SACM - United Kingdom
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://drepo.sdl.edu.sa/handle/20.500.14154/9667
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Item Restricted The Use of Mother Tongue in English Classrooms in Qassim Secondary Schools(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-11-30) Allehaimeed, Abdulaziz; Ateek, MohammedCode-switching (CS) refers to the use of a person’s first language (L1) in teaching or learning a second language (L2). According to Lin (2008), CS in the classroom is the employment of multiple linguistic codes by any classroom participant. As a contentious issue in the second language acquisition field, CS has elicited a variety of opinions, including those of researchers who oppose CS in classrooms where English is being taught as a second or foreign language and those who support it. This study is one of few to examine CS within the Saudi context. The current study concentrates on secondary schools in Saudi Arabia's Al-Qassim region. It investigates the classroom perspectives of both students and teachers and the functions of teachers’ CS. To do this, various data collection methods are employed. To investigate perceptions of CS, quantitative instruments, such as questionnaires for both teachers and students, are used. Furthermore, qualitative instruments, such as classroom observations and teacher interviews, are utilised to examine the CS functions of teachers. The results indicate that both students and instructors consider CS useful when learning an L2 and that teachers utilise CS for a variety of purposes, including social functions, classroom management, topic switching, and repetitive functions. Furthermore, classrooms observations indicated that instructors use CS excessively and unnecessarily. This dissertation concludes by discussing the limitations of this study and implications for future research.49 0Item Restricted Sociolinguistic Research Into Foreign Language Teaching: A Reflection Upon Efl Classes In The Saudi University.(Saudi Digital Library., 2023-09-07) Alhomaidan, Raghad; Chen, YangguangThis research into foreign language teaching of English in Saudi Arabia aims to discover reasons why despite the popularity of English language courses, Saudi Arabian students are disadvantaged. This will answer the research question, which is, simply, what steps must the Saudi Arabian educational authorities take to ensure that this disadvantage is overcome? After examining and critically reviewing the literature, five graduate students from Saudi Arabian universities were interviewed about their experience of learning and using English. It has been established from these interviews that four findings are raised for attention: first, the target language (English) environment and resources available for class teaching are limited; second, the target language (English) is under-utilised in class; third, teaching is too exam-oriented with insufficient emphasis on communication; and fourth, there are a limited number of confident and competent English teachers. These four findings well explain why Saudi Arabian students are challenged and in the UK university, and answer what has been going wrong with EFL class in Saudi Arabia. The research therefore urges the Ministry of Education to take steps that include better budgeting, smaller class size and the recruitment of competent English teachers including native speakers. The ultimate goal is to develop Saudi students’ language performance in both oral and written communication.31 0Item Restricted Meeting Learners at Their Cognitive Zones: The Effect of Explicit, Implicit and Differentiated Instruction on Saudi EFL Learners’ Performance and Lived Experience(2022-09) AlAmir, Bayan AlHashmi; Ahmadian, Mohammad; Badger, RichardThis mixed-method research study aims at bridging the gap between Instructed Second Language Acquisition and Individual Differences as two well-established, yet (almost always) treated as distinct, educational areas of research. It explores the differentiational effect of explicit/implicit/differentiated instruction on L2 learners’ acquisition of the English Article System and the extent to which students’ working memory capacity and form-complexity interact with instruction. To form a holistic and clear point of view of the effectiveness of explicit, implicit and differentiated instruction in language classrooms, the decision was made to triangulate the results of a four-week pretest-posttest classroom experiment and follow-up interviews with learners. To run the experiment, 90 intermediate-level EFL students were assigned to three instructional conditions: explicit, implicit and differentiated. They were instructed on the English Article System for three weeks, twice weekly, in sixty-minute-long sessions. Subsequent to the treatment, students were sent a licence to an online working memory battery designed to measure the performance of different components of working memory (i.e., the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, and the central executive). Five students from each group were, then, randomly selected for comprehensive three-stage interviews at the beginning of which the study’s main constructs were introduced in simplified terms. The study results have shown that implicit instruction is the most effective one out of the three, followed by differentiated instruction, whose effect is greater on the explicit knowledge measure. Explicit instruction, on the other hand, has been found not to be effective on the explicit knowledge measure and of slight effectiveness on the implicit one. The second part of the experiment results shows that differentiated instruction is the only form of teaching to neutralize the effect of varying levels of working memory capacity and form-complexity. The interview results have come almost in line with the experiment findings; students have perceived differentiated instruction as the most effective form of teaching, followed by implicit instruction and then explicit instruction. These results are believed to have some important implications for the field of Second Language Acquisition.33 0