabic possessive noun phrases are identically structured, however, Arab learners sometimes make errors in the use and position of ''s' (Qasim, 2013).…”

English Education Reform in Arab World

“…For example, they would write "I am interested with it" instead of "I am interested in it." Such mistakes occur because Arabic prepositions follow different rules and as mentioned earlier in this article and Arab learners would use correct prepositions only if they had an equivalent in their native language or else they would omit or use wrong prepositions (Tahaineh, 2010).…”

“…Pedagogically, these learners could be taught to be careful when they make such transfers. They can be made aware of positive and negative transfers while teaching grammar (Tahaineh, 2010). Thus, identification of the problem could lead to designing new pedagogical strategies for teaching syntax to Arab learners and creating awareness in them to avoid such errors.…”

“…They should be made conscious of its importance in producing coherent and cohesive writing. A study in the contrastive analysis of discourse markers would definitely help teachers and learners alike in comprehending mistakes and errors produced during learning English (Tahaineh, 2010). The detailed contrastive analysis and error prediction can significantly improve the pace of instruction.…”