The present paper adopts a qualitative methodology to address the various frames and scenes activated while textually memeing an image macro, specifically, Woltze’s problem picture, The Letter. To achieve this objective, the researcher is to employ Fillmore’s (1976, 1982) Frame Semantics. The data consists of a single image selected following the jurors’ feedback and submitted to purposively selected female students from the Department of English-College of Education for Women-University of Baghdad, using a Google form. The study has concluded that having activated a similar frame does not necessitate sharing a similar number of elements and/or referents. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the activated frame and the scene. Identifying a similar frame does not guarantee having a similar scene. The same image macro can yield multiple construals that are semantically and visually constrained. The emotions generally lean towards the negative side, with an occasional mild sense of humor. Not all the figures in the image have been used in frame and scene construction; rather, the focus has been only on the things that pulled the participants’ attention. The overarching frames share the sense of having a problem, thereby reflecting the problem picture genre.
This study examines transknowledging as a transformative and epistemically interdisciplinary approach to enhancing multilingual competence and cultural awareness among Saudi English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Unlike translanguaging, which mainly focuses on how learners alternate and integrate multiple languages to facilitate communication and comprehension, transknowledging also involves drawing on learners’ local cultural practices, prior social experiences, indigenous knowledge, and discipline-specific perspectives to interpret, negotiate, and produce knowledge in educational contexts. This involved 42 Saudi undergraduates at Majmaah University and 14 international faculty members. Using a mixed-methods design, data were collected via a 3-point Likert-scale questionnaire with both open- and closed-ended items. Qualitative responses were analyzed using conceptual thematic coding to ensure rigorous categorization and interpretation. Findings reveal that 78.6 percent of Saudi participants reported that their multilingual skills enhanced their core language abilities. In comparison, 73.8 percent suggested that multilingualism engages individuals in ways that break cultural stereotypes. 85.7 percent of the faculty members in the study reported supporting transformative transknowledging practices in their EFL classrooms, and 78.6 percent also reported believing that transknowledging enhances the educational experiences and learning of Saudi students. These findings demonstrate that transknowledging unites language fluency with indigenous cultural knowledge, fostering engagement, global communication readiness, and highlighting the need for institutional commitment, educator training, and curricular innovation to build equitable, epistemically and culturally enriched learning environments.
This study examines the role of student-generated literary works in character education within Indonesian Islamic higher education. It aims to understand how literary methods support moral and ethical development alongside language skills in this cultural and religious context. The research uses a qualitative descriptive design, including document analysis, interviews, and classroom observations to collect detailed data on educational practices and student experiences. Findings show that incorporating Islamic themes and local cultural wisdom into literary activities strengthens students’ character formation by fostering values such as integrity, responsibility, and social awareness. Student literary productions effectively promote critical thinking, empathy, and self-expression. The study also emphasizes the importance of curriculum design that integrates literary methods with character education goals, supported by collaborative learning strategies. Overall, the research demonstrates that literary methods offer a holistic approach to character education, enhancing both moral development and language proficiency. These findings provide practical insights for educators and curriculum developers aiming to integrate character education through literature in Islamic higher education. The study contributes to understanding culturally relevant educational practices and suggests future research on long-term effects and digital literary forms.
This study analyses the acknowledgement section in doctoral dissertations written by first language (L1) and second language (L2) English writers. The study also aims to explore any gender differences in the construction of this genre. A corpus of 80 dissertation acknowledgements was compiled: 40 written by native English speakers and 40 by nonnative English speakers. Each group was further divided by gender (20 males and 20 females). Drawing upon Hyland’s (2004) move structure model, we found that the two groups of writers did not adhere to the same move structure of acknowledgement. The English acknowledgements produced by native speakers consisted of four moves: Reflecting Move, Thanking Move, Announcing Move, and Signing off Move. On the other hand, the English acknowledgements written by nonnative speakers consisted of seven moves: Opening Move, Praising and Thanking Allah Move, Reflecting Move, Thanking Move, Invoking and Blessing Move, Announcing Move, and Signing off Move. Female native English writers emphasised Reflecting and Thanking for Moral Support, while males prioritised Thanking for Academic Assistance and Accepting Responsibility. Similarly, female nonnative writers focused on Opening and Academic Thanks, whereas males highlighted Moral Support and the Announcing Move.
