Women’s Representation in Saudi Car Advertisements: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Alyaa Olwi, Areej Albawardi Journal of Arabian Studies, 2025 The lifting of the driving ban in Saudi Arabia has been a turning point for Saudi women. This historical event was covered by various media outlets and advertisers have benefited from the resulting shift in product marketing. This study employs a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach, adopted from Baldry and ThibaultFootnote1 and Kress and van Leeuwen,Footnote2 to accommodate the multimodal nature of advertisements. Specifically, the study analyzes six YouTube videos from 2020 and 2021 featuring women in car advertisements. The results indicate that celebrating women’s achievements is an indirect way of marketing cars. In addition, the discourse on empowerment is reflected in women’s language, interactions, activities, and interpersonal relationships. Representations of women in the advertisements create a balance between global empowerment and local cultural traditions. This can be seen in how these empowered women participate in global and local discourses.
Style Shifting on X: A Comparison of Saudi Male and Female Academics Hajar Alduwaihi, Areej Albawardi 3l Language Linguistics Literature, 2024 This study explores the phenomena of diglossia and style shifting among Saudi academics on X, with a particular focus on gender differences in these linguistic practices. The research aims to contribute to the understanding of the complex interplay between language, gender, and digital communication in the Arabic context. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses of a corpus of tweets from 80 Saudi academics (40 male and 40 female) across four Saudi universities. The data, consisting of 800 tweets, were systematically analysed to identify instances of style shifting across lexical and functional categories. The findings reveal an occasional presence of style-shifting in the digital communication of Saudi academics, with both male and female participants employing non-standard forms of Arabic in their posts. The results show that female academics have a slightly higher overall rate of style shifting, with males using more lexical shifts and females more functional shifts. The pervasive nature of style shifting across lexical and functional categories in the posts of Saudi academics underscores the need for a more dynamic approach to the study of language use and variation in the Arabic context. The findings have significant implications for Arabic linguistics, language variation theories, and language education, particularly in the context of teaching Arabic as a foreign language. The study serves as a catalyst for further research on the intersection of language, gender, and digital communication in the Arab world, contributing to ongoing efforts to promote linguistic diversity, cultural understanding, and social justice in the digital age. Keywords: Arabic language; digital communication; gender difference; Saudi academics; style shifting
Detecting Qassimi Saudi Dialect in Saudi Digitally-mediated Communication: A Linguistic Perspective Areej Albawardi International Journal of Arabic English Studies, 2024 This paper argues that there are some phonological, morphological and semantic spoken features that are faithfully transmitted to written texts in written interactions via social media. The study adopts a mixed methods approach to detect whether there is a match between the spoken Qassimi Saudi Dialect and its written counterpart. The data for this study comes from WhatsApp textual chats exchanged between 103 Qassimi Saudi speakers. In addition to the linguistic analysis of chats, an online questionnaire was employed to examine the perception of Qassimi as well as non-Qassimi Saudi speakers on whether words elicited from the data are from the Qassimi dialect or not. The findings indicate that some spoken features of Qassimi Arabic have been found in the written digitally-mediated communications of Qassimi speakers. Qassimi Dialect spoken features are found at the phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic levels. The findings of this study have a number of practical and methodological implications for linguists and dialecticians
Saudi women driving: images, stereotyping and digital media Areej Albawardi, Rodney H Jones Visual Communication, 2023 This article examines the representations of Saudi women driving that circulated shortly after the lifting of the ban and considers the social, commercial and technological forces that helped to shape those representations . A corpus of images was collected from two international image banks – Getty and Shutterstock – as well as from a Google Image search. The images use Van Leeuwen’s (2008) visual representation framework in Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between the images available in the image banks and those that were made prominent in the Google search. In addition, semantic metadata accompanying these images were also analysed in order to understand the linguistic constraints that had been put on searches for these images and the ontologies of the issue that they promoted. Finally, a more detailed analysis was performed on images that had been appropriated into different contexts such as news stories and advertisements to investigate how these images were adapted to support different political, cultural and commercial agendas. Findings suggest that images of Saudi women that circulated online internationally shortly after the lifting of the ban were mostly generic and decontextualized, creating simplified and trivialized depictions of gender relations and social change in the Kingdom. The analysis shows how commercial concerns which influence both the creation of stock images and the way they are taken up by news organizations and advertisers can sometimes have the effect of erasing the complexity of political events and reinforcing the very stereotypes they seem to be challenging.
