The Impact of Raising Awareness of Arabic and English Word Order Differences on Arabs’ English Use

Abstract

English is a language with a rigid word order, whereas Arabic is more flexible. Canonical English word order is often a challenge for users whose first language is flexible. This study explores how Arabic learners transfer their knowledge of Arabic word order styles into the English language, and it compares Arabic learners’ use of English word order before and after raising learners’ awareness of Arabic and English word order differences. The significance of this study is manifested in its employment of both Error Analysis and Contrastive Analysis to determine priorities for efforts. The study employed an action research design to investigate the impact of adapting Galperin’s teaching model alongside explicit teaching of differences in Arabic and English word order. Four Arabic English language teachers and 142 Saudi students participated in the present study. The participating students were taking a beginning-level English course at a Saudi university. Through mixed-method approaches, the findings of the pretest and posttest showed that some learners used their knowledge and experience of Arabic standard and slang word order to compose sentences in English. This study concludes that the intervention helps Arabic learners avoid committing word order errors, as the posttest scores are better than the pretest scores at a statistically significant level.