Knowledge and Use of Grammar among Indonesian Second Language Learners of Arabic: Focus on Grammatical Gender Agreement

Abstract

This study investigates spoken production of Indonesian L2 learners of Arabic examined by the frameworks of Local Impairment Hypothesis (LIH) and Missing Surface Inflectional Hypothesis (MSIH). Because the feature strength is absent from L2 learners, LIH claims that they will suffer from impairment at any stages of development. Accordingly, all participants will experience variability in the use of gender agreement. Conversely, MSIH predicts that such impairment L2 learners exhibit is superficial. Based on the view of MSIH, variability occurred in the inflectional surface feature system is because of mapping features to the correct inflected forms. Thirty-two subjects who participated in this study were divided into two distinct groups: intermediate and advanced. Grammaticality Judgment Task was employed to collect the data of knowledge of features, while Sentence Fragment Completion Task was utilised to elicit the use of surface inflected forms. Although the accuracy in the production of inflectional morphology was moderately low, the findings revealed that most subjects were aware of the grammatical features being examined in the study. Eventually, the findings confirm the framework of MSIH and were not in line with LIH claiming that the higher variability will occur in both tasks at any stage of development.