Genericity acquisition by Arabic-speaking learners of English: an intervention study

Abstract

Genericity, a universal semantic property, encodes complex form-meaning mappings. Learning genericity in a second language (L2) is challenging due to the nature of mapping the semantic meanings and their morphophonological expression, as well as the learner's native language (L1) and the L1-L2 crosslinguistic differences. The literature suggests that Generative Second Language Acquisition findings can be beneficial for the L2 classroom and, therefore, call for bridging the gap between GenSLA and L2 instruction by applying SLA findings in the L2 classroom (Slabakova, 2019; Whong et al., 2014; Marsden, 2018; Ionin & Montrul, 2023). This thesis seeks to contribute to bridging this gap by investigating the effect of addressing the learnability concerns predicted by acquisition research through instruction on the acquisition of genericity by Arabic–speaking learners of English in a classroom context, within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2009) and Slabakova's (2009) cline of difficulty and Bottleneck Hypothesis. To this end, it conducts a cross-linguistic analysis of how genericity works in English and Modern Standard Arabic in preparation for predicting the difficulty that Arabic-speaking learners of English may face. Then, it tests how teaching intervention informed by SLA findings can affect learning generic form-meaning mappings in characterising and kind generic meanings. This thesis predicts that mapping indefinite singulars and bare plurals onto characterising generics is challenging and that L2 learners will use the L1 form-meaning mappings with this meaning. Also, it predicts that the participants may face similar challenges in mapping bare plurals onto kind generic meanings. Mapping definite singulars onto kind generics is predicted to be less challenging in light of the similarity between the L2 learners’ L1 and L2 in this condition. Finally, instruction is predicted to support the L2 learners’ acquisition of generic form-meaning mappings. This thesis follows an intervention study design to test these predictions with a pretest, intervention, post-test and delayed post-test. The study included two groups of low-intermediate L2 learners divided into experimental and comparison groups (total n = 64), and a native control group who provided a baseline (n = 20). The experimental group received instruction on genericity for eight weeks. The study tasks included a written elicited production task, an acceptability judgement task with contexts, and a forced-choice task. The pre-test results revealed that Arabic–speaking learners find the generic form-meaning mappings challenging even when mapping definite singulars to kind generic meaning where the L1 and L2 are similar. The immediate post-test results revealed a significant improvement in the experimental group’s mappings of bare plurals to both generic meanings and mapping definite singulars onto kind generic meaning. However, even after instruction, mapping indefinite singulars to characterising generics remained challenging for the experimental group. The comparison group did not show improvement in all conditions in the post-test. The experimental group maintained the improvement in mapping bare plural to kind generic meaning in the three tasks after being tested twelve weeks later. This study suggests that explicit instruction that considers the reassembly requirement in a learning context in depth and maximises the L2 learners’ engagement with input through practice might positively impact feature reassembly in L2 learning. The results support FRH and BH and highlight the benefit of using SLA findings in operationalising instruction to support L2 acquisition in the L2 classroom-based acquisition context.