This paper provides a contrastive analysis of locative and directional motion events in English and Arabic. Within a micro-parametric approach to crosslinguistic variation, it argues that both languages encode the distinction between manner and direction in their inventory of motion verbs. In the prepositional domain, purely locative and directional prepositions are shown to exist in the two languages; they respectively derive locative and directional interpretations with manner of motion verbs. The class of ambiguous prepositions, which gives rise to both locative and directional interpretations, is shown to be distinctive of English. Implications of this contrastive analysis to the bidirectional acquisition of English and Arabic locative and directional motion constructions are discussed.

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This paper presents a comprehension-based model for explicit grammar instruction. It argues that the process of grammar teaching and learning can better be treated as a communicative event with content drawn from pedagogically relevant aspects of contrastive linguistic analyses of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2). Within a task-based pedagogy, L2 learners can be engaged in concept-forming activities that allow them to develop an understanding of the target grammatical features to facilitate later interlanguage restructuring. This model is illustrated with an exercise in the English dative alternation based on a contrastive analysis of this lexicosyntactic phenomenon in English, the target language and Moroccan Arabic, the students' L1.

No abstract

This paper presents a comprehension-based model for explicit grammar instruction. It argues that the process of grammar teaching and learning can better be treated as a communicative event with content drawn from pedagogically relevant aspects of contrastive linguistic analyses of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2). Within a task-based pedagogy, L2 learners can be engaged in concept-forming activities that allow them to develop an understanding of the target grammatical features to facilitate later interlanguage restructuring. This model is illustrated with an exercise in the English dative alternation based on a contrastive analysis of this lexicosyntactic phenomenon in English, the target language and Moroccan Arabic, the students' L1.