The study design

This is an experimental multi-case study which included five learners of Arabic in their final year of undergraduate studies at the University of Manchester. The decision to conduct a case study as opposed to a bigger scale experimental study reflected the intent that it should be more exploratory rather than aiming to lay substantial claims. Additionally, the availability of participants was another reason for conducting a multi-case study. A bigger number of participants would have provided more representativeness and variation but recruiting a bigger number of committed participants was not feasible.

In order to efficiently conduct this case study, a triangulation research strategy has been applied by drawing upon more than one source of information for more comprehensive analysis. These included interviews with the participants,

observations of their performance and comments as well as conducting listening comprehension pre- and post-tests. According to Duff, the strategy of

triangulation creates more confidence in interpreting data in qualitative research (Duff, 2008). The study design took the following steps:

a) Ethical approval was sought and granted following the guidelines set out for research at the University of Leeds.

b) A number of cognates collected from the data in the first part of the research were selected to form the core of the dialectal comprehension listening tests.

c) NSs of five dialects (Gulf31, Hijazi Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan) were asked to volunteer recording pre-written sentences in their own dialects. d) The recorded sentences were checked by other NSs of these dialects to

ensure their validity before they were used in writing the pre-test, the post- test and for use in the training sessions.

e) Arabic learners were approached to be the participants and the study was explained to them.

f) The pre and post-tests were piloted on two NNSs who were not participants in the study.

g) A listening pre-test was conducted to test the participants’ ability to recognise cognates in unfamiliar dialects.

h) 3 hours of training sessions were arranged in which the researcher taught cross-dialectal listening strategies to the participants and provided them with practice listening drills.

i) Comments from the participants before, during and after the training were documented.

j) A post-test was administered to test the participants’ dialectal comprehension skills after the training.

8.2 The participants

The participants in this study were five Arabic learners who were all in their final (fourth) year of Arabic language studies and who had been students of the researcher for more than two years. They were approached at the beginning of February 2013, which was the beginning of the second semester in the academic

31 Gulf dialects in most literature on TASL refer to the dialects spoken in Saudi Arabia and all the other smaller Gulf countries: Oman, Qatar, Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. However in this case study ‘Gulf’ refers to the dialects of Kuwait and Emirates which have some phonological and lexical characteristics that distinguish them from the Western Saudi dialects such as changing the MSA sound /dʒ/ to /j/ and the /k/ to /ʧ/.

year 2012/2013. An email was sent to a group of 8 students with the highest marks achieved in their MSA proficiency level in previous university exams. The choice of advanced learners versus intermediate or beginners was intentional in order to focus the study only on students with a good knowledge of MSA and at least one dialect. It was outside the scope of this study to test the effect of the language proficiency level on their performance in dialectal comprehension. Six out of the contacted students agreed to participate; but the final number of participants was five as one of them could not commit to attend. In selecting the participants, it was intended to make sure that they all had some instruction in at least one dialect. According to Trentman (2011), the knowledge of a dialect plus MSA was an advantage in dialectal comprehension in her study.

The participants were given a short questionnaire in order to collect some

information about their language knowledge and to make sure that none of them were bilingual or of Arab origin, which might have an effect on their dialectal comprehension. Table 8.1 below shows the information gathered about the participants who will be referred to throughout the study using the anonymous labels P1 to P5 (for Participant 1 to 5). All of the participants were monolinguals with English as the mother tongue for four of them and German for one participant (P2). They all stated that they were between 22 and 25 years old. All the

participants happened to be studying one or two other languages besides Arabic in their university degree. They all had instruction in at least one Arabic dialect during their year abroad.

P1 was an exception regarding the variety of Arabic dialects that she had been exposed to in comparison with the rest of the participants. She stated that she had been motivated to learn about different dialects since the beginning of her Arabic studies which led her to make many Arab friends in Manchester and to watch a lot of Arab media and write down the linguistic characteristics she observed in each dialect. She also had intensive exposure to the Emirati dialect working as a primary teacher in a school in Dubai during her year abroad there. During the interview before the pre-test, P1 commented that she can understand a number of Arabic dialects quite well to the extent that she can compete with some of her NS friends in guessing where an Arab person is from by listening to their dialect and

understanding them. The researcher’s familiarity with these students, their proficiency level, their attitude to Arabic learning and their motivation were very useful in selecting them. All the selected students were hard working and very committed to their Arabic studies throughout their degree and they achieved high marks in their university MSA examinations averaging between 72 and 92% in previous academic years.

Table 8.1: The demographics of the participants

Participant Gender L1 L2 Dialects exposed to Context of dialect exposure Proficiency score out of 100 in MSA P1 F English Arabic, Urdu, Spanish Jordanian, Egyptian, Emirati, Moroccan, Iraqi, Saudi 10 months (year- abroad) in Emirates, 3 months in Jordan, 2 months in Morocco and short travels to Egypt and Saudi, Arab media and having many Arab friends. 90 P2 F German Arabic, English, Hebrew Egyptian, Levantine 14 months (year- abroad) spent in Egypt, 3 months spent in Palestine, having a Lebanese friend. 92 P3 F English Arabic, French

Egyptian 10 months (year- abroad) in Egypt, Arab media 75 P4 M English Arabic, Farsi Egyptian Moroccan 5 months (year- abroad) in Egypt, 6 months in Morocco, Arab media 72 P5 M English Arabic, German, French

Egyptian 10 months (year- abroad) in Egypt, Arab media