Arabic English Research Articles

Unraveling Conversational Implicatures: A Study on Arabic EFL Learners

Abstract The present research aimed to evaluate the comprehension level of conversational implicature among a group of 30 senior Native Arabic-speaking students enrolled in the BA program of English Language and Literature at a UAE university. The participants’ comprehension of implicatures was assessed by providing them with 20 excerpts from the American sitcom Seinfeld (https://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html). The participants were asked to select the implied meaning of one underlined utterance as it occurred in context. The findings of the study indicate that Arab English as a Foreign Language learners have a slightly below-average proficiency in comprehending implicatures produced by native English speakers, which can be attributed to their lower level of proficiency, lack of pragmatic competence, and their lack of information about the American culture. The most challenging types of implicatures to grasp were those flouting the maxim of manner (35.34%), while the easiest types to interpret were those flouting the maxim of quantity.

Exploring the Effect of Arabizi on English Writing by Arab English Learners

The study explores the impact of the Arabizi phenomenon on English writing by Arab English Learners. Due to the popularity of social networks, Arab students combine Roman numbers and letters to produce a new writing code with unconventional rules. The study is significant because most researchers studied the impact of Arabizi on the Arabic language. In contrast, this study focused on the effect of Arabizi on English writing by Arab learners. The study sample consisted of twenty sophomore female students majoring in the English language at one of the Jordanian governmental universities. The main research questions are how Arabizi affects English writing and the justification behind the continuity of this new writing code. The researcher analysed samples of the intervention of Arabizi on writing in English to answer the first question. To answer the second question, the researcher interviewed the sample members to investigate the reasons for the continuity of this new writing code. The study results concluded that not all English foreign language learners use Arabizi, while others use it regularly for several reasons, although it affects their English writing. By the end of the study, the researcher presents recommendations for linguists and English language teachers.

The Contribution of Vocabulary Knowledge to Summary Writing Quality: Vocabulary Size and Lexical Richness.

Vocabulary knowledge plays an important role in writing. Previous research has examined the relationship between various aspects of vocabulary knowledge and independent writing performance and limited attention has been given to integrated writing such as summary writing. Our study investigated the contribution of two aspects of vocabulary knowledge (vocabulary size and lexical richness) to summary writing quality. In addition, we examined the extent to which lexical richness measures relate to summary writing quality among students who have smaller vocabulary sizes and students who have larger vocabulary sizes. We addressed these questions by administering a lexical decision test called the LexTALE and analyzing lexical richness and writing quality in the summary writing of 73 Arabic English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners of English. The results revealed a strong positive correlation between vocabulary size and summary writing quality, indicating that a larger vocabulary size is associated with higher-quality summaries. . However, most measures of lexical richness did not show a significant correlation with summary writing quality. Interestingly, the relationship between lexical richness measures and summary writing quality varied when learners were put in two groups with different vocabulary sizes.. Implications of the findings of the study for language teaching pedagogy and for research on the complex relationship between vocabulary knowledge and summary writing are discussed.

On Ambiguity in the Arabic Language: Scrutinizing Translation Issues through Machine Translation from English and French into Arabic

Ambiguity in some syntactic structures of the same language has always posed problems to the human translator and to machine translation. These problems become more complex for the Machine Translation of genetically unrelated languages such as Arabic, English and French. Arabic Lexical ambiguity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) also poses problems when the semantic fields of Arabic words differ from those of English for instance. This often occurs when two or more words from Arabic equate to a single word in English. Semantic gaps between the two languages are also a source of ambiguity in Natural Language Processing. We shall deal with some cases of ambiguity in machine translation from Arabic to English and French and vice versa. The questions addressed in this paper relate to segmentation, determination / non-determination, coordination and the issue of the word as a meaningful and functional unit. Some aspects of the segmentation of constituents into grammatical categories and their comparison with structures of Arabic English and French are addressed in this paper.

