AUS Repository

Increasingly, airports around the world are becoming hubs for the coexistence of different cultures. Therefore, they need to include facilities that can accommodate, as far as possible, the needs of passengers from various backgrounds. Among these are prayer facilities for people of different faiths. This paper focuses on the design and operational requirements for Muslim prayer facilities. Due to the nature of Muslim prayer patterns, airports that expect to serve Muslim passengers need to have prayer facilities of which the design and operating systems are adequate. Such facilities remove the necessity of Muslims having to pray in public areas in airports and performing ablution in public restrooms. If facilities dedicated to Muslim use are unavailable, the performance of these acts in public places may not only render those who perform them unable to concentrate, but also raise the curiosity of others or make them uncomfortable. The paper firstly describes the need for prayer facilities and the pattern of their use. It then defines the architectural and operational requirements, including location in the airport, the components of the prayer space and supporting elements such as ablution stations. The paper functions as a reference for designers and operators of airports particularly in areas with large Muslim populations, such as the Middle East, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Pacific Rim, Central Asia and Europe.

It has been noted that many learners of English, including Arab learners in UAE public schools exhibit difficulties with English spelling. These difficulties have been attributed to a number of causes, such as the irregularity of the orthographic system of English and mother tongue interference. These spelling difficulties cause learners to commit many spelling errors that distort their written production, affecting negatively their overall writing proficiency. In addition to the negative effect of poor spelling on writing proficiency, it has been argued that many poor spellers have problems with reading. Therefore, overall research has emphasized the importance of spelling for developing competent second language users. The purpose of this study was to investigate how big the spelling problem is among Arab learners of English in UAE public schools, identify the commonest types and likeliest causes of their spelling errors, and measure how much progress they achieve in spelling proficiency as they move to higher grades. An additional purpose of the study was to investigate teachers' perceptions of the spelling problems of Arab learners of English, attitudes towards teaching spelling, and practices in spelling. To answer these inquiries, students' spelling errors were collected and analyzed from compositions written by over 537 male students from four different educational levels, Grades 9, 10, 11, and 12. Frequency of spelling errors for each grade was calculated and compared to the other grades. Then, errors were categorized according to their types and likely causes for each grade. Variations in performance between the four levels were noted and analyzed. Teachers' perceptions, attitudes and practices were investigated using questionnaires and interviews. Results show that the frequency of spelling errors in students' written production is high and that students show insignificant progress as they graduate from high school. The spelling problems in UAE public schools at these levels appear to be resistant to instruction in that students in the different levels have similar spelling problems. Additionally, the teacher survey and interview results demonstrate that little attention is given to this problem. Spelling activities are very rare in textbooks, the participating teachers do not receive any training on how to teach spelling, they do not devote adequate time to teaching spelling, and some teachers have misconceptions about the nature of spelling problems, their causes and effective ways of responding to them.

English language education has become a vital part of many educational systems in the world. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the official language is Arabic, but with the diversity of the population, English is used as the language of wider communication. English is not only used as a lingua franca among the multiple nationalities and ethnic groups that reside in the UAE, but also proficiency in English is perceived to be fundamental for any student seeking a prosperous career. Thus, bilingualism has led to widespread use of English among the young Arab generation who are gradually "losing their ability to think and produce knowledge in Arabic" (Badry, 2007, p. 1). Given this widespread use of English in all areas of communication, this study explored high school students' use of and attitudes towards their mother tongue, Arabic, and English. I sought to know how young Arabs' acquisition of English affected their use of Arabic and attitudes towards it, and whether or not the extensive use of English might lead to the loss of the Arabic language. Arabic speaking students between the ages of 14 and 16 from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds and from five private international schools in Dubai and Sharjah where the medium of instruction is English and the Arabic language is taught as a subject answered a questionnaire about their linguistic practices and attitudes towards their native language. In addition, 73 of the students' parents completed a survey about their awareness of whether the use of English impacts the maintenance of Arabic and their perceptions of the role of English in the future of their children. The analysis of the data collected from both these students and parents indicated that although there was an obvious impact of English on these young Arabs' use of Arabic, both students and parents were not fully aware of its consequences.

The aim of this thesis is twofold. First of all, in Chapters 1 and 2, we review the well-known Adomian Decomposition Method (ADM) and Variational Iteration Method (VIM) for obtaining exact and numerical solutions for ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, integral equations, integro-differential equations, delay differential equations, and algebraic equations in addition to calculus of variations problems. These schemes yield highly accurate solutions. However, local convergence is a main setback of such approaches. It means that the accuracy deteriorates as the specified domain becomes larger, that is as we move away from the initial conditions. Secondly, we present an alternative uniformly convergent iterative scheme that applies to an extended class of linear and nonlinear third order boundary value problems that arise in physical applications. The method is based on embedding Green's functions into well-established fixed point iterations, including Picard's and Krasnoselskii-Mann's schemes. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is established by implementing it on several numerical examples, including linear and nonlinear third order boundary value problems. The resulting numerical solutions are compared with both the analytical and the numerical solutions that exist in the literature. From the results, it is observed that the present method approximates the exact solution very well and yields more accurate results than the ADM and the VIM. Finally, the numerical results confirm the applicability and superiority of the introduced method for tackling various nonlinear equations.