Purpose
Recent advancements in science and technology have led to an emphasis on using technology to make education more interesting. The inclusion of computers, internet and technological media has made education more diverse, vivid and enthusiastic. The use of technology such as YouTube in education stimulates visual and auditory learning, which results in favorable outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a guideline for more systematic utilization of YouTube that has been possible in Saudi EFL classrooms at King Khalid University/Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Design/methodology/approach
YouTube videos that illustrated a variety of special spoken discourse and interaction were selected to widen Saudi EFL students’ socio-linguistic experience. In total, 48 students were divided into two groups; one group intensively used YouTube through the course, while the other did not. A quasi-experiment method was used to collect data.
Findings
The use of YouTube in studying English spoken discourse played a pivotal role in enhancing Saudi EFL students’ proficiency. The experimental group students’ outcomes revealed positive gains through the integration of video elements in teaching.
Originality/value
This study is among the first to examine the use of YouTube technology for educational purposes, particularly in the context of Arab countries.
Social media platforms allow users to share thoughts, experiences, and beliefs. These platforms represent a rich resource for natural language processing techniques to make inferences in the context of cognitive psychology. Some inaccurate and biased thinking patterns are defined as cognitive distortions. Detecting these distortions helps users restructure how to perceive thoughts in a healthier way. This paper proposed a machine learning-based approach to improve cognitive distortions' classification of the Arabic content over Twitter. One of the challenges that face this task is the text shortness, which results in a sparsity of co-occurrence patterns and a lack of context information (semantic features). The proposed approach enriches text representation by defining the latent topics within tweets. Although classification is a supervised learning concept, the enrichment step uses unsupervised learning. The proposed algorithm utilizes a transformer-based topic modeling (BERTopic). It employs two types of document representations and performs averaging and concatenation to produce contextual topic embeddings. A comparative analysis of F1-score, precision, recall, and accuracy is presented. The experimental results demonstrate that our enriched representation outperformed the baseline models by different rates. These encouraging results suggest that using latent topic distribution, obtained from the BERTopic technique, can improve the classifier's ability to distinguish between different CD categories.
The optimized use of authentic videos is integral in language classrooms. However, the research concerning the use of videos for developing audiovisual reception, four language skills, and vocabulary are found to be lacking. This study, therefore, reviews the developments related to the use of video in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The main question of this study is: how does the pedagogic video contribute to improving English learner's language skills? This study is beneficial for university teachers who teach content courses to Saudi students using specialized online video courses, science animations, presentations, and online video lectures. The review suggests that teachers must engage in continuous proficiency development as well as selfdiscovery for overcoming the challenges that impair their learning and development. The use of videos is important as it can increase students' retention ability, through visual support and comprehension of the spoken discourse. ESP should not be regarded as an important aid to the teaching, rather it should be used as a component of an integrated skills package. Based on the findings, it has been reviewed that there is a need to integrate a collaborative strategy for teaching that assists in overcoming the learning issues based on the ESP course teaching. Teachers can monitor their speech to ensure a logical flow in the overall ESP content and its viable presentation.
The optimized use of authentic videos is integral in language classrooms. However, the research concerning the use of videos for developing audio-visual reception, four language skills, and vocabulary are found to be lacking. This study, therefore, reviews the developments related to the use of video in English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The main question of this study is: how does the pedagogic video contribute to improving English learner’s language skills? This study is beneficial for university teachers who teach content courses to Saudi students using specialized online video courses, science animations, presentations, and online video lectures. The review suggests that teachers must engage in continuous proficiency development as well as self-discovery for overcoming the challenges that impair their learning and development. The use of videos is important as it can increase students’ retention ability, through visual support and comprehension of the spoken discourse. ESP should not be regarded as an important aid to the teaching, rather it should be used as a component of an integrated skills package. Based on the findings, it has been reviewed that there is a need to integrate a collaborative strategy for teaching that assists in overcoming the learning issues based on the ESP course teaching. Teachers can monitor their speech to ensure a logical flow in the overall ESP content and its viable presentation.
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