Jordanian Learners’ Acquisition of English Nominal-Phrase Premodification

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating Jordanian learners' acquisition of nominal phrase premodification. The predominant concerns in this piece of research were to identify the problems that Jordanian learners encounter in their acquisition of English premodification and to identify some plausible causes of such problems. One special problem lies in the fact that English imposes certain rules and conventions on the sequence of premodifiers in nominal phrases, while Arabic offers its users more flexible strings. The findings revealed that Jordanian learners of English are confronted with a difficulty during their acquisition of the sequences of premodifiers in terms of recognition, correction and production. Statistical evidence was provided to prove the validity of the presumed hypotheses. As far as the causes of errors are concerned, the study revealed that the learners' errors are caused by interlingual and intralingual transfer. Additionally, the researcher attributes some errors to the context of learning which does not place proper emphasis on the semantic and psycholinguistic aspects of the phenomenon.