Students’ attitudes are usually consulted before launching any learning/teaching program since they are the center of the learning process. This study is also motivated by such an aim as it gauges the attitudes of Saudi health track students on learning English for specific purpose (ESP). Furthermore, the students’ perceptions toward the culture of English are sought. It also explores the factors that impact the students in their endeavors. The study applies mixed methods by conducting a survey and follow-up interviews to gather information from 57 Saudi students enrolled at the preparatory year program (PYP), and interviews with 25 students. Findings show that the students have a moderately positive attitude toward learning English. Further, students’ responses aggregate toward moderate attitudes toward learning the target culture. In addition to that, the study reports some factors which shape the students’ positive attitudes toward learning English: (1) teaching quality, (2) classroom scenario, and (3) classroom environment. The study indicates the necessity of engaging students in a relaxed learning environment. As far as the English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers are concerned, they need to take into consideration their students’ interests while preparing and delivering the lectures.

The purpose of this study is to explore the existing effect of gloss conditions on reading comprehension and vocabulary understanding of learners in the context of English as a foreign language. The study composed of 72 male students aged between 19 and 21 years selected from Qassim University in Saudi Arabia. The participants were divided into four groups, namely; L1 Arabic gloss, L2 English gloss, a combination of L1 and L2, and the last group with no gloss. Results and findings of the study revealed a significant difference regarding the comprehension of the texts among the experimental groups when correlated with the control group. Additionally, there was no significant change noted regarding performance among the experimental groups. Another finding indicated that the learners had a preference of L1 and L2 gloss over L1 gloss and L2 gloss types, with 93.03% of them preferring to read glossed texts. Overall, these findings suggest that the gloss and no conditions were significantly distinct. This research results will be beneficial for future studies that are interested in developing reading comprehension of EFL learners.

SMS language is a form of written English that is often used in informal

No abstract

Based on data from numerous languages, such as English, Frisian, and Danish, Merchant (2001) proposes the preposition stranding generalization (PSG), which states that only languages that allow preposition stranding under wh-movement also allow preposition stranding under sluicing. The availability of this generalization has been the subject of a number of studies. Two contrasting views have been identified in the literature. The first view confirms the availability of the PSG in a number of different languages. The other view claims that this generalization is untenable as there exist non-preposition stranding languages that allow preposition stranding under sluicing. Our aim in this paper is to examine the availability of the PSG in the dialect of Hijazi Arabic (HA). Based on empirical data from HA on the syntactic behavior of preposition stranding under wh-movement and under sluicing, we argue that this PSG does not hold in HA. It has been observed that HA is like Emirati Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, and Indonesian in that it disallows preposition stranding under wh-movement but allows it under sluicing. Therefore, the results of this research may contribute to the ongoing discussions on the phenomenon of sluicing in linguistic theory to help obtain a more universal analysis of this interesting ellipsis construction.