Comprehension of English Conditionals by Advanced Arabic-English Bilingual Speakers

Abstract

The aim of this research is to determine the comprehension level of advanced Arabic L2 speakers of English conditionals, types I, II, and III. An online test was used which consisted of a total of 60 questions. The test questions were divided into two sections: syntactic structure questions and inference of meaning questions. These were grouped into 20 questions for each conditional type. Thirty-five participants, 29 females and six males, were recruited. The findings demonstrated that the participants' comprehension level was not high. Furthermore, conditional type II was observed to be the most difficult type of conditional. The findings also revealed that participants performed better in inference of meaning questions than in syntactic structure questions. Investigating such conditional constructions offers us a deeper understanding of the relationship between form and meaning.