The acquisition of generic reference by L1 Saudi Arabic learners of L2 English

English and Arabic differ in their use of articles with genericity and this might affect learners’ accuracy. English has two types of genericity – the Noun Phrase (NP)-level generic (singular with the definite article and plural with bare plural nouns) and the sentence-level generic (singular with the indefinite article and plural with bare plural nouns) – while Arabic uses only the definite article, without differentiation. This study investigates the effects of first language (L1) transfer, proficiency level, receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary on the acquisition of genericity. To examine generic contexts in English, 160 L1 Saudi Arabic learners of English completed an acceptability judgement task, receptive and productive vocabulary tasks and a proficiency test. The study outcomes, which relate to both low-level and high-level learners, show target-like performance for the use of the definite article with the NP singular but non-target-like performance with the NP plural and sentence singular and plural, in which the learners overused the definite article; these findings indicate the effect of L1 transfer. The results showed that the learners had problems mapping the features that differ between the L1 and L2 but that they did not show difficulties in acquiring uninterpretable features. Receptive and productive vocabulary along with the proficiency level affected the Saudi Arabic learners’ accuracy with regard to generic contexts.