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EFL Learners’ Metacognitive Awareness and its Relationship to their Vocabulary Knowledge
Author
الطلحي ، فاطمة حمادي
Supervisor
Dr. Wan Fara Adlina WanMansor
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2018
Hit
0
Empowering Chinese-American Women: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Re-Writing of Chinese Legend and Myth in The Woman Warrior: Memoir of Girlhood among Ghosts
Author
القرشي ، منال عبد الله ضيف الله
Supervisor
د . محمد نور العبود
Category
English Language – Literature
Type
Master
Year
2017
Hit
0
Using the critical perspectives developed in postcolonial studies, minority discourse, and multiculturalism, this thesis aims to highlight the conflict in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior between the Chinese minority culture and the dominant American one, as well as the gap between earlier and later generations of Chinese-Americans. It also detects the novelist's quest for self-identity as a second-generation Chinese girl caught in-between the American culture and the received Chinese culture. As a Chinese-American woman, Maxine Hong Kingston realizes the difficulty of survival in a highly complex social structure that is characterized by sexism, racism, and classism. Thus, she looks for a new means for survival, which she discovers in re-writing her own Chinese culture. The best example of such practice can be found in her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), where Kingston interweaves the literary forms of memoir, myth, legend, and her own experience as a girl growing into adulthood in a culturally diverse environment. This study demonstrates that Kingston is able to fashion a Chinese-American identity that is neither wholly Chinese nor completely American, but both: a form of a new identity which reconciles the differences between her ancestral homeland and her new one in diaspora. In seeking her new identity, Kingston has to deal with race and culture on the one hand, and gender and generational gaps on the other hand. Additionally, she has to reconcile two different cultures to find a unique hybrid cultural voice to articulate her experience – a voice that entails resisting one culture and embracing another alternately. This thesis shows how a story is not just a story. In fact, the thesis will go on to argue that Kingston's work does not only tell us about the life of a woman in America, but it also reveals America's important role in her personal and literary life. Finally, this study will demonstrate how Kingston, through her literary re-writing or re-narration of Chinese tales, legends and myths, can translate, transmit, and illustrate her original culture. Against Chinese-American authors who ignore their history and new identity formation in the United States and who prefer instead to reinforce their identification with China, Maxine Hong Kingston uses "re-writing" as a strategy to fashion a new identity and create a voice for herself as a hybrid Chinese American woman.
Empowering Chinese-American Women: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Re-Writing of Chinese Legend and Myth in The Woman Warrior: Memoir of Girlhood among Ghosts
Author
القرشي، منال عبدالله ضيف الله
Supervisor
Dr. MHD Noor Al-Abbood
Category
English Language – Literature
Type
Master
Year
2017
Hit
0
Using the critical perspectives developed in postcolonial studies, minority discourse, and multiculturalism, this thesis aims to highlight the conflict in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior between the Chinese minority culture and the dominant American one, as well as the gap between earlier and later generations of Chinese-Americans. It also detects the novelist's quest for self-identity as a second-generation Chinese girl caught in-between the American culture and the received Chinese culture. As a Chinese-American woman, Maxine Hong Kingston realizes the difficulty of survival in a highly complex social structure that is characterized by sexism, racism, and classism. Thus, she looks for a new means for survival, which she discovers in re-writing her own Chinese culture. The best example of such practice can be found in her book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), where Kingston interweaves the literary forms of memoir, myth, legend, and her own experience as a girl growing into adulthood in a culturally diverse environment. This study demonstrates that Kingston is able to fashion a Chinese-American identity that is neither wholly Chinese nor completely American, but both: a form of a new identity which reconciles the differences between her ancestral homeland and her new one in diaspora. In seeking her new identity, Kingston has to deal with race and culture on the one hand, and gender and generational gaps on the other hand. Additionally, she has to reconcile two different cultures to find a unique hybrid cultural voice to articulate her experience – a voice that entails resisting one culture and embracing another alternately. This thesis shows how a story is not just a story. In fact, the thesis will go on to argue that Kingston's work does not only tell us about the life of a woman in America, but it also reveals America's important role in her personal and literary life. Finally, this study will demonstrate how Kingston, through her literary re-writing or re-narration of Chinese tales, legends and myths, can translate, transmit, and illustrate her original culture. Against Chinese-American authors who ignore their history and new identity formation in the United States and who prefer instead to reinforce their identification with China, Maxine Hong Kingston uses "re-writing" as a strategy to fashion a new identity and create a voice for herself as a hybrid Chinese American woman.
