ENGLISH GRAMMAR

English Grammar

English Grammar

Part 1.

This paper will attempt to explore the problems faced by Arab learners of English language when they try to correctly learn English articles. There are many reasons and exploring each and every aspect will require a large amount of work. However, some of the major difficulties can be addressed here.

In this paper, the major problems faced by Arab learners of English are underlined and how Arab learners rely heavily on other measures to learn English which would not be conducive such as attempts to pronounce English words by relying on consonants. This is just an example. The basic problem that Arab learners of English face in their initial stages is that they rely on the lexical structure of their mother tongue. The Arabic language has a different orthography than English language. The fact is that Arabic is different than the English language because it is a Semitic language. This makes Arabic very much different than the English language. The chances that an Arabic learner of English would make a mistake when he tries to communicate or use English is very high owing to the many differences that exist between the English and the Arabic language (CASPARI , 1967, pp 76).

Arabic has three consonant roots and each of them allows parts of speech to be formed by the combination of the fixed vowel patterns. Parts of speech also form when any of these consonants make a combination with an affix. Also, the patterns in the Arabic language tend to be vastly different than the ones found in the English language. Hence, when an Arab tries to learn English, he is faced with a great deal of confusion when eh attempts to find the patterns that are present in Arabic language in the English language. The net result is that the Arab learner is unable recognize and distinguish the parts of speech and articles that are found in English language. The net result is that the Arab learner is not able to make a difference between the noun and verb or noun and adjective. Thus, he faces great difficulty in learning the articles (CASPARI , 1967, pp 76).

Another major difference in the English and Arabic language is that while the Arabic language has one single present tense, the English language on the other hand, has both the simple and the continuous form. The Arabic language also does not have verbs that could be used to indicate a thing that is present in the present tense. These are some of the major differences that cause many problems fire the Arab learners of English language. Another difference is that the present prefect tense is not employed in Arabic. This is because in Arabic, there is no distinction among the actions that have occurred in the past. Also, another profound difference is that the modal verbs are not present in the Arabic language.

The Arabic language has its own use of definite articles that are in no way same or similar ...