Papers by Reem Alkhammash
Frontiers in Psychology
The research contributions of metaphor as part of (critical) discourse studies have flourished du... more The research contributions of metaphor as part of (critical) discourse studies have flourished during COVID-19; hence, it is necessary to consider their progress and foresee their future growth. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of COVID metaphor research in discourse and to identify the most recent research foci, bibliometric, network, thematic mapping and word cloud analyses were conducted in this study. The results showed that (1) research on COVID metaphors is largely shaped by Critical Discourse Analysis research approaches and methodologies; (2) the research production has investigated traditional genres such as news and emerging genres, including social media and multimodal data; and (3) research highlights the role played by metaphors in persuasion in public discourse. The findings of this study can assist future research in this or related fields by providing an overview of metaphor research in crisis communication.
Frontiers in Psychology, Nov 25, 2022
In recent research on figurative phrases, factors (e.g., familiarity, transparency, meaning, and ... more In recent research on figurative phrases, factors (e.g., familiarity, transparency, meaning, and decomposability) have played a significant influence on how native and non-native English speakers (various L1 and L1 Arabic) acquire, process, and comprehend figurative language. These factors are not always described and operationalized precisely and are frequently considered autonomous. This study explores these factors in terms of language users' ratings and their abilities to accurately infer meaning from a variety of familiar English and translated idioms and novel metaphors. A total of 123 participants from various language groups engaged in this study. The findings showed that familiarity is a strong predictor of transparency. In the ability to infer the meaning correctly, the best-fit model included an interaction between transparency and familiarity. The findings showed that guessing the meaning correctly led to a greater increase in the scores of transparency and decomposability. We explore how these factors work together to enable speakers to infer the meaning of both known and new figurative words at various levels. These results have significant implications for the learning and teaching of figurative phrases in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context, as they indicate variables that may make a figurative phrase valuable in terms of teaching time and effort.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
The language used to present an argument has long been argued to influence people's reaction to t... more The language used to present an argument has long been argued to influence people's reaction to that argument. This study examined how language and grammatical structure influenced response to health-related dilemmas. We investigated whether medical students' willingness to receive a medical treatment or to take an action (regarding advancing one's own health or other people's health) was influenced by the language (first versus foreign) and the grammatical structures (modifiers and quantifiers) used. Saudi medical students (N = 368) read healthrelated dilemmas using different adverbial modifiers and quantifiers in Arabic or in English. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Arabic with high certainty (i.e., very-modifier and all-quantifier), Arabic with low certainty (no very-modifier and somequantifier), English with high certainty, and English with low certainty. The results showed that the participants were susceptible to a foreign language effect, but not to a grammatical structure effect. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to how different healthscenarios may affect decision making for health professionals.
Arab World English Journal, 2019
Recent research has shown that little attention has been paid to teachers' views regarding giving... more Recent research has shown that little attention has been paid to teachers' views regarding giving oral corrective feedback (Sepehrinia & Mehdizadeh, 2016). To fill this gap, this empirical study investigates the beliefs of Taif University's teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) about their feedback practices and their perception of the impact that these practices have on students' performance. An opinionnaire of 18 items was designed with closed-ended questions. A five-point Likert's scale was employed to measure three subscales: teachers' beliefs and practices about their corrective feedback; types of oral corrective feedback used by EFL teachers; and their perception of students' uptake. The survey was administered to fifty-seven English as foreign language (EFL) teachers at the English Language Centre (ELC), Taif University who were asked to fill in an online survey regarding their oral corrective feedback practices in the classroom. Their responses were analysed quantitatively. The findings of the study were that the participants allocated highest preferences to the techniques of elicitation, repetition and recast, and that they frequently use them in their classrooms.
Multimodal Communication
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, extensive research has been done on how the pandemic has been ... more Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, extensive research has been done on how the pandemic has been metaphorised. However, little research has focused on how the pandemic is associated with the depiction of gender relations in political cartoons. Therefore, this study showcases sexism and gender relations by examining how both gender and gender relationships have been expressed metaphorically. It draws on conceptual metaphor theory as well as concepts related to visual metaphors in multimodal discourse, covert sexism, and dehumanisation to analyse a corpus of 100 Arabic cartoons depicting men and women alone and as couples that were published during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results demonstrate that typo-pictorial metaphors and those related to body modification, dehumanisation, and the coronavirus are associated with prevalent covert sexism during the pandemic. In short, the findings suggest that COVID-19 has contributed to how women in relationships have been negatively portrayed in...
Scientific Studies of Reading
We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processin... more We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Methods Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore how native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) and high-proficiency Dutch-Chinese learners (Experiment 2) on-line process 4-character novel noun-noun combinations in Chinese. In each pair of nominal phrases (Numeral+Classifier+Noun1+Noun2), the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 varied (plausible vs. implausible) while the whole nominal phrases were always plausible. Results Results showed that the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 associations had an immediate effect on Noun1, and a reversed effect on Noun2 for both groups of participants. Conclusions These findings indicated that plausibility plays an immediate role in incremental semantic integration during on-line processing of Chinese. Similar to native Chinese speakers, high-proficiency L2ers can also use the plausibility information of classifier-noun associations in syntactic reanalysis.
