The Acquisition of English Adverb Placements by Saudi Female Learners

This study aims to understand how Saudi female learners acquire the use of adverbs at various positions in English sentences. The focus was on three types of adverbs: Manner, Time, and Frequency. Two tasks were conducted to collect data from 133 students in the grammatical judgment and writing the correct sentences using these adverbs. The findings of this study verify that Saudi female students encounter difficulty in selecting proper types of adverbs such as Frequency, Manner, and Time to place at various positions in a sentence. The students failed to achieve a native-like level of performance in this regard. A significant factor relating to this finding is the word order used in Arabic, which also has variations in positioning adverbs within sentences. The students would transfer the rules of Arabic to adverb positions accurately. The students generally exhibited a similar performance in acquiring three types of adverbs.