Arabic Second Language Learning and Effects of Input, Transfer, and Typology

Mohammad T. Alhawary

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781626166479, 9781626166462
• eBook ISBN: 9781626166486
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Despite the status of Arabic as a global language and the high demand to learn it, the field of Arabic second language acquisition remains underinvestigated. Second language acquisition findings are crucial for informing and advancing the field of Arabic foreign language pedagogy including Arabic language teaching, testing, and syllabus design.

Arabic Second Language Learning and Effects of Input, Transfer, and Typology provides data-driven empirical findings for a number of basic and high-frequency morphosyntactic structures with two novel typological language pairings, examining Arabic second language acquisition data from adult L1 Chinese- and Russian-speaking learners of Arabic as a foreign language. Alhawary’s study examines the different processes, hypotheses, and acquisition tendencies from the two learner groups, and documents the extent of the successes and challenges faced by such learners in their L2 Arabic grammatical development during the first three years of learning the language. In addition, the book offers both theoretical and practical implications related to input exposure, L1 and L2 transfer, and typological and structural proximity effects.

This book serves as a valuable resource for both second language acquisition experts and foreign language teaching practitioners.

Chapter 1

Description of the Target Structures

The target forms discussed in this chapter include nominal gender agreement, verbal gender agreement, tense/aspect, and null subjects. The description provided pertains to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), comprising the main formal classroom input of the participants as evident in their assigned textbooks (see chapters 3–6). The description is not intended to be exhaustive. Focus is on those features relevant to the data investigated. The target forms are among the high-frequency and most essential core structures to which Arabic second/foreign learners are exposed in the first years of their learning and are characterized by a great degree of regularity.

1.1 Preliminaries

Before discussing the target forms, an overview of Arabic word structure is in order. Words in Arabic (as a Semitic language) have a unique underlying form–meaning relationship derived by combining a root and a pattern. The former (consisting of three to six consonants but most typically three) denotes the core semantic meaning while the latter (consisting of vowels and sometimes, additionally, a derivational affix/auxiliary consonant) carries some additional meaning. In other words, the complete meaning of a given word obtains only from combining both. Accordingly, a given word can have a large number of related words sharing the same root. Table 1.1 shows a list of related words derived from the root ʔ-k-l “that to do with eating.” The derivation is carried out by different types of affixation, including prefixes, suffixes, and infixes or circumfixes. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 (following O’Grady et al. 2009) show how the pattern -a-a- is affixed to the root ʔ-k-l “that to do with eating” to form the perfective/past tense and the pattern ya-u- is affixed to the same root to form the imperfective/present tense, respectively (see also Alhawary 2009a, 2011).

Learners of Arabic do not usually learn Arabic words or their derivation by combining a given root with a pattern from early on. Instead, they start by learning words (and storing them in memory) as base forms. They learn that certain words such as perfective/past tense and imperfective/present tense verbs inflected for third person singular masculine are base forms from which other (derived) verbs as well as active and passive participles are formed. For example, from the base form ʔakal “he ate,” another verb such as ʔakkal “he fed” is derived by duplicating the second root consonant to derive a causative meaning (see table 1.2). Similarly, singular nouns and singular (real) adjectives are introduced as base forms for the dual and plural of such forms (table 1.2).

Table 1.1Lexical derivation based on root

Figure 1.1Lexical derivation based on combining root- and pattern-bound morphemes to derive the past tense verb ʔakal “he ate”

Figure 1.2Lexical derivation based on combining root- and pattern-bound morphemes to derive the present tense verb yaʔkul “he eats/is eating”

Table 1.2Lexical derivation based on word base/stem

Although Arabic root system may not be relevant in Arabic L2 mental lexi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Transliteration Symbols
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Appendixes
• References
• Index
• About the Author