Creativity is an important skill that should be promoted throughout the educational system. However, teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in high schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) generally do not appear to use creative approaches for reasons that are not well understood. Understanding EFL teachers' attitudes about creativity…

English teachers at junior middle schools often employ traditional vocabulary teaching techniques such as L1 equivalents, word lists, pictures, and word formation rules. They reinforce the students' retention of vocabulary by asking them to read aloud the words repeatedly and copy the new words as homework. In this study, suggestions are given to…

Translation and language teaching techniques which take language learners' first language (L1) as point of reference for teaching the second language (L2) have been long discouraged on the ground that these teaching techniques would end in the fossilization of L2 structure forms in the learner's Interlanguage system. However, in recent years, the…

The aim of this paper is to investigate, from a student perspective, how English communication skills are taught in Oman's schools and higher education institutions. Previous research has documented the lack of communicative ability in English among school and higher education graduates in Oman (Al-Issa, 2007; Moody, 2009). However, the reasons…

This paper gives a short analysis of the nature of reading. Though it is generally believed that reading involves perceiving the written form of language, the term reading has not been clearly defined up to date. It is possible to see reading as a process, or to examine the product of that process. Three reading models, namely Bottom-up Model,…

Metadiscourse is a new and interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vital role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. Metadiscourse embodies the idea that writing and speaking are more than just the communication of ideas and presentation of ideational meaning. Rather…

Metonymy is an important means for people to know the world and enrich the language; and it is a way of thinking used widely in people's daily life. This paper illustrates firstly the cognitive nature of metonymy in terms of its definition, classification and contiguity notion. Based on this, the author then studies the meaning extension and…

Many English professionals do not seem to pay much attention to the use of L1 in English language classrooms, based on the tenets that English should be taught in English to expose the learners to English which would enhance their knowledge of English and accelerate their learning. While research findings have been inconsistent in relation to this…