Wafa Zoghbor

The United Arab Emirates puts tremendous effort into protecting the Arabic language and reinforcing its position as the language of the country’s constitution and national identity. The country’s higher education system is built on English-medium instruction, which, alongside the worldwide adherence to native-like norms that accompanies English as a global language, appears to reduce the opportunities for Arab students to take ownership of English. This chapter focuses on the negotiable space between Arabic and English in a United Arab Emirates English-medium instruction higher education context. Data were triangulated from self-reflections by thirty Emirati students (20 females and 10 males) and interviews with four faculty members of maths and information technology who taught through English. The findings show that while English-medium instruction is considered a form of multilingual education, Arabic was believed to have a positive impact on the students’ control over their university courses. The chapter provides implications for how multiple competencies can help Arab students exercise ownership of English, reduce their linguistic and cultural insecurities, and retain their identity while learning in an English-medium instruction context.

A key element in bringing long-term change in teacher practice is engaging teachers in reflection. While being a reflective practitioner is an important part of being an educator, using systematic reflection to help improve teaching practice requires training and mentorship. This chapter describes a professional development programme that utilised the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning framework in an English as a Medium of Instruction university in the United Arab Emirates. The programme aimed to raise awareness among faculty of the benefits of reflective practice and guide them through the process of designing their own classroom interventions to help measure the extent to which their teaching strategies and materials were effective in supporting students successfully attain their learning outcomes. Measures of impact are presented, while three case studies from faculty members who attended the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning programme are used to further illustrate the effect of the programme on teaching practice. The chapter concludes with tips on how to implement a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning programme to provide faulty in a multinational higher education institution with transformative professional development.

With the ever-shortening lifespan of electronic devices due to advancements in electronics and attractive consumer designs, a dramatic rise in the electronic waste magnitude has been reported as a severe challenge worldwide. These devices do contain not only valuable recyclable materials but also toxic chemicals which can impose human effects and environmental pollution. This paper investigates the awareness among UAE educated people about the electronic waste magnitude. Regionally, UAE generates 17.2 kg of e-waste per capita every year. It ranks among the highest producers of e-waste in the middle-east. As such, in efforts to develop guide strategies and extend awareness among UAE population, a diagnostic survey was conducted and spread among 562 government undergraduate students (202 males and 360 females). One significant finding revealed that despite only one-quarter of the students are not genuinely aware of e-waste definition and its environmental effects; those who are aware ...

The spread of English as the world lingua franca has evoked the rethinking of the significance of native-speaker (NS) norms and models in teaching English, and as a result, the target of pronunciation teaching and learning has shifted from imitating native accents to achieving speech intelligibility. The Lingua Franca Core (LFC) proposal introduced a list of phonological features in English that are, arguably, the minimum required to achieve intelligibility and argued that mispronouncing these features is expected to cause a breakdown in communication among non-native speakers. As a consequence of this, it has been suggested that LFC be prioritized in teaching and learning English pronunciation. In response to the LFC proposal, researchers have become polarize

The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of post-secondary Arab learners towards native and non-native varieties of English. A stimulus tap was incorporated within semistructured interviews where respondents listened to 6 speakers (an Indian, Arab, Thai, British, American, and Canadian) and then answered 5-Point Likert scale questions. The findings revealed that the interviewees encountered difficulties identifying the speakers’ first languages. Whilst the British and Canadian speakers were perceived more positively than the other speech samples and were easier to understand than the Thai speaker, they were less understandable to the interviewees than the Arab and Indian speakers. The American speaker was perceived less positively than the other speech samples and was also the least understandable. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and specific recommendations that could facilitate improving Arab learners’ tolerance of their own (as well as other non...

Poster presented at the 3rd International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca, Vienna, Austria, May 22th-25th 2010. The poster is also available from the conference's website: http://elfconference.univie.ac.at/publications-vps-and-ppts/

... 2000) proposed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC): a list of features which she presumes to be the minimum required to result in intelligible communication among non-native ... I am deeply indebted to the post-secondary Arab students and the UK participants ... CA Contrastive Analysis ...

