A linguistic aficionado hailing from the land of ancient wonders … Egypt. With a deep passion for unraveling the mysteries of language. I Proudly hold the title of professor in linguistics … a journey I embarked upon the illustrious year of 1993. Throughout my tenure, I have had the pleasure of imparting knowledge to a diverse tapestry of students hailing from diverse corners of the globe: From the sands of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait to the chilly expanses of Russia, and the exotic lands of Oman and Yemen. Each encounter has enriched me with a kaleidoscope of culture, shaping my perspectives with every interaction.
The primary assumption underlying the present study is that Egyptian Arabic Written Wedding Invit... more The primary assumption underlying the present study is that Egyptian Arabic Written Wedding Invitations (EAWWIs) can meaningfully be characterized as a genre. The present study is an attempt to identify the generic constituent moves of EAWWIs and observe how such functional moves are used strategically. Therefore, the researchers adopted the Swalesian genre move analysis approach. A corpus of 300 written wedding invitations drawn from all the governorates of Egypt was used for this study. Genre analysis of the corpus indicated that, in addition to the primary function of inviting the receiver to attend the particular wedding party detailed in the invitation, the EAWWIs communicate a lot of information about the socio-cultural norms and practices encoded in the rhetorical and organizational components of this type of genre. It was also found that EAWWIs are elaborate in the information they convey. They are intended to communicate information about the reciprocal relationship between members of the families on social occasions in the Egyptian society. Results also indicated that Muslim and Christian EAWWIs have a lot in common in terms of their schematic structure and communicative purpose.
Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics
Infographics are visual data that are used in public service announcements to convey particular m... more Infographics are visual data that are used in public service announcements to convey particular messages to a particular group of people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Health (MOH) in the Kingdom of Bahrain relied heavily on the use of infographics to communicate different types of information to all its people. The study at hand aimed to analyze the Medical Announcement Infographics (MAIs) published by the Bahraini MOH during the pandemic. Two research questions were posited. The first one investigated the schematic moves in MAIs, and the second one researched the extent to which the Bahraini Medical Announcement infographics on COVID-19 Pandemic met the contextual variables of register. The study utilized Swales’ genre-analysis model and examined the contextual variables of the MIA register and the lexicogrammatical features highlighted in Systemic Functional Linguistics in relation to the Bahraini MOH’s MAIs. The study concluded that the register variables showed ...
Gomaa, Y. 2017. Linguistic Landscape in the Arabian Gulf: The Case of Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain, Hermes, Cairo University Center for Languages And Professional Translation, Cairo, Egypt, 2(2), 7-16., 2017
The ethnographic study reported in this article investigated the linguistic landscape of Manama, ... more The ethnographic study reported in this article investigated the linguistic landscape of Manama, the capital city of the Kingdom of Bahrain, by looking at the languages used on street signs. Data for this investigation were collected primarily from publicly visible signs. Building on the classification systems used by McArthur (2000), Schlick (2003), Huebner (2006), Backhaus (2007), and Ben Said (2010), a three-level classification system was developed to categorize a corpus of 493 photographs of signs. The study yielded a number of research findings. Modern Standard Arabic was shown to be the undisputed official language with respect to its visibility on public and private signs. Bahraini Arabic, the local Arabic vernacular, was shown not to have a high level of representation. English was shown to have a substantial impact on the Bahraini linguistic landscape. Additional languages (i.e., Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Tagalog, and Chinese) were also represented, but with decent levels of representation. The use of multiple scripts was another dimension of linguistic diversity that this study addressed. Another interesting finding observed was the combination of different languages on the same sign. The bilingual pair Modern Standard Arabic plus English was the most frequent combination found, which indicated the favouring of Arabic-English bilingualism in terms of the combination of languages on street signs.
