Idiomaticity toward Pragmatic – Functional Translation: Navigating Second Language Acquisition and Its Implications to Teaching Filipino Tertiary Learners (Published)
The paper examined pragmatic-functional translation method used to navigate toward second language acquisition focused on how ESL students translated ideas to see how teachers could help in learning classroom translation procedures and identify pedagogical implications in teaching a second language. Focused on Pragmatic-Functional Translation (PFT), the researcher investigated translational actions in the pragmatic social contexts, in the study, the classroom setting. Aimed at finding out how students translate from L1 to L2. Using contrastive analysis (CA), specifically contrastive socio-linguistics, the researcher of this paper attempted to bring into compromise order of two languages toward the closest meaning of the texts for general audience. With the hope to identify the translation techniques used by the respondents, the study researcher did Contrastive Analysis (CA) to find out the equivalence effect in the rewording process and to analyze interview texts applied aimed at identifying social functional meaning of the translation.
Keywords: Idiomaticity, Pedagogical Implications, Pragmatic-Functional Translation, SLA
THE COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH GRAMMATICAL COLLOCATIONS BY KUWAITI EFL LEARNERS (Published)
This study aims to investigate Kuwaiti EFL learners’ ability to comprehend and produce grammatical collocations in English. It also examines whether their English proficiency level and the type of grammatical collocation influence their comprehension and production of such collocations. The results show that the difference in performance between the advanced learners and intermediate learners was enough to differ statistically on both comprehension and production tests. Furthermore, the most frequent types of errors that may occur as well as some possible reasons for their occurrence have been identified. Noun + preposition and adjective + preposition were the most problematic types in comparison with other types in both groups. It has been suggested that L1 interference plays a central role in the comprehension and production of grammatical collocations by Kuwaiti EFL learners. Particularly, literal translation from Arabic has been found to be the main reason for grammatical collocation errors. The prepositions in Arabic do not usually correspond to their English counterparts e.g., at in angry at, which is literally translated to *angry from in Arabic. Finally, lack of knowledge of grammatical collocations is also an important reason behind such errors. It might be suggested that English language curricula taught in Kuwait do not pay enough attention to grammatical collocations. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications that may help teachers of English as a second/foreign language increase the awareness of grammatical collocations.
Keywords: Collocations, Error Analysis, Kuwaiti EFL learners, Kuwaiti Spoken Arabic, L1 interference, SLA, grammatical collocations
ARAB STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION IN LEARNING ENGLISH: A STUDY OF PYP STUDENTS (Published)
Motivation is the driving force that puts a person in action to achieve his/her goal. Motivation determines the direction of the action. The present study attempts to interpret what important factors affect the motivation of Saudi students in English. The study also looks at the relationship between English language learning motivation of Saudi students and their achievement in English. The data were collected from preparatory year programme, Najran university students. The quantitative approach has been used for data. The major finding of the study is that students don’t want to be looked down upon as ignorant. It has been found that students prefer to learn English due to its international hype and they want to look like English people because they are very impressed by the western culture. The findings also reveal that there is a positive correlation between Saudi students’ motivation and their achievement in English. The study shows interesting effects of motivational factors in learning English.
Keywords: Arab Students, Motivation, Preparatory Year, SLA, attitude