This paper provides an exploration of a range of perspectives and attitudes towards the emergence of Life Skills in the Moroccan Higher Education curricula. We briefly introduce the national context of the Bachelor’s Degree Reform (BDR)... more
This paper provides an exploration of a range of perspectives and attitudes towards the emergence of Life Skills in the Moroccan Higher Education curricula. We briefly introduce the national context of the Bachelor’s Degree Reform (BDR) of 2019 introducing these skills as well as the international proactive measures to create a new space for well-being policies and assessments. The focus of the present article is to explore the students and professors’ views on officially integrating such innovative modules within the academic program for the first time. In order to obtain relevant data, a qualitative approach was adopted. The findings suggest that the majority of interviewed university professors were supportive of the aforementioned reform (BDR). The reluctant minority voiced out their concerns over the lack of clarity regarding the teaching and evaluation methodologies for skills in which there has been no proper teacher training yet. On the other hand, the students’ narratives ...
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This study aims to examine the relationship between the productive knowledge of some lexical and phraseological indices and the quality of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ writing. A sample of 120 expository essays, written... more
This study aims to examine the relationship between the productive knowledge of some lexical and phraseological indices and the quality of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ writing. A sample of 120 expository essays, written by semesters 1 and 5 university students in a less proficient EFL context, are rated by human evaluators and automatically examined for the target indices. The results show that, unlike the index of lexical diversity, both indices of content word frequency and range could significantly discriminate between different proficiency levels. For the phraseological indices, both the proportions of rare and frequent bigrams yielded between-group differences, with higher proficiency students performing significantly better in both categories. Using a regression analysis, the results show that the use of rare and contextually restricted content words and the production of larger proportions of rare and frequent bigrams could be considered indicators of better ...
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Because most of the previous research on translation constraints in English-Arabic-English translation has separately investigated English-Arabic and Arabic-English translation problems, the current study is meant to compare the... more
Because most of the previous research on translation constraints in English-Arabic-English translation has separately investigated English-Arabic and Arabic-English translation problems, the current study is meant to compare the constraints that EFL students face across the two translation types. To attain this objective, English-Arabic and Arabic-English tests were administered to forty-seven (N= 47) EFL students in two Moroccan university educational settings to measure their abilities in the two translation domains. The results reveal that the participants' scores in both versions are not at the expected ability level due to the obstacles they encounter in the translation process. The study also shows that having a good ability in the English-Arabic version cannot strongly predict a similar good ability in Arabic-English translation because of the different natures of the two languages, which suggests taking more care of the student’s proficiency in English and Arabic languag...
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Proceedings of the 27th MATE Annual Conference 61 The Requisites of Educational/Academic Leadership for Change and Development Mohammed Larouz Moulay Ismail University, Meknes Introduction Leadership is a fast expanding and increasingly... more
Proceedings of the 27th MATE Annual Conference 61 The Requisites of Educational/Academic Leadership for Change and Development Mohammed Larouz Moulay Ismail University, Meknes Introduction Leadership is a fast expanding and increasingly popular, but a fascinating ...
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While frequency of occurrence and lexical diversity are common measures of lexical proficiency, very few studies have examined range along with these two other lexical indices, especially in EFL contexts. Using a sample of 529... more
While frequency of occurrence and lexical diversity are common measures of lexical proficiency, very few studies have examined range along with these two other lexical indices, especially in EFL contexts. Using a sample of 529 undergraduate EFL learners’ essays, the present study examined the development of three indices of lexical proficiency (word frequency, range and lexical diversity) across 3 different proficiency levels. No similar study has been conducted so far in the Moroccan context, which makes this study a valuable contribution to a better understanding of university learners’ productive lexical knowledge. Unexpectedly, although frequency is an established measure which can successfully show differences in learners’ proficiency, the results of this study indicate that at the productive level, the range of content words and lexical diversity might better reflect differences among learners of different proficiency levels. While word frequency was stable among the three gro...
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In Morocco, public service announcement is a complex field in which various linguistic practices and semiotic representations collide. Hence, the aim of the present work is to demystify the misalignment between language and visuals in the... more
In Morocco, public service announcement is a complex field in which various linguistic practices and semiotic representations collide. Hence, the aim of the present work is to demystify the misalignment between language and visuals in the public service announcement in a video on the protection of the environment, namely towards forests. This study adopts a discourse and a visual analysis to clarify the extent to which the interpretation of the announcement leas to misunderstanding and causes a lot of ambiguity. The study also shows that the trees and forests are linguistically reported as feminine constructs while the visuals portrayed them as masculine constructs. This article has a lot of implications for public institutions, advertising companies, and future researchers whose efforts are required to reconsider the pendulum between the linguistic and the visual in public announcements so as to effectively raise people’s awareness towards environmental issues.
