Iraqi EFL learners' use of parallel structures

Abstract EN

Parallelism is defined as a linguistic pattern which involves purposeful repetition on the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels.

The theoretical part of this study shows that parallelism is, on one hand, a linguistic rule the departure of which may lead to ungrammatical, illogical or ambiguous English sentences, and it is, on the other hand, a stylistic foregrounding feature that enables the writers in general and the foreign language learners in particular to highlight, emphasize ,and intensify their messages.

The practical part of this study investigates the Iraqi EFL learners' ability to employ parallelism in producing English sentences which are syntactically correct and semantically acceptable.

It also investigates the learners' ability to emphasize and intensify their messages through the use of parallel structures.

The study comes up with the conclusion that the subjects' errors can be attributed to the teaching context, as well as to the negative interference of the mother tongue.

It is also concluded that teaching parallelism through analyzing its forms and functions in the English sentence can positively affect the learners' performance.