CHALLENGES FOR ALBANIAN STUDENTS USING NON-REFERENTIAL ‘IT’ AND ‘THERE’ CORRECTLY: SOME USEFUL TEACHING SUGGESTIONS AIMING FOR THEIR PROPER USAGE

Abstract

Even though Albanian students studying English as a foreign language attain a high proficiency in the language, they still end up using the referential ‘it’ and ‘there” incorrectly. Most of these errors are inter-language errors and should be attributable to the L1 (first language) rather than the target language (L2). Given the above, almost all studies conducted in other languages have laid the blame so far on the language structure of their respective first languages (L1). Despite the large number of studies in other languages, there has not been any comprehensive studies to date in Albanian with regard to causes of errors with non-referential ‘it’ and ‘there’. Almost all studies in Albanian have scratched the surface of such non-referential subjects ‘it’ and ‘there’ by providing only examples of correct usage by failing to resort to the comparative approach between the grammatical structures of both languages and stopping short of providing any teaching suggestions that would help English teachers in Kosovo and Albanian-speaking countries to cope with such inter-language errors. In order for us to grasp the nature of these errors and the real linguistic structures which are behind such errors, it would be wise in this study to examine closely the morphological structures in both languages, and by means of comparative analysis to pause briefly at each of the examples provided for both ‘it’ and ‘there’ to explain the nature of the errors associated with each one of these. Along with the explanations provided to this effect, we will be trying to provide the Albanian teachers with some teaching suggestions as how to go about teaching the non-referential ‘it’ and ‘there’, in order for the Albanian student using English as a foreign language not to fall into the trap of making the inter-language error of ‘it’ and ‘there’.

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