Ghazi Algethami

Taif University · Foreign Languages

This study provides an acoustic description of the vowel system of Najdi Arabic, a major dialect spoken in Saudi Arabia. It aims to go beyond the phonological description provided by Ingham (1994) and offer an acoustic description of Najdi Arabic vowels. Fifteen native speakers of Najdi Arabic were recorded reading CVC words containing all the Najd...

This study aims to describe the production of English monophthongs by nonnative Saudi speakers. It acoustically examined the production of English monophthongal vowels by Saudi second language (L2) speakers. Sixteen L2 participants produced twelve English monophthongs in carrier words. Comparable data were obtained in native Saudi Arabic and native...

The current study is a partial replication of Flege and Port (Language Speech 24(2):125–146, 1981), which examined the production of pre-fortis clipping (i.e., vowel shortening before voiceless obstruents) by Saudi L2 English speakers. In addition, it examined whether language experience operationalized as the length of residence in an English-spea...

The current study explored the relationship between phonological awareness and word reading fluency among young Saudi English as a Foreign Language (EFL)learners. Two tests were completed by thirty young Saudi EFL learners. The first test comprised 25 questions related to phonological awareness. In the second test, the learners were asked to read a...

Rhythm metrics can detect L2 development of target-like speech rhythm but interpretation of the results from metrics in learners’ speech is problematic because the mapping of metrics to underpinning phonological features is indirect. We investigate speech rhythm in L1 Arabic/L2 English, which differ in key properties contributing to the percept of...

The current study characterizes the production of English consonants by Saudi L2 speakers and offers pedagogical implications for teachers and curriculum designers. Fifteen nonnative Saudi speakers, with at least one of year of residence in an English-speaking country, were recorded individually reading an English passage containing all the English...

Development of tailor-made indigenous teaching content, after assessing the target learners’ needs and proficiency, is necessary to address to specific needs of specific learners, ensure optimum learning and motivation. This quantitative investigation attempted to determine the communicative competence of SSETH in English language skills to develop...

Communication skills are extremely important for the tourism industry; they form an integral part of most tourism activities. Using English, as the international lingua franca, is an essential part of these skills, especially for international tourism. Saudi Vision 2030 places a high importance on international tourism as a driving force for econom...

Explicit pronunciation instruction has been shown to be effective in improving language learners’ pronunciation, yet it is not clear whether the same can be said about implicit pronunciation instruction. In addition, the role of orthography in improving language learners’ pronunciation is yet to be fully understood. Thus, this research examined the...

The drastic and unplanned shift to online teaching caused by the Covid-19 pandemic offers researchers with unprecedented opportunity to examine a wide range of issues related to online language teaching and assessment. The current study surveyed English language teachers (N = 161) from several Saudi universities regarding their experience with teac...

Being able to speak or communicate orally is an ultimate goal for most English language learners. Thus, teaching speaking is a main component of the curriculum in most communicative-based English language classrooms. However, teachers struggle to teach speaking in English language classrooms. Two main reasons contribute to this struggle: insufficie...

The drastic and unplanned shift to online teaching caused by the Covid-19 pandemic offers researchers with unprecedented opportunity to examine a wide range of issues related to online language teaching and assessment. The current study surveyed English language teachers (N = 161) from several Saudi universities regarding their experience with teac...

Being able to speak or communicate orally is an ultimate goal for most English language learners. Thus, teaching speaking is a main component of the curriculum in most communicative-based English language classrooms. However, teachers struggle to teach speaking in English language classrooms. Two main reasons contribute to this struggle: insufficie...

Accreditation is a common means of quality assurance used by academic institutions to provide assurance to their stakeholders. However, accreditation requires time as well as human and financial resources. Policy makers and schools' managers are faced with the question of whether accreditation is worth the time and effort and can lead to actual imp...

Recent research has shown that explicit pronunciation teaching is effective in improving learners’ speech comprehensibility, and many studies have presented effective ways to teach pronunciation (Thomson & Derwing, 2014). However, it is still not yet known in many EFL (English as a foreign language) settings whether this finding has any effect on t...

This paper reports on a study that attempted to examine the effect of explicit pronunciation instruction of some English segments (individual sounds) on the degree of perceived foreign accent in EFL Arab learners’ speech. Nine Arab learners of English in an EFL (English as a foreign language) setting were assigned to two groups, experimental and co...

Most previous studies, that have examined the effect of explicit pronunciation instruction on foreign language speech, have focused on the short term effect of explicit pronunciation instruction, usually measured immediately after instruction. For this reason, it is not yet clear whether the attested benefit from pronunciation instruction can be su...

This paper reports on a study conducted to examine the avoidance of using English phrasal verbs by Saudi learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). It also examined the effect of phrasal verb types (literal vs. figurative) and years of learning English in a foreign language setting on the avoidance of phrasal verbs by Saudi EFL learners. A nu...

Documentation of communicative behaviour across languages seems at a crossroads. While methods for collecting data on spoken or written communication, backed up by computational techniques, are evolving, the actual data being collected remain largely the same. Inspired by the efforts of some innovative researchers who are directly tackling the vari...

This study attempted to further examine the so-called Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit, which refers to the intelligibility advantage L2 listeners have over native listeners when they listen to L2 speech produced by speakers who share the same native language. 19 native speakers of Australian English and 19 L2 speakers of English whose...