This interview with Tahrir Hamdi, author of Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity (2023), undertakes a retrospective and prospective interrogation of the book’s central theses, considering the seismic reverberations of 7th October 2023. It probes the conceptual architecture of Hamdi’s titular formulation, synthesising Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Hirsch’s “postmemory” to theorize the ongoing reconstitution of Palestinian national identity across the exilic, diasporic, and occupied Palestinian geographies. It traverses several interconnected axes: the metaphorics of marginality; the expressive modalities of dispossessed communities; the indispensability of the oppositional intellectual in sustaining cultures of resistance and counterhegemonic consciousness; the dialectical relationship between armed struggle and aesthetic-intellectual praxis; and the performativity of literature and art as instruments of decolonial mobilization. Hamdi’s responses critically reappraise the Palestinian Authority’s capitulation through the Oslo Accords, recuperate Fanon’s theorization of decolonial violence, and underscore the prescience of the book’s engagement with the UNRWA-right of return nexus and the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism. The interview concludes with Hamdi’s prospective vision for Palestine, asserting the dismantlement of the Zionist project and the inevitability of return and liberation. This exchange contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on Palestinian cultural production and resistance literature in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and genocide.
This study examines the effectiveness of the URUBAH game as an Android-based Arabic learning application developed using the ADDIE instructional model and Unity 3D software, with the aim of improving second-language (L2) learners’ Arabic writing proficiency. The game was designed to support Indonesian learners of Arabic who experience difficulties in spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. It addresses these challenges by focusing on the morphological and syntactic features of Arabic while considering structural differences between Arabic and English writing systems. The objectives of this research are twofold: first, to develop an interactive digital learning tool that enhances Arabic writing skills through gamification; and second, to evaluate its effectiveness in comparison with traditional teaching methods. A mixed-methods approach was employed, integrating quantitative data derived from pre- and post-tests with qualitative insights gathered from surveys and learner feedback. The findings indicate that the game positively improves writing outcomes, including learners’ accuracy, fluency, and overall engagement. In addition, learners’ motivation increased, accompanied by reduced anxiety when practicing Arabic writing through the interactive platform. In conclusion, the URUBAH game presents a promising instructional approach with practical applications for teaching Arabic as a second language. It also demonstrates the potential of integrating advanced digital technology into language classrooms to enhance learning experiences
This article situates Zeina Hashem Beck’s ghazals within the category of world poetry, aiming to avoid hegemonic notions of this category as much as possible. The ghazal is a form of lyric that originates as a mode in seventh-century Arabic poetry. Definitions depend on the historical period and linguistic tradition of its performance. Key moments of the form’s migration include tenth-century adaptations to Persian and Urdu, as well as late eighteenth-century popularization in European languages. A translation project led by Aijaz Ahmad engendered a revival in English in the late twentieth century. However, many North American poets wrote free-verse versions criticized vehemently by Agha Shahid Ali in the introduction to his anthology Ravishing DisUnities (2000). Through the lens of historical poetics, this article argues that Hashem Beck draws on various stages in the ghazal’s legacy for her own unique translingual iterations. Schooling in Lebanon and co-hosting of the podcast Maqsooda account for her indebtedness to Arabic poetry, yet she pays tribute to Shahid’s anthology and writes anglophone ghazals that follow the rules upheld by the Kashmiri-American poet. Close readings of Hashem Beck’s ghazals published to date identify translingual elements, as well as the ways in which motifs, such as love and exile lead to explicit localizations. The article thus demonstrates how Hashem Beck’s ghazals combine influences from different phases in the form’s development.