2021 International Conference of Women in Data Science at Taif University (WiDSTaif )
Science production related to COVID-19 has increased exponentially in recent months following the... more Science production related to COVID-19 has increased exponentially in recent months following the pandemic outbreak, yet little has been done to investigate this huge science production from a linguistic and data-driven perspective. The research answers the following questions: What does the term “coronavirus” collocate with? and what does language tell us about the points of focus of science production on Coronavirus in general? Data for this research consisted of a large corpus of research articles that were published as part of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). Covid-19 corpus has 224,061,570 words and 50,754 documents. The analysis took a rigorous data driven approach in investigating linguistics phenomena - keyword and collocation analyses of science discourse of COVID-19. Statistic scores reported frequency of occurrences and strength of collocates. Findings showed that early science production focused on naming, describing, classifying the virus. Another point of focus is the spread of the virus. Also, findings have also noted speculation about the origin of the new virus. Science production of research investigated behavior of the virus, the life cycle of the virus and its diagnostic virology. In general, the findings are expected of science research carried out to solve a problem. As the data was collected May 2020, most research has focused on knowing more about the nature of the problem. Findings have implications for understanding in-depth points of focus in research regarding COVID-19 at the early stage of science production.
Training, Language and Culture
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Promoting 21st century skills in the classrooms and the call for the integration of soft skills i... more Promoting 21st century skills in the classrooms and the call for the integration of soft skills in all subjects have become national & economic "imperatives" to succeed in the global world and the diverse economy (Lamb, Maire, & Doecke, 2017, p.8). Research has found that second language proficiency is relevant to effective leadership in the U.S. labor market (Oliverio-Olivieri, 2016) and that fostering leadership skills (LS) in language classrooms is paramount to make connections and develop lasting partnerships (Eaton, 2010). This research paper aims to investigate language instructors’ level of readiness to implement leadership skills (LS) in EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom at Taif University. The study addresses leadership from a competency perspective and explores the benefits of fostering of LS in the Saudi EFL context. The study followed a quantitative approach in collecting and analyzing the data. The findings of this study show that the level of teac...
This paper investigates how various Muslim-identity groups are represented in the British press. ... more This paper investigates how various Muslim-identity groups are represented in the British press. The study adopted an intersectional critical discourse analysis as an analytical framework (see Baker and Levon 2016) of a corpus of a medium size. The method adopted used drew on corpus methods by identifying strong collocations associated with each identified identity followed by qualitative analysis. The findings highlight the living experiences of British Muslims which might be gendered, classed and racialized with certain Muslim identity-groups. The present study demonstrates through an intersectional approach that media representations of Muslims are constituted through race, gender and class and that Muslims are perceived to be othered in contemporary British public discourses.
Discourse & Communication
The use of language and images in the media may have a strong effect on people’s political cognit... more The use of language and images in the media may have a strong effect on people’s political cognition. In this regard, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine can lead to reluctant uptake of the vaccine even among medical staff. In two experiments, this article tests the hypothesis that the public’s willingness to get vaccinated against the novel coronavirus depends on the framings they are presented with. Two hundred thirty-two female Saudi students are exposed to either pro- or anti-vaccination messages. In Experiment 1, they are asked to read semi-artificial news stories, and in Experiment 2 political cartoons. The results show that readers of the news articles, but not of the cartoons, are susceptible to framing effects. We consider the implications of how issues are framed for journalists and health professionals.
International Journal of English Linguistics, Aug 26, 2019
This study explores the discourse of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics or... more This study explores the discourse of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics or medicine (STEM) fields produced by Twitter users on social media, with a particular focus on language usage and function in this discourse. The exploration of the women in STEM discourse was achieved by collecting a body of tweets using popular hashtags addressing women in STEM from the last week of October 2017. Following a corpus-based approach, this study analyzes the most frequent evaluative adjectives and 4-grams. Results from the analysis of evaluative adjectives show that Twitter users represent women in STEM fields positively by using positive adjectives such as great, amazing, inspirational etc. Furthermore, the analysis of the most frequent 4-grams reveals that Twitter users employ hashtags such as #ilooklikeasurgeon and #womeninSTEM to promote the work of women in STEM fields, show their appreciation of women working and studying in STEM and challenge prevalent gender stereotypes of STEM professions. It was found that the production of women in STEM discourse by most Twitter users has contributed to increasing the strength of women in the STEM community in social media, evidenced by their practices of advocacy, networking and challenging gender biases online. The discourse of women in STEM in social media is an example of discursive activism that focuses on the larger dialogue of women in STEM and highlights dominant forms of sexism and gendered stereotypes of women's work in male dominated professions.
GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies
Coverage of the Brexit referendum dominated UK media in the summer of 2016. Previous research has... more Coverage of the Brexit referendum dominated UK media in the summer of 2016. Previous research has focused on the Leave-leaning press and the representations of politicians within that debate. Analysing the British media representation of the EU is paramount in understanding dominant, conflicting discourses regarding the decision of British voters in the period preceding the referendum. This study compares language use in conflicting discourses of Brexit in British media by adopting a corpus-based discourse analysis using the Brexit corpus in Sketch Engine. Drawing on two corpus methods, namely concordance analysis and collocation analysis of the lexis under study (i.e., the term 'EU'), results of the analysis show that in the Leave campaign, the EU is represented in a negative sense in that continuing to be a member of the EU is viewed as bringing certain economic danger to the future of the UK and as increasing the prospect of terrorist attacks. However, the EU is represented in the Remain campaign both positively and negatively. It is represented positively in that the British public is reminded that the UK shares similar values to those held by the EU and negatively in that the media are critical of the EU in its current form. The Remain campaign also dismantles narratives made by the Leave campaign detailing the benefits of exit to British sovereignty and economy. This article concludes with a discussion of the dominant discourses about the EU found in the British media.
Talks by Reem Alkhammash
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Papers by Reem Alkhammash
Talks by Reem Alkhammash