Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-31).

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri State University, 2009. / "May 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 15-16). Also available online.

The editor's Thesis--Uppsala. / Text in Arabic with French commentary. Includes bibliographical references (p. ix-xvii).

Thesis (Diplôme de Recherches Approfondies)--University of Tunis I, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-266).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thèse univ.--Paris III--Lettres, 1972. / Bibliogr., p. 7-21. Index.

Educational and economic developments in the Persian Gulf have increased the need for academic English reading fluency in the rising generation of college-bound students. A discussion of the literature on the linguistic properties of Arabic diglossia and orthography affirms the challenge that Arabs confront in L1 literacy. Because of the difficulties encountered in Arabic literacy, the transfer of L1 skills to L2 emerges as a salient issue for English instruction in the Arab world. The following study of Arab ELLs' academic reading fluency in Arabic and English investigates a hypothesized positive correlation between L1 and L2 reading abilities. Quantitative and qualitative data were obtained through the administration of academic reading fluency instruments in both Arabic and English and a survey of reading habits to a sample of 112 post-secondary Gulf Arab students in an English language program in Doha, Qatar. The analysis of the data reveals a correlation between Arabic and English reading fluency confirming previous research on transfer of reading skills between L1 and L2. The data further suggest the advisability of promoting reading fluency training in L1 as a facilitator of L2 fluency, especially in localities such as the Persian Gulf, where the professional environment requires young graduates to have fluency skills in both languages.

Arabic news articles in heterogeneous electronic collections are difficult for users to work with. Two problems are: that they are not categorized in a way that would aid browsing, and that there are no summaries or detailed metadata records that could be easier to work with than full articles. To address the first problem, schema mapping techniques were adapted to construct a simple taxonomy for Arabic news stories that is compatible with the subject codes of the International Press Telecommunications Council. So that each article would be labeled with the proper taxonomy category, automatic classification methods were researched, to identify the most appropriate. Experiments showed that the best features to use in classification resulted from a new tailored stemming approach (i.e., a new Arabic light stemmer called P-Stemmer). When coupled with binary classification using SVM, the newly developed approach proved to be superior to state-of-the-art techniques. To address the second problem, i.e., summarization, preliminary work was done with English corpora. This was in the context of a new Problem Based Learning (PBL) course wherein students produced template summaries of big text collections. The techniques used in the course were extended to work with Arabic news. Due to the lack of high quality tools for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and topic identification for Arabic, two new tools were constructed: RenA for Arabic NER, and ALDA for Arabic topic extraction tool (using the Latent Dirichlet Algorithm). Controlled experiments with each of RenA and ALDA, involving Arabic speakers and a randomly selected corpus of 1000 Qatari news articles, showed the tools produced very good results (i.e., names, organizations, locations, and topics). Then the categorization, NER, topic identification, and additional information extraction techniques were combined to produce approximately 120,000 summaries for Qatari news articles, which are searchable, along with the articles, using LucidWorks Fusion, which builds upon Solr software. Evaluation of the summaries showed high ratings based on the 1000-article test corpus. Contributions of this research with Arabic news articles thus include a new: test corpus, taxonomy, light stemmer, classification approach, NER tool, topic identification tool, and template-based summarizer – all shown through experimentation to be highly effective. / Ph. D.

Arabic language ideology that views the colloquial as a threat to the standard language and fears a public role for the colloquial register remained prevalent throughout much of the twentieth century. Yet, in late nineteenth-century Egypt, the Nahda project of disseminating knowledge to ‘the masses’ gave rise to several journals that found a public role for Ammiyya, introducing it into the realm of written knowledge. This study analyzes the processes of introducing Ammiyya into the written realm and the subsequent attempt at reeling the register back in from the public sphere. Through a framework of the sociolinguistic analysis of style and the process of iconization, Part I analyzes Abdallah al-Nadim’s use of language variation in his journal, al-Ustaadh, and how it aided in sorting out contradiction between ideology that hailed the standard as the suitable public register and practice that conceded a role to the colloquial. This study argues that even as his journal published didactic dialogues in Ammiyya, Nadim’s language practice chipped away at the prospect of a sustained literary role for the colloquial through the use of ‘styles’ that aligned the standard with authority and a keen understanding of the modernity project and through indexing the colloquial with the backward realm of uneducated women. Through the framework of the process of ‘erasure', Part II analyzes linguistic practices aimed at reeling the colloquial back in from the realm of written knowledge. It demonstrates Nadim’s efforts - near the end of the publication of his journal - to erase the notion that an educated Egyptian would have any use for the register. Nadim removed the salient features of Ammiyya from his dialogues and scolded his interlocutors who displayed their backwardness through the continued use of the features. Late nineteenth- century works, such as Hasan Tawfiq’s Usuul al-Kalimaat al-Ammiyya, represent a continuation of the ideology-practice dialectic from Nadim’s attempted erasure of the colloquial. However, whereas Nadim erased salient features of the colloquial from his writings, these works attempted to trace Ammiyya terms back to their assumed Fusha origins, with the aim of unifying the language by erasing the register. / text

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