Teachers’ guide towards a contrastive analysis of Arabic and English.

There has been a relative lack of work in the field of FL teaching in relation to Arabic students learning English. Numerous works highlight the constant grammatical errors made by Arab students due to negative MT interference, which suggests the need for practical solutions to help teachers overcome this difficulty. Therefore the major focus of this dissertation is to reveal common errors, analyse them according to the CA and provide a set of personalised lesson plans based on CA for teachers to utilise and understand how L1 can heavily impact the SLA if used judiciously. This study also investigates teachers’ difficulties and identifies the importance of L1 usage by evaluating various teaching styles of the past and present; furthermore it justifies the reapplication of CA. All this is obtained through an extensive study of relevant literature and the implementation of empirical research. The later was carried out through a case study at The European Institute of Human Sciences using different data collection techniques. Two EFL teachers were interviewed: NE and NA speakers. A more detailed analysis was carried out with the NA teacher and his twenty-five students through classroom observations, questionnaire and a thirty-minute test. The participants were all intermediate level students. This research produced a number of key findings: both the teachers recognised the positive effect of L1 inclusion. The students displayed a relative need for CA, and ironically when their errors were defined using CA, it revealed how the NL plays a substantial role by causing negative interference. Additionally, the common errors detected from the test are listed as follows: word order, genitive possessive case, adjectives and personal pronouns. The main conclusion to be drawn from this work is that L2 learning is inadequate without referring to L1; moreover Arabic and English both share a linguistic and genetic relationship which is only made apparent after the CA study. Overall this study recommends the need for further research and work to continue the re-establishment of CA, supplying teachers’ with practical guidelines and gathering more examples of errors committed by Arab students, and the means of addressing them by adopting a similar approach to that outlined here in the sample lesson plans.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

ma

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Qasim, Maria Jannat

• PE Saesneg
• PJ Semitaidd

Dc Identifier Grantnumber

UWTSD

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.uwtsd.ac.uk:434