The United Arab Emirates puts tremendous effort into protecting the Arabic language and reinforcing its position as the language of the country’s constitution and national identity. The country’s higher education system is built on English-medium instruction, which, alongside the worldwide adherence to native-like norms that accompanies English as a global language, appears to reduce the opportunities for Arab students to take ownership of English. This chapter focuses on the negotiable space between Arabic and English in a United Arab Emirates English-medium instruction higher education context. Data were triangulated from self-reflections by thirty Emirati students (20 females and 10 males) and interviews with four faculty members of maths and information technology who taught through English. The findings show that while English-medium instruction is considered a form of multilingual education, Arabic was believed to have a positive impact on the students’ control over their university courses. The chapter provides implications for how multiple competencies can help Arab students exercise ownership of English, reduce their linguistic and cultural insecurities, and retain their identity while learning in an English-medium instruction context.

The case study university was established for women’s education by federal decree of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the 1990s. It was selected as it has a high percentage of women leaders. That situation is unusual, particularly in the male dominated socio-cultural environment of the Middle East. Regional statistics on women in academia are analysed in this chapter, and an interpretation of interviews with female leaders at the university is presented. Three themes of best practices were identified: women leading change within the specific academic context of the case study university (CSU); recruitment, retention, and promotion policies that support women’s leadership; and the mitigation of influences from the socio-cultural environment. These best practices in the CSU enabled the negotiation of space for women’s academic leadership.

The global spread of English as the world lingua franca has an impact on the goals of teaching pronunciation, where 'comfortable intelligibility' should be the goal rather than native-like pronunciation. Jenkins (2000) proposed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a syllabus that includes a list of phonological features that are, arguably, the minimum required to result in intelligible communication among non-native speakers of English (NNSs). This study has rethought the contents of this list for Arab learners. To this end, the intelligibility of 50 L1 Arabic learners of English at post-secondary level was evaluated by 18 non-Arab speakers using the buzzer technique, and an index has been developed for unintelligible utterances in the speakers' speech samples. The findings support most of the core features in the LFC except for the quality of the long vowel /ɜː/, rhotic /r/, and word stress in words of more than two syllables. These findings are used to propose a revised version of the LFC syllabus for Arab learners.

The spread of English as the world lingua franca has evoked the rethinking of the significance of native-speaker norms and models in teaching English, and as a result, the target of pronunciation teaching and learning has shifted from imitating native accents to achieving speech intelligibility. The Lingua Franca Core proposal introduced a list of phonological features in English that are, arguably, the minimum required to achieve intelligibility and argued that mispronouncing these features is expected to cause a breakdown in communication among non-native speakers. As a consequence of this, it has been suggested that LFC be prioritized in teaching and learning English pronunciation. In response to the LFC proposal, researchers have become polarized; while some have found LFC a promising approach, others have argued against its appropriateness as a target of pronunciation teaching and learning. This paper evaluates the controversial position of the LFC proposal in the literature, focusing on three main dimensions: the LFC’s potential to result in intelligible communication, its teachability and its scope of function as an alternative target to the NS models, and the influence of different attitudes on the success of implementing the LFC.

The status of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become an increasingly popular topic in Applied Linguistics. It has been suggested that the native speakers (NSs) and their pronunciation models have become relatively unimportant in international communication. This results in a lively discussion of which pronunciation model to use in classrooms (Dauer, 2005). Jenkins (2000) proposed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC): a list of features which she presumes to be the minimum required to result in intelligible communication among non-native speakers (NNSs) and should form the basis upon which the pronunciation syllabus of learners of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) should be designed. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a pronunciation syllabus based on the LFC in improving the intelligibility and comprehensibility of Arab learners in comparison to learners of the traditional pronunciation syllabus (based on Received Pronunciation and/or General American). The potential effect of the syllabus was determined by implementing a quasi-experimental approach and semi-structured interviews within which the buzzer-technique was implemented. This research found that learners of the LFC syllabus scored relatively higher in comparison to the learners of the traditional pronunciation syllabus in terms of intelligibility and comprehensibility scores. The difference, however, between both groups remained insignificant. The degrees of intelligibility and comprehensibility were influenced by several factors. The interviewee's knowledge about the phonology of Arabic and exposure to non-native varieties facilitated intelligibility and comprehensibility. Negative attitudes towards certain phonological features, in most instances, did not impede intelligibility and/or comprehensibility. The research also gives support to most of the core features in the LFC except the rhotic /r/, quality of the long vowel /ɜː/, and word stress in words of more than two syllables. While this research implies the need to modify the LFC pronunciation syllabus based on the Arab learners’ phonology, further research is still required to investigate the pronunciation syllabus needs for learners in other contexts.

