This study aimed at finding out whether Singaporean secondary social studies textbooks contain global themes, in which grade level those global themes are introduced, the percentage of global themes in socials studies textbooks at each grade level, and which global themes are emphasized. A checklist consisting of four main global themes was developed. Those are (1) global systems such as cultural, political, economic, ecological, technological, social, educational and healthcare systems,…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 2:11pm —
No Comments
Findings of an exploratory study with a sample of students at the colleges of medicine, pharmacy, science, and computer science revealed that English is the language of classroom instruction and most textbooks used in most of the courses at those colleges. Students reported that they do not study the Arabic equivalents of English technical terms in their major area of study. It was noted that students have misconceptions about the Arabization processes. Most of them believe that borrowing and…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 2:02pm —
No Comments
The article assesses the impact of the national curricula including textbooks, women’s sports, how women are presented in a nationalist curriculum in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia on women. The article touches upon women’s experiences in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, women’s voices, women’s interpretations and understandings of women, gender and national curricula. The historical context is also described.
Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 2:01pm —
No Comments
65 EFL freshman students were enrolled in a 4-hour writing course. Pretest results showed that the students could not put two words together. The posttest results showed a great improvement in writing ability. The students could write fluently and communicate easily. Spelling, punctuation and capitalization errors significantly decreased. Improvement was noted in essay length, neatness, mechanical correctness and style. Improvement was due to student factors and efficient task management…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 2:00pm —
No Comments
Thirty six EFL freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were given a dictation, a listening comprehension test and a decoding test. The purpose of the study was to find out whether EFL freshmen students' spelling ability correlates with their listening comprehension and decoding skills. Data analysis showed that the typical EFL freshman student misspelled 41.5% of the words on the dictation, gave 49.5% correct responses on the…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:59pm —
No Comments
Year after year, EFL and translation programs at King Saud University are experiencing significant increases in female freshman student enrollments. This study aims to investigate the effect of female freshman student enrollment figures in EFL programs on student achievement and attitudes, program staffing, classroom instruction, management, assessment, resources and facilities utilization on the basis of female faculty demographic, female faculty teaching load, number of courses and total…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:58pm —
No Comments
Vocabulary teaching and learning constitute a major problem for EFL instructors and students. The pretest showed that freshman students at COLT have difficulty in pronouncing, recognizing the meaning of, using and spelling English words. In their first semester, freshman students are required to take a vocabulary course that consists of 50 lessons (2000 words), each consisting of a presentation page and a practice page. To help the students learn, retain, apply and relate word, the…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:57pm —
No Comments
The present study found that 90% of female Saudi translators who graduated between 1990 and 1996 are not working as translators. Although translation jobs are available in hospitals, translation bureaus, and embassies, many graduates find the jobs open for women unsuitable because of working conditions, stringent qualifications, staff policies, salaries and benefits. Others disliked the nature of the work and cited insufficient information about employment opportunities, lack of motivation, and…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:56pm —
No Comments
159 grammatical agreement errors collected from the translation projects of nine Saudi graduating seniors majoring in translation were analyzed. A grammatical agreement error was defined as the incorrect inflection of nouns, verbs, adjectives, anaphoric pronouns, and determiners to show a mismatch in singular, dual, or plural forms or a mismatch in masculine and feminine gender in correspondence with a subject, modified noun or antecedent. There were more disagreeing verbs than pronouns than…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:55pm —
No Comments
Interlingual data, examined in the present study, consisted of advanced students' deviant use of VSO and SVO structures in the translation of expository texts from English into Arabic. Although English is an SVO language and Arabic has two word orders: VSO (verbal sentences) and SVO (nominal sentences), students seemed to translate imitatively rather than discriminately. Analysis of the syntactic context showed that VSO structures were avoided and SVO structures were overgeneralized in long…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:54pm —
No Comments
