In the paper by Ghaith (2003, p. 83-93), the introduction is very brief and is really irrelevant to the subject matter of the investigation (p. 83-84). The investigation was about different learning styles and their effects on academic achievement, class cohesion and social support. Although the study was carried out on students learning English as a foreign language (EFL), the subject matter was irrelevant because it was the methods of learning and how they affected these parameters that were being examined, not how well these methods taught English per se. However, the introduction talks only about the fact that many countries use English as the language of instruction in universities, and that not being proficient in the language limits the access of such students to further education, and obstructs their academic achievements. In Lebanon, many students are not familiar enough with the English language to use it as their language of academic instruction. The researcher used students studying ELF as subjects in his study, but students in any subject would have served his purpose equally well.
The literature review is also rather brief and really does not give much detail on most of the studies it cites (Ghaith, 2003, p. 84-85). The first paper cited sets up the rationale behind the study, but the remainder are only cited briefly in the form of numbers of studies and the overall results. No details of how the studies were carried out are given. Ghaith (2003, p. 84-85) only presents generalized results gained from groups of studies that found similar results. There is no indication of who the subjects of these studies were, how the studies were conducted, the number of subjects studied, the assessment criteria used, and no results are presented from individual studies. The results reported are almost all the opinions of other authors gained by comparing the results of many studies conducted by third parties. No direct...