علاء باجي جبر الخزعلي

Gemination is a phonetic phenomenon whereby two identical /sounds/ co-occur in one word or at words boundaries. The co-occurrence of two identical sounds doesn’t matter, what matters is their pronunciation. Whether to pronounce them as one sound or two sounds is a matter treated differently across languages that have geminate sounds. As the present paper restricts itself to two languages only, Arabic and English, it investigates how gemination occurs in the two languages and how it can be represented? Is it restricted to consonants only or it can also occur with vowels? What type of gemination each language exhibits? These questions beside some more others are the main concern of the present paper in which the phenomenon of gemination is clarified in general, then a study of gemination is presented in English and Arabic respectively. There is a common view point which holds that English does not have gemination, but in fact it appears that English has gemination at certain conditions. Although it is unlike Arabic in its realization, but it can be said that gemination exists in English.

Cleft sentences are devices in English that can help putting the focus on a particular part of a sentence and emphasize it by a variety of ways. The purpose of this research is to investigate the EFL students’ ability in producing this kind of structure. The investigation is built upon a test given to a number of subjects of EFL. The subjects, in turn, are supposedly acquainted to cleft sentence so as the investigation becomes objective and the results become reliable. Hence, verifying the research hypotheses and extracting some concluding remarks related to the problem in question are drawn by depending on the answers of the test in a statistical method then discussing them and finding weak and strong points.

Motivation has been widely accepted by both teachersand researchers as one of the key factors that influencethe rate and success of second/foreign languagelearning. Motivation provides the primary impetusto initiate learning the foreign languageand later the drivingforce to sustain the long and often tedious learning process(Dornyei, 2001: 117). The Factors that affect the learners motivation towards English language are investigated in the present study. The results obtained throughout the questionnaire and the statistical analysis show that learners are motivated mostly by learning a foreign language to be used and especially the English language