The teaching/learning of English literature to university EFL/ESL students has been essential to the development of their critical thinking skills. Using a corpus linguistics approach, the present study investigates the extent to which learners’ critical awareness is apparent through their analysis and interpretations of the characters and themes in the novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), by Ernest Hemingway. A literary learner corpus of 206 literary argumentative essays was compiled from a '20th Century American Novel' course at an English-medium university in Lebanon. The essays were quantitatively analyzed to investigate prevalent thematic trends. This study was able to draw thematic differences between Hemingway’s novel and the learners’ literary analytic interpretations. The main findings indicated that the learners’ collocational networks strongly supported Hemingway’s stylistic ‘iceberg principle’- a critical thinking-based expectation Hemingway had for his readers. Most importantly, this lexical analysis revealed a clear ‘genre’ shift from narration in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms Corpus to argumentation in the Learner Literary Corpus. Overall, this study underscores the importance of literature courses in developing students’ critical thinking skills and the role corpus linguistics can play in quantifying ‘critical thinking’ measures in literature.
This paper examines how English idiomatic expressions used during the 2024 U.S. presidential debates were interpreted into Arabic. It focuses on idioms used by Trump, Biden, Harris, and the moderators, and applies Relevance Theory to study how Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya interpreters rendered them. The idioms were selected based on their frequency, centrality, and anticipated impact on the source audience. The Arabic interpreting strategies were categorized into literal interpretation, explicitation, adaptation, omission, and misinterpretation. The analysis reveals a constant tension between linguistic efficiency and pragmatic fidelity. Omission emerged as the most common strategy (35.6%), particularly when interpreters faced culturally opaque idioms. Literal interpretation (26.7%) and explicitation (22.2%) strategies were used when close Arabic equivalents were available, but often failed to convey the original pragmatic meaning. Adaptation (6.7%) and misinterpretation (8.9%) were the least frequently used. The findings suggest that many current strategies fall short when applied in the fast-paced environment of live political broadcasts. This highlights the need for more focused interpreter training. Future research should include feedback from Arabic-speaking audiences and interviews with interpreters to provide a more complete understanding of how meaning is managed, adjusted, or lost during live interpretation of political debates.
This study investigates the effects of semantic and structural factors on the second language acquisition of English genitive constructions by Jordanian Arabic speakers. The study used two tasks: an Acceptability Judgement Task (AJT) and an Elicited Production Task (EPT). In both tasks, possessors varied in animacy (animate vs. inanimate) and complexity (simple vs. complex possessors). A control group of native English speakers showed a strong preference for the ’s-genitive in animate contexts and the of-genitive in inanimate ones, with only mild effects of structural complexity. The L2 group showed the same overall preferences, but their responses were more gradient and showed stronger sensitivity to possessor complexity. In the AJT, ratings for the ’s-genitive dropped notably in Animate–Complex contexts, whereas in the EPT, the L2 group produced the of-genitive at high rates across all conditions. Proficiency had a selective effect: more advanced learners were more target-like mainly in the complex-possessor contexts where English and Jordanian Arabic differ most. These findings support the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, suggesting that semantic cues are acquired earlier and more robustly than the structural mechanisms underlying the English ’s-genitive. The difference between judgement and production shows that learners may recognise the target forms before they can produce them easily.
This study examines the development of theatrical criticism in Jordan from the perspective of cultural discourse analysis, focusing on its interactions with social, political, and knowledge transformations. The study begins with the historical context of Jordanian theater since the 1960s, when it shifted from limited university-based performances to an institutionalized cultural activity. This development was accompanied by the emergence of academic criticism in Jordanian universities, which provided more precise analytical and methodological tools and contributed to transforming theatrical reading from an impressionistic approach into a more systematic practice. The study also highlights the role of journalistic and festival criticism as mediators between performance and audience, particularly in light of contemporary shifts associated with digitalization. The study concludes that Jordanian theatrical criticism has transcended the role as a reflection of performances to be a tool for producing the meaning and reshaping the cultural identity. That is within an ongoing dialogue between the local, the Arabic, and the universal. This necessitates adopting a hybrid method that combines academic rigorism with the flexibility of the digital space to ensure the continuation of its cultural and intellectual role.
