This study attempts to investigate the production of English grammatical collocations amongst Saudi students majoring in English in the KSA and those in the UK. It also shows the most frequent types of errors that may occur as well as some possible reasons for their occurrence. For this purpose, the researcher analysed essays written by the participants. The results reveal that Saudi EFL learners in the UK do grammatical collocation errors less than those who learn English in the KSA. Additionally, the highest number of errors in both groups was recorded on the grammatical collocations patterns, noun + preposition and adjective + preposition. It seems that L1 interference plays a crucial role in students' erroneous responses, especially those which contain a preposition. For instance, the majority of noun + preposition, adjective + preposition and preposition + noun are used incorrectly throughout the essays. Furthermore, the avoidance phenomenon in SLA may be used by Saudi students. They tend to avoid using some grammatical collocation categories such as adjective + that-clause and noun + that-clause since they are beyond their English proficiency level. Finally, the lack of knowledge of grammatical collocations is another possible reason behind such errors. Educational leaders, curriculum designers and teachers need to shed light on these types, especially as the English language curricula used in the KSA do not pay a great deal of attention to grammatical collocations.

This study examines the apology strategies used by 30 Saudi EFL teachers in Najran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), paying special attention to variables such as social distance and power and offence severity. The study also delineates gender differences in the respondents' speech as opposed to studies that only examined speech act output by native and non-native speakers of English. To this end, the study employs a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) that consists of 10 situations designed to test how the respondents would react if they imagine that they belong to different types of social status whether higher, lower or equal. In addition, social distance and power have been taken into consideration in designing the ten situations included in the test used in this study. The results reveal that Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) is the most used apology strategy by the Saudi respondents followed by downgrading responsibility (DR), upgrader, offer of repair, taking on responsibility and then verbal redress. The results also reveal that gender has a great impact on the use of apology strategies in various ways. For instance, the IFID strategy and the upgrader strategy are used by males more than their female counterparts, whereas females use the DR strategy more than their male counterparts. It has been argued that some of the respondents' answers to the test were influenced by their mother tongue, as reported in previous studies conducted on apology strategies. The study discusses the results elicited via the DCT and compares them with those of previous studies on apology strategies and other speech acts. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for further research.

This study examines the apology strategies used by 30 British native speakers of English and compares them with those employed by 30 Saudi EFL teachers, using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The study considers expressions of regret based on gender, cultural differences and severity of the offence. It is a quantitative, descriptive research study; it relies in its data collection process on a DCT whose reliability and internal and external validity are verified. It investigates three categories of variables types: binary, nominal and ordinal. The binary variables refer to gender, i.e., male and female, the nominal category is concerned with Arabic and English languages, and ordinal variables refer to the most frequent apology strategies employed by the respondents. The present study uses a quantitative method of data analysis which employs descriptive statistics (i.e., frequency analysis and percentages) in order to address the research questions and indicate the types of apology strategies that are frequently used by the speakers of the two investigated groups. The findings show different ways of using apology strategies by the two investigated groups based on the variables considered. Finally, the study concludes with some pedagogical implications for EFL teachers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).