The Development of Verbal Structures in L2 Arabic - Article Example

The Theory Processability theory has an assumption that learners are bound to acquire the second language in a particular sequence. Every stage in the sequence is an imperative requirement for higher stage in the hierarchy where by any structure that is given will be produced by the learner of the language only if the required procedures for processing are available. The implicational hierarchy is founded on psychological constraints that are general such as word access, working memory capacity that is limited, the linearization problem and grammatical information storage that is temporary. Another version of Processability theory says it is ways in which linguistic non-linearity can be modeled by the inclusion of Lexical Mapping Theory and discourse functions. Processability Theory highlights the key principle as being the unification of grammatical information either across or within constituents. Processability theory predicts that morphemes are acquired in the following order: lexical morphemes, phrasal morphemes and lastly, inter-phrasal morphemes. The aims of the article The main aim of the study is to find out the developmental stages of morphology of Arabic as a second language within Processability Theory perspectives. It scrutinizes within verbal sentences. It gives information describing the morphological nature agreement in Modern Standard Arabic verbal structures and to get to know its typological features, for a reason of establishing a framework that permits one to point out the stages of development of MSA morphology agreement. It focuses particularly on the hierarchical acquisition of MSA verbal structures based on Processability Theory. Method of Study The study takes into consideration the nature and research methods that have been put in place to learners’ inter-language development through Processability Theory. The approach takes into account the nature of the study which examines the development of the learners’ inter-language and the constraints or limitations of cost and time. The design that considered the two factors is a cross-sectional quasi-longitudinal approach or method. Data Collection The data collection was carried out over a period two academic semesters in a cross-sectional quasi-longitudinal approach. The participants who were three in number were selected from three groups (Advanced, Intermediate and Beginners) at the Australian National University where they were studying Arabic as their second language. The Beginners get for hours of formal instruction every week in addition to a non-supervised language hour in the lab (5hrs multiplied by 13 weeks in a semester, it gives 65hour per semester; which will translate to about 130hour at the end of their first year. The intermediate class gets the same amount of hours per semester as the beginners class which totals to about 260 by the end of second semester. The advanced class gets 130 hours per semester which translate to about 390 hours by the end of the third year. At the time the first data was collected, the beginners who took part in the study has completed approximately 32 hour of formal instruction. The advanced class had completed 224 hour whereas the intermediate class had completed approximately 128 hours. All the learners committed three or more hours to Arabic tuition each week, had not studied Arabic prior to joining university, had no private tuition, and are not from an Arabic background. Participants were shown to pictures of trips, family, surrounding environment, parties and many others, then they were asked to talk about them. They were further asked questions relating to their family, studies, occupations, careers, friends and many others. All the interviews were tape recorded. The interviews which took between 7 to 15 minutes each were informally carried out to maximize the authenticity and spontaneity of data. The data was then analyzed and empirical finding deduced. Findings The results showed that the three learners produced the test structures in accordance with Processability Theory prediction. The beginner, Alice, had not produced any of the test structures during the first two sessions. At the third session Alice produced all the test structures save for the relative clause. The intermediate learner, Jonathan, produced all the test structures at the first session and the relative clause was produced once at the first session and not the subsequent sessions. The one time utterance of the relative clause that the learner exhibited was incorrect. The advanced learner, George, also produced all test structures save for the relative clause as early as session one of the data collection. George initially production of relative clause was at session four then five, but no context was recorded for this structure at session six. Critical Comments Arabic is a non-configurational Semitic language with complex and rich morphological and typological system majorly built on the concept of patterns and roots. Arabic stems are primarily formed by inserting of a mixture of affixes and the vocalism which shows some fissional feature as well. Consequently it is the morphology that is applied to indicate grammatical functions, by case making, and not the order of the word which is quite flexible. Arabic inflectional morphology, as opposed to Arabic derivational morphology is highly concatenative and regular. It applies the use of case marking (accusative, genitive and nominative) to mark relations in grammar between the utterances of various utterances. Arabic sentences are either verbal (non-equational) or verbless (equational). Verbless sentences comprises of only nominal constituents whereas verbal sentences have verbs. The rules which govern morphological agreement in the two types have been discussed by a number of Arabic linguists. Using affixes with one to one form-function relationship is the most straight forward way of hypothesis testing derived from the processability hierarchy. But owing to the highly Arabic language inflectional nature, in many instances, affixes do not demonstrate this one to one form-functional relationship. Subsequently a focused distributional analysis is needed to establish the relationship between the diacritic feature and the affix. The important of this theory in Arabic as a foreign language The empirical findings of the study support Processability Theory prediction. It points out that the test structures in Arabic developed in accordance with Processability Theory. The study findings support Processability Theory sequential stages of inter-language development and give evidence that learners obtained the structures accordingly. Studies on Arabic as a second language provide further evidence in support of Processability Theory universal hierarchy. It has heighted crucial issues: the question of the importance of specific target language grammar to predict the point of emergency of structures of target language during the process of development. The second issue is concerning the need to account for multiple structures at the stage level in the so called intra-stage level. The Processability Theory take into consideration the number of positive utterances produced by the learners out of the total number of a particular test structure to decide about emergence of structure. In Arabic it is used to predict the inter-stage development of the language and the process acquisition of Arabic as the second language. Reference Al Shatter, G. The development of Verbal Structures in L2 Arabic. The Australian National University Read More