As part of its community service activities, the Applied Linguistics Research Lab (ALLAB) participated in two events at King Saud University and AlFaisal University. On Thursday, October 17, 2019, Dr. Dina El-Dakhs, ALLAB Leader, delivered a talk to the students of the undergraduate Psycholinguistics course at the Department of English Language and Literature at King Saud University based on an invitation from the course instructor, Dr. Eman Kamal. Dr. El-Dakhs received the invitation at the ALLAB’s seminar on Psycholinguistics, which was held on Monday, October 7, 2019. Dr. El-Dakhs’s talk at King Saud University featured a presentation on her ISI-indexed journal article: El-Dakhs, D. (2017). The effect of language exposure and word characteristics on the mental word associations in the second language: The case of Arabic-English bilinguals. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46(4), 1033-1052. In her talk, Dr. El-Dakhs shared the motivation, procedure and results of her study. She also shared the implications of her study on relevant theoretical models and on pedagogy. Additionally, she discussed with students potential directions for future research based on her study. During the talk, Dr. El-Dakhs invited the students to join the ALLAB activities and to become members.
After the talk at King Saud University, ALLAB had a booth at the open house of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Association of Language Teachers (KSAALT), which was held on Saturday, October 19, 2019 at AlFaisal University. During the event, ALLAB Leader and investigators, Dr. Dina El-Dakhs and Ms. Fatima Ambreen, familiarized the participants with the lab activities and how they can become members. Additionally, ALLAB offered 5 free registrations to an 8-hour course on action research for English language teachers that will be held at Prince Sultan University in November 2019 to KSAALT members. It is worth noting that the KSAALT Riyadh Chapter Representative is Dr. Safaa Eissa who is also an ALLAB investigator.