This study attempts to test whether fifty advanced Kuwaiti EFL learners have acquired the English passive alternation. To this end, the researchers used a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) to check whether the participants would be able to distinguish between alternating and non-alternating verbs. The verbs used in the test were chosen based on their frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results reveal that positive transfer from L1 played a big role in the participants' correct answers on the test, especially with regard to the verbs that passivise. Additionally, the participants may have provided wrong answers on the GJT due to their unfamiliarity with some of the verbs. However, the participants faced various difficulties with the verbs that do not passivise. These difficulties could be ascribed to over-generalising the passivisation rule, or confusing the non-causative with the passive construction. Their overall score suggests that they have not acquired the English passive alternation (total mean=45%). The study concludes with some recommendations for further research.

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Bilingual lexicographers, translation specialists and English teachers in the Arab world do not have access to computerized corpora of parallel texts for the English-Arabic language pair. This project has been carried out to meet this requirement by establishing the first general parallel corpus of English texts and their Arabic translations. The first phase of the project involved the selection of general source texts having appropriate lexical and stylistic features. The chosen source texts deal with a variety of topics such as the environment, globalization, psychology, history, politics, drama, etc. Their Arabic translations were taken from The World of Knowledge series published by the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Kuwait. Keywords: PARALLEL CORPUS, LEXICOGRAPHY, TRANSLATION, BILINGUAL DIC-TIONARY, COLLOCATIONS, ALIGNMENT, SYNONYMS, DERIVATIVES, ANTONYMS, GLOS-SARY, FREQUENCY Opsomming: 'n Nuwe Engels-Arabiese parallelletekskorpus vir leksikografiese toepassings Tweetalige leksikograwe, vertaalkundiges en Engelsonderwysers in dieArabiese wêreld het nie toegang tot gerekenariseerde korpusse van parallelle tekste vir die EngelsArabiese taalpaar nie. Hierdie projek is onderneem om in dié behoefte te voorsien deur die eerste algemene parallelle korpus van Engelse tekste en hul Arabiese vertalings tot stand te bring. Die eerste fase van die projek het die keuse van algemene brontekste behels wat geskikte leksikale en stilistiese eienskappe besit. Die gekose brontekste handel oor 'n verskeidenheid onderwerpe soos die omgewing, globalisering, psigologie, geskiedenis, politiek, drama, ens. Hul Arabiese vertalings is geneem uit The World of Knowledge-reeks gepubliseer deur die National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) in Koeweit.

This study tries to shed light on the role of dictionary examples in the comprehension of word meanings. An experimental procedure has been devised whereby two groups of students with English as major subject at Kuwait University were asked to provide the Arabic equivalents for ten English headwords. The first group was given a list of entries for these words copied from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) while the second group had to read the same list but without illustrative examples. Results indicate that the students' decoding performance was negatively affected by the presence of illustrative examples in the dictionary entry.

The three dictionaries are compared with regard to their inclusion of 73 Arabic items (including loanwords) used in texts on Islam and the Middle East at the Google news file. With religion as theme, eight of these terms have been examined and compared across their entries in these three dictionaries to determine the closeness of the lexicographic description of these terms to their original meanings among native speakers of Arabic and to detect, from these speakers' viewpoint, any deficiencies in the defining language of their respective entries. The examination of the definitions of terms relating to Islam and the Arab world in the three dictionaries has revealed a number of pitfalls that may require editorial reconsideration. These include circularity, insufficient information, negative contexts, very general definitions, ambiguity, incomplete information, narrow definitions and encyclopedic redundancy.