Foreign Languages

With the emergence of video game localisation studies in the last decade, scholarly interest in translation studies in this young discipline has increased. Although globalisation has encouraged video game companies to offer their products in as many languages and markets as feasible, this academic discipline is still an under-researched area, especially in the Arab context. This article presents an overview to engender a better understanding of the nature of video games and their localisation in the Arab market. This market is distinct due to its culture, politics and language. In addition to the translational challenges related to the Arabic language, this study deals with the specificities of video game localisation from political, cultural and linguistic perspectives. This research offers a historical overview of the localisation of video games into Arabic since the inception of the practice, including an outline of the main localisation milestones in this field.

Learning environments have a significant role in increasing or decreasing students' motivation, desires, and attitudes toward learning. The objective of this study is to investigate particularly the effect of learning environments on students' motivation and that will be obtained by drawing a comparison between online learning environment and traditional learning environment and the participants will be from Taif university female students. A survey was applied to collect data from students of Taif University. For data analysis SPS software used to generate descriptive statistic and T-Test will be run to compare the score means. The outcomes of this research will be helpful in improving countries for educational thinkers to better understand effects of learning environments on students' motivation.

Saudi Women’s influence on local dialects

There is much research that discusses the gender influence on the usage of language and dialect. Women deal with language differently from men; this is obvious in the prosody of speech, choice of vocabulary and the way they use grammar. These studies were conducted in different western and eastern cultures and societies. 

Two of the first western sociolinguistic studies were Labov (1966), conducted in the U.S.A., and Trudgill (1974) in the U.K. Labov finds that women tend to use features of Standard English more than men. Trudgill has the same conclusion, as he points out that women surpass men in using prestigious linguistic variables.

In contrast, there are a number of studies conducted in different Arabic-speaking societies that examined the influence of gender on dialects. In the 1980s, both Kojak (1983) and Abdel-Jawad (1981) agreed that women in Syria and Jordan did not to use Classical Arabic features, and instead they tend to use features of the local dialects. They claimed that Arab men tend to use the prestigious Classical Arabic. This finding is totally the opposite of what has been found in the western communities. In 1986 Hasan Ibrahim differentiated between the concept of prestigious Arabic and the use of Classical Arabic in modern Arab societies. Al-Wer (1991) and Haeri (1997) followed Ibrahim and explained that Standard Arabic dialects are the ones that should be related to the concept of prestigious Arabic as in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In light of this amended understanding, later research proved that Arab women are no different from western women in their readiness to use prestigious standard dialect features more than men, which is in line with their important role in leading to dialect change.

In this paper, I will examine the influence of Saudi women on local Saudi dialects. There are a number of different sociolinguistic studies which were conducted on Saudi dialects, including Al-Essa (2008); Alghamdi (2014); Al-Ammar (2017) and Hussain (2017).

This paper aims to examine the efficacious of using social constructivism in teaching sociolinguistics. The students of a bachelor's degree in a department of English language and linguistics used to suffer in doing sociolinguistic projects and some of them failed in doing so although they obtained good marks in the written exams. This noteworthy dilemma led the researcher to conduct an action research as an attempt to discover the causes of this problem and to propose solutions. This action research took place in a sociolinguistic classroom for a one academic semester. The researcher decided to modify her teaching method by applying social constructivism theory which is embodied in student-centered method. Furthermore, the instructional scaffolding was used in the classroom to facilitate the knowledge flow and the students learning. The data was collected from the students' performance in three related sociolinguistic tasks and to test the progress in the students' cognitive and linguistic skills another data was collected from the course final project. The data revealed that students are struggling with the high level of cognitive abilities such as, applying, analyzing, justifying and thinking critically. Furthermore, students also lack some crucial linguistic and research skills such as, do phonetic transcription correctly, explain the findings based on the sociolinguistic theories and principals, highlight the importance of their work, steer clear of pilgrims and avoid redundancy in writing. The results of the action research showed that implementing social constructivism theory, which is based on the concept of learning by doing, in sociolinguistic classroom helped the students to absorb and digest the knowledge simultaneously with developing their cognitive skills. INTRODUCTION There is nothing fret the teachers as the student's failure in accomplishing a course project. This problem becomes more complicated when the students achieve good results in the written exams but wrestle in applying their knowledge in a particular project; a project that has a nature of practicality where the students need to use advanced skills. The researcher, who is a university teacher, finds that her students in sociolinguistic course are doing well in the written exams but can't implement the final project successfully. This dilemma urges the researcher to investigate the reasons and to unearth affective solution; she relies on action research to solve this problem. Milles (2007) states that action research gives teacher researchers different and new knowledge about how to develop teaching practice and solve significant problems in classroom. The researcher starts with applying social constructivism theory in her teaching which is a theory that emphasizes the concept of learning by doing. To be able to utilize the knowledge in real life, students need to acquire this knowledge in an educational collaborative environment. In this environment students participate and contribute to the learning process, rather than being passive learners. Kim (2006) points out that learning in constructivism framework contributes to intellectual, social and psychological development of learners to convey it in different authentic contexts. The findings of the current research reveal that students who participate and engage in learning, build up high level of cognitive skills such as, applying, analyzing, justifying and solving problems. The results also show that students in the current research became able to confidently interact and communicate with other in a real-life context. The students also showed a good progress in their performance which was reflected in their marks.