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The present paper aims at investigating the relationship between speaking and writing in descriptive discourse among Moroccan university EFL students within the department of English Studies at Moulay Ismail University, Meknes, Morocco.... more
The present paper aims at investigating the relationship between speaking and writing in descriptive discourse among Moroccan university EFL students within the department of English Studies at Moulay Ismail University, Meknes, Morocco. To attain this end, 80 undergraduate semester six students studying English as a foreign language were randomly selected to participate in the current study. Subsequently, speaking and writing proficiency tests were administered to the participants to measure their descriptive abilities in speaking and writing. The data were analyzed by carrying out correlation and regression analysis in SPSS. The results reveal that there is a strong positive and statistically significant correlation between speaking and writing in descriptive discourse, r = .61. Descriptive speaking can predict 37 percent of EFL students’ descriptive writing (R2 =.37). The study ends with implications for teachers, syllabus designers, and the department of English studies.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted mental and emotional health in significant ways, and has worsened the already existing crisis of rising anxiety, chronic stress and depression among the youth. This was particularly marked by the drastic... more
The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted mental and emotional health in significant ways, and has worsened the already existing crisis of rising anxiety, chronic stress and depression among the youth. This was particularly marked by the drastic lockdown measures, the incessant stream of bad news, and the sudden shift to online education. Faced with stressors, resilience is a skill-set that aids with adapting, coping, and bouncing back from adversity while maintaining or quickly returning to a relatively healthy psychological functioning. This article therefore aims to explore the past, present and future situation regarding emotional and mental resilience skills in Moroccan higher education curricula. To this end, structured and semi-structured interviews have been conducted with four senior officials at the Ministry of Education in Rabat, Morocco. Furthermore, surveys have been collected from faculty members in eight public universities. The findings reveal that resilience education has ...
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This research was conducted to investigate the relationship between two variables: critical thinking skills and argumentative writing skills in Moroccan Preparatory Classes of Higher Engineering Schools (Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes... more
This research was conducted to investigate the relationship between two variables: critical thinking skills and argumentative writing skills in Moroccan Preparatory Classes of Higher Engineering Schools (Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Ecoles) ( CPGE), Omar Ibn Khattab Meknes . The participants were the 2nd year Maths and Physics (MP) students in CPGE, Omar Ibn Al Khattab Meknes. 60 students participated in the study from a total number of 120 students. The research adopted the correlation design to measure the degree of association between two variables using the statistical procedure of correlation analysis. In this regard, a critical thinking test (AssessmentDay Practice Test Experts, 2018) was administered to test students’ critical thinking skills. Then, the students were asked to write an argumentative essay about social networking and creativity. To analyse the collected data, the study resorted to SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Science, version 23). Pe...
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In Morocco, public service announcement is a complex field in which various linguistic practices and semiotic representations collide. Hence, the aim of the present work is to demystify the misalignment between language and visuals in the... more
In Morocco, public service announcement is a complex field in which various linguistic practices and semiotic representations collide. Hence, the aim of the present work is to demystify the misalignment between language and visuals in the public service announcement in a video on the protection of the environment, namely towards forests. This study adopts a discourse and a visual analysis to clarify the extent to which the interpretation of the announcement leas to misunderstanding and causes a lot of ambiguity. The study also shows that the trees and forests are linguistically reported as feminine constructs while the visuals portrayed them as masculine constructs. This article has a lot of implications for public institutions, advertising companies, and future researchers whose efforts are required to reconsider the pendulum between the linguistic and the visual in public announcements so as to effectively raise people’s awareness towards environmental issues.
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The coverage of environmental issues is of great importance to Moroccan newspapers, namely As-Sabah, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Massae. The present study explores the frequency of articles that covered environmental issues and investigated the... more
The coverage of environmental issues is of great importance to Moroccan newspapers, namely As-Sabah, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Massae. The present study explores the frequency of articles that covered environmental issues and investigated the newspapers’ professionalism in writing environmental reports on man’s environmental setting violations. The Research was accomplished through the framework of ecolinguistics to categorize and analyze all environmental stories that extended from March to July 2020. The sums of 308 issues of the three newspapers were manually checked to identify the issues reported about environmental problems. The findings revealed that environmental coverage by the three newspapers was feeble. Precisely, only 73 newspaper issues pertaining to the three newspapers contained at least one environmental title. Practically, identified environmental articles were manually searched and treated based on a keyword selection such as environment, forest, animals, water, pollution...
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This chapter presents a study investigating the effect of teachers’ feedback on EFL students’ dissertation writing in Moroccan higher education institutions. It focuses on teachers and students’ perceptions and practices of feedback as a... more
This chapter presents a study investigating the effect of teachers’ feedback on EFL students’ dissertation writing in Moroccan higher education institutions. It focuses on teachers and students’ perceptions and practices of feedback as a pedagogical tool. The purpose is to probe the power of teachers’ feedback on university students’ dissertation writing skills and identify its type, nature and eventual repercussions on the quality of their dissertations. The questions raised in the chapter address feedback delivered orally, in writing or through information technology, its nature and its impact on doctoral students. The chapter adopts a phenomenographical research approach that takes into consideration the variation of the data. Questionnaires and interviews with both students and teachers are used to describe and explore the participants’ beliefs and attitudes towards the effects of teachers’ feedback on EFL writing. The study’s findings indicate much discordance between students’ conceptions of feedback and teachers’ understanding of what feedback comprises, offering a number of potential pedagogical implications as well as questions for further research.
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Drawing on previous studies on the relationship between speaking and writing modalities, this paper provides a critical synthesis of theoretical and empirical research on the interconnections between the two versions. Along with this,... more
Drawing on previous studies on the relationship between speaking and writing modalities, this paper provides a critical synthesis of theoretical and empirical research on the interconnections between the two versions. Along with this, this systematic review shows that research on the issue at hand has been classified under three main categories: a) speaking effect on writing; b) writing effect on speaking, and c) correlation between speaking and writing. While experimental research has emphasized the impact of speaking and writing on each other, correlational endeavors have been much concerned with the symmetrical, reciprocal, and predictive connections between these two interrelated domains. Overall, the current review suggests that learning a second or foreign language could be enhanced by complementing speaking tasks by writing ones and vice versa. In this case, speaking could be taught along with writing to allow students to transfer their skillfulness from one to the other.