English as a Foreign Language Female Students’ Awareness of their Written Errors: The Case of Taif University
Author
البيشي ، نورة محمد فايز
Supervisor
د.نايف سعد الثبيتي
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2018
Hit
0
This is a study of the effects of written corrective feedback (WCF) on students’ awareness of their errors in EFL writing context in the foreign languages department (FLD) at Taif university. Data on teachers' beliefs and students' preferences regarding written corrective feedback (WCF) were collected via interviews. The participants in the case study were 20 female students at the intermediate level at Taif university, divided into two equal groups (direct corrective feedback and indirect corrective feedback). Both groups were requested to write on three topics selected from their curriculum. Group A received indirect corrective feedback (ICF) in the form of error underlining and short comments. Group B received direct feedback feedback (DCF) in the form of error correction above the original errors. The data were collected and analyzed according to the error analysis approach. The main findings of the case study showed that ICF group had more improvement in their writing than the DCF group by committing less errors. The findings of the interviews showed that teachers and students valued WCF highly in teaching and learning process. Finally, students preferred ICF to DCF in language learning. This study concludes by providing some implications for teachers. Teachers should vary their corrective techniques to meet the requirements of all students and take into consideration individual differences and students' preferences regarding the type of corrective feedback
English Code Mixing in Arabic Print Advertising Discourse
Author
العوفي ، رشا إبراهيم
Supervisor
د. محمد حسان زكريا
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2017
Hit
0
The current study aimed to shed some light on the status of the English language in our current time in relation to the Saudi society. It attempted to do that through the linguistic investigation of English mixing in Arabic print advertising discourse. The main approach used in the study is Kelly-Holmes‟ linguistic fetishism approach which focuses on the symbolic use of language. Two Arabic magazines were chosen and a quantitative analysis of the advertisements was used to investigate the percentage of the English mix and its place in the advertisements. Also a qualitative analysis was employed in investigating other aspects of English mixing such as the use of Roman script for languages other than English, use of English numbers, and English in non-Roman script in the analyzed advertisements. To determine the percentage of English mixing the study used a cline of code-mixed advertising developed by Martin (2002). In addition, the location of English elements in an ad bore indications to its function. The definition of each function is based on Bhatia‟s (1992).As a result of the quantitative analysis it was found that English was used in Arabic advertising mostly in small structures such as phrases and single lexical items in parts of the advertisements that do not have informative function. The qualitative analysis also confirmed that the main function of English mixing in Arabic advertising discourse is the Symbolic function. There is a clear tendency for employing English suggested by the high frequency of occurrences. However the nature of this mix functions mostly symbolically indicating that English remains in the level of a favorite foreign language in Saudi Arabia
Evaluating Mobile English Grammar Learning Applications
Author
القدسي ، أبرار عبد الستار
Supervisor
Dr. Wan Fara Adlina Wan Mansour
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2018
Hit
0
This study has been motivated by the affordability and popularity of mobile applications as language learning materials. The study tries to contribute to the emerging field of mobile assisted language learning (MALL) by deeply evaluating the design of current mobile English grammar learning applications (henceforth referred to as MEGLA) available on Android system from regular MALL users’ perspective. In essence, these regular MALL users are either ESL teachers or learners. The reason of restricting the evaluation on MEGLA available on Android OS is the fact that currently Android dominates the OS market. In order to fulfill this objective, the researcher had to explore determinants which affect the decision regular MALL users make on a selection of an app. To achieve this, semi structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with regular MALL app users. They were ESL teachers and undergraduate students at Taif University. Then, thematic analysis was applied to extract themes from transcriptions. Findings of the interviews showed that the number of downloads, app rating, suggestions from teachers or colleagues, cost, and the logo design are the most salient determinants of an app for potential download. These findings were applied then to retrieve a sample of five mobile English grammar learning applications (MEGLA) available on Android OS. A paper-based, self-administered questionnaire was then distributed amongst 25 regular app users for evaluation. The questionnaire was developed based on Hubbard’s (2006) CALL evaluation framework and Yu-Yin et al. (2018) m-learning success model. The questionnaire endeavors to link together aspects of English language teaching materials evaluation represented in CALL courseware evaluation framework to success measurements proposed in the information system success (ISS) models. By far, and to the researcher best knowledge, the (ISS) model has never been used to evaluate MALL applications. Results showed that respondents highly evaluated technical features of MEGLA regardless the absence of multimedia features in some of them. Moreover, respondents reported their general satisfaction with their experience using the apps although more than third of them said the apps did not motivate them to learn English grammar. Findings of the content quality part of the questionnaire showed that linguistic structuralism and pedagogical behaviorism approaches dominated MEGLA activities. These approaches are realized mostly in tutorials and drill activities focus on sentence level structure, and absence of communicative features. Such findings suggest that linguistic and pedagogical principles should be taken into account when developing MEGLA .
