• Muhammad Khan

  Author

The purpose of this study is to determine independently the difficulties that crop up
during the process of teaching-learning of a target language because of the L1 interference. It is
argued that if typologically distinguished features of English and Arabic are incorporated into the
‘contrastive analysis hypothesis’ it is possible to predict not only the areas of difficulty for a
second language learner, but also the relative degree of difficulty. The present paper focused
mainly on comparison of morphological processes in different word classes, i.e. noun, pronoun,
adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, articles, interjection and their inflections
wherever applicable in Arabic and English. There are significant differences between the
knowledge of the native and foreign languages. A child learns native language not because of his
conscious effort to know the language, but because of natural development of thinking at early
age. The description and analysis of the available data earned encouraging results towards better
teaching-learning of English as a second language through contrastive approach. The
comparison of Arabic and English languages helped determining the level of L1 interference and
specific areas of difficulties in teaching-learning of the target language. The way to decrease the
level of difficulties lies in comparison of native and target languages.

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