This study investigated apology strategies used in Jordanian spoken Arabic. The main purpose was to find whether gender plays a role in selecting apology strategies related to different situations. A modified version of Harb’s discourse questionnaire was employed for collecting the data. The participants included 20 males and 20 females. The data were codified and classified using Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP), by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984). Both qualitative and quantitative approach was used in analysing the collected data. The findings of the study demonstrate that there are more similarities than differences between females and males in the use of apology strategies. In addition, it was found that both groups tend to use multiple apology strategies in the same utterance; however, their strategies vary in frequency. The results demonstrated that there is no substantial quantitative difference in the use of apology strategies between Jordanian males and females. Further research employing a multi-factor framework (age, gender, education) of addressees is needed.
The purpose of this study was to look at how the contrastive lexical approach influenced Saudi EFL learners’ writing proficiencies. Forty-six Saudi EFL learners from the College of Science and Humanities at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University were randomly selected for this study. The study sample was then divided by the block randomization method into two equal groups: an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG). All the EFL learners were males, aged between 16 and 19. First, a pretest was administered to the two groups to gauge their writing proficiency. The experimental group then received writing instructions using the Contrastive Lexical Approach (CLA) over the course of 12 sessions, precisely, two fifty-minute sessions a week. While the participants in the EG were given L1 equivalents for L2 formulaic codes, the CG received conventional instructions and regulations during which participants began to skim and scan texts comprising the same formulaic codes as for the EG without being given any kind of translation and were then requested to write on the same subject matters as the experimental group. The two groups each received a posttest at the end of the treatment. After confirming the normal distribution of the data, the paired sample t-test was used to strike a comparison between the mean scores of the two posttests. The results demonstrated that adopting a contrastive lexical approach had a considerably significant impact on Saudi EFL learners’ writing proficiencies. The implication, as the size effect results showed, was that there was a strong correlation between CLA and writing skill development.
This study investigates the size and depth of vocabulary knowledge and its relationship to the general language proficiency of EFL learners. The study sample included 120 students from the University of Bahrain. The sample was randomly selected from the student population and split into two groups in terms of their level of English: intermediate and advanced. The study aims to answer four questions: (1) What is the effect of general language proficiency on the sizes of the receptive and productive vocabularies of learners of English at the University of Bahrain? (2) How does general language proficiency affect the depth of vocabulary knowledge of learners of English at the University of Bahrain? (3) What is the relationship between receptive and productive vocabularies and the depth of vocabulary knowledge? and (4) What is the relationship between vocabulary size and the nature of lexical networking? All the students in the sample completed three vocabulary tasks. The first two tasks were Meara and Jones’s Eurocentres Vocabulary Size Test (1990) and Meara and Fitzpatrick’s Lex30 word association task (2000), which were used to measure the sizes of receptive and productive vocabularies. The third task was Gyllstad’s COLLEX test (2007), which was used to investigate the depth of vocabulary knowledge. A quasi-experimental approach was adopted using a quantitative approach to analyze the data. The data of the study were analyzed by comparing the results of the two groups in relation to the three tasks using SPSS 16.0. The findings of the study have revealed that general language proficiency has a positive effect on learners’ receptive vocabulary size, a moderate effect on learners’ productive vocabulary size, and a very low effect on the depth of vocabulary knowledge. In addition, no relationship was shown between the size of vocabulary and the nature of lexical networking. With reference to these results, pedagogical and future research recommendations are made.
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