Papers by habib abdesslem
Arab World English Journal, Mar 15, 2015
The importance of studying modality as a tool that speakers use to convey their attitudes and eva... more The importance of studying modality as a tool that speakers use to convey their attitudes and evaluations is well documented. However, research on learners' cognition of modality is at its beginning. This paper concentrates on the cognition of possibility in epistemic modal auxiliaries. It relies on what it calls utterance completion test to study the cognition of epistemic modality by 29 Saudi students and by 3 native speakersone British and two Canadians. The data analysis shows that while the native speakers' cognition is largely in line with linguists' descriptions, the Saudi students' cognition conforms very less to the linguists' descriptions. It reveals that students tend to confuse epistemic modality with deontic modality, and within epistemic modality itself, they confuse possibility with necessity. Saudi students also have difficulties with past epistemic possibility and they confuse the present perfect with the past proposition residue carried by modals. The study attributes this confusion to L1 transfer and lack of familiarity with some pragmatic aspects related to the target language culture. To help learners develop their cognition of modality, the study recommends that grammar textbooks and grammar teachers focus in the first place on the semantic subtleties of modal auxiliaries, without ignoring the pragmatic dimension that accompanies the utterances in which they occur. The study does not question by any means teaching language in context to develop speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills.
This volume examines the major trends in linguistics from the beginning of the 20th century to th... more This volume examines the major trends in linguistics from the beginning of the 20th century to the early 1990s. It traces the developments from system-sentence analysis to research in text-linguistics and spoken discourse analysis. It looks in particular at the contributions of the philosophers of language, ethnographers of communication, social dialectologists, ethnomethodologists, and students of artificial intelligence to the domains of discourse analysis, language acquisition research, syllabus design, methodology, and classroom research. Reference to the Tunisian context is made throughout, discussing the linguistic community, educational system, textbooks, and students' attitudes toward English and the way it is taught.
Iral-international Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 1996
English-Medium Instruction in Higher Education in the Middle East and North Africa
Iral-international Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 1993
In this paper, the A. claims that classroom Research cannot establish itself as a discipline, if ... more In this paper, the A. claims that classroom Research cannot establish itself as a discipline, if it does not relate at least the field of Second Language Acquisition Studies, Discourse Analysis, Syllabus Design, and Methodology. To support his claim he presents a very brief account of his study of English Lesson Discourse recorded in Tunisian secondary schools. In this study he adopts the notion of frame; he adopts Bialystock's degrees of knowledge analysis and levels of control; and he draws on Littlewood's and Di Pietro's ideas concerning syllabus design and methodology
The present paper discusses the notion of motivation and how the Chomskian approach to second lan... more The present paper discusses the notion of motivation and how the Chomskian approach to second language acquisition research has affected it. The paper proposes a new definition of motivation that is more flexible and variable. It draws on the works of sociolinguists and psychologists to account for a multi faceted self in the social networks of speech communities and discourse communities. Finally, the paper calls on a revision of foreign language acquisition and second language acquisition.
Iral-international Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 1996
L'A. examine le modele de Fearch et Kasper (1983) des strategies de communication. Il utilise... more L'A. examine le modele de Fearch et Kasper (1983) des strategies de communication. Il utilise des exemples d'apprenants turcs en anglais L2 pour demontrer que ce modele est trop rigide. Il montre la necessite de se tourner plus vers les strategies des apprenants du point de vue de l'analyse du discours et examine la relation entre langue, culture et personnalite dans le comportement verbal
This volume examines the major trends in linguistics from the beginning of the 20th century to th... more This volume examines the major trends in linguistics from the beginning of the 20th century to the early 1990s. It traces the developments from system-sentence analysis to research in text-linguistics and spoken discourse analysis. It looks in particular at the contributions of the philosophers of language, ethnographers of communication, social dialectologists, ethnomethodologists, and students of artificial intelligence to the domains of discourse analysis, language acquisition research, syllabus design, methodology, and classroom research. Reference to the Tunisian context is made throughout, discussing the linguistic community, educational system, textbooks, and students' attitudes toward English and the way it is taught.
