The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of using communicative language teaching (CLT) activities on EFL students’ speaking skills at the English Language Institute (ELI) of the University of Jeddah (UJ). The researcher conducted the current study in two classes of 21 female EFL students each; one class was the experimental group and the other the control group. The experimental group was taught using three communicative activities—interviewing, problem-solving, and role-playing—while the control group was taught using traditional methods. The current study followed a quasi-experimental study to answer the primary research question. The quasi-experimental study was conducted using a pre- and post-test design to determine if there was a significant difference between the scores of the experimental and control groups. The findings of the current study show that the experimental group scored higher than the control group. These findings have positive implications for the continued implementation of CLT teaching practices at the ELI of UJ.

Grammar teaching has been a long tradition in EFL instruction in various parts of the world and Saudi Arabia is no exception to this. However, various approaches to teaching grammar have emerged over a period of time. For this, professional development (PD) programs are designed to meet the EFL teachers’ needs by enabling them to use a range of approaches and techniques. To do this successfully, professional needs analysis of teachers is essential. The present study investigates the beliefs of teachers regarding the use of various teaching approaches for grammar teaching and their need for professional development (PD). Questionnaire survey was conducted among 50 randomly chosen EFL teachers at a public sector university. The results showed that EFL teachers deem grammar as a foundational framework for teaching English as a foreign language. Furthermore, grammar is thought to be a major factor in developing accuracy and correct use of EFL. Moreover, the teachers have the theoretical knowledge of various grammar teaching methods using TBL, PBL and CLT. However, they need to develop practical skills for grammar instruction. Thus, the study recommends that the universities in Saudi Arabia need to arrange regular PD programs so that the EFL teachers with modern methods to teach English grammar successfully.

This paper explores the professional development literature in the educational setting. The different literature pieces are aligned to a framework that requires effective professional development to focus on three concepts: content, context, and process. The content focuses on the "what" question in the programs while the context aims to align the content with "where" question. The third component is the focus on the process variables that professional development should follow. This paper tries to add to the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) fields' literature by presenting categorized overview of relevant works. The different theories include adult learning theory, functional theory, multiple intelligences, twenty-one learning styles, the Australian Government Quality Teaching Program (AGQTP) model and model of teacher change.

This study explores the perceptions of EFL instructors about their reflective practice and its effect on their professional development in a Saudi Arabian university. This study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Two study instruments were used; a survey questionnaire with a study sample of 100 male and female participants and semi-structured interviews with a study sample of seven female instructors. The findings show that some instructors in general have a positive perception of reflective practices and they utilize a diversity of reflective tools. Female instructors show a greater degree of involvement in a reflective practice than male instructors in three of the four examined dimensions (cognitive and meta-cognitive, moral and learner and reflective teaching in general). However, no significant difference is reported between males’ and females’ perceptions in terms of the fourth dimension (practical). Based on the findings, recommendations have been made to encourage reflective practices in the Saudi EFL context.

In recent times, natural language processing (NLP) technique has received significant attention in content retrieval (CR) domain. The emergence of digital libraries, in recent years, enables people from across the globe to access and store books, documents, and literature of multiple kinds. The development of NLP models has considerably improved the performance in terms of digital library management. In this scenario, artificial intelligence‐based expert systems are required to handle massive quantities of data that exist in digital libraries and achieve effective CR performance. In this background, the current study designs NLP with deep learning enabled hybrid content retrieval (NLPDL‐HCR) model for digital library management. The aim of the presented NLPDL‐HCR is to effectually retrieve the images as well as textual data from digital libraries based on a user's query. The proposed NLPDL‐HCR model encompasses two major stages namely, text retrieval and image retrieval (IR). During text retrieval process, the proposed NLPDL‐HCR model includes term frequency inverse document frequency vectorizer with optimal gated recurrent unit (GRU) model. The hyperparameters of the GRU model are optimally adjusted with the help of RMSProp approach. Besides, the IR process involves three sub‐processes namely, densely connected networks‐based feature extraction, butterfly optimization algorithm‐based hyperparameter tuning, and Euclidean distance‐based similarity measurement. The experimental analysis results, accomplished by the proposed NLPDL‐HCR model using benchmark datasets, highlighted its superior performance over recent state‐of‐the‐art approaches.