This chapter explores the origins of the pronunciation for English as a lingua franca (ELF), before going on to detail how an ELF approach to teaching pronunciation can be put into practice. Key issues that will be dealt with in the chapter include: English is used as a native language (ENL), English is used as a second language (ESL), English is used as a foreign language (EFL), and ELF: differences in pronunciation teaching goals; variation, accent, and intelligibility; the ELF core (LFC); teaching ELF pronunciation - classroom models; teaching ELF pronunciation - classroom techniques; teaching ELF pronunciation - the learner's mother-tongue phonology; Concerns regarding the teaching of pronunciation for ELF. An ELF approach to teaching pronunciation centers around two areas: competence in the LFC and good accommodation skills, and two major teaching situations, multilingual groups and monolingual groups.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of post-secondary Arab learners towards native and non-native varieties of English. A stimulus tap was incorporated within semi-structured interviews where respondents listened to 6 speakers (an Indian, Arab, Thai, British, American, and Canadian) and then answered 5-Point Likert scale questions. The findings revealed that the interviewees encountered difficulties identifying the speakers’ first languages. Whilst the British and Canadian speakers were perceived more positively than the other speech samples and were easier to understand than the Thai speaker, they were less understandable to the interviewees than the Arab and Indian speakers. The American speaker was perceived less positively than the other speech samples and was also the least understandable. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and specific recommendations that could facilitate improving Arab learners’ tolerance of their own (as well as other non-native) varieties of English. The data in this paper forms part of a broader study investigating the attitude of Arab learners towards the shifting ownership of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).

Teachers’ understanding of the process of speech perception could inform practice in listening classrooms.
Catford (1950) developed a model for speech perception taking into account the influence of the acoustic
features of the linguistic forms used by the speaker, whereby the listener ‘identifies’ and 'interprets' these
linguistic forms based on the association between them and the context of speech. This paper critically reviews
Catford’s model and proposes an alternative one distinguishing between two levels of perceiving speech: word
recognition and utterance comprehension. Smith and Nelson (1985) refer to these as 'intelligibility' and
'comprehensibility’, respectively. The proposed model could inform classroom practice as well as curriculum and
material design.

The status of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become an increasingly popular topic in Applied Linguistics and there is a lively discussion around which pronunciation model to use in classrooms (Dauer, 2005). Jenkins (1998, 2000, and 2002) proposed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC): a list of features which are presumably the minimum required to result in intelligible communication among non-native speakers of English (NNSs) and should form the basis upon which the pronunciation syllabus of learners of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) should be designed. While very few teachers of English today would (theoretically) argue that aiming at native-like pronunciation is necessary or even desirable, many teachers, nevertheless, remain skeptical about the teachability of the LFC (Jenkins, 2007). This paper addresses this doubt introducing the construct of the 'LFC', its potential implication in classroom, and its scope and function beyond classroom setting.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the
fieldwork of a current doctoral thesis to
investigate the influence of a pronunciation
syllabus based on the Lingua Franca Core (LFC)
in improving the intelligibility and comprehensibility
of Arab learners. The paper will introduce
a sample of how this syllabus has been designed
based on a Contrastive Analysis (CA) between
the LFC and the phonology of Modern Standard
Arabic (MSA). It will then present a workable
example of how the pronunciation elements of
the LFC syllabus can be integrated in adopted
textbooks and discuss the classroom practice
which the LFC necessitates.