Linguistic phenomena at play in the Saudi EFL classroom

Abstract

The present study assesses the correlation between metalinguistic awareness and language dominance for bilingual Saudi EFL learners as such factors are responsible for successful intercultural communication. The study participants comprise convenience samples, a total of 166 EFL learners, selected by native-speaking EFL teachers from eight sections in the language and translation departments at Qassim University. The study also examines the vocabulary size of these participants who are all from the second and third levels of education by applying a cross-sectional survey approach. The aim is to understand the role of metalinguistic awareness and language dominance in the interactions of the sample who are comparably native in Arabic and English with native English speakers. Results of the study show that Saudi bilingual learners have high positive perceptions in lexical metalinguistic awareness and moderate levels with regard to language dominance. The study also shows that there is a correlation between metalinguistic awareness and language dominance (r=0.78) as the receptive and expressive vocabulary quantity are the significant predictors. Moreover, results show that vocabulary size is not affected by morphological metalinguistic awareness.