The parallelism between the Arabic and English sentences is quite clear in the learners' errors. The two examples above demonstrate that in the first sentence the students dropped verb to be, while in the second one, they used verb to be but deleted the indefinite article. This fact supports the students’ comments that they know the grammatical rules that underlie the deviant sentences they have produced, but because of their reliance on their native language, they have produced these errors. .
