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This paper summarizes a study I conducted for my Master's degree, in which an attempt was made to shed some light on the influence of the pronunciation of English language teachers on that of their students in the areas of vowel phonemes, word stress and intonation. A sample of ten teachers and twelve students from each teacher's class was drawn from ten public secondary schools in Amman. The major concern of the study was to determine how far the pronunciation of the English language teachers, among many other interrelated factors, shapes that of their students.

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This study focuses on the evaluation of native and non-native English instructors by 140 students enrolled in the Intensive English Program of a university in the United Arab Emirates. A forty-minute writing task was given to the candidates to elaborate on the contributions of the native and non-native instructors from various perspectives within a Grounded Theory approach. These perspectives included the instructor's oral skills, literacy skills, grammar, vocabulary, culture, teaching style, knowledge of L1 and experience of L2. The study adopts qualitative research methods in collecting and analyzing the data, where a Discourse Analytical approach is used to explore the students' perceptions of both native and non-native instructors. The results show that learners have positive perceptions of both native and non-native instructors, with distinctive qualities for each group. The findings point out that native speakerism is not a decisive factor in learners' preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the problems that translators and Arab learners of English encounter in translating Arabic sentences containing the Arabic discourse marker "fa" into English. Several types of texts were surveyed in order to identify the salient functions that this marker has in Arabic discourse. Five major functions were identified: Explanatory, Consequential, Causal, Sequential and Adversative. A translation task was designed to find out how this marker translates into English. The subjects were 50 English-major Arab students studying at the University of Sharjah. The difficulties that Arab learners encounter in translating Arabic "fa" into English were identified and rank ordered in terms of difficulty.

Modelling the distributional semantics of such a morphologically rich language as Arabic needs to take into account its introflexive, fusional, and inflectional nature attributes that make up its combinatorial sequences and substitutional paradigms. To evaluate such word distributional models, the benchmarks that have been used thus far in Arabic have mimicked those in English. This paper reports on a benchmark that we designed to reflect linguistic patterns in both Contemporary Arabic and Classical Arabic, the first being a cover term for written and spoken Modern Standard Arabic, while the second for pre-modern Arabic. The analogy items we included in this benchmark are chosen in a transparent manner such that they would capture the major features of nouns and verbs; derivational and inflectional morphology; high-, middle-, and low-frequency patterns and lexical items; and morphosemantic, morphosyntactic, and semantic dimensions of the language. All categories included in this benchmark are carefully selected to ensure proper representation of the language. The benchmark consists of 45 roots of the trilateral, all-consonantal, and semivowel-inclusive types; six morphosemantic patterns ('af'ala; ifta'ala; infa'ala; istaf'ala; tafa"ala; and tafā'ala); five derivations (the verbal noun, active participle, and the contrasts in Masculine-Feminine; Feminine-Singular-Plural; Masculine-Singular-Plural); and morphosyntactic transformations (perfect and imperfect verbs conjugated for all pronouns); and lexical semantics (synonyms, antonyms, and hyponyms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives), as well as capital cities and currencies. All categories include an equal proportion of high-, medium-, and low-frequency items. For the purpose of validating the proposed benchmark, we developed a set of embedding models from different textual sources. Then, we tested them intrinsically using the proposed benchmark and extrinsically using two natural language processing tasks: Arabic Named Entity Recognition and Text Classification. The evaluation leads to the conclusion that the proposed benchmark is truly reflective of this morphologically rich language and discriminatory of word embeddings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to explore the difficulties that Arab EFL learners of English encounter in the use of five verbs of senses when used as copulas, main verbs, main verbs with a metaphorical use, and as parts of idioms. A questionnaire consisting of three parts was specially designed to elicit the necessary data for this study at the levels of recognition and production. The subjects of the study were 30 randomly selected senior English major university students. The results of the study show that the students encountered tangible difficulties in using the five target verbs. A hierarchy of difficulty was established and the main causes of the problem were identified.

ABSTRACT This study attempts to explore the difficulties that Arab EFL learners of English encounter in the use of five verbs of senses when used as copulas, main verbs, main [...]

ABSTRACT This paper explores the use of the synonymous verbs burglarize, rob and steal in various authentic contexts in an attempt to identify the semantic and syntactic constraints that differentiate [...]

ABSTRACT Parallelism is a well-recognized norm in English sentences; Dr. Johnson, Frances Bacon, and Walt Whitman are but few examples of creative writers who distinguished their styles with parallelism. Because [...]

