Moneera Alshehri

Thesis title: Comparing Three Grammar Teaching Methods: Investigating Effectiveness and Learners’ Attitudes

Email: H.Alshehri@liverpool.ac.uk

Supervisors: Primary supervisor (90%): Dr. Hitomi Masuhara, Secondary supervisor (10%): Dr. Karl Simms

Biography: Moneera Alshehri is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool. Moneera is investigating the effects of using different teaching methods on the acquisition of English grammatical structures. She completed her MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Liverpool where she became interested in grammar teaching methods.

Research Interests: Moneera is specialising in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). She is interested in studying how learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) engage, in relation to performance and attitudes, with different English language teaching approaches. In her research, Moneera is comparing the conventional ‘presentation-practice-production’ (PPP) method with another two approaches; the consciousness-raising (CR) and experiential-discovery (ED), to teach three groups of Saudi female English language learners at university level. She is mainly focusing on investigating the effectiveness and learners’ attitudes towards these three teaching methods in terms of the acquisition of a few grammatical structures which seem to be some of the most problematic language features for Saudi learners.

Conference papers

  1. Can Teaching English Grammar Be Any Different? Investigating Learning Gains and Learners’ Views on Three Teaching Methods (University of Liverpool Postgraduate conference 2016)
  2. Can Teaching English Grammar Be Any Different? (MATSDA conference 2016)
  3. Experiencing Grammar: Comparing the Effects of the Experiential Discovery (ED) and Consciousness-Raising (CR) Approaches on the Acquisition of Grammatical Structures (University of Liverpool Postgraduate conference 2015)
  4. Experiencing Grammar: Comparing the Effects of the Experiential Discovery (ED) and Consciousness-Raising (CR) Approaches on the Acquisition of Grammatical Structures (MATSDA conference 2015)

Publications

A conference paper published in the proceedings of the 9th Saudi Student Scientific (SSS9th) conference- Paper Title: Consciousness-raising Tasks and the Acquisition of Second Language (L2) Grammatical Structures: an Investigation of the Saudi EFL Teaching Context (2016)

Teaching experience

  • King Saud University (Saudi Arabia): pre-MA teaching experience for one year
  • University of Liverpool (The department of Continuing Education): three years of teaching experience (teaching the Arabic course) after the MA and during the first year of PhD