This pragmatic descriptive study is aimed at investigating the use of hedging by Arab speakers of... more This pragmatic descriptive study is aimed at investigating the use of hedging by Arab speakers of English. It is geared towards answering the question of how frequently hedging is used in the abstracts of the Linguistics Master theses written by Saudi students enrolled in the English department at the College of Languages and Translation, Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A corpus of 100 randomly selected Linguistics Master Theses abstracts (27,411 words), written between 2013 and 2016, were carefully examined quantitatively, and analyzed according to Hyland's (2000) classification of hedging words, using the online LEXICOOL text analyzer. The results indicate that Saudi students rarely use hedging words in writing the abstracts of their Linguistics Master theses. The limited number of hedging words used in the corpus reflects the students' lack of pragmatic competence and cross-cultural variation. The present study is limited to a single genre, i.e., Linguistics Master Theses Abstracts. Further studies combining both discourse analysis and qualitative interviews, focusing on the use of hedging by Arab speakers of English, with more diverse academic texts in different genres, would enhance the findings, and help explain whether pragmatic competence or cross-cultural variation affects the use of hedging by Arab speakers of English.
Randwick International of Education and Linguistics Science Journal, 2022
The study at hands is a cross-cultural exploration of request strategies in Kuwaiti Arabic and Br... more The study at hands is a cross-cultural exploration of request strategies in Kuwaiti Arabic and British English dialects. A mixed method approach of a qualitative and quantitative analysis was used (i.e., a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and semi-structured interviews). Data was collected from a total of five hundred participants, two hundred and fifty from each group. Sixty participants were chosen for the semi-structured interviews. The analysis of the collected data was based upon Brown and Levinson's (1987) social variables (e.g., power, distance, and ranking). Also, the data was analyzed following Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's (1984) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). The results of the study revealed that Kuwaiti Arabic and British English participants used the conventional indirect level in the form of query preparatory in most situations. Furthermore, power as a social variable affected Kuwaiti Arabic and British English participants’ flow of a reque...
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2022
This study attempts to demonstrate the mediating role the translator is entrusted with and the ef... more This study attempts to demonstrate the mediating role the translator is entrusted with and the efforts undertaken by him/her to transcend cultural barriers. Two plays written by the renowned Egyptian dramatist Noamaan Ashour feature high on this study because they are heavily laden with culture-bound expressions that mirror the Egyptian cultural milieu. Also, the study explores the strategies formulated by the translator to address the problem of culture-bound items. These items pose a challenge to the translator since they are so deeply embedded in the source culture that the translator may find it difficult to render them into the Target Language (TL). Each translation strategy has its merits and demerits: cultural substitution is a reasonable strategy, but it entails that the translator should carefully consider equivalents and the hierarchy of correspondences so as to adapt the values of the Source Language (SL) cultural system to the values of the TL cultural system. Translatio...
This study examined language policy in the virtual linguistic landscape in the Kingdom of Bahrain... more This study examined language policy in the virtual linguistic landscape in the Kingdom of Bahrain as exemplified in its E-Government National Portal. It was carried out with the aim of extending the view of the linguistic landscape beyond the mainstream research that is typically anchored and defined within the parameters of given geographic boundaries. It sought to answer the question of how the linguistic diversity is experienced in cyberspace. Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) Preference Model Theory of language choice was used to address this question. The findings authenticate the assumption that the Bahraini virtual linguistic landscape shares not only specific features with physical counterparts, but also displays unique attributes
2020 Sixth International Conference on e-Learning (econf), 2020
This study applied the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explore the ... more This study applied the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explore the attitudes of English major students on using virtual learning platforms and their impact on the improvement of oral communication skills. Data was collected using a survey that was administered to English major students at the University of Bahrain (UOB). Data was coded and analyzed using descriptive statistical tools on SPSS. The overall results showed a mean value of 3+ for all statements demonstrating the relative effect of virtual learning in advancing oral communication. In addition, the mean values for all the constructs were above 3 indicating that most of the responses of the participants were leaning on the positive effect of virtual learning. The results showed that social influence had an impact on the use of e-learning to promote oral communication skills with a mean value of 3.53. The mean values of each construct demonstrated a general tendency of acceptance of virtual learning in relation to oral skills. However, there was a weak level of intention to use e-learning in the future as more than two statements had low mean values. Moreover, although there was a general moderate acceptance of virtual learning, the nostalgia to the genius loci of the classroom was evident. Interestingly, there seems to be no difference between the two groups, and hence gender might not have an effect on the acceptance of information and communication technology (ICT) as an environment for promoting oral communication skills.
