An Assessment of Acquiring English Attributive Adjective Order by Saudi University Freshmen and Senior EFL Students

The complex structure of English nominal pre-modifications, particularly the adjective word order, has emerged as a significant area of research.This complexity causes learning difficulties for language learners, irrespective of their linguistic background.English as a foreign language (EFL) students whose first language (L1) is not English may face challenges in language acquisition due to the different syntactic patterns of their native language, like Arabic, especially in terms of noun phrases.This study intended to investigate the difficulty level Saudi EFL participants faced in identifying the correct adjective order.Moreover, the research evaluated the performance of freshmen and seniors separately to identify the challenges in mastering adjective order and the effectiveness of the teaching methods they had experienced.To achieve these objectives, a pre-nominal adjective test (a test assessing the order of adjectives placed before nouns) was designed.It consisted of four levels of adjective order statements.The first level starts with a basic two-adjective sequence and advances to three-adjective combinations like quality, size, and age.The third level consists of a fouradjective order: material, origin, and purpose.Finally, the fourth level