A checklist consisting of the general and specific narrative and expository text structure skills was constructed and used to analyze and classify all the reading questions that follow the narrative and expository texts in junior and senior high school reading textbooks used in girls’ schools. Analysis of the reading questions has indicated that of a total of 1282 questions in all twelve reading textbooks, only 35 questions were allocated to text structure: 23 questions covered narrative texts…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:53pm —
No Comments
59 EFL college students took a cohesion test in which they identified four types of cohesive ties in a reading text. Incorrect responses were analyzed. It was found that substitution was the most difficult to process followed by reference and ellipsis, whereas conjunction was the easiest. In resolving the cohesion relationships, the students used the following faulty strategies: an anaphor was associated with the closest noun whether intersentential or intrasentential. When preceded by two…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:51pm —
No Comments
A checklist consisting of criteria for reading lesson design was used to analyze, describe and evaluate reading lesson components, layout and aesthetic aspects. Findings indicated that reading lessons lack many essential components such as advance organizers, interspersed questions, instructions and explanations in the margins. Comprehension questions that follow the reading text within each grade level and across the grade levels did not differ in number nor comprehension level measured.…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:50pm —
No Comments
The study aimed to investigate the reading interests of female college students in terms of the magazines they read and the topics they like to read and the topics senior and junior high school reading textbooks cover. Findings of a questionnaire and interviews with female college students at King Saud University indicated that 77% of the students read women’s magazines, 77% like to read about fashion and make-up, 66% read articles about movies and pop-stars, 24% read poetry magazines, between…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:47pm —
No Comments
The study investigated ESL students’ ability to comprehend and analyze advertisements, to identify the stylistic features of advertisements, to find out the features that are easy to identify, and those that are difficult to identify. Results of a test with 66 ESL college students showed ad features that were easy to identify and those that were difficult to identify. Responses also reflect the difficulty level of the different stylistic features of the advertisement. Correcting faulty…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:46pm —
No Comments
The educational system in Saudi Arabia consists of 6 years of elementary school, 3 years of junior and 3 years of senior high school. In grades 1-3, the students learn to read and in grades 4-12, the students read for comprehension. At each grade level, the students use a reading textbook and students throughout the kingdom study the same reading textbooks and same reading curriculum. First the study will define the word identification, reading comprehension, product and process skills and…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:45pm —
No Comments
The aim of this workshop is to show English teachers how reading comprehension can be effectively taught to EFL/ESL struggling college readers. The teaching strategies include the following: (1) Helping students understand the book and chapter organization; (2) Predicting the content of a reading text from the text title before reading, comparing a text to a building, writing the topic of each paragraph in the margin, underlining the main ideas, numbering the supporting details, circling words…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:43pm —
Comment
The present study tried to find out the percentage of ESL and translation students who use the electronic dictionary (ED), differences between ESL and translation students in using ED, level at which students started to use an ED, courses in which students use an ED, kinds of ED that students use, i.e. monolingual, English-Arabic, Arabic-English, general or specialized ED, the percentage of words that they find in an ED, kinds of linguistic information that they obtain from an ED, reasons for…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:42pm —
No Comments
178 students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation and 10 translation and interpreting instructors were surveyed. It was found that 45% of the students use an electronic dictionary (ED). 99% of those use a general English-Arabic ED, 68% use an Arabic-English ED, 27% use an English-English ED and only 2% use a specialized ED. The students gave 12 reasons for not using an ED in specialized translation courses. It was also found that 70% of the translation instructors…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:41pm —
No Comments
150 female graduate students at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were interviewed. Since most students are not proficient in English, they are required to take an ESP course when admitted to the M.A. and Ph. D. programs, as locating information in specialized journals is required for their assignments, term papers and theses. Results indicated that 13% of the students use search engines like Google and AltaVista to locate information and fewer than 1% can search the ERIC database.…
Continue
Added by Reima Al-Jarf on March 3, 2009 at 1:40pm —
No Comments