Does Gender Matter? Motivation and Learning EFL: A Saudi Case Study Amani Alghamdi, Areej Albawardi, Nadya Alzuabi, Luluah Alshaiji International Journal of Arabic English Studies, 2023 Motivation is one of the most determining factors for the acquisition of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) with gender a key factor. This quantitative research focuses on gender, motivation, and EFL learning in Saudi Arabia. An adapted version of the Motivation and Attitude Questionnaire (MAQ) was used in March 2021 at two Eastern Province public secondary schools. Data were collected from 169 students (aged 16–18). The final sample frame (N=100) comprised a quota sample of 50 males and 50 females. Descriptive analytics affirmed that overall motivation to learn EFL was quite high (female M = 4.06; male M = 3.79). Extrinsic and instrumental motivation prevailed overall with intrinsic and integrative motivation highest for female respondents. Gendered differences were not significant at p< .005 (Asymp. Sig. = .772). Recommendations include (a) research to address contradictory results (level/type of motivation and gender influence) and (b) the mediating effect of attitude and (c) focused efforts to ensure intrinsic motivation in EFL education.
Politeness in an Educational Context Areej Albawardi, Albandari Alqahtani Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2022 Human daily social interaction is anchored in interpersonal discourse, and linguistic politeness is thus vital to our everyday language including face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Politeness conventions in emails are not being taught to students and seem to be a work-in-progress. In a power-asymmetrical context such as student-teacher interaction, requests are pragmatically demanding, complex, and inherently face-threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Little research has been conducted on face-saving and politeness in requests produced by a sufficient number of participants. This paper attempts to investigate requestive emails written in English by Saudi students directed to instructors belonging to the same Saudi academic institution. The study attempts to examine how English language female students employ linguistic politeness in composing their requestive emails. In more detail, it aims to examine English language students’ use of email openings and closings and uncover the different devices employed in both, including address term’s presence/absence and formality/informality. Results show that most students (97%) in the current data opt for including an opening pre-request, while only 72.5% of their emails include a closing.
 
 Received: 31 August 2022 / Accepted: 12 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022
Multivocality of Saudi COVID-19 discourse in social media posts: A socio-semiotic multimodal perspective Naimah Ahmad Al-Ghamdi, Areej Hammad Albawardi Gema Online Journal of Language Studies, 2020 This paper examines the discourse of COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus) in social media posts and argues that the mediated COVID-19 discourse in Saudi Arabia enacted a variety of voices and thematic discourses that cannot be fully evaluated without reference to the locality of the sociolinguistic semiotics of the speech community. It attempts to construct the various non-verbal multivocalities in written and visual COVID-19 discourse present in 24 texts obtained from Saudi social media platforms, namely WhatsApp and Twitter, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the months of February, March and April, 2020. WhatsApp and Twitter are chosen because they are considered the platforms most used by Saudis in Saudi Arabia (GlobalWebIndex, 2020a, 2020b). The study employs a socio-semiotic approach to the analysis of collected data following Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996), mediated discourse analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001) and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA). The analysis aims at integrating the social semiotics and multimodal approaches to better understand the dynamic Saudi discourse on COVID-19. The discourse on COVID-19 has revealed the dynamic multi-layered nature of governmental, individual and public voices pertaining to COVID-19 multi-discoursal themes, novel multimodal resources and the specific cultural semiotics of Saudi Arabia. The findings of the study revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic mediated discourse is relevant to the local speech community diglossic situation, cultural semiotics, social norms and integrated national identity.
Vernacular mobile literacies: Multimodality, creativity and cultural identity Areej Albawardi, Rodney H. Jones Applied Linguistics Review, 2020 This paper focuses on how advanced learners of English at a woman’s college in Saudi Arabia use Snapchat to communicate with their classmates. It examines not just the way the English language becomes a meaning making resource in these exchanges, but also how English is strategically mixed with photos, drawings, emoji’s, and other languages to create meanings, identities, and relationships. The theoretical framework used to understand these strategies is adopted from ‘geosemiotics’, an approach to discourse that focuses on how meanings (as well as identities and relationships) are created through the ways semiotic resources are arranged in physical space. The analysis highlights how Snapchat creates opportunities for female learners of English in Saudi Arabia to open up new ‘cultural spaces’, and how these spaces can facilitate their language learning. At the same time, it is argued, these new ‘cultural spaces’ are contingent on the various creative ways these learners make use ofphysical space. Implications for understanding the relationship between creativity and translanguaging are discussed.
