Interlanguage Error Analysis: an Appropriate and Effective Pedagogy for Efl Learners in the Arab World

Book excerpt: First of all the author wants to make it crystal clear that the present work is of a great benefit both for the English and Arab learners of the target language either Arabic or English. This edition of the book pinpoints previous researchers' findings regarding English and Arabic phonological, morphological and syntactic similarities and differences and how all these differences result in mistakes and errors by the Arab learners of English in their learning process. These mistakes or errors are unconsciously or involuntarily made by Arab learners of English due to the differences between the system and sub-systems of the two languages. The present attempt is the result of my realization as an English language teacher as to how a teacher can minimize students difficulties in learning of English and maximize their knowledge, skills and competency of English as a foreign or second language. This is the first edition. The work is pedagogically oriented and primarily intended to make teaching-learning of English as a foreign/second language a bit easy especially for the first-year university students of English language in the Arab world: (Gulf area such as KSA, UAE, Kuwait, and the Middle East Area, such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and so on). The focus is on phonetic and morpho-syntactic variations in Arabic and English languages. This area of research becomes more interesting through the assumptions – (i) information about the differences and similarities between Arabic and English language is to be supplied at an early stage since this facilitates the students learning task, (ii) the differences are to be presented in pedagogically suitable format, (iii) it is useful to separate and present phonetics, morphological and syntactic categories as they function in suitable contexts and not merely abstract notions, (iv) before students may tackle contrastive analysis, they should have basic knowledge of Arabic and English languages similarities and differences and (v) pre-modification and post-modification of lexical and syntactic structures are to be explained appropriately.