Hajj guides in the second holy city in Islam deal with some million visitors and pilgrims to the holy Prophet's mosque. Although they are well trained in terms of hospitality and guidance, they seem to lack the basic communication skills in English. As most of the visitors and pilgrims resort to English as an international language, the need arises for developing a systemic ESP course for these Hajj guides. This study assesses the English language needs of these guides. Data gathering methods-including a questionnaire, a proficiency test and unstructured interviews -allowed testing of the questions via triangulation to validate the results.
The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) uses Percent Time Spent Following (PTSF) as key service measure for assessing the level of service of two-lane highways. However, the indicator is difficult to measure directly in the field. For this reason, its estimation to date has been based on analytical procedures using equations derived from simulations and field observations at representative location based on surrogate measure; as the percent of vehicles traveling with headway less than 3 seconds (3 s). Findings from empirical studies confirmed that the HCM analytical procedures used in estimating PTSF yield results that are inconsistent with the 3 s surrogate measure and mostly overestimate the indicator. This paper presents a review on the estimation of PTSF on two-lane highways and suggests probable approach to substantiate the application of the current practice. Further, the authors of this paper argued that the use of 3 s as surrogate for estimating PTSF based on field observation at a specific point may not represent the actual time spent following over a long segment of two-lane highway since PTSF is space related measure. Hence, the authors suggest the use of test vehicle approach over the highway segment to be evaluated to identify the variables that are required for the development of a representative PTSF measurement model. It is expected that this review and suggestion offered will contribute in advancing performance analysis of two-lane highways.
This study was conducted to investigate the correlation between moral commitment and EFL teacher standard-based performance. 20 Muslim English native speaking instructors who work at Taibah University Language Centre participated in this study. The following instruments were used for investigating the correlation between teachers' moral spirituality and their practical classroom performance: a scale of religious commitment, an open-ended questionnaire of spirituality and a standard-based observation sheet of the teachers' performance. The present study sheds light on the nature of moral commitment and its correlation to EFL teacher performance based on different personal conceptions about Islam.
Choice of vehicle’s speed is one of the most important factors for a driver for proper vehicle’s control and selecting a wrong speed results in loss of vehicle’s control; particularly in negotiating road curvatures. Many of such speed related errors could be attributed to inconsistencies in the road alignment, that surprise the driver as a result of sudden change in road characteristics leading to an excess critical speed, hence, losing the vehicle’s control. This inconsistency should be accounted for and controlled by the engineers. This study was carried out to evaluate the speeds of the drivers when negotiating various layouts of road bends, determination of possible factors affecting drivers’ operating speed and development of prediction models for operational 85th percentile driver’s speed. Speeds of over 4000 vehicles (light and heavy) were collected at 10 road curves of various designs using speed radar meter and video recording system. Speeds were measured at three different points along the curves; the entry, mid and exit points. Preliminary findings from this study revealed that there are some inconsistencies in the features of the existing road curves. The design of the existing curves used in this study can be regarded as fair as the change in the operating speed of light vehicles was found to be higher than 10 km/h; being the established lower limiting value. Likewise, the road curves could also be regarded to fall within a fair and poor design because the average change in operating speed exceeded the limiting value of 20 km/h when compared with the posted speed limit. However, more data would be required to improve the accuracy of the results.
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