Lexical Cohesive Devices and English Writing Quality

This mixed-methods study investigated the use of lexical cohesive devices (LCD) for 56 Arab English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in the UAE. The quantitative descriptive approach was used to find out the frequency of LCD in learners’ essays, and the quantitative correlational approach was implemented to examine the association between LCD and the writing quality. However, the qualitative descriptive approach utilized semi-structured interviews of 4 EFL teachers and 15 EFL learners to identify the challenges that they encountered regarding using LCD in essay writing. The findings demonstrated that repetition and collocations were the most frequently used LCD, while meronyms and hyponyms were the least common in participants’ essays. There was also a moderate positive correlation between cohesive density and the writing quality. The difficulties reported by the participants in dealing with LCD included themes pertaining to awareness and instruction, de-contextualization of cohesive devices (CDs) and feedback and correction.

The Dilemma of Utilising the Present Perfect Tense in English Writing by Arab English Learners

This study diagnoses the challenges of foreign language learners in using the present perfect tense when writing in English. Most foreign language learners fail to correctly write sentences using the present perfect tense and substitute it with the past tense. The researchers suggest an instructional program based on steps for teachers to solve the problem of the present perfect tense. The study sample is twenty students in the seventh grade in one of the government schools for girls. The researchers asked the participants to write sentences using the present perfect tense. After analysing students' sentences, the researchers detected many incorrect cases of using of the present perfect tense and highlighted the incorrect usage for discussion. The results show that most errors stemmed from Arabic words interfering with English. The present perfect tense presents more significant challenges for Arab students than the simple past tense. The study showed that students' native language influences English grammatical structure use. These results have significant implications for how the mother language affects EFL classrooms. The results also reflect the students’ misunderstanding of the meaning of the present perfect since they are unfamiliar with the function of the present tense. Finally, teachers are part of the problem because they follow the traditional grammar teaching method, which focuses on structure rather than function. The researchers suggest a series of recommendations based on the study's findings.

Arabic–English Pocket Dictionary (Cory) Based on Symbolic Art to Increase Arabic Vocabulary Mastery in Elementary School

The purpose of this study is to describe the Arabic–English Pocket Dictionary (Cory) Based on Symbolic Art to increase Arabic vocabulary mastery in elementary school. To find out how Cory is implemented and increased, this research uses classroom action research methods. Classroom action research (CAR) is a research method whose implementation is carried out to find out problems in the learning process as well as steps that teachers can take to improve the quality of learning, which refers to the research implementation process, consisting of four stages, namely (1) Planning, (2) Actualing, (3) Observation, and (4) Reflecting (reflecting in general on the research process). This must be done in at least two cycles if it shows the target that has been determined. The research process was carried out in two cycles. The results of the first and second cycle post-tests obtained an average score of 76 and 95, respectively, with learning completeness results in each cycle of 70% and 100%. Thus, the percentage increase in student learning outcomes is 30%.

Contrastive Analysis of Interlanguage Features of an Arab English as a Second Language (ESL) Speaker

This study was an attempt to analyze a collection of data from a second language speaker of English. The data was collected through an interview with an informant, who was an Arab male student in his first year of graduate studies at an American university. The interview lasted about 15 minutes and was recorded in English. The purpose of the interview was to pinpoint the utterances, phrases, or dialogues that contained interlanguage features and explain why those forms might exist. The interlanguage utterances were categorized by topic depending on the type of feature produced. The groups were classified in the following manner: the use of the 3rd person singular -s, the use of the plural -s, and the use of articles. These forms were then analyzed by considering the possible underlying rule for each feature and developing a pattern by comparing each feature to its correct counterpart. The resulting patterns revealed two main reasons for interlanguage data: attributions to the informant’s native language and particular sentence structures in English. The study concludes with suggested future experiments and investigations of the most noticeable interlanguage features as well as suggestions for English language instructors and general teaching practices.

