<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p> Many languages of the world have a grammatical gender system that divides all nouns into gendered categories. The gender assigned to a given noun requires gender agreement with associated items in the sentence, such as: determiners, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns. Research in the area of grammatical gender acquisition has found that this grammatical category poses considerable difficulty for L2 learners. However, rarely was this area of difficulty the focus of L2 studies in Arabic. The present study focuses on the problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language. It examines advanced Arabic L2 learners’ written errors of gender assignment and agreement in the Arabic Learner Corpus (ALC) v2, compiled by Alfaifi, Atwel, and Hedaya (2014). Based on the classification and analysis of the errors, possible factors of the difficulty facing L2 learners in assigning the correct gender are discussed, and recommendations to reduce their effects are suggested.</p></abstract>

Many languages of the world have a grammatical gender system that divides all nouns into gendered categories. The gender assigned to a given noun requires gender agreement with associated items in the sentence, such as: determiners, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns. Research in the area of grammatical gender acquisition has found that this grammatical category poses considerable difficulty for L2 learners. However, rarely was this area of difficulty the focus of L2 studies in Arabic. The present study focuses on the problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language. It examines advanced Arabic L2 learners’ written errors of gender assignment and agreement in the Arabic Learner Corpus (ALC) v2, compiled by Alfaifi, Atwel, and Hedaya (2014). Based on the classification and analysis of the errors, possible factors of the difficulty facing L2 learners in assigning the correct gender are discussed, and recommendations to reduce their effects are suggested.

The problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language

P.O. Box 132739, Jeddah 21382, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Journal of Language and Cultural Education

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

{"article-title":"The problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language"}

Many languages of the world have a grammatical gender system that divides all nouns into gendered categories. The gender assigned to a given noun requires...

The problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language

Publié en ligne: 09 févr. 2016

Pages: 17 - 28

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jolace-2016-0002

Mots clés
gender assignment, gender agreement, Arabic L2 errors

© 2016

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

The problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language

Publié en ligne: 09 févr. 2016

Pages: 17 - 28

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jolace-2016-0002

Mots clésgender assignment, gender agreement, Arabic L2 errors

© 2016

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Mots clés
gender assignment, gender agreement, Arabic L2 errors