Paragraph Structure in Arabic and English Expository Discourse

Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Some contextual considerations in the use of synonymous verbs: The case of steal, rob, and burglarize

This paper explores the use of the synonymous verbs burglarize, rob and steal in various authentic contexts in an attempt to identify the semantic and syntactic constraints that differentiate them from one another. The study, drawing data from newspaper articles, books, spontaneous speech as well as the BNC and concordance systems, shows that each of these words possesses semantic and syntactic features that distinguish it form the other two. The study also shows how contextual factors determine the choice of one verb rather than the other. After presenting many illustrative examples that reveal the peculiar nature of each verb, the paper attempts a componential analysis of these three synonymous items that further illustrates the uniqueness of each one of them

Arab EFL learners’ acquisition of verbs of senses

This study attempts to explore the difficulties that Arab EFL learners of English encounter in the use of five verbs of senses when used as copulas, main verbs, main verbs with a metaphorical use, and as parts of idioms. A questionnaire consisting of three parts was specially designed to elicit the necessary data for this study at the levels of recognition and production. The subjects of the study were 30 randomly selected senior English major university students. The results of the study show that the students encountered tangible difficulties in using the five target verbs. A hierarchy of difficulty was established and the main causes of the problem were identified

A discourse-based approach for Arabic question answering

The treatment of complex questions with explanatory answers involves searching for arguments in texts. Because of the prominent role that discourse relations play in reflecting text-producers’ intentions, capturing the underlying structure of text constitutes a good instructor in this issue. From our extensive review, a system for automatic discourse analysis that creates full rhetorical structures in large scale Arabic texts is currently unavailable. This is due to the high computational complexity involved in processing a large number of hypothesized relations associated with large texts. Therefore, more practical approaches should be investigated. This paper presents a new Arabic Text Parser oriented for question answering systems dealing with لماذا “why” and كيف “how to” questions. The Text Parser presented here considers the sentence as the basic unit of text and incorporates a set of heuristics to avoid computational explosion. With this approach, the developed question answering system reached a significant improvement over the baseline with a Recall of 68% and MRR of 0.62

How Far Does the English Language Teachers' Pronunciation Affect That of Their Students in Jordanian Public Schools?

This paper summarizes a study I conducted for my Master's degree, in which an attempt was made to shed some light on the influence of the pronunciation of English language teachers on that of their students in the areas of vowel phonemes, word stress and intonation. A sample of ten teachers and twelve students from each teacher's class was drawn from ten public secondary schools in Amman. The major concern of the study was to determine how far the pronunciation of the English language teachers, among many other interrelated factors, shapes that of their students

The teacher as researcher in the context of language teaching

AbstractThis study highlights the importance of action research in the process of EFL teaching. It shows how the teacher can utilize action research as a vital means for promoting learning outcomes and solving teaching problems encountered in the classroom. The paper presents the results of a teaching experiment, employing collaborative action research in two EFL classes in which English was taught through English. The use of action research inspired the authors to develop a teaching approach that takes learners’ linguistic, cognitive and affective traits into consideration. The experiment was applied throughout a whole semester. The paper reports on the workability and success of this approach in creating a thriving teaching learning atmosphere. The results also supported and recommended the use of collaborative action research in solving teaching problems in classrooms