The fact that Turkey has recently taken steps to enhance the communication with other countries and increased the opportunities for foreign students to have education in Turkey boosted the demand to learn Turkish as a foreign language. However, one of the biggest problems in this field is the relatively low quality and quantity of the materials that are insufficient to meet the demands for learning Turkish. Games, which foreign language teachers frequently make use of in their classes, are known to reduce the anxiety levels of students, add the “fun” element to the class and help students revise what has been taught. Games are activities in which individuals compete against others or collaborate with each other to reach a certain goal within a specified framework. There have been numerous works related to the use of games in foreign language education so far, though a great amount of them were written in English and focused on teaching English as a foreign language. Jill Hadfield’s “Elementary Communication Games” (1985), “Advanced Communication Games” (1996) and “Advanced Speaking Games” (2001) are some of the most used books in this area. These books include easy to use, highly practical and cost-effective games that can be used in almost all language levels. The aim of this study is to increase the quality and the quantity of the games used in the beginning level of teaching Turkish as a foreign language. With this aim, a total of 20 communication games were designed based on the A1 speaking outcomes of “İstanbul Yabancılar için Türkçe” course book. These games were applied in a class of 12 Turkish learners for 8 weeks and they were evaluated by the learners in terms of their advantages and disadvantages in a focus group interview. At the end of the meeting, these results were obtained: Games are effective tools in teaching Turkish to foreigners, improve the retention time of what has been learned, help students learn new words, increase the interaction and cooperation among students, decrease their anxiety levels of speaking Turkish and break the monotonous routine of classes etc.

This paper reports on Moroccan EFL learners’ acquisition of English diphthongs. It uses the Constraint Demotion Algorithm (CDA henceforth) (Tesar & Smolensky, 1998, 2000) to examine the role of cross-linguistic influence on the acquisition of this particular aspect. Ninety-six Moroccan learners participated in the study. They were evenly divided into three academic levels: Baccalaureate, Second Year University, and Master’s. The participants performed an oral fill-in-the-blanks test that elicited their intuition about the various English diphthongs. The main findings of this study are that learners´ prior linguistic knowledge impacts their acquisition of English diphthongs. Learners tend to fluctuate between the French and the Arabic hierarchy before they were able to converge to the English one. Besides, the results suggest an influential role of academic level as learners’ pronunciation errors were shown to diminish progressively as they climb the academic ladder.

The research dealt with determining the significance of the terms of political life contained in the texts of the Maqamat, and showed for example how the word (the state) requires some words towards (the king, the sultan, the ruler, the governor, the president), and that the semantics of these words are developed and not static through their application in the theory of semantic fields. The significance of the vocabulary in the Arabic language is derivative, not authentic, and the word grows and develops according to the subject change, and the context is its primary role in determining the meaning of the word in the texts of the maqamat, and between the research that the words of political life were varied with converging meanings, and they came out in certain places to metaphorical purposes identified by the research, and they have varied The semantic relationships in the fields are not limited to a specific type, and there is no perfect synonym, but rather a partial synonym, because of the simple semantic differences between them.

Cultural criticism is one of the literary phenomena that characterized modern Arab literature, as its appearance was coupled with modern literary renaissance, and it occupies a wide area in modern Arab poetry. The most important thing that distinguishes this kind of poetry is the spirit of modernity, as it expresses the suffering of people, its concerns after what was previously poetry captive to the past, and the tradition that makes it unrelated to its era. Cultural criticism is important for expressing the positives or exposing the negatives for themselves. Rather, it invests in the following considerations related to the vision of man and with him the culture of those positives or negatives and the criterion for classifying them in this or that box. For this he seeks to present the possibilities available, and to discover the boundaries that produce meanings or receive connotations for practices in cultural contexts. The interest of cultural criticism is highlighted through the study procedures in which it uses methods of induction, analysis and interpretation. It is worth noting that the field of cultural criticism intersects with the so-called cultural studies that include the study of elite, folk and subcultural cultures, ideologies, literature, and science of science, social movements, daily life, the media, and philosophical and social theories and the like. And take all of that tools for analysis and interpretation without the domination of one of the rest of them, or the deliberate exclusion of some of them.