Libyan EFL Learners' Awareness of the Difference between Predicative and Attributive Adjectives

Abstract

Learning the target language grammar is an important step in the language learning process. In English grammar, the role of adjectives is to describe and modify nouns. This study investigates whether Libyan learners of English as a foreign language at Misurata University are aware of the different positions of adjectives in English sentences. This is based on the fact that English adjectives are classified into two main types: central adjectives which can appear before or after the noun they modify and peripheral adjectives which can appear in just one position either before nouns they modify (attributive), or after nouns (predictive). The study concentrates on the second type of adjectives which can only appear either in attributive or in predicative positions. The research instrument used with the 43 students who participated in this study was a grammaticality judgment (GJ) task and a multiple-choice test. The results showed that Libyan EFL learners were not fully aware of the difference between attributive and predicative adjectives as a result of positive evidence-only instructions given in their grammar classes.