Rendering natural collocations in a translation task: The effect of direction, congruency, semantic transparency, and proficiency

AbstractSecond language (L2) research has extensively examined various factors that might influence the processing and learning of collocations, including congruency, semantic transparency, L2 proficiency, and (to a limited extent) directionality. However, research examining the effect of these factors on the natural rendering of collocations by translation trainees is scarce. The present study aims to apply the factors identified in L2 research in a natural translation context. The aim is to examine whether such factors may influence rendering collocations naturally from the source language to the target language. Ninety‐two Arabic–English translator trainees took part in the study. They translated short equivalent passages containing 40 collocations in both directions (Arabic—English and English—Arabic). A mixed‐effects model was fit to examine factors that may predict the production of a natural collocation: translation direction, L1 congruency, semantic transparency, and proficiency. Results showed no differences between the production of natural collocations to and from the native language. However, there was a significant effect of congruency and semantic transparency; congruent collocations and collocations that had a transparent meaning were more likely to be rendered naturally. Moreover, estimated proficiency level in English modulated congruency effects in that the difference between congruent and incongruent items declined as estimated proficiency increased. Results of the present study suggest that second language models and translation models should incorporate semantic transparency of collocations. Moreover, the results imply that collocations and their properties should be explicitly taught in translation classrooms.

Investigation of the use of infographics to aid second language vocabulary learning

People learn and remember more effectively and efficiently through the use of texts and visuals than through texts alone. This paper explores the potential of infographics in aiding vocabulary learning and retention among Arab English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The paper adopts a quasi-experimental two-group pretest–post-test–delayed test design. A total of 41 Arab EFL learners participated in this study. The experimental group was taught vocabulary using infographics for 10 weeks, whereas the control group was taught using the traditional way of instruction. Infographic materials were designed to teach the students’ course “Vocabulary I,” where the syllabus modules were fully converted into infographics during the whole semester. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed using two recognition vocabulary tests, word definition, and word grammatical measures, that were administered before the intervention, immediately after the learning session’s completion, and at a delayed time (4 weeks after the whole treatment). An oral interview was used to gauge the learners’ production knowledge of vocabulary. In addition, a questionnaire was utilized to examine the learners’ perceptions toward using infographics for learning EFL vocabulary. Results showed a significant difference between the scores of the groups in favor of the experimental group in vocabulary recognition knowledge and vocabulary production knowledge over the immediate run and the long run. Moreover, the participants in the experimental group showed high perceived usefulness of learning with infographics. Pedagogical implications and recommendations for future research were also proposed.

Language as power in the therapy room: A study of bilingual (Arabic–English) therapists' experiences

AbstractThe topic of language as power (LaP) in individual therapeutic encounters has thus far been overlooked, and as bilingual therapists have the ability to use more than one language in the therapy room, their experience of LaP is a compelling research area that this paper attempts to explore. This qualitative, inductive, phenomenological study used interviews and interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore five bilingual Arabic–English‐speaking therapists' experiences of LaP in the therapeutic encounter. The study identifies two overarching themes: (a) the emergence of identity and power from language and (b) comparisons of power in the English and Arabic languages. Within these themes, the study finds that therapists experience LaP through multiple avenues: self‐disclosure, intersectionality, being transported to different identities and expressions of power and power of expression in Arabic–English. These multiple avenues illustrate the complexity of LaP in the therapeutic encounter. The study sheds light on an underexplored area in psychotherapy, illuminating an important area for psychotherapists and training institutions to consider when working with clients.

The Effect of Speech Perception in Noise on Arabic and Spanish Bilingual Listeners.

The purpose of this study was to compare speech perception performance in noise, as measured by signal-to-noise ratio for 50% correct scores (SNR-50) and SNR loss, between monolingual English speakers and two bilingual second-language learner populations with normal hearing sensitivity: Arabic-English and Spanish-English bilinguals. Additionally, this study observed how speech perception in noise varied as a function of language dominance for the Arabic-English bilinguals. This study was a quasi-experimental, nonrandomized study. Adults with normal peripheral hearing sensitivity participated in this study: Group 1 (n = 16) bilingual Arabic-English speakers who learned English as a second language; Group 2 (n = 10) bilingual Spanish-English speakers from a previous study; Group 3 (n = 27) monolingual English speakers combined from this study and the study of Mendel and Widner (2016). Speech perception was assessed using standardized methods for the Quick Speech-in-Noise (QuickSIN), the Bamford-Kowal-Bench Speech-in-Noise, the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT), and the Words-in-Noise tests. The two bilingual groups had significantly higher SNR-50 scores and greater SNR loss as compared to their monolingual peers. SNR-50 negatively correlated with language dominance for the QuickSIN and HINT for the Arabic-English speakers. Despite having normal hearing and being proficient in the English language, bilingual Arabic-English and Spanish-English speakers exhibited a mild SNR loss. Speech perception abilities were affected by test difficulty as well as the individual's degree of language dominance.