This paper examines the phenomenon of Verbal Case and how its assignment interacts with syntactic and morphological processes, particularly in languages that exhibit rich case-marking systems. Through a detailed Minimalist Program analysis of verbal predicates, this study argues that the markers appearing at the ends of verbs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are not mood, agreement, nor tense markers, but rather Verbal Case markers. It proposes that finiteness on the Inflectional head (Infl) licenses the structural Verbal Case feature on verbs via an Agree relation, and that certain complementizers, such as lan, function as case-assigning particles. The findings aim to contribute to a broader understanding of Verbal Case within syntactic theory and linguistic typology, with implications for our understanding of language variation and universals.
This study investigates the effect of gender and age on phatic communication through Snapchat streaks among Jordanian Snapchat users. It tests whether Snapchat streaking behaviour differs across gender and age groups. It focuses on three areas, including streak maintenance patterns, visual content types preferred by users, and perception of emotional and relational aspects that users associate with streaking. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach that includes a survey of 100 participants, quantitative visual analysis of streak images, and semi‑structured interviews with 50 participants. The findings show that both Jordanian males and females actively use exchanges of Snap streaks for purposes of digital connection. However, Snapchat streaking reveals gender and age-based differences in both streaking patterns and the use of visual content type; for example, females are more likely than males to maintain longer Streaks, and younger users show a stronger tendency to actively engage in Snapchat streaks and to maintain them. These gendered preferences resonate with wider sociocultural norms and further demonstrate that the phaticity of Snapchat streaks functions as a simple yet symbolically rich ritual of digital connection.
Helen Keller’s work has been lauded for confronting disability and battling social inequity but also criticised for its racial orientation, Western prejudice, and fixation on disability. This stylometric study used corpus tools to identify genre-specific linguistic patterns and stylistic alterations within Keller’s oeuvre. A sociographic examination of the most frequent n-grams reveals how Keller’s deafblindness anchors both the positive and negative associations with her persona and how idolisation of Keller as an inspirational exemplar is inseparable from the exploitation and social stigmatisation of her disabilities. Keller frames disabled people as a subject worthy of an audience’s interest, but her first-person pronoun collocations demonstrate that she wields multiple voices that construct different identities in her personal correspondence, published memoirs, and public addresses. The frequency and concordance of proper nouns and keywords add validity to critiques of her sociopolitical positions.
This paper examines comparatively the concept of symbiotic storytelling as a narrative strategy in two major environmental novels: Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) and Ibrahim al-Koni's The Bleeding of the Stone (1990). Drawing on ecocritical posthumanism theory, symbiogenesis, and posthumanist thought, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding how these novels construct profound interdependence between human and nonhuman life. While Powers employs scientific realism and polyphonic narrative structures modeled on mycorrhizal networks, al-Koni crafts mythic allegory rooted in Tuareg animism and desert spirituality. The analysis reveals that despite their divergent cultural contexts—North American forests versus the Saharan desert—both novels challenge anthropocentrism and advocate for ecological consciousness through distinct yet convergent narrative strategies. This study contributes to global comparative ecocriticism by demonstrating how different cultural traditions offer unique resources for imagining ecological interconnectedness. The paper concludes that symbiotic storytelling represents an urgent and necessary mode of environmental literature, one that can help readers reimagine humanity's relationship with the more-than-human world.
