Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted EXPLORING THE IMPACTS OF CULTURAL VALUES, BELIEFS, AND ATTITUDES ON THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL) BY SAUDI STUDENTS(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-11-22) Alotaibi, Ali; Wallington, AlanThe acquisition of English as a Second Language (ELS) has a significant role in the education of Saudi students influenced by the significance of English language internationally used in communication in education and global interactions. However, the learning and acquisition of ESL for Saudi students is influenced by cultural awareness, language anxiety, cultural relevance, multilingualism, and societal expectations, hindering the outcomes of their language development and acquisition. Different pedagogical approaches and teaching methodologies are leveraged by ESL educators to improve the learning experience for ESL students. Despite different studies addressing influence of sociocultural factors on ESL education, the role of cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes on the influence of second language acquisition by Saudi students is still understudied. This study explored how cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes influence the language development and acquisition of English as a second language by ESL students, and the effectiveness of different teaching strategies. The present research was based on a qualitative research methodology involving semi-structured interviews with 13 ESL educators and two ESL Saudi students. The presented findings revealed the significance influence of sociocultural factors on the motivation and engagement levels of Saudi students, suggesting that cultural shock and barriers impact their language learning processes. The findings alluded that by ESL educators aligning their teaching approaches with the cultural backgrounds of their students improves the students’ participation and engagement levels by promoting cross-cultural awareness and communication. The findings also suggested the blended learning strategy to be an effective pedagogical approach in addressing the unique learning needs for Saudi students. These findings have significant implications for the ESL curriculum and education systems by highlighting the challenges faced by ESL students and educators induced by sociocultural factors, and recommended different approaches that can be implemented to improve the language learning, development, and acquisition of English as a second language.18 0Item Restricted Automated Repair of Accessibility Issues in Mobile Applications(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-11-29) Alotaibi, Ali; Halfond, William GJMobile accessibility is more critical than ever due to the significant increase in mobile app usage, particularly among people with disabilities who rely on mobile devices to access essential information and services. People with vision and motor disabilities often use assistive technologies to interact with mobile applications. However, recent studies show that a significant percentage of mobile apps remain inaccessible due to layout accessibility issues, making them challenging to use for older adults and people with disabilities. Unfortunately, existing techniques are limited in helping developers debug these issues; they can only detect issues but not repair them. Therefore, the repair of layout accessibility issues remains a manual, labor-intensive, and error-prone process. Automated repair of layout accessibility issues is complicated by several challenges. First, a repair must account for multiple issues holistically in order to preserve the relative consistency of the original app design. Second, due to the complex relationship between UI components, there is no straightforward way of identifying the set of elements and properties that need to be modified for a given issue. Third, assuming the relevant views and properties could be identified, the number of possible changes that need to be considered grows exponentially as more elements and properties need to be considered. Finally, a change in one element can create cascading changes that lead to new problems in other areas of the UI. Together, these challenges make a seemingly simple repair difficult to achieve. In this dissertation, I introduce a repair framework that builds and analyzes models of the User Interface (UI) and leverages multi-objective genetic search algorithms to repair layout accessibility issues. To evaluate the effectiveness of the framework, I instantiated it to repair the different known types of layout accessibility issues in mobile apps. The empirical evaluation of these instantiations on real-world mobile apps demonstrated their effectiveness in repairing these issues. In addition, I conducted user studies to assess the impact of the repairs on the UI quality and aesthetics. The results demonstrated that the repaired UIs were not only more accessible but also did not distort or significantly change their original design. Overall, these results are positive and indicate that my repair framework can be highly effective in automatically repairing layout accessibility issues in mobile applications. Overall, my results confirm my dissertation's hypothesis that a repair framework employing a multi-objective genetic search-based approach can be highly effective in automatically repairing layout accessibility issues in mobile applications.36 0