Group work is one of teaching methods that is widely used in education today, and some of the language instructors, including Arabic, had been incorporating this method in teaching, instead of the traditional method, considering the advantages of applying it in the classroom. This quantitative survey explores group dynamics in learning Arabic language. The instrument used is a questionnaire of 41 items, that are divided into 5 sections. Section A is the demographic profile and section B looks at learning strategies; direct and indirect. Next, section C focuses on social interaction while Section D looks at more knowledgeable others. Finally, Section E focuses on the zone of proximal development. 189 students that take Arabic language as a third language course in a public university were chosen to be the respondents for this study. Findings of this study reveal that learners do show group dynamics in learning Arabic language through five stages of Tucker's group development which are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. From this study, it is clear that group work can help students in learning Arabic language, enhance their understanding and improve their skills as well. Therefore, it is encouraged for the instructors to use collaborative learning in their class frequently to enhance the students' understanding.
Oral presentation requires some level of performance to a crowd of people, unlike reading, writing, or listening. Hence, fear of speaking in a foreign language is a common concern of students, especially when presenting in front of a large audience. Many people who fear public speaking avoid public speaking situations altogether, or struggle in those situations due to lack of confidence and skills. Therefore, learning a foreign language requires the use of communication strategies so that students face less difficulty and become proficient. This study aimed to identify the success factors of students in oral presentations and examined the causes of fear among Arabic language students in a Malaysian public university. For that purpose, a set of questionnaires was distributed to students studying three different levels of Arabic as a third language from various faculties at Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Selangor Campus. The questionnaire was systematically designed from Endler (1980) for oral communication strategies with the addition source of fear adapted from Yaman and (Kavasoğlu, 2013). The survey has three sections which are demographic profile, communication strategies, and fear of oral presentation. The study involved 321 students that were selected through purposive sampling. The findings of the study show that oral presentation in Arabic is dominant despite being on a moderate scale of use. Also, students' nervousness and the capacity of the audience have an influence on their speaking skills in simulations and role-play activities. The study recommends recognizing the anxiety sources and levels of anxiety when preparing for and delivering an oral presentation. It clearly represents a step closer to a successful presentation among non-native speakers. It also suggests that both lecturers and students be more aware of foreign language speaking anxiety. Overall, as this study investigates effective communication strategies and its associated factors of fear, it is hoped that the study will provide practical suggestions for teachers and meaningful recommendations for future research.
Numerous corpus studies have suggested that teaching materials design could greatly benefit from the empirical information about language use provided by corpus linguistics. In spite of the awareness that corpus-based research can offer valuable insights for materials development, still relatively small number of studies report on the practical applications of corpus data for teaching materials development. There is no clear guideline or framework on how corpora and corpus studies could assist in developing teaching materials. Hence, this study focusses on one grammatical item which poses problems to Malaysian learners, that is, prepositions. The objectives are (i) to identify prepositions in the British National Corpus as a reference corpus and the descriptions offered by linguists and grammarians as a reference grammar, and (ii) to provide a framework to use reference corpus, reference grammar and corpus-based research, as a resource for developing materials in the teaching of prepositions. In order to meet the objectives, content analysis was used as the methodology throughout this study. The findings showed that reference corpus, reference grammar and corpus-based research could be used systematically as guidance to develop corpus-informed materials. It is hoped that this contribution of knowledge could have an impact on second language learning-teaching.
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