Problems faced by the Speakers of Urdu in learning Spatial Prepositions; A comparison of L1 and L2 Acquisition of English Spatial Prepositions

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Acknowledgement

I would like to sincerely thank my friends, family and colleagues for the endless understanding, guidance and patience, and most importantly, the support and friendship during my studies. The mentorship of these people has been paramount in facilitating me a well-formed experience which has always provided unswerving guide in achieving my goals. They encouraged me to go further with all my projects and helped me groom into an independent thinker and a good student.

It is due to the humble efforts of my leaders and mentors that I have inculcated in me the confidence to develop my own individuality and sufficiency which enables me to perform the tasks with independence. In the course of completing this dissertation, I am also grateful to my co-workers and friends who provided me enough knowledge and entertainment and proved to be helpful in performing the huge research work. Besides this, the consistent guidance and assistance from my colleagues also gave me distinctive opportunities to gain a wider breadth of experience and undertake an extensive research work.

Finally, and most importantly, I extend sincere thanks to my family members, who provided utmost care and all the strength and encouragement. My faith and ambition has become stronger due to the prayers of my family who tolerated my temper and complains with patience. Without this unending support and encouragement, the completion of this enormous research work would not have been possible.

Declaration

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTII

DECLARATIONIII

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW1

Spatial Prepositions1

Problems faced by Urdu Speakers8

Hemispheric Asymmetry in Morphological Processing13

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter discusses the fundamentals and the background of the topic. It will elaborate upon the problems faced by the Speakers of Urdu in learning Spatial Prepositions.

Semantics of spatial prepositions

In the mainstream of L2 teaching and learning, the spatial prepositions have taken a long way to find a way in the research field. As is pointed out by Littlemore &Low (2006a), “in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the problems that figurative language poses for foreign language learners, how learners cope with figurative language, how they learn it, and what sort of instruction facilitates the ability to communicate in the short term, and learn in the long term. However, in contrast to the vast literature on metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive issue in general, metaphor in L2 teaching and learning has only been investigated in limited depth and scope. Amongst these limited studies that have examined how L2 learners actually use or understand metaphors in various genres such as speech or writing, it is noted that spatial prepositions present a hurdle for second language learners ...