The present study investigates the writing errors of ninety Saudi non-English major undergraduate students of different proficiency levels from three faculties, who studied English as a foundation course at the English Language Center in the College of Languages &Translation at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia in the academic year 2016-17. The findings reveal that the common errors the Saudi EFL students make in writing English paragraphs fall under four categories namely grammar, lexis, semantics and mechanics. Then it compares the categories, types and frequency of errors committed by these three groups of students. Among these categories, grammar has been observed as the most error-prone area where students commit errors the most. The study also posits that among the three groups, the students of the College of Medicine make the minimum errors in all the types and the highest number of errors is committed by the students of Engineering College. The College of Computer Science is in the second position in making errors. The frequency of error types is also found different among these three groups.Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.1p.31wari, &Al-Khasawneh (2013) highlight some causes behind their weaknesses of writing like weaknesses in knowledge and understanding of grammatical items, less practice, and educational background. Ansari (2012) delves deep into the difficulties of writing faced by Saudi students and finds out the root cause of their weaknesses which is in school's education system where students are not taught English in a proper way. By defining 'writing' and 'error' separately, this study mainly examines the writing errors committed by some non-English major undergraduate students of different proficiency levels from three colleges-Computer Science, Engineering and Medicine who studied English as a foundation course at English Language Center in the College of Languages &Translation at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia in the academic year 2016-17. It also makes a comparison of the types and frequency of errors made by these three groups of students. In the end, the study comes up with some recommendations. Objective of the StudyThe aims of the present study are two-fold. The primary concern is to find out different types of errors made by Saudi Advances in Language and Literary Studies
For mobile clients, sufficient resources with the assurance of efficient performance and energy efficiency are the core concerns. This article mainly considers this need and proposes a resourceful architecture, called mRARSA that addresses the critical need in a mobile cloud environment. This architecture consists of cloud resources, mobile devices, and a set of functional components. The performance efficiency evaluates implementing the proposed context-aware multi-criteria decision offloading algorithm. This algorithm considers both device context (network parameters) and application content (task size) at run time when offloading an executable code to allocate the cloud resources. The appropriate resources select based on offloading decisions and via the wireless communication channels. The architecture's remarkable component is the signal strength analyzer that determines the signal quality (e.g.-60 dBm) and contributes to performance efficiency. The proposed prototype model has implemented several times to monitor the performance efficiency, mobility, performance at communication barriers, and the outcomes of resource-demanding application's execution. Results indicate performance improvement, such as the algorithm appropriately decides the cloud resources based on device network context, application content, mobility, and the signal strength quality and range. Moreover, the results also show significant improvement in achieving performance and energy efficiency. Sufficient resources and performance efficiency are the most significant features that distinguish this framework from the other existing frameworks.
<p>The role of a mother tongue (L1) in the teaching and learning of a foreign language (FL) has been the subject of much debate and controversy. This paper reports on a piece of research carried out in our own teaching environments (at universities both in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) and presents an analysis of the attitudes of students and teachers towards the use of learners’ mother tongue (in this case Bengali and Arabic) in English language classrooms at the tertiary level where English is taught as a non-major subject. For the study, two surveys with the same questionnaires were conducted in two universities each from Bangladesh and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) with the participation of 1000 students and 30 teachers. Results suggest that a judicious and moderate use of L1 does not hinder learning; rather, it assists, aids and facilitates the teaching and learning process thus providing the teacher with an effective pedagogical tool for maximizing the learning outcomes.</p>
Using mobile technology in English learning and teaching has been on the rise all over the world over the past few decades and hence, has received considerable attention and importance from academics in recent years. As a result, several experimental studies have been carried out about the use and effectiveness of mobile phones in the teaching/learning process. However, there have been only a few studies on mobile-assisted listening comprehension. This study aims to explore whether Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) is effective in teaching/learning listening skills to the students of university-level English language programs and could better enhance students’ listening ability. It also endeavors to assess why some MALL strategies/techniques are more effective than others. This study uses a qualitative research method. It exclusively uses the relevant secondary materials available on the broader topic- the use and efficacy of mobile phones in teaching/learning listening skills. The results indicated that the MALL is meaningfully efficacious in teaching/learning ESL/EFL listening skills. Therefore, using appropriate strategies could positively contribute to bringing about better learning. Besides outlining a brief overview of MALL, the study also recommends some practical and useful stratagems that ESL/EFL educators can use while designing MALL listening tasks/activities.
With the widespread application of smartphones in and outside the classroom, mobile-based teaching and learning is drawing much attention and hence being extensively practised nowadays across the globe. Recently, using smartphones for assessment purposes has been a new phenomenon and the researchers are still examining what processes the use of mobile-based assessment tools may include and what outcomes and challenges they can cause to teachers and students in terms of learning/teaching performance, motivation and attitudes. There have been a good number of research studies on the use of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) or Mobile Learning (ML) in EFL or ESL classroom but not much literature is known about the mobile-based language assessment, especially mobile-based formative assessment (MBFA). Hence, this study attempts to shed light on MBFA and review the recent literature available on it and its effective utilization in developing ESL/EFL speaking skill. This paper uses a qualitative research method that exclusively uses the relevant secondary references/works available on the topic. The literature revealed that MBFA practices in ESL/EFL speaking classes are effective to a certain extent and some tools and procedures seem to be more effective than others depending on the design principles and strategies used by teachers or app developers.
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