WHY WAS ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING DIFFICULT FOR ME
...s a common difficulty for me. In English, adjectives usually precede the nouns they modify while in Arabic adjectives follow nouns. As I noticed, this difficulty occurs mostly with beginners and kind of disappears with intermediate or advance level students. This is the case because this rule is obvious and it doesn’t have many exceptions. However, students may write something like this: * there are three rules very important. Instead of: There are three very important rules. 2.Coordination In English, an item in a series is separated by comas, and the coordinate conjunction “and” is used just before the last word. The case in Arabic is different; each item in a series is preceded by the conjunction “wa” which is equivalent to “and”. Accordingly, the following sentence is perfectly correct in Arabic: * my favorite fruits are oranges and apples and bananas and grapes. 3.Articles In English, abstract words referring to ideas, attributes or qualities are used without the article “the” to refer to that idea which belongs to everybody or everything. In Arabic, however, such abstract words are preceded by a definite equivalent to “the” in English. As a result, Arab students often make mistakes such as the following: * the life is beautiful. Instead of: Life is beautiful. 4.Agreement Agreement is one of the common difficulties with Arab ESL students and me. In English, few adjectives show agreement in number with the nouns they modify, such as “this-these” and “that-those”. Other adjectives are used to modify singular as well as plural nouns. In Arabic, however, the situation is different. Adjectives agree in number and gender with the nouns they modify. As a result, agreement errors of this type occur commonly in the English writings of Arab students. For example, a student might write something like: * I would like to visit others states. Instead of: I would like to visit other states. 5.Prepositions Prepositions might be the most common difficulty for ESL students speaking different languages. They even pose difficulties for some university teachers. The reason for that is that there are some prepositions in English that have the same or similar function. For instance, the prepositions “in”, “at” and “on” in the following sentences indicate place with subtle differences in usage: -He is at home. -He lives on campus. We are usually unaware of such differences in usage. Arab students in particular have a big problem with such sentences because of their Arabic interference. When you translate the previous sentences into Arabic, one Arabic preposition “fi” is used to indicate the three meanings. So, when students are not sure which preposition to use in such sentences, they often compare these sentences with their Arabic equivalence giving a literal translation of that Arabic preposition in English. Such translation is usually the cause if errors like: * I had my exam in Monday. Instead of: I had my exam on Monday. Errors also occur because of the confusion between other prepositions such...