2020 Sixth International Conference on e-Learning (econf), 2020
E-Learning has recently become the most predominant feature in higher education following the COV... more E-Learning has recently become the most predominant feature in higher education following the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims at investigating learners' perceptions and observable behavior in the selection of research methodology pre and post COVID-19. It specifically addresses the increasing demands for information and knowledge and the accompanying changes in philosophical assumptions, methodological choices and research design used in conducting research over time. A sample of 250 Level-3 and Level-4 students, who are attending various accounting and business writing courses in which a research project is a prerequisite at the University of Bahrain, has been carefully observed during the period 2018–2020. Students are divided into two groups of non e-learners and e-learners depending on whether they are taught using conventional or electronic teaching methods pre and post COVID-19, respectively. Results show that there are remarkable and substantially significant differenc...
Through the instrumentality of the translation allusions strategies proposed by Leppihalme (1997)... more Through the instrumentality of the translation allusions strategies proposed by Leppihalme (1997) and the Skopos-plus-loyalty approach developed by Nord (1997), the present study scrutinizes the English translation of six Islamic-legal terms and six metaphors used for women in selected Prophetic Hadith from two English versions of Al-Tabrīzī’s (d. 1348 A.D.) Mishkat-ul-Masabih that have been translated by Fazlul Karim (1938) and Robson (1963). The results indicate that Fazlul Karim’s (1938) translation of the of Islamic-legal terms shows his commitment to provide the Muslim reader with the necessary Islamic rulings and opinions taken from the Prophetic Hadith. However, the language in his translation is found to be incomprehensible in many cases because it strictly adheres to the Arabic structure. By comparison, Robson’s (1963) language appears natural and the terms are translated more accurately regarding the ‘general meaning’ of the word. In addition, his translation is comprehens...
The primary assumption underlying the present study is that Egyptian Arabic Written Wedding Invit... more The primary assumption underlying the present study is that Egyptian Arabic Written Wedding Invitations (EAWWIs) can meaningfully be characterized as a genre. The present study is an attempt to identify the generic constituent moves of EAWWIs and observe how such functional moves are used strategically. Therefore, the researchers adopted the Swalesian genre move analysis approach. A corpus of 300 written wedding invitations drawn from all the governorates of Egypt was used for this study. Genre analysis of the corpus indicated that, in addition to the primary function of inviting the receiver to attend the particular wedding party detailed in the invitation, the EAWWIs communicate a lot of information about the socio-cultural norms and practices encoded in the rhetorical and organizational components of this type of genre. It was also found that EAWWIs are elaborate in the information they convey. They are intended to communicate information about the reciprocal relationship between members of the families on social occasions in the Egyptian society. Results also indicated that Muslim and Christian EAWWIs have a lot in common in terms of their schematic structure and communicative purpose.
Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics
Infographics are visual data that are used in public service announcements to convey particular m... more Infographics are visual data that are used in public service announcements to convey particular messages to a particular group of people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Health (MOH) in the Kingdom of Bahrain relied heavily on the use of infographics to communicate different types of information to all its people. The study at hand aimed to analyze the Medical Announcement Infographics (MAIs) published by the Bahraini MOH during the pandemic. Two research questions were posited. The first one investigated the schematic moves in MAIs, and the second one researched the extent to which the Bahraini Medical Announcement infographics on COVID-19 Pandemic met the contextual variables of register. The study utilized Swales’ genre-analysis model and examined the contextual variables of the MIA register and the lexicogrammatical features highlighted in Systemic Functional Linguistics in relation to the Bahraini MOH’s MAIs. The study concluded that the register variables showed ...
