Abstract-This paper is restricted to the investigation of linguistic variation among the Kashmiri speakers at the level of phonology and lexicon of their language in accordance with certain social variables, viz-a-viz. religion, education, region / socioeconomic status, age and occupation. In the present paper, an effort has been devoted to examine as to how the structure of the Kashmiri language varies at the level of phonology and lexicon, in accordance with above mentioned social variables. It also takes into account the possible reasons behind this variation. The present paper explores as to how the social heterogeneity of the Kashmiri speech community is reflected in the linguistic behavior of its speakers, and gives rise to variations in the use of their language at the level of phonology and lexicon. The paper begins with giving a brief introduction about language variation, social variables, and linguistic variables. It also discusses the historical perspective of language variation, and throws light on the related literature by discussing some important studies of variation carried out by different scholars of linguistics from time to time. In this study an attempt has been made to picturize the social structure of the Kashmiri speech community in terms of its social stratification/ and social heterogeneity. The paper also discusses the research methodology adopted in carrying out this study.
The primary focus of the present study is to investigate the anxiety level of Saudi undergraduate students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). An attempt has been made to find out various possible causes, sources, and effects of foreign language anxiety on Saudi EFL learners. The study aims to answer the main question; if this anxiety affects the learning process of Saudi EFL learners positively or adversely. The study demonstrates some models and strategies related to causes and effects of anxiety. These models and strategies can be applied as potential management tools and strategies for reducing the level of anxiety encountered by Saudi EFL learners. The researchers employed quantitative and qualitative approaches to collecting and analyzing the data. A 33-item questionnaire adapted from Horwitz et al (1986) distributed among 271 subjects has been used as the main tool for the data collection. All the four basic language skills were tested to elicit the data for measuring the level of anxiety in Saudi students learning English as a foreign language. In addition to the above quantitative approach, some semi-structured interviews were conducted with both EFL learners and teachers. The outcome of the present study can significantly contribute to the development of the quality of learning English as a Foreign Language. It can also serve as an effective mechanism to solve problematic issues among EFL learners in general and Saudi EFL learners in particular. The study offers to introduce researchers and teachers with certain reliable scales for the evaluation of Saudi EFL learners' progress in their learning process. Five-point (5-point) Likert scale is one of these major scales used in the present study.
Undergraduate learners learning English in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia often complain that they face problems in understanding audios played in their listening skills' classroom. Audio materials are recorded by native English speakers at a speedy pace with challenging linguistic or content input in unfamiliar or less familiar contexts or situations. As it is observed in classes of listening skills, listening materials are more focused on teaching test instead of teaching listening acquisition. Teachers play the audios, students do a variety of exercises and activities (fill-in-theblanks, multiple-choice, short writing questions, matching and pronunciation practice), and conclude the lesson with 'right/wrong' feedbacks or shift to teaching another skill. In both cases, listening lessons provide insufficient internalization of comprehensible input. The present study explored perceptions of Saudi English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates and EFL teachers towards the use of 'Listening Transcript' (LT) in lessons of listening skills. It investigates if LT help students in overcoming the difficulties that they face in bottom-up processing and topdown processing and what EFL teachers think about the pedagogical value of LT and ways of using it in the lessons of listening skills. It is a mixed method of research. It employs survey to collect quantitative data in the form of a 15-item questionnaire of 60 female Saudi undergraduates and a semi-structured interview of 10 EFL teachers in King Khalid University (KKU), Abha, Saudi Arabia to gather qualitative data. The result of the study shows that LT plays a more decisive role in developing bottom-up skills like identifying segmental suprasegmental features of speech, recognizing words, recalling information, relating with real life, selecting words, restating and explaining the content than developing top-down skills (high order skills) like distinguishing information, comparing and contrasting, judging, and formulating your learning. The study finds there is a need for designing strategies to use LT more creatively and powerfully.
Sharing lexicon is a direct outcome of a language contact situation. When two or more languages exist side-by-side while serving the communicative requirements in a particular social situation, they grow in an envelope and environment of linguistic exchange, and sharing of lexicon among them becomes a natural process. In a language contact situation, the speakers of one language are bound to incorporate linguistic items from their contact languages into their language to satisfy their communication needs. In the linguistically heterogeneous and multilingual situation of the Kashmiri Speech Community, Kashmiri, a member of the Indo-Aryan family, and Arabic, a language of the Semitic family of languages, are two significantly dominant contact languages. The side-by-side existence of these two languages while serving different sociolinguistic purposes and the assignment of different roles to them in various domains of the social life of the Kashmiri speech community have resulted in a linguistic amalgamation at a very large scale. This linguistic amalgamation has, in turn, resulted in the transfer of an enormously huge stock of lexicon from Arabic into Kashmiri, thereby paving a smooth path for the development of an extensively large amount of lexicon common to them. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to demonstrate various Kashmiri-Arabic language contact situations and the subsequent transfer of the Arabic lexicon into the Kashmiri language. The paper also considers the impetus and inspiration behind this Arabic-Kashmiri linguistic flow in detail. The influence of some sociolinguistic factors and linguistic implications of the Kashmiri-Arabic common lexicon has also been explored in the study. In the paper, an effort has been made to throw light on the hospitality of the Arabic language in donating an enormously huge amount of word treasure to Kashmiri and the receptivity of the Kashmiri language in accepting this vocabulary treasure from the Arabic language.
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