Every Time the Same Story: The Representations of Children and Adolescents in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Gloria Anzaldua’s Friends from Other Side, and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio
Author
الشريف ، فاطمة عوض علي
Supervisor
د. محمد نور العبود
Category
English Language – Literature
Type
Master
Year
2016
Hit
0
The world of children is a mirror of their real surroundings, while the world of adolescent children exhibits a preview of the larger, more mature world of their community. This thesis will pursue a literary-critical analysis of the representations of the Latino child in contemporary American society through the following seminal Spanish-American texts: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984) and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Gloria Anzaldua’s Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado (1993), and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995). The study focuses on how and why Cisneros in some selected stories in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories and Anzaldua in Friends from the Other Side portray children (from the age of six to the age of twelve) as immigrants, reporters, and warriors. It will also demonstrate how the images of individual characters are, in fact, representative of the collective cultural identity of this age group, defining their common conflicts and desires. This analysis will draw on post-colonial criticism and interpretive methodologies of modern literary theory, especially feminism and psychoanalysis. This study will ultimately examine the distinctive qualities these authors ascribe to adolescents in their journey of self-discovery. It, thus, demonstrates that a child character could, in fact, tell us more about the adult world of his/her community. Accordingly, this study will argue that although child characters are often simple and naïve, they serve both as portraits of young characters, and as recurring representations of the Latino community as a whole.
Exploring EFL Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices Regarding Pronunciation Teaching at Taif University
Author
السفياني، مرام معتوق عطية
Supervisor
Dr. Ghazi Fahad Algethami
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2017
Hit
0
Given that teaching pronunciation has not been given enough attention in EFL— English as foreign language—classes, this study aimed to investigate what EFL teachers believed about teaching pronunciation, how they taught pronunciation, and what pronunciation training they had. To date, no study has explored teachers’ beliefs and practices about pronunciation instructions in Saudi context. This study surveyed teachers at Taif University, particularly, teachers of the English Language Centre (ELC). The data were gathered through an online web tool called SurveyMonkey. The responses from fifty-five English teachers were subjected to quantitative analysis via SPSS. The data from the openended questions were categorized under various themes. The results revealed that the teachers highly valued pronunciation teaching and most of them looked at it as important as teaching other skills. In addition, the findings showed that the teachers had a positive tendency toward pronunciation teaching. For instance, all of the teachers said that they taught pronunciation in their classes, regardless of the amount of time they spent in pronunciation instruction. The unavailability of the pronunciation materials and technological recourses forced the teachers to employ traditional strategies for teaching pronunciation. Also, the findings showed a lack of specific pronunciation training available to the teachers, though the teachers desired to have more training opportunities. Hence, this study provides a snapshot of the current status of pronunciation instruction in ELC. Recommendations are presented that adequate pronunciation teaching training that incorporates effective use of technology should be provided to teachers.
Feminist Politics: Oppression and Resistance in The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple
Author
الجعيد، مشاعل باخت
Supervisor
Dr. MHD Noor Al-Abbood
Category
English Language – Literature
Type
Master
Year
2017
Hit
0
Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are some of the pioneers who have discussed themes of oppression practiced against African-American women for their gender, social status, and race. These African-American women experience a different and more difficult kind of oppression than what white women, foreign women, or African-American men typically go through. There are several factors and elements that make their experience different and more difficult. First is the fact that the African-American community has often adopted the white community's values and norms that regard the African-American women as naturally worthless. Second, the legacy of slavery is a further burden for African-American women as it includes several racist ideologies that specifically target the African-American women's chastity and femininity. The thesis will show how some of the ideologies as the Sapphire and the Jezebel, which were created during slavery, still negatively affect African-American women. It will also show how the African-American society has adopted some of the slaveholders' tactics and used them as oppressive gender tactics. Third, being at the bottom of the hierarchical system makes the African-American woman a scapegoat the African-American man uses to release some of his frustration and anger at the white community. In addition, such a position makes it easier to exploit her physically and financially. The fourth and most important factor is the intersections in the African-American woman’s identity. My thesis aims to show how these African-American women’s gender issues cannot be understood or analyzed without taking their race and social status into consideration. In other words, the intersections in the African-American woman’s identity results in a unique kind of oppression that can be described as triple oppression. All these factors coalesce in making her the most exploited, degraded, disrespected, and neglected person in America.
