• Dr.Gamal M A Abdullah

  Author

• Adeeb M H Thabet

  Author

The present article investigates the difficulties that encounter the Arab learners of English as a foreign language, when using or translating sentences and phrases, which containing the definite article ‘the’/’al’. The subjects of the study are third year students of English department at the Faculty of Education – Radfan, university of Aden (one of the recognized universities in the Arab World). The results obtained show that most of the students of the third level, English department, at the Faculty of Education-Radfan make errors when they translate the Arabic definite article in sentences into English. The study also reveals that most of the students are not familiar with the different usages of the English definite article and most of them spontaneously translate the Arabic definite article "al" into the English definite article "the" even if it is expressed by a zero article in English. Further, it has shown that the vast majority of the students' errors are due to the effect of their mother tongue (interference) on English and their unfamiliarity with the different situations in which the definite article is used or not in English.

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