This study examines the effectiveness of using YouTube videos in teaching the speaking skills among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students in Jordan. The study sample comprised 80 students attending Oral Skills classes in the English Language and Literature Department at a private university in Jordan. The participants were equally divided into a control group and an experimental group of 40 students each. The experimental group was taught through the use of YouTube videos, while the control group was taught the speaking skills using the traditional approach. A pre-test and a post-test were administered to the two groups. Four TEFL experts were asked to rate the participants’ performance using the IELTS speaking band descriptors, which consist of four main categories: fluency & coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range & accuracy, and pronunciation. The findings showed that the performance of the two groups was improved. However, compared to the traditional group, the experimental group demonstrated a relatively better improvement. The results also showed significant progress in the speaking performance of the students subjected to the YouTube experiment. Of all the four constructs under investigation, pronunciation and fluency & coherence were the most noticeably advanced in the performance of the YouTube experimental group. The present study recommends that YouTube videos be embedded into the EFL classroom to improve students' speaking skills.

The present study investigates Jordanian university students' attitudes toward code-switching (CS), and code-mixing (CM), to find out when and why they code-switch and the most frequent English expressions that they use in Arabic discourse. For this purpose a three-section questionnaire was developed and distributed to students (N 352). Section 1 elicited biographical data; Section 2 elicited students' attitudes toward CS/CM in relation to English, toward CS/CM in relation to Arabic, and toward CS/CM in relation to language users; and Section 3 elicited data as to why and where students CS/CM with English and the motives behind that. The students are shown to have negative as well as positive attitudes toward CS/CM with English in Arabic discourse ± attitudes that are in some ways contrary to expectation. The results also indicate that students CS/CM with English for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is the lack of Arabic equivalents for English terms or expressions. Finally, there is frequent use of many English expressions, which varied in range and scope in the speech of Arab educated speakers.

This study is aimed at investigating the rating and intelligibility of different non-native varieties of English, namely French English, Japanese English and Jordanian English by native English speakers and their attitudes towards these foreign accents. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers used a web-based questionnaire which targeted native speakers of English. The materials for this study were a questionnaire for respondents to fill out and tape recordings of six different short stories, each of which was recorded by a non native speaker of English. The first short story was tape-recorded by a male French speaker and the second by a female French speaker. Similarly, the other four short stories were tape-recorded by male and female Japanese and Jordanian speakers respectively. The respondents or raters consisted of 110 native speakers of English (78 females and 32 females); the majority of them from the USA, but there were others from Britain, Canada, and Australia. They were requested to surf the webpage www. englishforeignaccent .com, especially designed by the researchers, fill out the questionnaire and rate the non-native varieties under investigation, and four months later the number of respondents reached one hundred and ten which constituted the sample of the study.Data obtained indicated that the Jordanian accent was considered as the most intelligible, followed by the French then the Japanese English accent. The native speakers also showed significantly more positive attitudes towards Jordanian English than French and Japanese English. Finally, the positive attitude towards Jordanian English was affirmed by the respondents who assigned the Jordanian English speakers to the most prestigious professions such as medicine and teaching.

This study examines whether a qualitative analysis of news headlines produces complementary, convergent, or dissonant findings with a quantitative analysis of the full news story. Headlines are among the most important parts of a news story and its summary. This study investigates the construction of Qaddafi in the headlines of two newspapers before and during the 2011 Libyan civil war. This is based on a sub-corpus of headlines that was taken from a 6.5-million-word corpus of two newspapers; one published in English; The Guardian, and the other in Arabic; Asharq Al-Awsat from 2009 to 2011. The analysis of the headlines has produced complementary and convergent findings with the corpus analysis and suggests that the 2011 Libyan civil war represents a turning point on how Qaddafi is represented in the investigated newspapers. This study concludes that analysing headlines proves to be a good down-sampling option to reduce large news corpora to a workable amount of data.

Film translation has become a worldwide field in which subtitlers translate and transfer language and style from one culture into another. Subtitling has always been affected by cultural elements. The purpose of this study was to find out how professional subtitlers differ from fansubbers when dealing with such expressions concerning the strategies that both groups use to subtitle these expressions. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers identified 120 slang expressions from two American movies, Goodfellas and Training Day, but chose only 30 slang expressions to report on how they were rendered by both groups.  Results of the study showed that the professional subtitler and the fansubbers faced many challenges and used varying strategies when subtitling slang expressions. The challenges were related to the presence of some cultural terms and different types of slangs which are unfamiliar to most subtitlers. The most frequent strategies used by the professional subtitler and fansubbers were paraphrase, euphemism, omission, and calque. The study recommends that further studies be conducted on a larger sample of slang expressions in American or British movies and TV series. In addition, the subtitling of these slang expressions can be investigated in other target cultures and languages such as Spanish, Persian, Turkish, Greek, and Kurdish.