Identifying the Grammatical Errors Committed by Saudi Intermediate EFL Learners: A Step Towards Solution
Author
الهميل، محمد مسلم عبدالله
Supervisor
Dr. Choudhary Zahid Javid
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2017
Hit
0
Identifying the Grammatical Errors committed by Saudi Intermediate EFL Learners: A Step towards Solution by Muhammad Muslim Al-Homail Grammar is considered very important for learning a foreign language as it is an important pedagogical skill and a significant part of target language proficiency. Teachers are, thus, supposed to identify L2 learners’ common grammar mistakes for addressing them in their teaching. Language errors have remained in focus in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. Non-native Speakers (NSs) are susceptible to making more grammar errors. English teachers in Saudi Arabia face the challenge to address to the grammar mistakes their students make in using English in all skills both receptive and productive. This study is intended to investigate the most common errors made by Saudi students at intermediate level. To achieve the research objectives, data through two different methods were collected. A Grammar exam, which was designed to identify proficiency of the participants in the main grammar areas , was conducted in the beginning of this research study. Then, the a Likert-scale questionnaire was administered to investigate the teachers’ tendency towards the grammatical errors usually committed by their students, the feedback methods they use, and the way/s they correct these errors. The results show that Saudi intermediate EFL students make a large number of both intralingual and inter-lingual errors. The results also revealed that there was consensus found about the effectiveness of error correction. Teachers supported the use of different methods and stated that they have a positive impact on EFL learners' correct use of grammar. They agreed that teachers in the EFL context of Saudi Arabia must use different strategies for error correction depending on the frequency of errors, proficiency as well as the reactions of their learners. It is recommended that grammatical errors need more attention and the teachers need to provide essential feedback to minimize the error occurrence.
Information Structure and Intonation in Al-Baha Arabic
Author
الغامدي،خلود صالح محمد
Supervisor
Dr. Muhammad Alzaidi
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2019
Hit
0
It is widely assumed that aspects of Information Structure (i.e., information focus, and contrastive focus) are intonationally encoded in some languages including English, and a few studied Arabic dialects. Recent studies empirically show that languages differ in how these two aspects are intonationally encoded. In English, for example, items in an utterance carrying new information (i.e., information focus) are associated with the specific pitch accent H*, and items carrying contrastive focus as its discourse function receive the bitonal pitch accent L+H* (Pierrehumbert, J. and J. Hirschbergm 1990). To our knowledge, no studies exist investigating whether and how these two aspects of information structure in Baha dialect are intonationally encoded. Therefore, the current study presents an empirical investigation into whether and how information focus and contrastive (i.e., aspects of information structure) are intonationally encoded in the under-researched Arabic dialect (i.e., Al-Baha dialect). It aims to provide a detailed phonological and phonetic analysis of whether and how these aspects of information structure are intonationally encoded. This study used the question-answer paradign to study the intonational patterns of those two aspects of information structure. The results reveal that intonation plays a role in identifying information focus and contrastive focus in BA utterances, and show that the excursion size of focus increases across the three focus conditions (broad focus > information focus > contrastive focus). Moreover, results show a post-focus compression. As for the pre-focus region, it shows that there are no systematic differences across the focus conditions. These findings suggest that Al-Baha dialect is similar to the other Arabic dialects such as Urban Hijazi Arabic, and Egyptian Arabic. Compared to other languages, the results of this study places Al-Baba dialect to be among the languages that exhibit post-focus compression
Information Structure and Intonation in Al-Baha Arabic
Author
العبدلي ، خلود صالح محمد
Supervisor
Dr. Muhammad Alzaidi - Dr. Ghazi Algethami
Category
English Language – Literature
Type
Master
Year
2019
Hit
0
Investigating Wh-Movement in Interrogative Constructions in Spoken Hijazi Arabic
Author
المالكي، تهاني أحمد حميدي
Supervisor
د/ غازي القثامي
Category
English Language -Foreign Language
Type
Master
Year
2021
Hit
0
This thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of wh-questions in spoken Hijazi Arabic (HA). It analyses the wh-movement that occurred in interrogative root and embedded clauses using the framework of the Minimalist Program. It also shows that the motive behind this A`-movement is the unvalued [Q] features that wh-phrases bear. Consequently, these wh-phrases are forced to move to the left periphery of clauses and land at the functional projection FocP for feature valuation. The thesis maintains that HA clauses use two skipping strategies, the particle ʔilli and the expletive pro, to fill the criterial position Spec,SubjP and satisfy its Subject Criterion when the clause`s thematic subject is not available (either it carries unvalued discourse features, or is being required to remain in a post-verbal position). The study shows that the particle ʔilli triggers presupposition to its derivation, facilitates the wh-movement in intransitive structures, and solves the ambiguity of interpretation in certain environments. In presuppositional argument structures, having the particle ʔilli at Spec,SubjP, the focus operators at the head Foc˚ can be overtly realized as copular pronouns, to imply a higher degree of presupposition to these derivations. The study shows that these copular pronouns are endowed with a set of unvalued gender and number agreement features which force them to agree with the closest matching goals in their c-command domain. In addition, the thesis studies the left periphery of HA interrogative structures. It shows that, besides the wh-phrases at Spec,FocP, these left edges can host multiple topics, such as A-Topic and C-Topic. It proves that, in root clauses, the A-Top is externally merged to the derivation and bounds a resumptive pronoun/clitic at its thematic position inside the clause. C-Topic, on the other hand, is internally merged by virtue of the unvalued [C-Top] feature that it bears. In embedded clauses, the thesis shows that these clauses lack the A-TopP.
Perceived English Language Needs among New Graduate Cadets in King Fahad Taif Air Base
Author
القثامي، فيصل سعود
Supervisor
Dr. Naif Al-Thobaiti
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2018
Hit
0
This research aimed to investigate the English language needs of Taif Airbase newly graduated cadets. The participants were 100 trainees who had been in the Airbase from one to three years after graduating from TSI. The data were collected through a questionnaire in order to seek answers for three research questions. 1) What are the English-language needs of the newly graduated cadets at Taif Air Base? 2) What is the cadets' impression of the TSI English language course? 3) How does the cadets‘ awareness of the importance of English in the workplace help them to identify their English-language needs? The data were analyzed through SPSS. The results revealed that the trainees‘ considered listening and speaking skills as the most needed skills on job compared to reading and writing skills. Moreover, the trainees' impression of their current English language course showed that it did not help them during training or job. Finally, the results indicated the trainees are not fully aware of the English importance for their job. Therefore, the researcher recommends designing an English language course based on learners' needs that meets the equivalent level of training and the job requirements. Furthermore, the researcher recommends elevating the cadets' awareness of their training programs and the critical role of English in their training and job through lectures, workshop and seminars.
Prosodic Encoding of Focus in Thaqafi Arabic Dialect
Author
الثقفي ، منى مصلح حامد
Supervisor
د . محمد الزيادي
Category
English Language - Linguistics
Type
Master
Year
2018
Hit
0
Much research has shown that information focus and contrastive focus (i.e., aspects of information structure) is encoded prosodically in many languages including few of Arabic dialects that have been studied. However, recent studies show that there are languages that do not encode focus prosodically, and hence, information focus and contrastive focus are not represented in their prosodic system. This thesis presents experiment work on the prosodic encoding of information focus and contrastive focus in Thaqafi Arabic Dialect (i.e., an Arabic dialect spoken in Thaqafi area in the Hijazi region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). To my knowledge, this study is the first study that aims to investigate whether information focus and contrastive focus are prosodically encoded compared with each other and with their neutral-focus counterparts in declarative sentences in Thaqafi Arabic Dialect (TQD, henceforth). It aims to provide acoustic analyses of the data, attempting to find out whether and how information focus and contrastive are acoustically encoded. Sixteen native speakers (10 females and 6 males) of TQD recorded short declarative sentences with “narrow” information focus and “narrow” contrastive focus at different locations or without any “narrow” focus. Detailed F0 analyses show that focus is realized by expanding the excursion size of the on-focus stressed syllables, compressing the excursion size of the post-focus syllables, and compressing the stressed syllables of the pre-focus region (if any). These findings demonstrate that in terms of prosodic focus, Thaqafi dialect is similar to the prosodic focus in Urban Hijazi Arabic investigated by Alzaidi (2014); however, it is different from the prosodic focus in Egyptian Arabic (Hellmuth, 2006).