Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Theory and Practice: Exploring an Evidence-Based Framework for Call and Language Teacher Education(Washington State University, 2024) Asiri, Ali; Egbert, JoyThis comprehensive overview synthesizes findings from two studies that explored English language education and teacher preparation through evidence-based approaches. The first study addresses the challenge of effectively integrating up-to-date technology into language classrooms, mainly focusing on computer-assisted language learning (CALL) professional development (PD) for English language teachers in Saudi Arabia. This theory-to-practice paper reviews existing literature on teacher PD and CALL PD, culminating in the proposal of a CALL PD framework tailored to the Saudi context. This framework incorporates elements identified as effective in improving current and future CALL PD initiatives. The second study explores the integration of educational escape rooms (EERs) as a novel strategy within teacher preparation programs. While EERs have proven effective in supporting learners across various disciplines, the study addresses the gap in research regarding their application in teacher preparation. The investigation incorporates four evidence-based theoretical elements (content authenticity, active learning, modeling effective instruction, and providing ongoing experiences) into the design of EERs for 45 pre-service teachers. The results highlight key themes in participant interactions during escape room experiences, shedding light on teamwork dynamics and communication. Moreover, participants reported enhanced learning experiences, emphasizing elements such as authenticity, active learning, 21st-century skills, modeling, challenge, and technology use. The findings suggest that designing learning experiences based on these elements can significantly benefit pre-service teachers, offering meaningful insights for teaching and future research directions.11 0Item Restricted Using CALL textual enhanced input to develop the real time comprehesion of English generic articles by Arabic L1 speakers(Newcastle University, 2024-01-24) Alshaikh, Asmaa; Lopez, ElaineAcquisition of English articles is notoriously difficult for L2 learners from languages with and without articles (Thyab 2016). Such difficulty motivates researchers to use instruction to ease the comprehension of articles (e.g. Lopez 2015; Sabir 2015; Abumlhah 2016). However, despite the ubiquity of implicit instruction, there is little research on whether it impacts article acquisition, particularly generic articles, as compared to explicit instruction (e.g. Snape, Umeda et al., 2016). Moreover, comprehension is usually measured by standard offline tasks, despite L2 acquisition being a largely unconscious, implicit process (Krashen 1982). I address these issues using an implicit teaching tool called textual enhanced input (TEI) (Smith 1993) and measure its impact on generic article acquisition in two contexts: noun- level generics (NLG) and sentence-level generics (SLG). I include a spontaneous real-time measure of comprehension (self-paced reading; SPR) (Jiang 2013), to fill the noted gap. The study recruited L1 Arabic, L2 English speakers at elementary and intermediate level, divided into two groups: instruction and control. Both groups received six hours of input across four weeks, with TEI applied only to the instruction group. Stories were used as teaching materials. The generic article and following noun were enhanced in the stories (generic article was highlighted, underlined, bolded and in a larger font, while the following noun was bolded following the procedure of Rassaei, 2015). Four tasks were used, two intended to measure implicit knowledge: elicited production with limited time and self-paced reading; and two intended to measure explicit knowledge: grammaticality judgment and forced- choice production. A pre-test and two post-tests were completed by both groups to examine whether TEI influences short- and longer-term acquisition of the generic article. Results suggest that TEI has a positive long-term effect on implicit comprehension, as revealed by the SPR, but not on implicit production nor explicit knowledge. This supports theefficacy of TEI for teaching generic articles. It also highlights the necessity of including a real-time psycholinguistic measure in intervention studies, as it detected results that were not found in the offline standard tasks used in the current study.19 0