This study compared and contrasted some syntactic aspects of the sentence in Arabic and English political speeches, namely sentence length, frequency of sentence types, and forms. It also aimed at determining the roles or functions of these features and the ideological goals they serve in the speeches. Twenty political speeches in Arabic and twenty political speeches in English were collected from the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meetings between 2015 and 2019. The analysis revealed that the sentence in the Arabic political speeches is slightly shorter than its counterpart in English. It was also found that the complex sentence is more frequent in the Arabic speeches, while the simple sentence is more frequent in the English speeches. The analysis also revealed that these syntactic features were used to perform several functions in the text to serve ideological goals such as promoting ideas and maintaining political neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differences between English and Arabic metaphors can be confusing and challenging for second language learners and translators. The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast between temperature metaphors pertaining to (hot, warm, cool, cold, ḥa:rr حار, dafiʔ دافئ and ba:rid بارد (in English and Arabic to find similarities and differences between them in terms of functions, frequencies, structures, collocations and the fields they were attested in. The data were collected from dictionaries, corpora, websites, advertisements and daily life conversations. The findings revealed that temperature metaphors in English were more frequently used than they are in Arabic. In addition, the functions used in English temperature metaphors are more and varied. Another finding revealed that Arabic does not have an equivalent to the English word “cool”. Finally, English temperature metaphors are attested in more fields than in Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idiomatic competence constitutes an essential component of foreign language learners’ communicative competence. Unlike the other types of competences, idiomatic competence has not been accorded adequate attention in second language acquisition research. This study investigates the extent to which Arab learners of English, at the tertiary level, can recognize and use English idioms in culturally appropriate contexts. It is an attempt to provide answers to the following questions: (1) how well can Arab EFL learners recognize idioms in English texts? (2) How well can they produce idioms in their written performance? (3) What type of difficulties may they encounter in recognizing and producing idioms? (4) What are the possible causes of such difficulties? (5) What implications may such a study offer to language teaching and learning, curriculum designers, textbook authors, teaching translation and training translators? A specially designed test consisting of four elicitation tasks was used to evaluate the competence of Arab learners of English in recognizing and using idioms. The subjects of the study were 100 students, including 50 English majors and 50 non-English majors. The analysis of the subjects’ responses revealed that their idiomatic competence is deficient and below expectations at the levels of recognition and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argued for a fresh understanding of Pickthall’s The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (1930) in light of Bourdieu’s sociological work. The main objective of this study was to examine Pickthall’s translation of the meaning of the Holy Quran utilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological model that employs the key concepts of field, capital and doxa. By hypothesizing a field which could be called ‘the field of English translations of the meaning of the Holy Quran’, the researchers aspired to understand the dynamics of this field and its structure through delineating the socio-cultural and socio-political forces. After conducting an analysis at the macro level, the researchers analyzed the paratextual elements of the translation, the data of which represent the starting point for Bourdieusian insights into the production of Pickthall’s translation. The findings of the study revealed that Pickthall efficiently utilized paratextual material to accrue cultural, social, economic, and symbolic capital and defend his doxa thus enhancing his position in the field of English translations of the Holy Quran. The study concluded that Pickthall’s is a social activity, situated in a social space, and carried out by translating agents, both individuals and organizations, who are in a ceaseless struggle over accumulating capital at stake in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at identifying the similarities and differences between weatherrelated metaphors in English and Arabic in terms of structure, function, and range of collocations. A sample of English and Arabic weather-related metaphors was collected from bilingual and monolingual dictionaries in both languages and from relevant corpora such as COCA and BNC. In addition, weather-related metaphors were collected from everyday conversations, dialogues and talk shows in the two languages. The data analysis revealed that weather-related metaphors are reflections of human experiences as they express human emotions, attitudes, behaviors, traits, actions, reactions, and situations. It was also found that weather-related metaphors are much more abundant in English than in Arabic. Moreover, English metaphors showed more diversity in the use of parts of speech than Arabic metaphors did. Temperature metaphors are the most frequent weather-related metaphors in both Arabic and English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse markers are words or phrases used in both speech and writing to signal relationships between discourse segments, including clauses, sentences and even larger portions of texts such as paragraphs. Their proper use in writing effectively contributes to textuality standards, particularly cohesion and coherence. On the other hand, learners; misuse, underuse or overuse of these markers may negatively impact the quality of the texts that these learners produce. This paper examined the ability of a group of Arab learners of English as a foreign language (ALEFL) from the University of Sharjah to recognize and produce discourse markers in written compositions. Using two elicitation techniques, the researchers collected data for this research from a sample of one hundred Arab learners studying English at the University of Sharjah. A test consisting of four parts was specially designed to evaluate participants; ability to recognize and produce discourse markers in context. In addition, two hundred compositions written by ALEFL were analyzed to investigate their ability to produce discourse markers. The data analysis revealed that the participants; ability to recognize and produce discourse markers was relatively low and their ability to recognize the functions of discourse markers in context was below expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed at investigating healthcare students' collocational competence at the level of recognition and production. It was an attempt to provide answers to the following five questions: (1) How well can students recognize medical collocations? (2) How well can they produce them? (3) What types of mistakes do they make in recognizing and producing collocations? (4) Which type of collocation is the most difficult? (5) What implications to teaching English to healthcare students may this study have? Data were culled from a sample of 100 students through specially designed questionnaires for both recognition and production. It was found that the subjects' collocational competence was below expectations. Therefore, it was recommended that medical collocations be accorded systematic treatment in the process of teaching English to healthcare students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]