Ahmed Smirkou - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Ahmed Smirkou

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Arab World English Journal, 2015

Investigating female rural students" attitudes towards learning English is a substantial need to ... more Investigating female rural students" attitudes towards learning English is a substantial need to identify EFL learners" perception of English and provide language teachers and textbook designers with research evidence. For this reason, numerous studies have been conducted to determine the correlation between learners" background and their language learning attitudes. However, very few research studies have targeted female rural students" language attitude to determine whether there is a correlation between their socioeconomic background and language attitude. Therefore, this study was conducted on a sample of 90 female rural students of two high schools located in two small Moroccan villages to identify whether they held a positive or negative attitude towards learning English and to specify the variables that shaped their attitudes. Participants were randomly selected and filled in a five likert scale questionnaire. The significant findings of the study include the participants" preference to study English rather than other foreign languages at high school; they displayed high motivation and frequent classroom participation in the English class, strong desire to improve their English communicative competence, negative attitude towards the culture used in the English textbook, and positive social value to a person who speaks English. Thus, this study concluded that there was no correlation between female rural students" socioeconomic background and their positive attitude to study English.

The objective of this study was to assess the phonetic use of the allomorphic variations of the p... more The objective of this study was to assess the phonetic use of the allomorphic variations of the past [+ed] and plural [+s] morphemes by a sample of 45 EFL semester one students at Ibn Tofail University, Morocco, using error analysis approach. To collect relevant data, two written tests were designed and distributed to a randomly selected sample to be filled in separately during 40 minutes: the first test consisted of a set of past regular verbs including some adjectives ending in ed, and the second one included a number of English nouns requiring the regular plural [+s]. Further, the participants were given an adapted list of nonce words from Berko"s study (1985). The principle was if they could provide the plural marking of the unfamiliar words correctly, it would be concluded that they knew how to pluralize words in different phonological contexts. The findings of the study demonstrated that the majority of the subjects failed to use the allomorphic variations /t/ and /id/ in different phonetic environments, substituted the latter allomorphs with the allomorph /d/, and erroneously generalized the allomorph /d/ to the adjectives that end in ed. In the second test, a great number of the subjects performed better in pluralizing the nouns that require the voiceless alternant /s/, but found the allomorph /iz/ more complex than the others since it requires a vowel insertion rule to break the cluster of two consonants having similar point of articulation, and overgeneralized the allomorph /-z/ to the nonce words requiring /-iz/.

The purpose of this study is to apply the principles underlying optimality theory to the translat... more The purpose of this study is to apply the principles underlying optimality theory to the translation of English idioms into Standard Arabic. It specifically aims to generate the ranking of competing markedness and faithfulness constraints that Standard Arabic assigns to idioms translated from English into Arabic. The scope of this study is limited to the analysis of the idiomatic expressions with total equivalence. This article proposes that optimality theory can be incorporated to analyze translation processes since translation is also characterized by violable universal competing constraints in the decision making and meaning negotiation processes that translators employ to derive optimal outputs. From various possible translations, translators ideally aim to select the output that is linguistically and culturally accepted in the target language but it may violate some language rules or constraints that are ranked low in that language. Hence, the optimal output (target text) is al...

Acquiring English grammar is often treated as a direct translation process. Language transfer is ... more Acquiring English grammar is often treated as a direct translation process. Language transfer is a result of this translation. In foreign language learning, when learners fail to understand the structure of L2, they most likely resort to L1 to generate sentences in L2. Working on this assumption, this study aims to determine and account for the copula omission elicited from the speech errors of Moroccan learners of English. The analysis has been carried out within the framework of Error Analysis (EA) and Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH). This study also explores the sources of making this grammatical error and examines the linguistic environments where learners omit the copula be. The data collection instruments are a teachers " questionnaire and a spoken test. In the questionnaire, the targeted subjects are 40 Moroccan teachers of English. As for the test, the participants are 80 Moroccan 1 st year baccalaureate students of English enrolled at Ibn Abbad High School, Kenit...

This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the f... more This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the framework of optimality theory. The focus is to unveil the phonological and morphological repair strategies enforced by the phonotactic constraints of the borrowing language to resolve sonority principle in complex codas. The investigated phonological strategy is schwa and a high vowel epenthesis. Schwa epenthesis is triggered to split final biconsonantal codas that violate sonority principle. In three consonantal coda clusters, schwa insertion is conditioned by the sonority value of the consonants, where it is consistently epenthesized before the most sonorous segment. A high vowel behaves differently; it is epenthesized in the final position without splitting the coda cluster, and enforces the cluster to be syllabified as an onset instead of a coda, and as such sonority principle is satisfied. It is also argued that the addition of the morphological marker {-a}, which is primarily morph...

This article is a critical analysis of the Arabic version of the ‘Moroccan strategic vision of ed... more This article is a critical analysis of the Arabic version of the ‘Moroccan strategic vision of education and training’. This ‘vision’, which was issued by the Moroccan Supreme Council for Education, Training, and Scientific Research, establishes a roadmap for reforming the Moroccan educational and training systems from 2015 to 2030. The ‘vision’ is analyzed within the framework of critical discourse analysis. As such, micro and macro linguistic features are utilized to scrutinize the structure of the text. The focus is, in particular, on how language can be strategically used to influence the reader’s perception of education and training and implicitly enforce them to accept the council’s recommendations. By analyzing the text, it is observed that the council uses a number of linguistic techniques (e.g. nominalization, metaphorization, handling responsibility, techniques of persuasion, etc.) to negatively evaluate the past and present education and training situations and dictate an...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

