Sultanate of Oman is one out of many developing countries around the world which have valued English as a very important international language and a tool for achieving multiple purposes. When His Majesty the Sultan came to power in 1970, the government accepted English as the only official foreign language and allocated huge budgets and resources for its implementation through education. However, almost three decades after this, it was found that students exiting the ELT system in Oman suffer from various inadequacies in their English language proficiency, which has had negative implications for Oman's national development. This has driven the government to attempt to revolutionize English language teaching (ELT) through pursuing a reform plan-Basic Education System (BES). This paper attempts to examine the attitudes of 141 freshmen, who have exited the BES and joined Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in September 2009, about their teachers and the curriculum. The results have shown that there have hardly been any significant changes in the BES reform project, as compared to the previously implemented system-General Education System (GES) mainly due to implementation shortcomings.

This study investigates the effect of storytelling as a strategy for developing story writing skills among grade seven pupils in a public Omani school. The sample of the study consisted of 243 pupils randomly selected and assigned to experimental and control groups. The data used for the purpose of this study were collected over the course of one semester via pre-post test design for equivalent groups. The experimental groups were taught by using the adopted storytelling strategy, whereas the control groups were taught by using the conventional procedures as prescribed in the formal teacher's guidebook. The researchers assessed the effect of storytelling as a strategy for developing story writing skills and the findings indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the story writing skills test. This was indicative of the fact that the storytelling strategy may have a significant positive effect on pupils' story writing. Important implications of this study within the framework of a similar context are also outlined.

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Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) penetration is growing at exponential rates and affecting societies, countries and organizations, which has led to a need for understanding whether they contribute to development. To ascertain whether ICT are contributing to development, the example of a current ICT, Twitter is used, along with the sim of this research: To understand and explain how public sector organizations are adopting and using online social networks; namely twitter, for the delivery of e-government services that will provide a better world to live in the Omani public sector. By considering this aim, we attempt to explain whether Twitter, contributes towards the creation of a 'better world' to live in, or leads to diverse outcomes in a developing country, Oman. To achieve the aim, we used two public sector organizations workforces' experiences and applied the Choice Framework (CF) developed by Kleine [1]. For the research approach, we employed a qualitative approach & the data collection techniques, reference to archival documents, interviews, photographic evidence and observations. The analysis was completed using the lens of interpretivism, socio-materiality along with grounded theory concepts. The study reveals that ICT4D is providing a better world for most of the citizens, but for the providers of the improved e-government services, it implies aligning local practices to the technology, which affects their home/work life balance. The contributions of this research lie in emphasising largely how the use of Twitter in Oman will lead to development. The Choice Framework selected for our understanding was adapted & led to diverse results to those mentioned in previous ICT4D studies; therefore, our research makes a contribution of understanding ICT4D in an e-government context, which was amiss in the previous frameworks. For businesses, our findings inform practitioners on the ICT Technologies areas that need attention while implementing them within an environment similar to Oman's public sector. For policymakers, this research informs of the areas that require policymakers' attention when placing their efforts where they are best served.