Graph transformer for cross-lingual plagiarism detection

<span lang="EN-US">The existence of vast amounts of multilingual textual data on the internet leads to cross-lingual plagiarism which becomes a serious issue in different fields such as education, science, and literature. Current cross-lingual plagiarism detection approaches usually employ syntactic and lexical properties, external machine translation systems, or finding similarities within a multilingual set of text documents. However, most of these methods are conceived for literal plagiarism such as copy and paste, and their performance is diminished when handling complex cases of plagiarism including paraphrasing. In this paper, we propose a new graph-based approach that represents text passages in different languages using knowledge graphs. We put forward a new graph structure modeling method based on the Transformer architecture that employs precise relation encoding and delivers a more efficient way for global graph representation. The mappings between the graphs are learned both in semi-supervised and unsupervised training mechanisms. The results of our experiments in Arabic–English, French–English, and Spanish–English plagiarism detection show that our graph transformer method surpasses the state-of-the-art cross-lingual plagiarism detection approaches with and without paraphrasing cases, and provides further insights on the use of knowledge graphs on a language-independent model.</span>

Impact of First Language Transfer on the Use of English Prepositions by Arab English Learners

This study aims to investigate the overuse of English prepositions by Arabs caused by first language transfer among high school, university, and graduate-level students who study English as a foreign language in Saudi Arabia. The researcher developed the research tool of multiple-choice questions to be responded to by the study participants, including five hundred thirty-one persons of the mentioned research community. It has been found after the analysis of responses of the study participants that the greater the students' competence level, the less impact the first language transfer has on second language acquisition. In this study, the researcher recommends that the student should be taught more about the different meanings and usage of prepositions in English and Arabic. In addition, more comparative linguistic research between English and other languages, such as Arabic, should be encouraged to help students understand how prepositions are used in each language.

Africa’s Poverty and Famines: Developmental Projects of China on Africa

Poverty exists without any face; it is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon. Poverty and famines existed before human civilization and culture. Human culture existed 0.07 million years ago, and civilization began 6000 years ago. In a modern civilized society, ‘first famine in human history occurred in 1708 B.C. From 1708 BC to 1878 AD, 350 famines occurred in various spheres of the world. The Encyclopedia Britannica listed 31 main famines from prehistoric to the 1960s. The sub-continent has also faced eleven severe famines from 1769-70 to 1943, and about 40.9 million people have died due to these famines. Similarly, more than 2 billion people live below the poverty line. Besides, China left 800 million people due to ‘Open Door Policy’. Now she is changing the world's shape through BRI. Africa is a complex and perplexing region of the world. Because, Africa is facing all the root problems of the world, i.e., poverty, massive unemployment and income inequality, mono-culture political economy, border disputes, intra-state wars, and ethnic and lingual clashes. In the land of Africa, the first famine was recorded 2273 years ago in Ethiopia’. About 2,582 languages[i] and 1,382 dialects are found on the African continent. From 1945 to 1999, humanity faced 25 interstate wars, most of which occurred in Africa. Therefore, 127 civil wars happened among 73 states in the same era, and 16.2 million people died. The Export and Import Bank of China will spend 1US$ trillion on the African continent in 2025.
 [i] Language which is speaking in Africa, Arabic (170 million) English (130 million), Swahili (100), French (115), Berber (50), Hausa (50), Portuguese (20) and Spanish (10) (Spolsky, 2018)

The Speech Act of Invitation: A Contrastive Analysis of Moroccan Arabic and American English

