Arab EFL Learners ’ Identification of English Sentence Patterns

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 < 0.05 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.


Arab EFL Learners' Identification of English Sentence Patterns
It is widely believed that most languages have similar sentence structures, but differ in their morphological structures (Haspelmath, 1993).Morphologically, languages are classified as either analytic or synthetic.An analytic language is one with little inflection whereas a synthetic one is inflectional.English is considered an analytic language while Arabic is synthetic (Al-Shujairi, 2015).Accordingly, many differences exist between the two languages.
An important aspect of such differences can be found in the two languages' sentence patterns.In English, words are arranged in patterns to give the correct meaning of the sentence.English sentence patterns are taught to EFL/ESL learners to improve their writing and speaking skills, and they are considered an important tool that students need to master for their reading and writing skills (Hostmeyer, 2016;Su, 2001).This knowledge is also crucial for precise translation production as well.Thus, not surprisingly, many books offer explanations and examples of how to form sentences in English following the main English sentence patterns to help develop flexibility and ease in written and reading work (Landon, 2013).
Many studies have compared Arabic and English sentence patterns (e.g., Alduais, 2012;Al-Shujairi, 2015;Breedlove, 2017) to raise awareness about how to construct sentences into common patterns to avoid confusion and add clarity to sentences.Breedlove's (2017) book helps English and Arabic students understand the differences between the two languages with respect to verb time, tense, aspect, mood, and transitive/intransitive structure.Alduais (2012) contrasted the simple sentence structure of English and Arabic to show that Arabic has four types of simple sentences (i.e., nominal, verbal, equational, and non-verbal) compared to English's single type (i.e., nominal).Al-Shujairi (2015) investigated transitivity and intransitivity in English and Arabic, noting similarities and differences.Both languages have transitive and intransitive verbs, but Arabic uses inflection to change an intransitive verb to a transitive one.
Yet few studies have focused on how well students identify English sentence patterns.Saif Al-Deen (2009) verified the hypothesis that "there is statistical significant differences among the Iraqi college students' ability in identifying sentence patterns" (p.11).She carried out an 18-item achievement test with 30 third-year college students in an English department in Iraq using the sentence patterns Stageberg (1981) identified.An analysis of the data showed that students could identify P1, P2, P3, and P4 well but not P5, P6, P7, P8, or P9.The study identified probable factors causing this low performance, such as pattern complexity and L1 interference, but these factors were not verified.Saif Al-Deen suggested the need for further research to determine the possible influence that Arabic sentence patterns might have on learners' ability to identify and use English sentence patterns correctly.A review of the literature found no further studies on EFL learners' ability to identify sentence patterns.Such studies are used as an assessment tool that is crucial to the education process where learners' needs are addressed, which may in turn result in having effective teaching plans.Three types of assessments exist: initial, summative, and formative.Initial assessments are used to identify learning and support needs before the start of the learning process to produce successful teaching plans.Summative assessment measures students' achievement at the end of semester to ensure that they have met the required standard to earn certification.Formative assessment provides a frequent and interactive assessment to measure students' progress and understanding to identify needs and adjust teaching appropriately (Bloom, Hastings, & Madaus, 1971).Thus, a measure that assesses learners' ability to identify English sentence patterns correctly would be useful in any of these processes (i.e., identify weaknesses for teaching, monitor progress, and assess learners' performance against specified targets).
As an EFL teacher for 28 years who has been teaching English sentence patterns for 15 years as part of a linguistics course, I found that the results of Saif Al-Deen's (2009) study to, at first glance, not correspond to my students' performance.I became interested in further investigating how Arab EFL learners identify English sentence patterns by testing the null hypothesis that "no statistically significant relationship exists between students' performance and the pattern they identified."To this end, the current study uses a different assessment method and a bigger number of participants.It also fills the gap by investigating the probable reasons behind students' failure or low performance in identifying any of the tested sentence patterns if they occur by analyzing the basic linguistic elements in each sentence pattern and by determining if Arabic sentence patterns have any influence on students' performance.

