Abstract
The present study investigates the effect of the first language (L1) on learners by using the negative and the positive evidence in the classrooms while teaching English directional prepositions such as ‘to’ and ‘into’. It is assumed that Arabic has two versions of ‘to’. It has the directional interpretation without boundary-crossing which is equivalent to the English ‘to’; whereas, it also denotes a similar interpretation to English directional preposition ‘into’ which is unavailable in Arabic and involves boundary-crossing. The study considers two groups to examine the effect of the overlaps, who are at an intermediate stage of development; the experiment group (E.G.) and the control group (C.G.). The control group is the base to measure the effectiveness of the treatments on the experiment groups’ judgments. Hence, an Acceptability Judgment Task is devised to elicit participants’ judgments on the task items in the pretest and the posttest. Results show clear advantage of the negative evidence in the experiment group’s performance in the posttest in learning ‘to’ with and without boundary-crossing. There is a difference in the experiment group’s performance in the posttest in learning ‘into’ with the boundary-crossing event after receiving the positive evidence. Similarly, a difference was observed in the experiment group’s judgment with those of the control group in the comparison between ‘to’ and ‘into’ with the boundary-crossing event in the posttest.
Highlights
The studies of argument structures in the first and second languages have increased the interest in the field of Second Language acquisition (SLA)
The results suggested that the overlap relationship possesses learnability problems for the L2 learners to adopt two type of scenarios
The present study aims to explore the potential effect of the overlap between L1 and L2 in learning of the English directional preposition ‘to’ and ‘into’ with manner-of-motion verbs among the Saudi Arabic speakers
Summary
The studies of argument structures in the first and second languages have increased the interest in the field of Second Language acquisition (SLA). The present study aims to explore the potential effect of the overlap between L1 and L2 in learning of the English directional preposition ‘to’ and ‘into’ with manner-of-motion verbs among the Saudi Arabic speakers. Saudi Arabic will be the subset and English will be the superset in relation of the directional B-C preposition ‘into’ Since this preposition is unavailable in Arabic, the positive evidence would permit L2 learners to broaden their L2 grammar. In light of previous researches on argument structures, the present study aims to investigate the Arabic directional preposition ‘to’ in relation to manner-of-motion to goal constructions. This study determines the effect of both treatments in learning L2 argument structures in relation to manner-of-motion constructions This is the first study to address the relationship of the overlap between L1 and L2 using animation clips. This study examines if learners are successful in learning the structures based on the given treatments
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