Journal of Educational Sciences > Volume 6, No. 2, 1994

Language Attrition of Saudi ESL- and EFL-Trained Teachers: Articles and Prepositions / Ali Yahya Al-Arishi

This paper reports the findings of an experiment designed to measure English language article and preposition attrition of twenty Saudi Arabian teachers of English as a foreign language. Ten of the subjects were trained in an ESL environment , the United Kingdom,  and ten in an EFL environment , the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, . For each subject, two English-teaching classes were audio-taped. Deviations in the use of articles and prepositions are analyzed. The results indicate: (1)  while previous attrition studies had suggested that preposition attrition is more prominent than that of other types of function words, such as articles. this was not the case in this study. where the two categories were attrited at basically the same rate. and (2)  whether training environment is ESL or EFL did not appear to affect the manifested attrition of articles and prepositions since incidences and types of article and preposition errors were basically the same for both groups. A tentatively-offered conclusion of this study is that the more semantically-based an item is, the less likely it is to undergo attrition.