Arab World English Journal, 2015

Investigating female rural students" attitudes towards learning English is a substantial need to ... more Investigating female rural students" attitudes towards learning English is a substantial need to identify EFL learners" perception of English and provide language teachers and textbook designers with research evidence. For this reason, numerous studies have been conducted to determine the correlation between learners" background and their language learning attitudes. However, very few research studies have targeted female rural students" language attitude to determine whether there is a correlation between their socioeconomic background and language attitude. Therefore, this study was conducted on a sample of 90 female rural students of two high schools located in two small Moroccan villages to identify whether they held a positive or negative attitude towards learning English and to specify the variables that shaped their attitudes. Participants were randomly selected and filled in a five likert scale questionnaire. The significant findings of the study include the participants" preference to study English rather than other foreign languages at high school; they displayed high motivation and frequent classroom participation in the English class, strong desire to improve their English communicative competence, negative attitude towards the culture used in the English textbook, and positive social value to a person who speaks English. Thus, this study concluded that there was no correlation between female rural students" socioeconomic background and their positive attitude to study English.

The objective of this study was to assess the phonetic use of the allomorphic variations of the p... more The objective of this study was to assess the phonetic use of the allomorphic variations of the past [+ed] and plural [+s] morphemes by a sample of 45 EFL semester one students at Ibn Tofail University, Morocco, using error analysis approach. To collect relevant data, two written tests were designed and distributed to a randomly selected sample to be filled in separately during 40 minutes: the first test consisted of a set of past regular verbs including some adjectives ending in ed, and the second one included a number of English nouns requiring the regular plural [+s]. Further, the participants were given an adapted list of nonce words from Berko"s study (1985). The principle was if they could provide the plural marking of the unfamiliar words correctly, it would be concluded that they knew how to pluralize words in different phonological contexts. The findings of the study demonstrated that the majority of the subjects failed to use the allomorphic variations /t/ and /id/ in different phonetic environments, substituted the latter allomorphs with the allomorph /d/, and erroneously generalized the allomorph /d/ to the adjectives that end in ed. In the second test, a great number of the subjects performed better in pluralizing the nouns that require the voiceless alternant /s/, but found the allomorph /iz/ more complex than the others since it requires a vowel insertion rule to break the cluster of two consonants having similar point of articulation, and overgeneralized the allomorph /-z/ to the nonce words requiring /-iz/.

The purpose of this study is to apply the principles underlying optimality theory to the translat... more The purpose of this study is to apply the principles underlying optimality theory to the translation of English idioms into Standard Arabic. It specifically aims to generate the ranking of competing markedness and faithfulness constraints that Standard Arabic assigns to idioms translated from English into Arabic. The scope of this study is limited to the analysis of the idiomatic expressions with total equivalence. This article proposes that optimality theory can be incorporated to analyze translation processes since translation is also characterized by violable universal competing constraints in the decision making and meaning negotiation processes that translators employ to derive optimal outputs. From various possible translations, translators ideally aim to select the output that is linguistically and culturally accepted in the target language but it may violate some language rules or constraints that are ranked low in that language. Hence, the optimal output (target text) is al...

Acquiring English grammar is often treated as a direct translation process. Language transfer is ... more Acquiring English grammar is often treated as a direct translation process. Language transfer is a result of this translation. In foreign language learning, when learners fail to understand the structure of L2, they most likely resort to L1 to generate sentences in L2. Working on this assumption, this study aims to determine and account for the copula omission elicited from the speech errors of Moroccan learners of English. The analysis has been carried out within the framework of Error Analysis (EA) and Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH). This study also explores the sources of making this grammatical error and examines the linguistic environments where learners omit the copula be. The data collection instruments are a teachers " questionnaire and a spoken test. In the questionnaire, the targeted subjects are 40 Moroccan teachers of English. As for the test, the participants are 80 Moroccan 1 st year baccalaureate students of English enrolled at Ibn Abbad High School, Kenit...

This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the f... more This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the framework of optimality theory. The focus is to unveil the phonological and morphological repair strategies enforced by the phonotactic constraints of the borrowing language to resolve sonority principle in complex codas. The investigated phonological strategy is schwa and a high vowel epenthesis. Schwa epenthesis is triggered to split final biconsonantal codas that violate sonority principle. In three consonantal coda clusters, schwa insertion is conditioned by the sonority value of the consonants, where it is consistently epenthesized before the most sonorous segment. A high vowel behaves differently; it is epenthesized in the final position without splitting the coda cluster, and enforces the cluster to be syllabified as an onset instead of a coda, and as such sonority principle is satisfied. It is also argued that the addition of the morphological marker {-a}, which is primarily morph...

This article is a critical analysis of the Arabic version of the ‘Moroccan strategic vision of ed... more This article is a critical analysis of the Arabic version of the ‘Moroccan strategic vision of education and training’. This ‘vision’, which was issued by the Moroccan Supreme Council for Education, Training, and Scientific Research, establishes a roadmap for reforming the Moroccan educational and training systems from 2015 to 2030. The ‘vision’ is analyzed within the framework of critical discourse analysis. As such, micro and macro linguistic features are utilized to scrutinize the structure of the text. The focus is, in particular, on how language can be strategically used to influence the reader’s perception of education and training and implicitly enforce them to accept the council’s recommendations. By analyzing the text, it is observed that the council uses a number of linguistic techniques (e.g. nominalization, metaphorization, handling responsibility, techniques of persuasion, etc.) to negatively evaluate the past and present education and training situations and dictate an...