Statement of the Study Problem
This study aims to assess Arab ELF learners' ability to identify English sentence patterns by testing the null hypothesis that "no statistically significant relationship exists between the students' performance and the pattern they identified" and examining the possible influence of Arabic sentence patterns on students' ability or inability to identify them.Different linguistic elements will be investigated to shed light on the sources of difficulty.
Most errors in writing and reading are attributed to a lack of awareness of how to construct a proper English sentence pattern (Hostmeyer, 2016;Su, 2001).In this paper, I will conduct a formative assessment with 64 Arab EFL students to investigate their ability to identify English sentence patterns in literary texts.This study may contribute to a growing understanding of EFL learners' sources of errors, which will help teachers adopt more effective instruction in English sentence patterns.

Aims of the Study
This paper has a twofold aim: The first is to test the null hypothesis that "no statistically significant relationship exists between the students' performance and the English pattern they identified."The second is to find sources of difficulty facing Arab EFL learners when they identify English sentence patterns and then determine if they are related to the negative influence of L1.

Assessment Tool
The present study used a different assessment tool than was used in Saif Al-Deen's ( 2009) study.Students were asked to identify English sentence patterns by deriving examples from novels and short stories rather than giving them sentences and asking them to state the patterns.In other words, language and literature were incorporated.Many studies have demonstrated the popularity of using literature as a tool to teach language skills and language areas such as grammar (Collie & Salter, 1987;Hismanoglu, 2005;Sage, 1987).These studies have suggested that literary texts can be a rich source for appropriate pedagogically designed materials for use by language teachers.Abdulmughni (2016) stated that using literature is the best way to speed the language learning process and facilitate students' enjoyment and motivation.This type of assessment can give a measure for understanding where students are put at ease while enjoying reading different novels and stories.

Participants
The participants of the study were 64 third-year college students studying at the Department of Linguistics at Princess Nourah University, Saudi Arabia.They have almost the same English background and study the same English courses.As part of their program, these students complete a course in linguistics in which they study English sentence patterns among other aspects of the language.The textbook used is An Introductory English Grammar (4th ed.) by Norman C. Stageberg.

Procedure
As part of their course in linguistics, the participants received explanation and practice on the basic English sentence patterns.Most grammar books (e.g., Stageberg, 1981) agree that there are nine main English sentence patterns (see Table 1).To measure the participants' performance and understanding of these patterns, a formative assessment was conducted.Students were assigned 28 works of literature (see Appendix A) and asked to choose nine of them from which to derive four examples of each English sentence pattern.Participants were directed from the beginning to pay attention to documentation, so the source of the examples could be easily validated.For each example, they gave the title of the work, the author, the page, and line number.Each student was asked to provide 36 examples from 9 works of literature.The total number of correct sentences derived from 28 literary sources was 1608 sentences out of 2304 (see Table 2) An ANOVA single factor test was conducted to detect any statistically significant relationship between the students' performance and the English sentence patterns they identified.An alpha of P < 0.05 was used as the cutoff for significance.A post hoc test was implemented to define levels of difficulty.

Results and Discussion
The analysis of the data showed that the relationship between participants' performance and the English sentence patterns they identified was highly significant, F (8,567) = 11.14, P = 0.00.The data are summarized in Table 3.The P value (0.00) is smaller than 0.05, so we reject the null hypothesis that "no statistically significant  rbs "to be" and ubject with a p be," which has studies to be attributed to th of "to be" an i, Carter, & G y by verbs lik o copula," wh se with the ver ese three patte found in ident found the ver Linguistics ing sentence p one, followed evel), and 8 (th atterns in liter und to be the m s ( 2009), which ded that all p asiest pattern t s 1, 2, 3, and 4 ern 1 is in the vel.A third dif tern 6 was co in the current he current study l-Deen's study udy classified ficult pattern.In Pattern 2 (N1 Be Av), the presence of an adverb made it difficult for participants to identify the pattern, although Arabic language has different types of adverbs just like in English.This finding corresponds to studies showing that EFL learners have difficulty mastering English adverbs, although they are present in their mother tongue (Leedham & Cai, 2013;Lei, 2006;Narita & Sugiura, 2006).

B. Linking verbs
Arabic language has linking verbs, but a fewer number than English.When we look closely into the errors made by the participants when identifying Pattern 4 (N1 LV Aj), we find them related to some linking verbs that do not exist in Arabic; however, participants could identify most English linking verbs that do not exist in Arabic.Participants who could not recognize Pattern 5 (N1 LV N1) faced the problem of finding the referent of the two nouns.Although copula use in English and Arabic is not identical, students could identify it in Patterns 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 but faced other obstacles.These results minimize the extensive reference to L1 in EFL learners' error sources and draw attention to other possible difficulty sources.

