In the domain of teaching bilingual students, the issue of using the first language in a second-language based class has been widely controversial. While some studies have questioned the method of moving between the two languages—Translanguaging, others found it highly beneficial. Here we aimed to investigate the effect of Translanguaging on the learner’s performance and language learning. 34 consenting female students of English participated in oral and written exercises pre-and-post the use of Translanguaging. A short questionnaire was answered afterwards to elicit the participants’ perception on the use of Translanguaging as part of their classwork. Even though students did not believe that their ability to alternate between the two languages has placed them in a significantly enhanced comfort zone,  their higher grades post-Translanguaging indicate Translanguaging enhanced their understanding and enabled them to achieve higher levels of knowledge processing. Nevertheless, the participants’ language was not significantly affected by the process. Overall, we can conclude that Translanguaging in a bilingual classroom is effective in fully understanding the topic and the information provided, yet it does not help improve language proficiency.

Extensive reading is reading as much as possible, for one's own pleasure, at a difficulty level at which one can read smoothly and quickly. In the domain of reading, this paper investigates the effect of extensive reading from e-books, through utilizing a number of downloadable reading application programs on the students' e-devices, as opposed to traditional book-reading in an ESL context. It aims at providing answers as to how e-book reading affects the students' reading rate, their reading comprehension, and their attitudes to reading. A group of 40 freshman female students studying in the College of Basic Education, in the English Department participated in the study. Students' writing diaries together with two questionnaires made up the tools of the study. The data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings indicate that e-reading may accelerate the progress of the students' reading rate, which might be due to the utilization of the reading application features that trains the students to practice faster rates of reading. As for the comprehension level, the students reported lower levels when they read from an e-resource. On the other hand, the students' attitudes towards e-reading tend to be less positive when compared to conventional book reading, due to a number of extraneous factors that were not part of the inherent nature of the e-reading activity. Future studies on e-reading, whereby confounding factors will be rigorously controlled for are highly recommended to reach out more conclusive findings on the matter.

Learning to speak a language does not necessarily mean learning to realize all the phonemes of that language. When a sound does not exist in a speakers' mother tongue, s/he tends to use a phonotactic; hence, either replacing the sound with another that might sound similar, eliminating the sound, or adding a sound to make it possible to realize. In some cases, the orthography of the target language causes confusion and is considered misleading to non-native speakers. There are only 6 vowels in Arabic phonetics, long and short. Yet, there are 20 phonetic vowel symbols in Received Pronunciation, and 16 in General American. The following study investigates the realization of the English vowels by Kuwaiti speakers, and the effect of orthography on such realizations. 64 male and female Kuwaiti speakers are recorded reading 55 words and 10 sentences. The data obtained was analyzed by Praat (qualitative data), and SPSS (quantitative data). Focus group interviews were also conducted to gain further insight into the topic. It was found that not only do the speakers replace the vowels that do not exist in Arabic, but they also mispronounce vowels that exist in Arabic as they are negatively affected by the English orthography.

Gender and teaching are gaining increasing attention in the field of higher education. The significance of teacher gender seems even more crucial in an environment based on gender segregation. In the scope of language teaching and gender, this study investigates the influence of gender on the students' selection of teachers in general, and language teachers more specifically. The participants, 146 English major students in an all-female college of education, were given a questionnaire of 32 statements--to be answered on a 5-point likert scale--and four open-ended questions; all of which aim at examining the difference between male and female English language teachers in terms of attitude, grades, teaching and even appearance. The statistics were analyzed in terms of frequency, mean and variance in correlation with the independent variables of age, social status, GPA and years in college. It was found that most students prefer male teachers as they believe that the positive personal traits of the male teachers far exceed those of the female teachers. Nonetheless, the statistics have revealed that both genders (and sometimes female more than male teachers) are good language teachers. Hence, reflecting the main finding: gender is not a criterion for good language teaching, but it is our students' criterion for choosing a language teacher.

Arabizi is a trendy language phenomenon utilized by young Arabs to communicate across various social platforms. Young Kuwaitis seem to not be any exception in that regard. This paper aims mainly at investigating the linguistic features of Arabizi as produced by the young generation in Kuwait, and the reasons for which the practice has been persistent amongst the youth community. The main corpus data was collected from spontaneous WhatsApp chats of 35 young Kuwaiti respondents who provided 400 of their e-messages to be linguistically analyzed by the researcher. A digital questionnaire was also implemented to illicit respondents’ responses on the reasons for which young Kuwaitis use Arabizi in their e-messages. Due to the heterogeneity of the spontaneous corpus, supplemental data was provided from a story writing that was sent to the respondents to be re-written in the style they choose when they normally chat on WhatsApp. From a linguistic point of view, the study reveals a number of tendencies that place Arabizi as a unique method of communication with a profile that employs both transcription and transliteration in the way it represents its consonants vs. vowels, Kuwaiti dialectical phoneme shifts and the wide use of extralinguistic features. Intensive code-switching and mixing has also been displayed. The present study also signifies a number of sociolinguistic reasons for which Kuwaiti users of Arabizi employ the script in their e-communication across social platforms.