The study describes and examines Malaysian pre-university students' integrative and instrumental motivation toward learning English language. In this study, 182 non-English major students in one of the Malaysian public universities are selected to fill out a questionnaire reflecting their attitudes and motivation towards learning English. The findings indicate that Malaysian pre-university students have very high motivation and positive attitudes towards leaning English and that they are more instrumentally motivated. Based on the findings some suggestions and recommendations for teachers have been highlighted.

The present study analyses errors on present simple tense among adult Arab English language learners. It focuses on the error on 3sg -s (the third person singular present tense agreement morpheme -s). The learners are undergraduate adult Arabic speakers learning English as a foreign language. The study gathered data from two types of instruments: a grammaticality judgment task (GJT comprising both grammatical and ungrammatical items and an elicited written production task (EWPT). Both tasks were designed to test the learners' underlying knowledge of present simple tense morphology in the Interlanguage (ILG) of adult Arab English language learners. The GJT comprised 12 grammatically/correctly inflected items, 6 omission items (OI) and 6 wrongly/incorrectly inflected items (WI). The findings suggest that adult Arab English language learners seem to have difficulty mastering the use of the 3sg -s due to first language (L1) interference. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for English as a foreign language classroom teaching practice as well as for second language teachers and researchers. The most frequent error types produced by the Learners are omission, phonological similarity, incorrect suffixation and substitution.

PurposeThis research shows how social media has affected learning at present during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has become the largest and most convenient area of communication. In the current scenario, it seems that social networking sites not only had a profound impact on our social structure and intra-social interaction, but also affected education in general and learning English language in particular. It has been proven that these various social media platforms have created a realm of digital environment in today's new-age learning. Social media platforms are social networking sites through which people interact and communicate with each other easily and conveniently. Undoubtedly and unquestionably, social networking has been proven to be a global phenomenon that has caused a vast paradigm shift in the world of Learning and education during the current pandemic. Therefore, the present study aims to reach the extent of the impact of the various social media platforms on learning English language during the COVID-19 pandemic from the students' point of view.Design/methodology/approachThe study was conducted at the undergraduate level for English language learners. The sample comprised 166 undergraduate students at Najran University. A survey questionnaire was administered to find out the impact of various social media platforms and social networking sites on learning English language in the academic year of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to highlight possible suggestions for improving future virtual language learning.FindingsThe findings of the study contributed to the area of online learning of English language during the COVID-19 pandemic. Final results confirmed that the utilization of social media has been significantly perceived to have positively impacted learning English language in terms of writing style, reading skills, listening and lexical variation, communication skills and grammar usage.Practical implicationsThe findings of the study can serve as fundamental indicators to implement prompt pedagogical reformations, for which a number of pedagogical implications can be proposed. Another equally important pedagogical implication is to design and provide professional development and training sessions to both students and educators on the ultimate utilization of social media as instructional technologies in the context of English language teaching and learning.Originality/valueThis research provides insights in developing policies to assist with the integration and utilization of social media platforms as instructional technologies in the context of English language teaching and learning and how institutions can respond to the advent of advancing technology, especially during and after the COVID-19 era. A model to improve online English language learning process is recommended as a guideline for all educators offering online learning.

This study investigates the acquisition of English be auxiliary and thematic verb constructions in non-past contexts by adult Arab learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). It is well known that second language (L2) learners show variability in the L2 production of verbal inflectional morphology by either omitting inflections or marking inappropriate substitution of one kind of inflection for another. The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Prévost and White, 2000) proposes that L2 learners have knowledge of functional categories and features underlying tense and agreement although sometimes they fail to produce the corresponding overt forms. In order to examine the nature of the adult Arab ESL learners' interlanguage (IL) grammar at the L2 ultimate attainment level as well as the extent to which the learners can acquire English be auxiliary and thematic verb constructions in non-past contexts, an oral production task (ORPT) was conducted with 77 adult Arab ESL learners subdivided into three proficiency levels (lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced). An analysis of the ORPT show that the L2 learners omit and wrongly use the be auxiliary verbal inflection (am, is, are) more frequently than the thematic verb inflection (-s) in their production. The results reveal that the adult Arab ESL learners, even at ultimate attainment level, are more sensitive to the thematic verb contractions than to the be auxiliary constructions. These results suggest that variability in the production of verbal inflectional morphology is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology in accordance with the MSIH. Keywords: Second language acquisition, Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, Arab ESL learners 1. Introduction English is taught as a second language (L2) for almost eight years at the school and the university levels in Yemen. However, anecdotal observations show that adult native (Yemeni) Arabic-speaking learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) have protracted difficulty acquiring and producing correct grammatical forms in speaking and writing, particularly the English verbal inflectional morphemes including the functional categories (FCs) of T(ense) and Agr(eement) and all related morphosyntactic features. Functional categories are grammatical categories which play a formal role in a sentence and the learning of these is essential to the acquisition of L2.The acquisition of FCs has been a major topic of debate in first language (L1) and L2 acquisition research within the framework of generative grammar (White, 2003). Over the years, generative research has examined the central question of whether L2 acquisition is similar to L1 acquisition by determining the availability of Universal Grammar (UG) to the L2 learner.UG is postulated as a theory of an innate language faculty which consists of invariant principles for all languages and a finite number of parameters that account for language variation (see e.g. Chomsky, 1995). Accordingly, language acquisition is assumed to i...

PurposeHow closely does the translation match the meaning of the reference has always been a key aspect of any machine translation (MT) service. Therefore, the primary goal of this research is to assess and compare translation adequacy in machine vs human translation (HT) from Arabic to English. The study looks into whether the MT product is adequate and more reliable than the HT. It also seeks to determine whether MT poses a real threat to professional Arabic–English translators.Design/methodology/approachSix different texts were chosen and translated from Arabic to English by two nonexpert undergraduate translation students as well as MT services, including Google Translate and Babylon Translation. The first system is free, whereas the second system is a fee-based service. Additionally, two expert translators developed a reference translation (RT) against which human and machine translations were compared and analyzed. Furthermore, the Sketch Engine software was utilized to examine the translations to determine if there is a significant difference between human and machine translations against the RT.FindingsThe findings indicated that when compared to the RT, there was no statistically significant difference between human and machine translations and that MTs were adequate translations. The human–machine relationship is mutually beneficial. However, MT will never be able to completely automated; rather, it will benefit rather than endanger humans. A translator who knows how to use MT will have an opportunity over those who are unfamiliar with the most up-to-date translation technology. As MTs improve, human translators may no longer be accurate translators, but rather editors and editing materials previously translated by machines.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study provide valuable and practical implications for research in the field of MTs and for anyone interested in conducting MT research.Originality/valueIn general, this study is significant as it is a serious attempt at getting a better understanding of the efficiency of MT vs HT in translating the Arabic–English texts, and it will be beneficial for translators, students, educators as well as scholars in the field of translation.