This paper combines corpus processing tools to investigate the cultural elements of Saudi education of English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks. The latest Saudi EFL textbooks (2016 onwards) are available in researchable PDF formats. This helps process them through corpus search software tools. The method adopted is based on analysing 20 cultural topics (nodes),

This paper argues that Arabic function words (FWs) vary in usage between old and modern Arabic, thus prompting an experimental investigation into their changeability. This investigation is carried out by testing classical Arabic (CA) in Arabic heritage language (AHL) texts – those labeled as archistratum – and the modern standard Arabic (MSA) of Arabic newspaper texts (ANT), each group of which contains randomly collected 5 million (M) word texts. The linguistic theory of the grammar of Arabic FWs is explained through the differences between CA and MSA, despite Arabic FW changes and the unlearnability and/or unusability of some FW constructions between in these two eras of Arabic usage. The dispersion/distribution of the construction grammar (CxG) of FWs and the number (n) of word attractions/repulsions between the two distinct eras is explored using the very latest and most sophisticated Arabic corpus processing tools, and Sketch Engine’s SkeEn gramrels operators. The analysis of a 5 M word corpus from each era of Arabic serves to prove the non-existence of rigorous Arabic CxG. The approach in this study adopts a technique which, by contrasting AHL with ANT, relies on analyzing the frequency distributions of FWs, the co-occurrences of FWs in a span of 2n-grams collocational patterning, and some cases of FW usage changes in terms of lexical cognition (FW grammatical relationships). The results show that the frequencies of FWs, in addition to the case studies, are not the same, and this implies that FWs and their associations with the main part of speech class in a fusion language like Arabic have grammatically changed in MSA. Their constructional changes are neglected in Arabic grammar.

This study utilized computational techniques for a reliable analysis of discourse. These techniques were adopted to analyze the progress of Saudi social change in terms of women’s empowerment within the Saudi transformation program. The data from open source 2021–2022 Saudi newspaper archives were automatically crawled using cutting-edge computational techniques and structured according to the sections of the Saudi newspapers: front page, economy, international, sports, society, culture and religion. The analysis was based on computing the minimally uneven distribution of the relative frequencies of the occurrence of the central word (the Arabic forms of woman and women) from the years 2021 to 2022. This produced two samples of text data, each of which represented the respective years. Calculating the normalized and adjusted frequencies of the central word from each section in the data from each year was important to avoid unbalanced absolute frequencies in the qualitative analysis stage. In addition, dispersion measures showed that the amount of variance in terms of the lexical dispersion of the central word was not high. The observable facts from the quantitative analysis produced a more accurate observational sample of citations, which we qualitatively analyzed. The results of the latter showed a considerable ascending change in favor of empowering women as a consequence of Saudi Vision 2030.

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This paper investigates the speaking and communication tasks in EFL textbooks in Saudi Arabia by means of corpus analysis. This analysis explores the extent to which the speaking tasks provided in Saudi EFL textbooks are communicatively incompetent, and is important due to the unsatisfactory, limited levels achieved by many learners of English at most educational stages, specifically primary, intermediate, and secondary. The reason for the poor oral skills among many EFL learners is due to the absence of authentic language learning tasks in a wide range of situations. The techniques used to detect the range of communicative tasks are based on sketching and retrieving the n-grams of in pairs and the verbal collocates say, talk, tell, ask, and discuss in a span of n = 2 ≤ ≥ 2. The experimental analysis driven from the intended textbooks shows that speaking tasks lack reasonable distributions of everyday communication examples and speaking/communicative situations.