This study examined the benefits, limitations and ethical considerations of utilizing ChatGPT in email communication among AUM academic staff. Surveying the perspectives of 53 faculty members of the American University of Madaba (AUM) regarding the advantages, disadvantages, and the possible ethical consideration of using ChatGPT in email communication, the results revealed that AUM’s academic staff are aware of the ethical considerations, such as plagiarism and bias in language, of using ChatGPT in email communication. To add, the results indicated that ChatGPT provides several benefits such as efficient drafting of emails, clarity of emails, coherence of messages, enhanced language skills, and convenience of time. As for the limitations, the results showed that ChatGPT would, at times, give the wrong information because it failed to understand the context. Accordingly, replies were out of context and found incapable of handling complex or specialized topics. The study concluded with some recommendations that aim at improving utilizing Chatgpt in a responsible manner in email communication
This article examines the circulation history of Emily Ruete’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess (1886) in Western publishing networks, revealing how the text’s material dissemination both amplified and constrained its counter-Orientalist potential. While previous scholarship has focused primarily on the textual content of Ruete’s counter-narrative, this study addresses how material conditions of publication and circulation fundamentally shaped the political efficacy of her intervention. This paper draws on extensive archival evidence, including book reviews and paratextual materials, while employing a methodological framework that synthesizes postcolonial theory with book history approaches. Through this integrated lens, it demonstrates how American and British editors systematically undermined Ruete’s authority through dismissive commentary, sensationalistic excerpting, and the addition of condescending subtitles. Western publishing mechanisms often framed her critique of Orientalism repositioning her as a native informant rather than authoritative interpreter, with British reviewers explicitly challenging her credibility while American newspapers fragmented her narrative into exotic curiosities. This study advances scholarly understanding of colonial knowledge production by demonstrating how publishing infrastructures functioned as technologies of imperial control, effectively neutralizing Arab women’s counter-narratives even while seemingly amplifying their voices.
This study applies Construction Morphology (CxM) (Booij 2010b) to a set of nonconcatenative morphological constructions in the Ha'ili dialect of Arabic (HD), a northern Najdi variety spoken in the Hā'il region of Saudi Arabia. Focusing on verbs of pretending and augmentative formations, the analysis draws on systematically elicited and naturally occurring data collected from native speakers of the dialect. The study investigates whether these constructions are best characterized as root-based templatic derivations or as word-based formations. The findings reveal a principled division between the two: verbs of pretending instantiate a root-based constructional schema in which consonantal roots map onto a fixed prosodic template, whereas augmentative forms are derived in word-based manner from diminutive counterparts. The coexistence of root-based and word-based mechanisms provides empirical support for a layered constructional architecture, in line with CxM, where abstract schemas and lexeme-based constructions interact within the morphological system of the dialect. More broadly, the HD data demonstrate that Arabic dialectal morphology cannot be reduced to a single derivational principle, but instead exhibits both root-based and word-based organization. The study therefore contributes to Arabic morphological theory by showing how CxM offers a unified framework for capturing systematic form-meaning correspondences in Semitic nonconcatenative morphology.
Literature seeks to engage and influence readers, particularly children, making the translation of children’s literature a complex task that requires careful cultural consideration. Given the close relationship between language and culture, expressions that are acceptable in one linguistic context may be inappropriate in another, especially in texts aimed at young audiences. This study investigates the euphemism strategies employed by Abdussadiq (2012) in her Arabic translation of Twain’s (1964) The Prince and the Pauper. It hypothesizes that euphemism was deliberately used to soften offensive or taboo expressions in the source text, thereby enhancing cultural acceptability and suitability for Arabic-speaking children. A comparative analysis of the source and target texts was conducted using qualitative methods to identify the types and functions of euphemism and quantitative analysis to examine their frequency and motivations. The findings reveal that the translator employed a range of euphemistic strategies to adapt the text to the cultural expectations of the target readership while preserving its core meaning. The use of euphemism did not diminish the original message; rather, it contributed to producing a linguistically and culturally appropriate text for young Arab readers.
