The current study investigated the influence of context-external variables; social power (High, Equal and Low) and social distance (Familiar and Unfamiliar) on the perception of Jordanian and English speech act of apology. Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and Scaled Response Questionnaire (SRQ) were used to elicit data from three groups: 40 Jordanian L2 speakers in Malaysia, 40 Jordanian non-English speakers in Malaysia and 40 English native speakers from British Council in Jordan. The three groups of respondents were asked to assess four contextinternal variables i.e. the severity of the offence, the possibility of the offender apology, the difficulty of the apology by the offender and the likelihood of apology acceptance by the offended party. Results of the study were accomplished using one way ANOVA and Tukey HSD post hoc statistical tests. The findings revealed that Jordanians have high sensitivity toward hierarchical power and social distance more than English native speakers. Moreover, results revealed that there are negative sociopragmatic transfers from L1 to L2 by JL2Ss based on their perception of the four-context-internal variables. Findings could be used to increase the cultural awareness toward some similarities and differences between both cultures.

Previous studies have revealed the importance of studying spoken professional-client/outsider interaction, especially the Q&A session, in various professional settings. However, most of the studies are located in non-religious professional settings. This article presents research in a particular religious professional setting, daee/propagator of Islam-client/outsider interaction. The research aims to study the daees' spoken discourse when interacting face to face with their clients/the outsiders. This particular article focuses on the analysis and discussion of the daees/ propagators of Islam's spoken discourse strategies when interacting with non-Muslim individuals/ potential converts who seek conversion to Islam in a communicative event called the Conversion to Islam Ceremony at a da'wah/Islamic propagation center in Malaysia. Ethnographic discourse analysis is employed to examine the daees/propagators of Islam's spoken discourse strategies in managing and maintaining involvement when interacting with their client during the Q&A session of the event. The analysis reveals that the daees, in order to propagate Islam, engage politeness strategies, topic management strategies, code-switching and humor.

The current study aimed primarily at investigating the acquisition of preposition stranding and pied piping by Jordanian EFL speakers. As secondary purposes, the study attempted to supply convincing accounts for the occurrence of preposition stranding and pied piping based on previous literature carried out on this area of language. The study also sought to show any instances of Null preposition phenomenon as acquiring preposition stranding and pied piping. In collecting the data needed for the study, grammaticality judgment and correction task was employed. The task consisted of 21 sentences; 15 of which were incorrect as a result of absence of prepositions and 6 were correct. 355 Jordanian EFL students from ten universities took part in this study. The results of the study indicated that, there were no statistical significant difference between the use of preposition stranding and pied piping among the respondents. More specifically, the respondents produced nearly equal rates of preposition stranding and pied piping. In addition, the results showed that transfer from Arabic is the best possible account for use of pied piping since both Arabic and English permit pied piping in International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2015 www.macrothink.org/ijl 17 interrogative clauses. In contrast, the frequent emergence of preposition stranding can be justified by salience factor. Lastly, the results revealed a strong evidence for the presence of Null preposition in the language of Jordanian EFL speakers.