This presentation points to the inextricable relation between Teaching, Learning, and Testing. It... more This presentation points to the inextricable relation between Teaching, Learning, and Testing. It argues that teachers can avoid Test Pollution and Negative Washback by adopting a cyclical process, where they articulate teaching and testing. It proposes that such dynamic teaching-testing helps students make better progress in their learning process and prepares them for Achievement Tests, Placement Tests, and Entrance Exams. The presentation calls on decision-makers in Saudi Arabia to consider introducing Regional or National Exams at the end of the Elementary School Level and/or the Intermediate School Level. It maintains that the introduction of such exams helps education authorities set clearer goals, stimulates teachers to adopt adequate teaching-testing procedures that meet the education authorities' goals, and motivates students to make sustained efforts to develop a satisfactory command of the subject they are studying or the language they are learning. Key terms: Testing...
This Issue of Arab Journal of Applied Linguistics reflects the Status of English Research in the ... more This Issue of Arab Journal of Applied Linguistics reflects the Status of English Research in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) . It contains three articles and two book reviews.
In this thesis a new model for the analysis of foreign language lesson discourse has been develop... more In this thesis a new model for the analysis of foreign language lesson discourse has been developed. It draws on existing models but provides flexibility by focusing on three levels: Frame, Move, Act. An attempt has been made in this thesis to clarify further the domain of pragmatics by looking at the various fields that have contributed to it. This has led the author to (i) differentiate between foreign language lesson discourse and other discourses and (ii) locate the new model in relation to other approaches to discourse analysis. The foregoing discussion has revealed to the author that many researchers and theoreticians have misunderstood many key terms in pragmatics which have contributed to unwarranted positions concerning the role of the teacher and the importance of textbooks in the classroom. A detailed analysis of discourse in eight English lessons in Tunisian secondary schools (two in each of the four years) has been undertaken. The results of the analysis reflect the inf...
Metadiscourse studies, inspired by Halliday's interpersonal metafunction of language, have do... more Metadiscourse studies, inspired by Halliday's interpersonal metafunction of language, have dominated academic discourse analysis. They tended to exclude the ideational metafunction in discourse and to reduce the reader/analyst to a concordance programme that scans texts for lists of pre-established, but not always clearly defined, linguistic features. This paper does not purport to present an alternative to metadiscourse studies. It capitalises on their findings, rehabilitates propositional content and restores the role of the reader and the analyst. It takes the research paper as the central core genre in academic discourse (Schmied, 2014, p.11) and approaches it as a Quadric Writer-(Author-Author)-Reader Encounter. The paper proposes a model for the analysis of academic discourse. It unpacks Sinclair's (1986) Attribution, Averral dichotomy into an Attribution categories cline and an Averral categories cline and relates the categories to levels of Writer-Author Presence and...
From the month of April 2018 to that of January 2019, (in 10 months), Arab Journal of Applied Lin... more From the month of April 2018 to that of January 2019, (in 10 months), Arab Journal of Applied Linguistics received 25 typescripts of full-length articles.
This paper draws an analogy between the histories of traditional grammars and Swales’ rhetorical ... more This paper draws an analogy between the histories of traditional grammars and Swales’ rhetorical model for Research Papers Introductions. It argues that though core grammar rules for the sentence and core rhetorical patterns for the Introduction have originated from description and have risen to the status of prescription, the study of language use in different contexts can consolidate the core grammar rules and the core rhetorical patterns without undermining variation and change. The present study applies Swales’ Create a Research Space Model to describe the rhetorical patterns of Research Articles Introductions in linguistics published by two University Journals in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It offers representations of the sequencing of Moves in core and extended Move patterns in what we propose to call A Syntagmatics of Moves . The study reveals that rhetorical patterns, different from Swales' core pattern, are recurrent in the analysed data. This finding brings to the fo...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
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Papers by habib abdesslem