This article indicates that Arab Libyan EFL learners are incompetent in oral communication. Despite spending years in learning English, they fail to employ that knowledge in real communicative situations. This might be the outcome of inadequate teaching approaches that are employed by Arab EFL teachers. Diaaba (2016) pointed out that, their overreliance on traditional approaches which emphasize extensive linguistic input rather than communicative output result in what Wolff (2010 cited in ibed, 2016 p. 338) calls 'mute English learners', who can read and write but cannot speak. The purpose of this study was to uncover challenges facing Arabic-speaking ESL students as well as teachers .13 participations are included in this article. Research questions focused on the needs of the Arab Libyan-speaking ESL students, the factors that influence their learning, and the problems the teachers face in supporting these students. Data sources included teacher and student interviews, classroom observations the results revealed that Arab Libyan learners face challenges in speaking skills due to linguistic and psychological barriers. The study concluded that several important challenges for teachers and students exist, including time, language support, and knowledge insufficient exposure to the target language and frequent use of Arabic were the main factors contributing to the Libyan EFL learners' speaking difficulties. Lack of speaking activities and overemphasis on accuracy at the expense of fluency by the teachers were other contributing factors.

Keywords: Speaking skills; speaking difficulties; instructional approaches; linguistic and psychological barriers

Previous studies have established that male and female speakers differ in their production of foreign language (FL) vowels due to biological differences in the vocal tract. These differences present a challenge when subjects recruited for an instrumental analysis of speech sounds include speakers of both genders. Most previous studies, therefore, focus on only one gender to avoid the problem of biological differences between males and females. However, different gender groups may perform differently in speaking tasks as their language experience may be influenced by other social factors. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the differences between Libyan male and female speakers in the production of English vowels, by examining the data with and without the use of normalization to determine the most difficult English vowels for Libyan male and female speakers. To achieve this goal, seventy Libyan participants (35 male and 35 female) were recruited to perform a speech production task of eleven English vowels embedded in carrier sentences. The data were collected and analyzed using PRAAT to extract the F1 and F2 formant frequencies for each vowel and to calculate the Euclidean distance (ED) of the English vowels produced by using the centroid as the reference point. With the unnormalized data, more overlaps were found for the male speakers when compared to the female speakers as the vowel space were more centred for the males compared to the females. With the unnormalized data, different pairs of vowel contrasts were identified as potentially problematic. However, with the normalized data, better categorical distinction is found in general. Only three vowels emerged as potentially problematic as the other pairs could potentially be disambiguated using vowel duration as a cue. The study demonstrated the utility of the Lobanov method for normalizing speech data to reduce variability associated to gender differences. The efficacy of the Lobanov method of normalization remains to be tested further to verify if the predictions made about difficult vowel pairs for Libyan EFL learners are indeed attested in their discrimination of these vowel pairs in future research. 

Medicinal herbs are used for growth promotion, disease control and other health benefits in aquaculture industry.

Here, we examined the effect of dietary laurel-leaf cistus (Cistus laurifolius) ethanolic extract on growth

performance, digestive enzyme activity, haematological profile and nonspecific immune responses in common

carp (Cyprinus carpio). In addition, resistance against Aeromonas hydrophila infection was examined. Common

carp was fed diets containing 0 (Control), 0.1 (CL0.1), 0.5 (CL0.5) and 1 (CL1) g kg􀀀 1 laurel-leaf cistus extract for

45 days. After 30 days, superoxide anion production (SAP) increased in CL0.1 and CL0.5 fish groups and at the

end of the study all experimental fish groups had higher SAP compared to that of the control (P ˂ 0.05).

Lysozyme activity (LA) was elevated in CL0.5 and CL1 treated groups on 30th day (P < 0.05), and this increase

was only observed in C0.1 fish group at the end of study compared to control (P ˂ 0.05). Myeloperoxidase activity

was significantly increased in CL0.5 and CL1 fish groups at the end of study. IL-1βgene expression was

significantly increased in treated fish in a dose-depended manner. Similar results were observed for transcription

of IL-6 and IL-8 (P < 0.05). Anti-inflammatory cytokines, IL-10 and TGF-β were highly up-regulated in the intestine

and head kidney of CL treated fish groups compared to control (P < 0.05). At the end of experiment,

significantly higher final body weight, weight gain, and specific growth rate were obtained in CL0.1 treated fish

group compared to control. However, growth was negatively affected in CL1 fish group (P < 0.05). CL1 fish

group had also a significantly higher FCR. Amylase activity was significantly increased in all experimental fish

groups compared to control (P ˂ 0.05). Trypsin activity was decreased in CL0.1 and CL1 fish groups (P ˂ 0.05).

WBC and RBC were significantly increased (P ˂ 0.05) in CL0.5 and CL1 fish groups, whereas haemoglobin,

haematocrit, mean cell, mean cell haemoglobin contents were no significantly changed among control and

treatment groups. Result of challenge test with A. hydrophila exhibited that survival rate in all treatment groups

was significantly higher than that of control. These findings demonstrated that laurel-leaf cistus at 0.1 g kg􀀀 1 can

be a suitable candidate for growth promotion, immune system induction and infection control in fish.

The salinity of irrigation water is a serious problem facing crop plants in the Mediterranean region, where plants are exposed to high temperatures and severe shortage of water in the dry season. So, this study was carried out in order to test the effects of five different salinity levels of sodium chloride (0.0, 50, 100, 150, 200 and 300 mM) on seed germination and early seedling growth of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). Fifty homogenous and cleaned seeds were germinated in Petri dishes inthree replicates. The salt stress decreased seed germination, the response of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) to salt stress and water stress was evaluated at the germination stage. The severe reduction in germination percentage and particularly germination speed with prolonged lag period by moderate salinity level at 100 mM NaCl, suggests that Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is a salt-sensitive species during germination. Salinity reduced germination uniformity and germination synchrony and might delay start of germination but accelerates its termination with a consequent shortening of the time spread of germination. The recovery percentage was lo wer but speed of recovery was higher compared with the corresponding parameters of the control seeds. Recovery percentage was slightly improved with increasing in the concentration of NaCl.

Abstract: This study was designed to evaluate the growth and digestive enzyme activity parameters of rainbow trout juvenile Oncorhynchus mykiss fed diets containing different levels (0%, 0.1%, 0.5% or 1%) of Glycyrrhiza glabra, Coriandrum sativum and Cassia angustifolia aqueous methanolic extract as a feed additive seventy-five days. The fish with initial weight of 22.65 ± 0.07 g were divided into 30 tanks so that 10 groups would be formed and stored as 50 fish in each tank, so the experiment was started as three replications. At the end of every month, samples are collected from the digestive system for use in measuring digestive enzymes, and scales and weights for use in measuring growth rate. Digestive enzymes like pepsin, trypsin, amylase and lipase and growth parameters such as final weight, weight gain (WG), specific growth rate (SGR), feed conversion ratio (FCR). Amylase, lipase, pepsin and trypsin are different in terms of enzyme activities. The effect of medicinal plants gave a good indication of improvement in the effectiveness of digestive enzymes with the length of the experiment during the surrounding environment. The values related to the growth parameters were lower than the control group in the study where similar or low values were encountered.