This paper aims to examine the efficacious of using social constructivism in teaching sociolinguistics. The students of a bachelor’s degree in a department of English language and linguistics used to suffer in doing sociolinguistic projects and some of them failed in doing so although they obtained good marks in the written exams. This noteworthy dilemma led the researcher to conduct an action research as an attempt to discover the causes of this problem and to propose solutions. This action research took place in a sociolinguistic classroom for a one academic semester. The researcher decided to modify her teaching method by applying social constructivism theory which is embodied in student-centered method. Furthermore, the instructional scaffolding was used in the classroom to facilitate the knowledge flow and the students learning. The data was collected from the students’ performance in three related sociolinguistic tasks and to test the progress in the students’ cognitive and li...

This paper is an exploratory work which attempts to understand the linguistic situation in Saudi
Arabia and to test the hypothesis of the emergence of a Saudi koine. To begin with, it is vital to
mention that the literature shows that many Saudi dialects are presently in a state of change. This
is due to tremendous social and financial changes taking place in the country starting from 1970.
A detailed description of these changes is presented in Al-Hathloul and Edadan (1993). The data
of the current study was collected from media, in particular, from 26 television advertisements.
Several variants were investigated: diphthongs [aw] and [aj], interdentals [θ], [ð], [ð̄ˤ] and their
stop counterparts [t], [d] and [đ], the affricate [dʒ] and the fricative [ʒ], the affricated and fricative
variants of (k) [tʃ] and [ts] and [s] and [ʃ] respectively, and finally the palatalized variant of (k)
[kʲ]. The results suggest that there is indeed an emergence of a Saudi koine, however, it is a doublesided koine, with influences from both Najdi and Hijazi dialects. These results go hand in hand
with those presented by Al-Rojaie (2020). Another important result that this exploratory work
demonstrates is that the use of the Najdi -influenced koine is clearly more prominent than the
Hijazi one in the language of advertisements. Nevertheless, in light of the dramatic social change
in the country, it is not possible to predict whether the Najdi koine will oust the Hijazi one or if
both will continue as two pan-Saudi dialects or whether a mixed dialect will be formed.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the changes that occur in one of the Saudi dialects, that is Ghamdi variety. The researcher examined the speech of Ghamdi migrants in the city of Mecca within the framework of dialect contact. Those migrants migrated from Al-Baḥa, a rural area in the south-western region of Saudi Arabia, to the city of Mecca in the Hijazi region. The data was collected through sociolinguistic interviews with 49 Ghamdi speakers, and one social variable was used namely, age. The speakers were divided into four age groups 14- 29, 30- 45, 46- 61 and 62+. This investigation was motivated by the obvious linguistic differences between rural Ghamdi and urban Meccan dialects. Two linguistic variables were examined: the diphthongs (ai) and (aw). The results showed that Meccan features, the monophthongs [ɛ:] and [ɔ:], occur in all age groups of Ghamdi migrants. This indicates that there is a change in progress toward Meccan features. Furthermore, the results of this rese...

This paper aims to analyze the kinds of peer observation of teaching in Saudi English language institutes. The data revealed that three models of peer observation of teaching are used: evaluative, developmental and collaborative. It was apparent that the evaluative model is the dominant one. The analysis of the results showed that there is a negative attitude toward Peer Observation of Teaching (POT) among teachers. They do not welcome the idea of being monitored and judged. The authors realized that institutes could enhance the benefits of POT by providing teachers with clear guidelines and engaging them in the construction of institutional policies that welcome other POT models

Pragmatic competence, the ability to use language effectively in a contextually appropriate fashion, has been a central concern in pragmatic studies for more than four decades. A large number of pragmatic competence studies have examined the pragmatics of native and non-native speakers of English, investigating the significance of the spread of the language across the globe. In the majority of studies, the focus has been on the pragmatic norms of native speakers, the development of English language learners’ pragmatic competence, and the apparent pragmatic differences between native speakers and language learners. However, there is a dearth of studies contrasting the pragmatic competence of EFL and ESL learners. The present study targets this under researched area, by evaluating the pragmatic competence of Saudi EFL learners in Saudi Arabia and Saudi ESL learners in the UK. More specifically, it investigates how EFL and ESL groups perform the speech acts of requests and refusals in ...