PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine students' perception of end‐of‐semester Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET), and to explore the extent to which SET are biased by non‐instructional factors.Design/methodology/approachA survey questionnaire about the end‐of‐semester SET was designed and administered to 819 students selected from a random list of summer classes at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Appropriate statistical analysis methods of the resulting data were performed.FindingsThe results of this study show that significant differences exist among the various demographic groups with respect to both students' perceptions of the evaluation process and their tendency to be biased by a number of non‐instructional factors. The study has presented evidence on how students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds affect their responses to SET.Practical implicationsThis paper provides useful information for the academic community concerning the validity and reliability of SET rating scales used in US universities abroad and whether the data obtained from such rating scales should be used for administrative and personnel decisions. In addition, teachers should examine SET assessments with care before undertaking modifications to their teaching practices.Originality/valueThis paper was the first to examine SET in a US university overseas, where the majority of students are non‐native speakers of the English language, and of an Arab origin. The findings illuminate the importance of understanding the cultural and linguistic contexts of the institution in which SET are conducted.
Reading is a multileveled and interactive process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text using their schemata. While it has been known for some time that both content and formal schemata are necessary for a complete understanding of written texts in a reader’s first language (L1), and has been suspected to be true in a reader’s second language (L2), it is still an area that has been generally ignored by both researchers and classroom teachers. The purpose of this paper is threefold. The first is to give a brief overview of some of the literature that deals with schema theory as part of a reader centered psycholinguistic processing model for both native and non-native readers. The second goal is to show how familiarity with the subject matter (i.e., content schema) as one aspect of schema theory, affects L2 reading comprehension. The third goal is to discuss the implications of schema theory in L2 classrooms.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has witnessed an unprecedented economic and cultural development since its foundation in 1971. Foreign labor and investment play a central role in this development, yielding a sharp imbalance between the Emirati and the foreign population. A population of no less than 85 per cent of highly transient foreigners strongly impacts the local linguistic landscape, with many languages competing in the public sphere. English occupies a special role in this multilingual texture, as it is used as a foreign language, a second language, and a lingua franca. It occurs in its standardized varieties, but also in several non‐standard forms, as foreign labor is recruited from places formerly under British or American influence. Based on a new questionnaire study of 692 university students, we explore the tension between English and Arabic, the prominence of English, the increasing use of English as a home language, and the emergence of a new variety of English: ‘Gulf English’.
Reputation systems as well as seller depictions (photos; avatars) have been shown to reduce buyer uncertainty and to foster trust in online trading. With the emergence of globalized e-markets, it remains an urgent question whether these mechanisms, found to be effective for Western cultures, also apply to other cultures. Hypothesizing that members of collectivistic cultures in contrast to those of individualistic cultures would rely more on visual social cues (seller faces) than on factual information (reputation scores), we compared buying decisions of Arab and German participants in an experimental trust game. Photo-realistic avatars were used instead of photos to control facial features and expressions. The results revealed significant main effects for both reputation scores and avatar faces. Moreover, both variables significantly affected the purchase behavior of Arab as well as German buyers, suggesting cross-cultural universals in the processing of trust cues. The results have implications for future cross-cultural studies in e-commerce as well as the design of online markets and shared virtual environments.
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