Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

A discussion of Arab-American business communication problems criticizes current Arabic instruction and argues that, if Western commercial interests are to participate in the Arab market, they must understand Arab interest in educating their own citizens to decrease dependency on foreigners and depend less on Arabs' knowledge of English. (MSE)

Describes a personal computer and LAN-based automated circulation system capable of handling both Arabic and Latin characters that was developed for use at King Abdullaziz University (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia). Outlines system requirements, system structure, hardware needs, and individual functional modules of the system. Numerous examples and flow…

Describes the research literature on diglossia, presents the practicality of Formal Spoken Arabic (FSA) from the training point of view, and gives a brief overview of features of FSA as taught at the Foreign Service Institute that have popularized it for teaching spoken proficiency skills to students of Arabic as a foreign language. (30…

Reports on experiments where Arabic-speaking subjects were asked to scan arrays of digits in both standard "Western numeral" and "Indian numeral" forms, and compares array-scanning patterns observed with patterns observed with speakers of other languages, particularly English. The implications in terms of the use of…

Two experiments are reported on the array-scanning characteristics of Malaysian subjects exposed to arrays of Roman and Arabic letters. Unique search patterns were found with both letters. Ways are discussed in which these patterns may be related to the underlying linguistic structure of words in Bahasa Malaysia, English, and Arabic. (13…

Results of this study suggest that it is possible to establish specific proficiency-based goals for elementary Arabic using the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages proficiency orientation, to adapt structurally based materials to meet these specific learning goals, and to accomplish the targeted skill proficiency levels set for…

The Arabic version of I. G. Sarason's (1984) Reactions to Tests scale was used to examine the impact of using item parcels on ad hoc goodness of fit indices in confirmatory factor analysis. Item parcels with different numbers of items and different numbers of parcels per factor were used. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 420 tenth graders…

The linguistic situation of Yoruba is described briefly and the origins of Arabic influence on the language are examined. It is noted that Arabic influences Yoruba mainly through Hausa, and four basic conditions results from adaptation of Arabic phonemes in Yoruba: (1) the consonant, which does not exist in Yoruba, is dropped without replacement;…

It is proposed that error patterns in acquisition of a second language can provide otherwise unavailable evidence for testing linguistic hypotheses about the second language itself. Three types of production and perceptual error patterns found in the learning of English by native Arabic speakers are outlined to support this suggestion. The error…

A collection of conference papers includes: "More on Arabic Vowel Harmony: A Metrical-Suprasegmental Approach" (Issam Abu-Salim); "The Phonological Assimilation of Borrowing" (Saleh Suleiman); "On Getting a Head: A Problem in Dependency Grammar" (Jonathan Owens); "Negation in Jordanian Arabic: A Developmental…

Points of similarity and contrast between English and Modern Standard Arabic in relativization are examined. It is concluded that while the relativization process is essentially the same in both languages, they differ with respect to the relative pronoun, the agreement of the relative pronoun with its antecedent, and the appearance of the…

English prepositions are generally considered difficult to teach to nonnative speakers, for a variety of reasons: the large number of possible meanings for many prepositions, which change according to the context in which they are used; the lack of a written guide to usage; and, for native Arabic speakers, the commonly-used grammar-translation…

An instructional guide to written Mauritanian Arabic contains 20 lessons, each presenting one or more letters of the Arabic alphabet and script. Graded exercises are included. The course is intended to be taught as the first stage in the Mauritanian Arabic training program for Peace Corps volunteers. The manual is entirely in Arabic. (MSE)

Two mixed varieties of Kannada, Perso-Arabic Kannada and English-Kannada, are analyzed with a view to characterizing the sociolinguistic functions of such mixed languages. The introduction consists of a definition of code-mixing, a brief review of earlier studies, and a statement of the aim and scope of the present study. Section Two is devoted to…