The present study aims to show the importance of ESL reading ability in acquiring English as a second language. The study involves 92 college students (males and females) from the Department of English at Nizwa College of Applied Sciences, Sultanate of Oman. They represent two groups, the foundation year students and the first year English majors. A number of tests were used to measure students’ overall proficiency in English as well as their reading ability (i.e., the ability to contribute to the main idea of the text, scanning, skimming, to derive word meanings from context, to use a dictionary to find meanings, definitions, to identify prefixes, antonyms and synonyms). Students’ ability to read was correlated to their proficiency level in the second language. It was found in the study that good readers were better users of the dictionary, derived meanings of words from the context and contributed to the main idea of the text better than poor readers did. Good readers were found to be high achievers in the second language.
This study aims to answer a significant problem of social sciences and philosophy: How do we construct an institutional reality such as diplomacy with an objective recognizable existence? The study assumes that the ability to build institutional reality is based on our biological capacity, as it takes different forms in all the institutions we construct. The study takes the theory of the American philosopher John Searle as an approach to examining the assumption. The study sums up important findings; cultures, although they share the biological capacity on which they produce institutional realities, differ in the form of the value standards on which the institutional realities are based. The study recommends the need of Arab social resea
... Show MoreThe concern of this article is the calculation of an upper bound of second Hankel determinant for the subclasses of functions defined by Al-Oboudi differential operator in the unit disc. To study special cases of the results of this article, we give particular values to the parameters A, B and λ
Background: Due to the variations in tooth anatomy and size among different populations, this study aimed to compare the mesiodistal width of primary second molars in Iraqi children with the mesiodistal width of stainless-steel crowns from different companies. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 220 intact maxillary and mandibular primary second molars selected from boys and girls’ Iraqi children aged 8-9 years collected from different primary schools in Baghdad city. The mesiodistal dimensions of the selected teeth and the available maxillary and mandibular stainless-steel crowns from three different companies were measured by using a 3-D scanner, and then the whole measurements were calculated usin
... Show MoreIn this paper, first and second order sliding mode controllers are designed for a single link robotic arm actuated by two Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs). A new mathematical model for the arm has been developed based on the model of large scale pneumatic muscle actuator model. Uncertainty in parameters has been presented and tested for the two controllers. The simulation results of the second-order sliding mode controller proves to have a low tracking error and chattering effect as compared to the first order one. The verification has been done by using MATLAB and Simulink software.
Arabic language processing with artificial intelligence has evolved significantly in the past decades, from traditional rule- and dictionary-based techniques, through statistical models to modern deep and transformer models. This review intends to present an overview of the most well-known Arabic models as well as datasets used for its training, and the main practical applications such as sentiment analysis, machine translation, speech recognition, and smart assistant. AI-based Arabic NLP has had good progress in the previous decades, from rule and dictionary-based approaches to statistical methods and deep transformative learning models nowadays. In addition to it, the most popular state-of-the-art models that are fine-tuned for the Arabi
... Show MoreThis research aims at investigating pupils’ ability in using discourse markers which are identified in the English textbooks of secondary schools. Four texts are chosen from third intermediate class. The four texts are short stories of different topics.
This research hypothesizes that there are no statistical significant differences among Iraqi intermediate pupils’ ability in using textual
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