This study investigated the effects of spaced and massed repetition on the acquisition and retention of English /b/ and /p/ sounds among Saudi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Forty-nine university students participated in a quasi-experimental design comparing two learning conditions: massed repetition and spaced repetition. Participants were taught the pronunciation of 40 new English words containing the target sounds through video-based instruction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigates health-promoting messages in British and Saudi officials' social-media discourse during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic. Taking discourse as a constructivist conception, we examined the crisis-response strategies employed by these officials on social media, and the role of such strategies in promoting healthy behaviors and compliance with health regulations. The study presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the tweets of a Saudi health official and a British health official that focuses on keyness, speech acts, and metaphor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe research contributions of metaphor as part of (critical) discourse studies have flourished during COVID-19; hence, it is necessary to consider their progress and foresee their future growth. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of COVID metaphor research in discourse and to identify the most recent research foci, bibliometric, network, thematic mapping and word cloud analyses were conducted in this study. The results showed that (1) research on COVID metaphors is largely shaped by Critical Discourse Analysis research approaches and methodologies; (2) the research production has investigated traditional genres such as news and emerging genres, including social media and multimodal data; and (3) research highlights the role played by metaphors in persuasion in public discourse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
November 2022
In recent research on figurative phrases, factors (e.g., familiarity, transparency, meaning, and decomposability) have played a significant influence on how native and non-native English speakers (various L1 and L1 Arabic) acquire, process, and comprehend figurative language.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe language used to present an argument has long been argued to influence people's reaction to that argument. This study examined how language and grammatical structure influenced response to health-related dilemmas. We investigated whether medical students' willingness to receive a medical treatment or to take an action (regarding advancing one's own health or other people's health) was influenced by the language (first versus foreign) and the grammatical structures (modifiers and quantifiers) used.
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