Basic Sentence Patterns Related to Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
Many studies have been conducted to compare transitivity and intransitivity in English and Arabic (e.g., Al-Shujairi, 2015).Similarities and differences have been noted.English and Arabic were found to be similar in having transitive verbs and intransitive verbs that can be transitive or intransitive according to context.Both languages have ditransitive verbs that can take two objects.On the other hand, and Arabic are different in two aspects.In Arabic, inflections play a role in changing intransitive verbs into transitive ones; for example, the Arabic intransitive verb "jalasa" can be changed into transitive by fronting "hamzah" ‫)أ(‬ to become "ajlasa" or by doubling the middle letter.Another difference is that some Arabic verbs can take three objects-for example, "Āclamtw clay mwhamad mwsāfirā (I told Ali that Mohammed will travel)"-unlike English, which has only two objects.Thus, the assumption that transitive and intransitive verbs might not exist in Arabic is excluded (Saif Al-Deen, 2009).
Students could identify Pattern 6 (N1 Intr) easily in this study.Pattern 7 (N1 Trv N2), which contains a transitive verb, was identified with a greater level of difficulty due to confusion in recognizing if the second noun has the same referent as the first one.It can be concluded that students were quite readily able to identify patterns with transitive and intransitive verbs.The level of difficulty increased, however, as students dealt with Pattern 9 (N1 Trv N2 N2) and reached its peak with Pattern 8 (N1 TrvN2 N3).The shared feature between Pattern 8 and Pattern 9 is that both have a ditransitive verb.Ditransitive verbs that require two objects are complex and confusing for EFL/ESL learners (Hang, 2007;Nagano, 2015;Wang, 2012).This conclusion will lead us to investigate another possible source: dative case and double object structures.

Dative Case and Double Object Structures
A dative case refers to a noun or a pronoun when it is used as an indirect object followed by a direct one.For example, in "he gave his daughter a camera for Christmas," "his daughter" is a noun in the dative case because it is used as an indirect object and followed by the noun "camera" as a direct one.The sentence structure is called a double object structure because it consists of two objects for one transitive verb.The dative and the double object structure are considered a critical and sensitive case in language processing even for native English speakers (Hovana & Levin, 2008;Snedeker, 2015).
Al-Tamari (1999) investigated dative and double object structures in English and Arabic to shed light on the challenging problems related to them and how previous approaches failed to analyze them.He proposed a minimalist approach introduced by Chomsky (1993) as a solution to analyze dative and double object structures in both languages.He believed that this approach is efficient in accounting for asymmetries in double object structures.Arab learners faced difficulty with ditransitive verb and double object structure, even though these structures exist in Arabic.
To conclude, this study found other sources of difficulty facing Arab learners in identifying some English sentence patterns, such as denoting referents and datives and double object structure that exist in L1 rather than the excessive reference to the mother tongue's negative influence.The dative and double object structures were found to be the main source of difficulty facing participating students in identifying Patterns 8 and 9.

Conclusion
This paper sought to achieve different goals.It was designed to investigate if a significant relationship exists between Arab EFL learners' performance in identifying English sentence patterns in literary texts and the pattern they identified.The results showed that participants could identify all sentence patterns and that the relationship between their performance and the pattern they identified was significant at p < 0.05.Seven levels of performance were found, starting from level one-occupied by the easiest Pattern 1-and continuing up the scale in order to Patterns 6;3;4 and 7;2 and 9;5;and 8.The second goal was to find the possible causes of this variation in performance and examine some of the patterns' components that might be a source of difficulty.Referents denoting, dative and double structures were found to be a source of difficulty.Previously, most EFL/ESL learners' errors in the target language have been extensively attributed to L1, but this study showed the two cases where the element was present in L1 but still not identified by students and vice versa.More focus on these components is recommended when teaching English sentence patterns to Arab EFL learners.Further studies should compare native and non-native performance to determine if any differences occur.Additional studies could also apply a method of teaching focusing on referents, datives, and the double object structure.

Table 1 .
English sentence patterns