Langauge structure Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Langauge structure - Assignment Example Arabski (1979 pp.135-143) says that making errors is part of the process of acquiring a language and is mostly influenced by transference and simplification. English and Arabic languages are different in many ways and as expected Arab speakers encounter many phonological, morphological and semantic problems when learning English. Arabic speakers do not recognize how to use adjectives in sentences. This is because in Arabic adjectives come after the noun whereas in English adjectives come before the noun. Most Arabic speaks erroneously transfer their knowledge of adjectives during the course of learning English (Cruse 1986 pp.40). This paper will discuss how Arab speakers struggle using adjectives while giving specific learner errors. The discussion will focus on some published language teaching material and it will analyze, compare and evaluate these errors. Project Description Theoretical Framework Studying errors second language learners make is a field that has created a buzz amon g linguists. Several theories have been advanced, and one such theory is the Contrastive Analysis This is a process that explains the comparative aspects of the Mother tongue (MT) and the Target Language (TL). James (1998) provides examples for instance consonant clusters, tense and comparison of the form and meaning of the two languages. This according to Fries (1945) is supposed to determine the oddities that result to interference and error. The reason being a second language learner may find some aspects of the target language easy to learn and others hard. The assumption second language learners make is that it will be easy to learn those aspects that are similar to their native language and very difficult to learn those aspects that are different from their native language. Contrastive Analysis has been conducted on many languages. Khuwaileh and Al Shoumali (2000) studied the writing of Arabic learners of academic English. He was focusing the frequent errors on coherence tense errors, lack of cohesion and parts of speech errors. The study compared the Arabic language and English. Bataineh (2005) investigated the problems Arab learners of language and translators’ encounter when translating Arabic sentences. The focus was on articles. Contrastive Analysis has faced some criticism and thus other theories emerged to fill the gap. The theory advocating for the existence of a â€Å"psychological structure latent in the brain† brought in the idea of Interlanguage (IL) seen in the process of learning a second language. Selinker (1972 pp.209-231) claimed that second language learners created some interim grammars in trying to achieve the target language but this vocabulary changes depending on the task of extraction and the context. IL is influenced by Transfer of training, Language transfer, Strategies of second language communication, Overgeneralization and Strategies of second language learning. As it is impossible to acquire a second language w ithout making errors, many linguists have invested time and resources in analyzing errors and why they occur. There are several reasons for studying errors. According to Corder (1975 pp.122-154) errors can tell a linguist how much a second language learner has acquired and what other aspects of the language require to be emphasized. Also as, James (1980) put it, errors are also markers of how the process of acquiring a second