The present study has highlighted the similarities and the differences between American English (AE) and Moroccan Arabic (MA) in terms of the speech act of invitation. In fact, several strategies have been used to make, accept, and decline an invitation. The study’s data has been collected via two online questionnaires using Google Forms. In fact, there is one questionnaire which was used to collect data from Americans who speak English as their mother tongue and another one for Moroccan whose mother tongue is Moroccan Arabic. Both questionnaires comprise a number of parts. The first part is where personal information is provided. As a matter of fact, the participants are asked about their region and city as well as their age and sex. They are also asked about their level of education. The second part is composed of four situations for each questionnaire. The participants have to answer in American English when filling out the questionnaire designed in English, whereas others have to answer in Moroccan Arabic when filling out the one in Arabic. The results have shown that there are some similarities between MA and AE in terms of the speech act of invitation. Therefore, it is worthwhile to note that in both AE and MA, there are some indirect and direct strategies which are used to make an invitation. In fact, there are many strategies shared by both MA and AE which indicates that there are similarities. However, there are also some differences given that each language has its own socio-cultural background.

Linguistic Landscape of Bilingual Shop Signs in Saudi Arabia

Shop signs are a visible indication of the linguistic landscape of a place, hence the need for public policies to control, particularly, bottom-up signs in situations where there are issues, such ensuring consistency and correct representation in the second language. To investigate the linguistic landscape of bilingual shop signs in Saudi Arabia, this study examines the lettering in bilingual shop signs in shopping malls in Riyadh and Jeddah in terms of relative size, information, and the quality of English-Arabic (E-A) and Arabic-English (A-E) transliteration or translation. This was done in view of the national policy in Saudi Arabia which aims to ensure correct Arabisation when inconsistencies have been observed in the Arab world. Moreover, it gives an indication of the linguistic landscape, which is necessary given the need to prepare the kingdom for the Saudi 2030 Vision and cater to the growing number of international visitors. Altogether, 184 signboards were observed and categorised, of which 68 were shortlisted for further analysis. Of these, 54 were A-E signs and 17 were E-A signs, with two in both categories. The majority (83.3%) of signs were bilingual with slight variation in relative size and display of information. Same sized lettering was displayed in 66.7%, and the same information in 64.8%. Remedial suggestions are given for language policy-makers to address the issue found of a few inconsistent and erroneous transliterations and spellings, which together accounted for 9.3%. Overall, the case is not as bad in Saudi Arabia as noted in some other Arab countries

Contrastive Analysis of Arabic-English Translation of Legal Texts

The present study aims to provide a contrastive analysis of Arabic-English translation of ten legal texts with an eye to evaluating the accuracy of the translation. The researcher collected the data from El-Farahaty’s (2015) Arabic–English–Arabic Legal Translation. A contrastive analysis was developed to assess the accuracy of the translation of the legal texts selected. The examination of the source legal texts and the translations provided either by the authoress of the book herself or the sources from which she collected them revealed serious errors such as overtranslation, omission of translating important words in the source texts, wrong choice of equivalents in the target language, gloss translation, punctuation mistakes in the target texts and grammatical mistakes in the target texts. Further research on the assessment of Arabic-English translation of legal texts is required to encourage professional legal translators and scholars to approach legal translation more professionally and responsibly.

Arabic English Code Switching among Saudi Speakers

Arabic English Code Switching among Saudi Speakers

Language Identification of Intra-Word Code-Switching for Arabic–English

Multilingual speakers tend to mix different languages in text and speech; a phenomenon referred to by linguists as “code-switching” (CS). Also, speakers switch between morphemes from various languages in the same word (intra-word CS). User-generated texts on social media are informal and contain a fair amount of different types of CS data. This data needs to be investigated and analyzed for several linguistic tasks. Language Identification (LID) is one of the important tasks that should be tackled for intra-word CS data. LID involves segmenting mixed words and tagging each part with its corresponding language ID. This work aimed at creating the first annotated Arabic–English (AR–EN) corpus for the CS intra-word LID task along with a web-based application for data annotation. We implemented two baseline models using Naïve Bayes and Character BiLSTM for AR–EN text. Our main model was constructed using segmental recurrent neural networks (SegRNN). We investigated the usage of different word embeddings with SegRNN. The highest LID system for tagging the entire data-set was obtained using SegRNN alone, achieving an F1-score of 94.84% and was able to recognize mixed words with F1-score equal to 81.15%. Besides, the model of the SegRNN with FastText embeddings achieved the highest results equal to 81.45% F1-score for tagging the mixed words.