Jordanian EFL Students' Perception of Noncontrastive Allophonic Cues in English Speech Segmentation.

The prominent role of allophonic cues in English speech segmentation has widely been recognized by phonologists and psycholinguists. However, very meager inquiry was devoted to analysing the perception of these noncontrastive allophonic cues by Arab EFL learners. Accordingly, the present study is an attempt to examine the exploitation of allophonic cues, mainly aspiration, glottalization and approximant devoicing to English word junctures by 40 Jordanian PhD students. Moreover, it aims to find out which allophonic cues are perceived more accurately during the segmentation process and if there is any evidence for Universal Grammar markedness. The experiment is led through a forced-choice identification task adopted from Altenberg (Second Lang Res 21:325-358, 2005) and Rojczyk et al. (Res Lang 1:15-29, 2016). The results of ANOVA unveiled that there is a statistically significant difference between the three types of allophonic cues, viz. aspiration, glottalization and approximant devoicing. This implies that the participants outperformed in stimuli marked by glottalization than by aspiration and approximant devoicing. This result provided further evidence for the universality of glottalization as a boundary cue in English speech segmentation. Overall, the Jordanian PhD students failed in perceiving the allophonic cues accurately and exploiting them to detect word boundaries. The present inquiry has the potential to provide several recommendations for syllabus designers, and second/foreign language teachers and learners.

Engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials.

This study explores the use and functions of engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials. To this end, the study analyses 80 editorials collected from two popular newspapers (40 from each): The Guardian which publishes in English and appears in the UK and Addustour which publishes in Arabic and appears in Jordan. Following Paltridge's (2020) taxonomy, the study utilises a mixed-method approach to assess whether differences in the use of engagement strategies between the two corpora are statistically significant and to identify the functions of the strategies used in the two sets of data. The findings show that there are statistically significant differences between the two languages in the use of some engagement strategies. In particular, Arabic editorials included more reader pronouns and less personal asides than did English ones. In addition, although questioning as an engagement strategy was absent in the Arabic corpus, it was used in the English one to transmit information and circulate knowledge. The findings enrich our understanding of how the editorial genre is constructed, and how editorialists engage with their readers in the two languages.

Linking cognition with pathos in American restaurants' menus: Jordan as a case.

This study aims to examine the strategies of persuasion used in American-cuisine restaurant menus in Jordan. It seeks to identify the power of language used by advertisers in order to attract and persuade their patrons. It mainly investigates persuasive strategies used in 26 American cuisine restaurant menus by adopting Aristotle's framework in association with Saussure's structuralist semiotics. The results showed that American restaurant menus tend to use various types of persuasive appeals that influence patrons emotionally, affect their food choices, and facilitate the process of convincing. The study also concludes that menus include five major appeals, namely sensual, emotional, desire, pleasure, and thought and brand appeals, whose ultimate goal is to provoke some desired mental images to influence the patrons' food choice decisions.

Grammatical devices of stance in written academic English.

Stance is a feature of academic writing that refers to how writers interact and engage with their readers by means of linguistic devices. This study focuses on the grammatical devices-and semantic distinctions thereof-that are employed by academic writers of English to express stance in research article abstracts in the areas of applied linguistics (AL) and literature (L). To this end, a corpus of 120 research article abstracts (60 in the area of AL and another 60 in that of L) was built and analysed using SPSS and following Biber et al.'s (1999) framework of grammatical devices of stance. The abstracts were extracted from high-quality journals in the respective areas: Applied Linguistics and English: Journal of the English Association. Both are ISI journals and published by Oxford Academic Publishing. A mixed-method approach, applying quantitative and qualitative measures, was adopted to answer the two questions: How is stance grammatically expressed in AL research article abstracts and L research article abstracts, and How is the expression of stance in AL research article abstracts similar to/different from that in L ones? The findings are construed in light of theories of academic discourse and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The results reveal that there are important similarities and differences in the extent to which and the means through which stance is expressed in AL research article abstracts and L research article abstracts. In particular, the findings show that both AL and L abstracts were similar in the most frequently used stance marker which is the stance complement clause. However, they were different in the frequency of use of other devices. The study provides insights into the ways academic writers express stance in various fields which better our ability to write research article abstracts.

Apologies in Arabic and English: A Cross-Cultural Study.

This study examines the apology strategies found in the speech of well-educated native Ammani Arabic speakers (Jordanian Arabic speakers) and native Mancunian English speakers (British English speakers). The study also attempts to examine Brown and Levinson's view which assumes that strategies of politeness are universal across all cultures. A discourse completion test containing a variety of scenarios requiring an apology of varying degrees of severity is administered to a sample of sixty participants, divided equally between Ammanis and Mancunians. The study shows that there are no significant differences between the two groups of participants due to culture except in two strategies, namely, concern for hearer and taking on responsibility (explicit self-blame). The British Mancunians significantly outperformed Jordanian Arabic speakers in their use of these strategies, indicating that Mancunians had more preference for using these strategies than Jordanian Arabic speakers. The study concludes with some implications for EFL teachers and syllabus designers.

The Effect of Communication Strategy Training on the Development of EFL Learners' Strategic Competence and Oral Communicative Ability.

This study examines the effect of communication strategy instruction on EFL students' oral communicative ability and their strategic competence. In a 14-week English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course (English Use II) based on Communicative Language Teaching approach, 80 learners were divided into two groups. The strategy training group ([Formula: see text]) received CS training based on a training program designed for the purpose of the present research, whereas the control group ([Formula: see text]) received only the normal communicative course using Click On 3, with no explicit focus on CSs. The communication strategies targeted in the training program included circumlocution (paraphrase), appeal for help, asking for repetition, clarification request, confirmation request, self-repair, and guessing. Pre- and post-test procedures were used to find out the effect of strategy training on language proficiency and CS use. The effect of the training was assessed by three types of data collection: the participants' pre- and post-IELTS speaking test scores, transcription data from the speaking IELTS test, and 'Click On' Exit Test scores. The findings revealed that participants in the strategy training group significantly outperformed the control group in their IELTS speaking test scores. The results of the post-test transcription data also confirmed that the participants in the strategy training group used more CSs, which could be attributed to the CS training program. The findings of the present research have implications for language teachers, and syllabus designers.