Gomaa, Y. 2017. Linguistic Landscape in the Arabian Gulf: The Case of Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain, Hermes, Cairo University Center for Languages And Professional Translation, Cairo, Egypt, 2(2), 7-16., 2017
The ethnographic study reported in this article investigated the linguistic landscape of Manama, ... more The ethnographic study reported in this article investigated the linguistic landscape of Manama, the capital city of the Kingdom of Bahrain, by looking at the languages used on street signs. Data for this investigation were collected primarily from publicly visible signs. Building on the classification systems used by McArthur (2000), Schlick (2003), Huebner (2006), Backhaus (2007), and Ben Said (2010), a three-level classification system was developed to categorize a corpus of 493 photographs of signs. The study yielded a number of research findings. Modern Standard Arabic was shown to be the undisputed official language with respect to its visibility on public and private signs. Bahraini Arabic, the local Arabic vernacular, was shown not to have a high level of representation. English was shown to have a substantial impact on the Bahraini linguistic landscape. Additional languages (i.e., Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, Tagalog, and Chinese) were also represented, but with decent levels of representation. The use of multiple scripts was another dimension of linguistic diversity that this study addressed. Another interesting finding observed was the combination of different languages on the same sign. The bilingual pair Modern Standard Arabic plus English was the most frequent combination found, which indicated the favouring of Arabic-English bilingualism in terms of the combination of languages on street signs.
This pragmatic descriptive study is aimed at investigating the use of hedging by Arab speakers of... more This pragmatic descriptive study is aimed at investigating the use of hedging by Arab speakers of English. It is geared towards answering the question of how frequently hedging is used in the abstracts of the Linguistics Master theses written by Saudi students enrolled in the English department at the College of Languages and Translation, Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A corpus of 100 randomly selected Linguistics Master Theses abstracts (27,411 words), written between 2013 and 2016, were carefully examined quantitatively, and analyzed according to Hyland's (2000) classification of hedging words, using the online LEXICOOL text analyzer. The results indicate that Saudi students rarely use hedging words in writing the abstracts of their Linguistics Master theses. The limited number of hedging words used in the corpus reflects the students' lack of pragmatic competence and cross-cultural variation. The present study is limited to a single genre, i.e., Linguistics Master Theses Abstracts. Further studies combining both discourse analysis and qualitative interviews, focusing on the use of hedging by Arab speakers of English, with more diverse academic texts in different genres, would enhance the findings, and help explain whether pragmatic competence or cross-cultural variation affects the use of hedging by Arab speakers of English.
Randwick International of Education and Linguistics Science Journal, 2022
The study at hands is a cross-cultural exploration of request strategies in Kuwaiti Arabic and Br... more The study at hands is a cross-cultural exploration of request strategies in Kuwaiti Arabic and British English dialects. A mixed method approach of a qualitative and quantitative analysis was used (i.e., a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and semi-structured interviews). Data was collected from a total of five hundred participants, two hundred and fifty from each group. Sixty participants were chosen for the semi-structured interviews. The analysis of the collected data was based upon Brown and Levinson's (1987) social variables (e.g., power, distance, and ranking). Also, the data was analyzed following Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's (1984) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). The results of the study revealed that Kuwaiti Arabic and British English participants used the conventional indirect level in the form of query preparatory in most situations. Furthermore, power as a social variable affected Kuwaiti Arabic and British English participants’ flow of a reque...
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2022
This study attempts to demonstrate the mediating role the translator is entrusted with and the ef... more This study attempts to demonstrate the mediating role the translator is entrusted with and the efforts undertaken by him/her to transcend cultural barriers. Two plays written by the renowned Egyptian dramatist Noamaan Ashour feature high on this study because they are heavily laden with culture-bound expressions that mirror the Egyptian cultural milieu. Also, the study explores the strategies formulated by the translator to address the problem of culture-bound items. These items pose a challenge to the translator since they are so deeply embedded in the source culture that the translator may find it difficult to render them into the Target Language (TL). Each translation strategy has its merits and demerits: cultural substitution is a reasonable strategy, but it entails that the translator should carefully consider equivalents and the hierarchy of correspondences so as to adapt the values of the Source Language (SL) cultural system to the values of the TL cultural system. Translatio...
