The acquisition of telic and atelic motion verbs by Arabic-speaking EFL learners

This study investigates how Arabic-speaking EFL learners acquire telic and atelic motion verbs, focusing on the challenges posed by structural differences between Arabic and English. Arabic, a verb-framed language, encodes motion events differently from English, which is satellite-framed, impacting learners' understanding of telicity. Sixty native speakers of Jordanian Arabic completed an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) and a Picture Description Task (PDT) to evaluate their grasp and production of these verbs. Paired and independent-samples t-tests were used to compare learners’ performance across motion verb types. Grounded in Processability Theory (Pienemann and Lenzing, 2020), the study found that learners easily judged atelic verbs but struggled to produce them in the PDT, often defaulting to Arabic-like constructions. They overgeneralized path encoding and found manner verbs challenging, indicating L1 influence. Statistically, the AJT showed no significant differences between telic and atelic verbs, while the PDT revealed a preference for atelic verbs, indicating challenges in applying telicity in real-time language use. The findings shed light on how these linguistic backgrounds affect learners' use of telic and atelic motion verbs and the cognitive processes in foreign language acquisition.