The Saudi Females Students' Tendency to Drop the Third Person-S

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Research Question4

Research Objectives5

Literature Review5

Tense and Aspect7

Methodology10

Recommendations for Further Research11

Conclusion11

Works Cited13

The Saudi Females Students' Tendency to Drop the Third Person-S

Introduction

When learning a foreign or second language, the success of our learning is measured, not by how many years we spent learning, the certificates we earned, the courses taken, or number of exams we had, but by the mastery of language and by how many of our goals we achieved. A good measure of how successful we are can be found in the communicative competence we have. This communicative competence can be manifested in all aspects of life where we might need to use the second language, e.g., English. Evaluating language learners on this criterion leaves much to the educators to do in order to come up with teaching programs that help nourishing this communicative competence; this gap is filled by offering English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses at professional institutions, and higher educational institutes.

ESP has sprung from the need of so many things that were happening all over the world at the same time. The growth of technology and economics after World War II, the huge development of linguistic theories, and the focus of educators on the needs of the learners, all have paved the way for the birth and nourishment of ESP. The robust maturation and development of ESP can be seen on two important levels: the categorizations of ESP, and the stages of development. By taking a quick look at the well-known categorizations of ESP in the literature, one can easily realize the big changes that have happened to ESP. This big shift in the number of programs under ESP is clear evidence of the quick growth of ESP, and the need for such programs. ESP has also undergone five stages of development. In the early 1960s, ESP started by focusing on the sentence level and constructing syllabi based on genres of the learners' disciplines. Then, it grew a bit and started to focus on the rhetorical aspects behind those sentences and how to implement them in communicative settings. After that, ESP started to focus on the skills that needed to be learned and how to make learning and teaching materials evolve around these skills (Yalcin, 1).

The main goal at this stage was to help learners master the skills they needed most for their jobs and/or professional settings. Right now, ESP is viewed more as an approach than as a product. That is why ESP researchers started to talk about teaching methods, class management, students and teacher roles inside classes, and affective factors like motivation and attitude. Since discussion of attitude and motivation related to ESP is a recent development, with the advent of the Learning-Centered Approach, there is little literature on the topic. It is for this reason that some researchers have said that, as far as motivational and attitudinal variables in ESP are concerned, there is no systematic line of studies in the literature that ...