This study examined language policy in the virtual linguistic landscape in the Kingdom of Bahrain... more This study examined language policy in the virtual linguistic landscape in the Kingdom of Bahrain as exemplified in its E-Government National Portal. It was carried out with the aim of extending the view of the linguistic landscape beyond the mainstream research that is typically anchored and defined within the parameters of given geographic boundaries. It sought to answer the question of how the linguistic diversity is experienced in cyberspace. Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) Preference Model Theory of language choice was used to address this question. The findings authenticate the assumption that the Bahraini virtual linguistic landscape shares not only specific features with physical counterparts, but also displays unique attributes
2020 Sixth International Conference on e-Learning (econf), 2020
This study applied the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explore the ... more This study applied the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explore the attitudes of English major students on using virtual learning platforms and their impact on the improvement of oral communication skills. Data was collected using a survey that was administered to English major students at the University of Bahrain (UOB). Data was coded and analyzed using descriptive statistical tools on SPSS. The overall results showed a mean value of 3+ for all statements demonstrating the relative effect of virtual learning in advancing oral communication. In addition, the mean values for all the constructs were above 3 indicating that most of the responses of the participants were leaning on the positive effect of virtual learning. The results showed that social influence had an impact on the use of e-learning to promote oral communication skills with a mean value of 3.53. The mean values of each construct demonstrated a general tendency of acceptance of virtual learning in relation to oral skills. However, there was a weak level of intention to use e-learning in the future as more than two statements had low mean values. Moreover, although there was a general moderate acceptance of virtual learning, the nostalgia to the genius loci of the classroom was evident. Interestingly, there seems to be no difference between the two groups, and hence gender might not have an effect on the acceptance of information and communication technology (ICT) as an environment for promoting oral communication skills.
2020 Sixth International Conference on e-Learning (econf), 2020
E-Learning has recently become the most predominant feature in higher education following the COV... more E-Learning has recently become the most predominant feature in higher education following the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims at investigating learners' perceptions and observable behavior in the selection of research methodology pre and post COVID-19. It specifically addresses the increasing demands for information and knowledge and the accompanying changes in philosophical assumptions, methodological choices and research design used in conducting research over time. A sample of 250 Level-3 and Level-4 students, who are attending various accounting and business writing courses in which a research project is a prerequisite at the University of Bahrain, has been carefully observed during the period 2018–2020. Students are divided into two groups of non e-learners and e-learners depending on whether they are taught using conventional or electronic teaching methods pre and post COVID-19, respectively. Results show that there are remarkable and substantially significant differenc...
Through the instrumentality of the translation allusions strategies proposed by Leppihalme (1997)... more Through the instrumentality of the translation allusions strategies proposed by Leppihalme (1997) and the Skopos-plus-loyalty approach developed by Nord (1997), the present study scrutinizes the English translation of six Islamic-legal terms and six metaphors used for women in selected Prophetic Hadith from two English versions of Al-Tabrīzī’s (d. 1348 A.D.) Mishkat-ul-Masabih that have been translated by Fazlul Karim (1938) and Robson (1963). The results indicate that Fazlul Karim’s (1938) translation of the of Islamic-legal terms shows his commitment to provide the Muslim reader with the necessary Islamic rulings and opinions taken from the Prophetic Hadith. However, the language in his translation is found to be incomprehensible in many cases because it strictly adheres to the Arabic structure. By comparison, Robson’s (1963) language appears natural and the terms are translated more accurately regarding the ‘general meaning’ of the word. In addition, his translation is comprehens...
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Papers by Prof. Yasser Ahmed Gomaa