Abstract

The article investigated if a significant relationship existed between Arab EFL learners’ and the English sentence pattern identified. The participants were 64 third-year college students studying in the Department of Linguistics at Princess Nourah University, Saudi Arabia. They were assigned 28 literary texts and asked to derive examples for each of the nine sentence patterns listed in Stageberg (1981). An ANOVA test at alpha level P  0.05 and a post hoc test were used to analyze data. The findings of the study showed a highly significant result at p  between participants’ performance and the pattern identified. Seven levels of difficulty were identified, where Pattern 1 was the easiest and Pattern 8 was the most difficult. The main components of each English sentence pattern were also investigated to find possible sources of difficulty, such as the use of the copula; transitive, intransitive, and ditransitive verbs; dative case; and double object structure. The denoting of referents, dative case, and double object structures were found to be the main sources of difficulty.

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