The Lexical Syntagmatic Errors among Arabic-Speaking Farsi Learnerss

Abstract

The present study sets out to lay bare the lexical syntagmatic errors of Arab Persian-speakers studying at Al-Mustafa Virtual University and expound the reasons for committing such errors. To achieve this aim, 260 writing samples of the intermediate-level Persian language learners were collected and sorted out. In the first stage, the lexical syntagmatic errors were identified. In the next stage, taking context into account, an attempt was made to determine the correct forms. Finally, drawing upon Selinger’s (1972, 1992) proposal, effective factors in committing errors were recognized. Given that the researchers did not have direct access to the participants of the study and their educational context, ‘transfer of training’ and ‘Strategies of L2 Communication’ were not taken into consideration for the purpose of the present study. The results of the study revealed that, from among the 56 identified lexical syntagmatic errors, effective factors in committing them can be subsumed under the following rubrics, respectively: Strategies of L2 Learning (41%), Native Language Transfer (36%), and overgeneralization (23%).

Keywords

• lexical syntagmatic errors
• error analysis
• native language transfer
• overgeneralization
• strategies of l2 learning