Entisar Elsherif

One of the Libyan Faculty of Education exit requirements is the graduation research project. Current literature review indicates the scarcity of literature on the quality of the graduation project in the Libyan context. Thus, the present study addressed this shortcoming by investigating the opinions of the faculty members at the Faculties of Education at various Libyan public universities on achieving quality standards in the graduation research projects. The design of the study was exploratory sequential mixed methods as we gathered both quantitative and qualitative data to get accurate and detailed picture of the Libyan teacher-educators’ views on fostering quality in the graduation research project. The context of the study is the Faculties of Education at eight Libyan universities. The participants were 62 Libyan teacher-educators who were faculty members at the Libyan Faculties of Education. Data were collected through documents, questionnaires, and follow up interviews. The re...

This exploratory case study aimed at investigating the student-teachers' views on using Facebook games for language learning. The participants were 48 student-teachers at the EFL Department of the Faculty of Education at a Libyan public university. They were required to play Facebook games for two weeks and then present their experiences through oral presentations and reflective journals. Data were collected through student-teachers' presentations and reflective journals. Data were analyzed qualitatively using a thematic inductive approach. Although few student-teachers had negative views, most of the student-teachers had positive views on using Facebook games for learning. They believed that Facebook games teach players following instructions and provide opportunities for language improvement, especially for vocabulary learning. We expect that our findings would provide teachers and practitioners with ideas for classroom research and encourage researchers to conduct further and more rigorous testing on integrating Facebook games into the EFL classroom.

"There is an increasing amount of research investigating the difficulties encountered by international students while writing academic English to help them overcome these problems and improve their academic styles. As research in the Libyan context is scarce and concerns with the Libyan postgraduates are almost non¬existent, the purpose of the study is to explore Libyan postgraduates' academic writing difficulties and their views and attitudes towards tutors' written feedback.
To investigate these points, questionnaires were sent to Libyan postgraduates and their tutors. Samples of tutors' feedback also were collected to have more valid and reliable data. Students (n = 73) were asked to report the type of difficulties they encountered while writing and the strategies they used to conquer their problems. They were also asked about their views on tutors' written feedback and whether they thought this feedback helped them improve their academic writing styles. Tutors (n = 8) were asked about the purpose of their feedback and the problems they noticed in Libyan postgraduates' academic writing. Additionally, feedback samples were analysed and compared with the other data.
Data indicates that Libyan postgraduates do have problems, mostly in being critical, expressing opinions accurately, closely followed by problems in organisation and using referencing to avoid plagiarism. The problems that were observed by tutors were in coherence in the planning stage, cohesion and repetition and circularity.
The possible causes, as reported by students, were lack of input, lack of experience, L1 interference, errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation and students' lack of vocabulary. The strategies that were reported by Libyan postgraduates were writing their academic work, attending pre-sessional and in-sessional courses, reading books and journals related to their courses as well as books on study skills and asking for help from tutors whenever it was needed. Data also showed that Libyan postgraduates highly valued tutors' written feedback and tried to use it to improve their future work.
The findings of this study support what other studies found and suggest that changes should be made in the Libyan context in the way of teaching writing by concentrating on the existing approaches more than the traditional ones in order to improve students' writing abilities and to prepare them for the academic context.
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