The present study compares the writings of a group of Arab students at the University of Bahrain in both Arabic and English. The main purpose is to investigate possible sources and solutions to the problem of textual incoherence and deviation. To this end, four hundred and sixty…
Since language is an important means of communication between human beings, it is held that writers or speakers can affect their readers or hearers by using certain linguistic means. The manipulation of semantics and syntax, namely the use of emotive language, is seen as an affe…
Initial investigations into English essays written by Syrian university students triangulated Syrian and British teachers’ evaluations of the essays and the lexico-grammatical features they identified as affecting the overall quality of writing, with text analyses of the sources…
The present thesis seeks to examine the grammatico-pragmatic problem of translating modality from English into Arabic (two formally and genetically different languages) and vice versa, with the aim of suggesting tentative ways that would tackle such a problem for the Arab transl…
The thesis deals with the problems of translating "soft-sell" advertisements between Arabic and English. It is argued that a standardisation strategy of any international advertising campaign across cultures of soft-sell advertising is unsuccessful at any time in the case of Ara…
This research was conducted for the purpose of assessing the practicality of introducing the Discourse Intonation theory in the Language Institute of Al-Baath University, Syria. Using a case study tradition, the various features of the theory were presented over a number of sess…
This thesis reports on two action research cycles conducted in the English Department of the Higher Language Institute at Tishreen University, Syria. With the problem of global coursebooks that are pre-determined for learners, the aim of this action research was to use supplemen…
This case study used a mixed method approach to explore the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language through the medium of a new online synchronous programme (CentrEM) at King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. Information was collected using questionnaires (240 s…
This multidimensional study comprehensively explores the English language textbook situation in Pakistan in five stages utilizing mixed methods approach. Two preliminary stages were small scale – a survey of the English language requirements and interviews of the officials invol…
Iran has been in the headlines in the recent years and decades for many socio-political reasons. Many of these involve the confrontation between Islamic revolutionary values and the foreign policies and aspirations of Western governments. Among the Iranian state’s revolutionary …
This is an investigative action research study on ways of improving the reading comprehension skills of Arabic medical school students. The study first analysed the difficulties of teaching and learning English and reading in English in a Saudi university medical college. An int…
This thesis consists of two mixed-methods studies: a validation study and an application study of Dörnyei's (2009a) L2 Motivational Self System with participants from China. The quantitative part of the validation study involved 1,154 Chinese middle school and university student…
This thesis investigates the use to which William Langland puts the Glossa Ordinaria to authorise his vision of ethical, social and ecclesiastical reform in Piers Plowman. There was much in late fourteenth-century England to arouse the ire of the reformer and satirist and among …
In the realization that second language learners’ grammatical competence does not always guarantee their communicative language ability and that meta-knowledge of English information structure might play an important role in developing their communicative language ability, I car…
As cognitive linguistics argues, the meaning construction processes that we employ to understand and interact with the world around us are dynamic processes and are highly metaphorical. Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson appears to be insufficient to expla…
Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald are responsible for some of the most popular yet obscure texts in the English Canon. Because Carroll and MacDonald are often credited with pioneering much of their genres — Nonsense Literature and Fantasy Literature — it seems that often they …
This thesis explores the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the speech of Chinese non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and native speakers (NSs), using corpus methodologies, the 'Linear Unit Grammar' analysis (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006) and text-based analyses. It reports that …
This thesis reports on a mixed methods classroom research study carried out at a British university. The study investigates the effectiveness of two different explicit teaching approaches, Illustration – Interaction – Induction (III) and Present – Practice – Produce (PPP) used t…