Abstract:

English Second Language (ESL) learners naturally make mistakes or errors in second language acquisition. This is also the case with Arabic learners of English. The authors of this paper present their preliminary observations of errors made by Arabic students based on 25 years of teaching experience in the Middle East. They differentiated the errors according to lexical-semantic-morphological, syntactic, mechanical, and ambiguous categories. In addition, they looked at interlingual causes --- direct transfer from their mother tongue to English (i.e., L1 to L2) and intralingual causes based on the fact that the learners do not know the linguistic rules of the L2. The examples observed by the researchers helped to determine the most frequent categories of errors and give practical solutions to teachers to prevent such errors from happening in the future. The study does not focus on specific assignments but on general observations over the years based on students correspondence. 

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