Correspondence between performance on sorting Tasks 1 and

An important part of the analysis was to see if some correspondence existed between performance on task 1 and task 2. In other words, did someone who perform well on task 1 also did well on task 2? It is important to know this because it might throw some light on relationship between the memorizers’ memory of the text and their sensitivity (or lack of it) to language patterns.

The results revealed mixed evidence for a relationship between memory for the Quran and awareness of morphological patterns in Classical Arabic. For example, participants 7, 8, and 10, who were absolutely accurate in separating Quranic and non-Quranic sentences, also did well in terms of locating errors and substituting correct morpheme for the incorrect one, compared with those who were not absolutely accurate in task 1. Similarly participant 11 who assigned only one Quranic sentence to the non-Quranic pile, and one non-Quranic sentence to the Quranic pile, correctly identified errors in three sentences and was able to explain the error in one. In contrast, participants 6, 3, and 9 despite performing well on task I could not perform well on task 2.

In the light of the above results, evidence for relationship between the participants’

performance on separating Quranic from non-Quranic sentences and their performance on grammaticality judgement is mixed and strong conclusion cannot be drawn in this regard. An interesting factor that seemed to bear upon the performance in task 2 which I had not anticipated was the memorizers’ perception of their memory and memorization. For example, participants 3 and 4, after having performed the task, said that they did not have solid

memory of the Quran. They said that their memory of the Quran was not as strong as that of other fellow memorizers. These two participants not only showed the lowest performance in terms of correctly allocating sentences to the incorrect categories by assigning two and four

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sentences, respectively, they also could not identify the location of the error in a single sentence.

7.5 Conclusion

When we entered this chapter we wanted to know whether the non-Arabic speaking

memorizers of the Quran incidentally internalize some features of Classical Arabic by virtue of their memorization. To establish this, participants were tested, in two separate tasks, on their memory of the Quran and their awareness of morphological patterns of Classical Arabic. The three research questions posed at the beginning of this chapter will be answered here:

(1) Can the Quran memorizers separate Quranic sentences from non-Quranic sentences?

(2) Can the Quran memorizers reliably separate grammatically correct sentences from grammatically incorrect sentences?

(3) Can the Quran memorizers indicate errors in the sentences they have identified as incorrect?

The capacity of all the participants successfully to separate the Quranic from non-Quranic sentences in Task 1 suggests that extensive repetition and rehearsal of the Quran made the text sufficiently familiar to them for it to be plain which sentences they had and had not seen before. Results from Task 2, i.e., the grammaticality judgement task, on the other hand, were mixed. While categorisation of sentences into correct and incorrect was only at a level of chance, locating and explaining the errors by some participants might be taken as indication of their having developed some understanding of the language patterns. However, even if these results do show that some participants internalized the correct patterns to explain the incorrectness, we need to be cautious in interpreting them. Although pointing to the location of an error is hard to get right by chance, there still is a chance element. And, indeed,

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one). Where there was no error in the sentence, any indication they gave of the supposed error’s location was, of course, also wrong.

As for the Arabic-speaking memorizers, they had an advantage over the non-Arabic-speaking memorizers that enabled them to more often identify the location and explain the nature of the error in sentences identified as incorrect. Nevertheless they still did not identify the sentences with errors at above chance level.It seems that they knew a few and didn’t know others. The ones they knew, they got right. So, although the statistics talk about chance, it’s really about the chances of them encountering an example they could do, rather than only about them guessing when they didn’t know the answer. It is not clear whether their ability to explain and correct the errors was the result of their memorization or if they already knew these patterns because of their being native speakers of a dialect of Arabic, and familiar with standard written Arabic. However, if extrapolation from the memorized Quran were indeed happening, we might expect that, with the advantage they had, they would have performed at greater than chance level overall.

Returning to the non-Arabic memorizers, the results are certainly are at odds with the implicit claims in the literature about the role of memorization in L2 learning.

In chapter 4, the following three alternative explanations for storage were compared in terms of their predictions as far as Quran memorizers’ sensitivity to language patterns was

concerned.

Prediction1- Mental lexicon: Quran learning would entail looking for opportunities to identify… patterns, so as to reduce the load on memory.

Prediction 2- Episodic Long Term Memory: Quran learners would have extremely accurate memory traces of the patterns into which the language falls, and therefore should be very much able to identify anomalous patterns that they have never previously encountered. Prediction 3-Procedural memory: When a Quran learner reads aloud a sentence in Classical Arabic that involves a sound-sequence never produced before (that is, one that begins in a familiar way but continues in an unfamiliar way) he should be able to notice it.

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Although all three explanations predicted some sort of sensitivity, none of them are confirmed, and this raises important questions about just what happens in Quran memorization.

In the final chapter the reasons for the present results will be discussed, especially the key differences between the Quran memorizers and the sorts of L2 learners discussed in the research literature. We will explore factors that might have stood in the way of the non- Arabic speaking participants’ awareness of grammatical patterns of Classical Arabic.