Research question 4: To what extent can the advanced

The pre-test showed a high level of lexical recognition with an average of 51% of correct answers including the dialects that the participants stated that they had not had exposure to. P1 was the only participant who had a lot of exposure to

different dialects and also had the motivation and the interest to learn about a range of Arabic dialects throughout her four-year degree. P1’s results in the pre- test supported her claim of being very good in understanding different dialects as she achieved a 93% proportion of correct answers with the Gulf and Saudi

appearing to be the easiest for her to recognise which could be due to the most recent extensive exposure that she had to these varieties prior the pre-test. The lowest score that all the participants have achieved was for the Syrian cognates. This could be a result of one particular difficult word in the pre-test which included three out of the total of 11 Syrian morphemes. This was the Syrian word ʔijr-ēn-eh “his (two) legs” which corresponds to rijlāh or rijlayh in MSA and which is shown in example (3) below. None of the participants managed to pair any of the three morphemes in this word (the Syrian content morpheme ijr to the MSA rijl “leg”, the dual number identifier ēn to the MSA ā(n)/ay(n) or the

possessive pronoun eh to the MSA h “his”. When the results were discussed with them afterwards, they all explained that this word had too many differences from MSA to be recognised and especially the change of some of the root letters and their order from r-j-l in MSA to ʔ-j-r in the Syrian dialect43.

(3) Syrian = w-allah ʔijr-ēn-eh teʕbet ṭūl-en-nhār By-god leg-(dual affix)-his (became) tired whole-the-day ‘Indeed, his legs became tired the whole day’

43 Note that the Syrian word ʔijr-ēn-eh was successfully understood by the two NSs who the test was piloted with prior administering it with the participants. They were not Syrian speakers but Egyptian and Saudi and they stated that they had never heard this word before; however, they managed to pair it with its cognates in other familiar dialects.

The highest scores in the pre-test were achieved in recognising the Libyan and the Egyptian dialects. This could be due to the students’ higher exposure to the

Egyptian dialect during the year abroad and through the Egyptian media and due to certain linguistic similarities between the Egyptian and the Libyan dialects such as the negation affixes ma/š which were successfully recognised by all participants despite the fact of not being exposed to the Libyan dialect before. The results in the pre-test show that although none of the participants - excluding P1 - had had exposure to the Gulf and the Saudi dialects, they managed to recognise, on average, the correct meaning of 48% of the tested morphemes in these two

varieties. They expressed the view in the interview after the pre-test that they had not expected to achieve these scores in understanding the lexis of these two varieties and did not feel confident about their answers because of their

unfamiliarity with these dialects. This may indicate that some Arabic students may have a perception of some dialects being entirely distant from other familiar varieties and they may underestimate their abilities to comprehend them. It is important to stress here that – as mentioned in the last chapter – these participants were the hardest working students in their class who achieved high marks during their four year degree in Arabic studies and so their results may be specific to their proficiency level. Students with a lower level of proficiency or those with less aptitude for L2 learning might have different results if given the same tests. The participants also happened to have learnt another one or two languages in addition to Arabic which are factors stated to enhance the acquisition of second and third languages (Andreou and Galantomos, 2009; Cook, 1999; Trentman, 2011).

One observation in the analysis of the results of the pre-test was that all the participants managed, on average, to recognise more content roots than the functional affixal morphemes. On average they achieved 56% of correct answers for the content roots and 42% for the affixal morphemes with the exception of the negation affixes for which they have achieved an average of 75%. One reason for the high score in recognising the negation affixes could be their linguistic

similarities across the Arabic varieties where they mostly comprise the prefix ma and, for some dialects, the suffix š. The participants seemed to have found more

difficulty in segmenting the other affixes of the object pronouns, the preposition /l/ and the tense and number identifiers. Although these might give the impression that they do not significantly vary in their phonology between the Arabic varieties, they can entail a change in the syllabic stress shifting from the content root

towards the functional suffixes. According to Field (2003), native listeners rely on the syllabic and lexical stresses to assist in determining the boundaries of words and morphemes; while L2 listeners can have difficulties in segmenting what they hear, he argues they can be trained to better segment morphemes if they learn about the stress patterns of L2 (Field, 2003).

An example of this shifting in dialectal syllabic stress can be seen in example (4) in the Saudi Hijazi phrase mā-ḥaḍḍart-all-uh ‘I did not prepare for him’ in which the stress is on the prepositional affix rather than on the content verb as is the case in the MSA equivalent ḥaḍḍartu. In the pre-test both the content verb ḥaḍḍart and the negation prefix mā were recognised by four out of the five participants. The preposition l was recognised by P1 and P2 and the object pronoun uh was

recognised only by P1. P2 translated the sentence as ‘haven’t you prepared dinner for them?’, P3 wrote ‘haven’t you prepared the dinner?’, P4 wrote ‘Did you

prepare the…..’ and P5 wrote ‘I didn’t …..dinner’.

(4) Saudi = mā-ḥaḍḍart-all44-uh-l-ʕaša Not-prepared-for-him-the-dinner ‘I didn’t prepare dinner for him’ MSA = mā-ḥaḍḍartu la-hu al-ʕa šāʔ

Not-prepared for-him the-dinner ‘I didn’t prepare dinner for him’

Another explanation for the participants’ higher percentages in recognising the content roots than the functional affixes could be the higher semantic value that the content roots convey. In a study by Field (2008a) investigating listening in English L2, he stated that in L2 listening comprehension, the learners across

different levels of proficiency give more attention to the content words than the functional ones (Field, 2008a). He comments that the reasons for this might be the fact that the content words carry more semantic value than the functional words or because the functional words are more difficult to identify in fast connected speech (Field, 2008a, p. 411). In the case of Arabic some of these functional morphemes are attached to the content words and they can entail different

syllabic stress among the different varieties as demonstrated in example (4) above. Example (5) also shows how the content root was easier to identify than some of the functional affixes. The example has a sentence in the Egyptian dialect with the tested word consisting of five morphemes. Although, all the participants were – to varying levels - familiar with the Egyptian dialect, it was still not easy for all of them to segment all the affixes in the long multi-morphemic word fa-štarit-hu-l-ha ‘so I bought it for her’. Four participants recognised the verb štarit ‘I bought’ and two participants only – P1 and P2 – recognised the last two morphemes l-ha ‘for her’. Their translations were as following: P1 and P2 translated the full sentence accurately; P3 wrote ‘I saw a beautiful dress in the shop, so I’m glad to buy it’; P4 wrote ‘I saw a beautiful thing in the shop, so I will buy it’ and P5 wrote ‘I saw a pretty…. In the shop…..’

(5) Egyptian = šufti fustān gamīl fi-l-maḥalli fa-štarit-hu-l-ha (I)saw dress beautiful in-the-shop so-(I)bought-it-for-her ‘I saw a beautiful dress in the shop, so I bought it for her’ MSA = raʔaytu fustān(an) gamīl(an) fi l-maḥall(i) fa-štaraytu-hu la-ha

(I)saw dress beautiful in the-shop so-(I)bought-it for-her ‘I saw a beautiful dress in the shop, so I bought it for her’

9.2.2 Research question 5: Can explicit instruction of the NSs’ listening