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Behavioral addiction is identified as any compulsive, repeated, and persistent behavior that leads to significant and functionally impairing harm or distress. The aim of this study is to determine the prevalence of internet, video-gaming, and pornography addictions among medical students in Western region. In addition, we intend to investigate the relationship between these behavioral addictions with stress and anxiety. Our study was a cross-sectional study with a sample size of 225. The study participants were medical students in their 3rd, 4th, and 5th academic years from five different medical colleges in Western region. The questionnaire included demographics and adapted five different pre-validated scales: Young's Internet Addiction Test – Short Version (IAT-SV), Internet Gaming Disorder Scale 9 – Short Form (IGDS9-SF), (PPC scale), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), and Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7). The IAT-SV scale showed: 71 (31.6%) of the participants had normal internet usage, 51 (22.7%) participants showed problematic usage, and 103 (45.8%) used the internet pathologically. The IGDS9-SF scale had observed the following values: 220 participants (97.8%) were non-disordered, and 5 participants (2.2%) were found to be disordered. Statistical analysis showed a highly significant association between stress and problematic pornography consumption (P < 0.01), and internet addiction (P P < 0.01). This study showed high prevalence of internet addiction and low prevalence of internet gaming disorder. Also, it gave more understanding to a possible association between these behavioral addictions with stress and anxiety.

Although negotiation via email takes place every day between students and their supervisors/lecturers, the processes underlying these negotiations have been largely neglected in research to date. Further, there is a need to investigate the linguistic email communication problems that Saudis encounter when they study abroad. This study aims to identify the dominant features of email communication of twenty Saudi and Australian post-graduate students with their lecturers. The research sought to understand the following: to what extent negotiation moves differ from one group to another; if there is a significant difference between the two raters when rating native speakers (NS) versus non-native speakers (NNS); whether there is a significant relationship between students scores and total number of words used in negotiation moves; the most important moves that might have affected the raters decisions when giving the highest scores versus the lowest scores; and whether there is difference between total scores of NS and NNS. Whereas the qualitative analysis employed (im)politeness as the theoretical framework, the quantitative analysis focused on the moves used by students in terms of context, proposal, justification, options, and requests. It was found that NS and NNS had similar likelihoods of gaining higher grades when using more details. When both NS and NNS failed to employ a focus-on-context move, they were likely to fail in their negotiations. International students need to be encouraged to give more detailed explanations to improve their negotiation techniques. Pedagogical implications include greater insights into the appropriate use of email negotiation strategies between students and their lecturers.

Thematic progression plays a vital role in organizing the information in a text and in enabling it to be understood and communicated effectively. Studies of multimodal business discourse have been confined to workplace contexts, and across the fields of management accounting, marketing, and finance. Based on Halliday’s (2014) analytical tools of systemic functional linguistic (SFL) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) analysis of images, an Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) was conducted to explore THEME and INFORMATION structure in five international students’ texts in a key topic in accounting, namely financial statements. The participants are first-year Master of Commerce Accounting Saudi students enrolled in the Accounting Concepts and Methods module at an Australian university. The findings of the SF-MDA revealed the frequency of Theme reiteration and the linear Theme pattern in financial statements. The first pattern is employed in accounting tables to list the corresponding numerical values. The SF-MDA findings of the balance sheet corresponded with Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) approach to the analysis of grammar of visual design in terms of compositional zones.

The multimodal experiential meanings of accounting play a vital role in maximizing the learning experiences of accounting students. This paper aims to explore the literacy and numeracy practices of six Saudi postgraduate students enrolled in the Master of Commerce accounting foundation module Accounting Concepts and Methods. Responding to repeated calls regarding the lack of research on the literacy and numeracy practices that construe disciplinary subjects, we employed a multidimensional approach proposed by Alyousef to describe the epistemologies of the module and the actual practices the participants engaged with to complete their assignment, in addition to conducting a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the experiential meanings in accounting texts. The SF-MDA enabled us to capture the patterns of such complicated interrelationships between numbers and texts. The findings of the analysis of the multimodal accounting financial statements demonstrated that systemic functional ...