ئەز   Aveen Mohammed Hasan

In Bahdini Kurdish (henceforth, BK), the realisation and the phonetic features of the glottal stop (GS) has not been extensively investigated and there is a debate about its phonemic status. In one hand, it is considered a phoneme that occurs only in a word-initial position. On the other hand, it is not con- sidered a phoneme but optionally produced at the beginning of vowel-initial words and does not affect meaning. The study aims at identifying the realisation of this sound experimentally, analyses its acous- tic features and whether it is affected by parameters such as vowel type, vowel position in the word and stress. The study is based on read speech produced by 10 BK native speakers. Then it is analysed phonetically using Praat to identify the presence/absence of the GS. Then the number of occurrences of the GSs are compared across vowel types, vowel position and stress. The results show that the GS is an epenthetic sound in BK that is inserted by the speakers to avoid onsetless syllables and to avoid vowel clusters. Different phonetic variations of the sound are realized in BK: A clear closure of the glottal stop, intermittent vocal folds vibrations during the GS closure, vocal folds vibrations start sim- ultaneously with the GS release. It appears not to be affected by stress but by position, as it is found more medially in V+V contexts than initially, and vowel quality as it is produced more before low vowels than non-low vowels.

Articulation tests record and analyze children’s speech. Theyare used to determine which sounds children can or cannot say or if the speech errors the children produce are developmentally appropriate or they are delayed.The aim of this study was to develop an articulation test for Bahdini Kurdish preschool-agechildren. For this purpose, a picture-naming test was designed to elicit spontaneous single-word responses representing 26 consonants in initial, medial and final positions and 8 vowels in medial positions. Seven experts were asked to review the test and complete a questionnaire. Then, it was presented to 65 normal Bahdini Kurdish speaking children. They were 38 males and 27 females from three different age groups: 3, 4, and 5years old. The children’s responses were recorded and then scored for each correct utterance and picture identification. The results show that there are no significant differences among the experts’ responses which reflect their approval for the test to be a valid tool for collecting the phonetic inventory of the children. There is a significant and high correlation between correct word utterances and picture identification which provesthe content validity of the test. Finally, there are no significant differences between males and females indicatingthat the test is suitable for both genders, while significant differences were found among age groupsin which olderchildren performed better than younger ones. Thus, the test is a valid and a reliable tool that can be applied to collect the phonetic inventory of Bahdini Kurdish speaking children.

The study investigates the impressions of students at University of Zakho, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, about e- learning during the Covid-19, highlighting some problems resulted from using this e-learning system. Also, the statistical significance of correlations according to gender is calculated. Using qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection, a questionnaire of seven items is utilized via google document and sent to nearly 1000 participants (males and females) via social media and online platforms. Only 752 responses returned. The data were interpreted and analyzed by Excel sheets and SPSS software. As there was statistical significance in gender differences, the results showed that the majority of the participants do not view e-learning as a fun process for their education and they have no willingness to use it for their future studies. In addition, more than half of the participants agree that (1) e-learning is costly; (2) lectures are better understood in classrooms; (3) e-learning is not adequate because of the internet and electricity outage; and (4) e-learning leads to some eye problems and headaches. Generally, knowing the students’ impressions about using e-learning for their education will be helpful for the university administrators, educational policy makers, teachers to determine the students’ genuine needs, motivation or challenges. This will be helpful to gain an understanding of e-learning in Kurdistan Region of Iraq, to cope with challenges involved in the process of e-learning, and develop approaches to solve the problems resulted from.

Verbal interaction is organized into sequences of utterances which are understood according to their sequential context. One of them is the opening sequences which are the initiation chunks of speech in order to start a conversation. Much work has been done on the opening sequences in other languages, whereas these sequences have not received attention by researchers in Kurdish. The study is the first attempt to identify the structure of the opening sequences in one variety of Kurdish, namely, Behdini. Besides, it will show the forms of each sequence identified in the structure and how the structures and sequences vary according to gender. The study is based on the analysis of the opening sequences of 77 radio phone call-in conversations. The data has been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively using the conversation analysis approach. Two structures of opening sequences in Kurdish are identified depending on whether the call is known or unknown. For the caller-unknown conversations, the structure is summons answer, greeting, how are you sequence, identification, and greetings sending/ compliments/ guest welcoming sequence. In the caller-known, identification sequence is not realized. The study identified the common forms of each sequence realized in the structure of the opening sequences. Some gender variations are realized in the structure of the opening sequences, their sequences and forms. The study is important because it will help identify language-specific conventions of opening sequences and to which extent they vary according to social factors. Besides, it will enrich the typological studies of opening sequences by adding another language-specific convention of opening sequences to the ones already investigated and to pave the way to formulate general or even universal principles of organisation of talk in interaction.

Loanwords are the words that are borrowed from other languages to be incorporated into a recipient language to be part of its linguistic system. Using loanwords is influenced by different factors and differs from one language or dialect to another. The current study compares the usage of loanwords in the written texts of two dialects of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji dialect (NK) and Middle Kurmanji dialect (MK) to identify which dialect uses loanwords more frequently. ìAvroî and ìKhabatî, the two local dailies, are used representing NK and MK respectively. The content of some of their articles are analysed according to the topics, i.e. politics, economics, law, science, arts and sport and the loanwords of each topic are categorized according to the number of occurrence, donor language and part of speech. The results reveal that MK dialect uses loanwords more frequ- ently compared to NK. There are inter and intra-dialectal variation according to factors such as the topic and donor language while no differences have been noted according to the part of speech. Thus, the current study reveals that adopting and using loanwords are significantly influenced by different factors such as dialect, topic, linguistic category and donor language.

This study investigates the students’ perceptions towards literature integration in language learning in the English Language Departments (henceforth ELD) at Duhok and Zakho universities. Knowledge about students’ perceptions will influence their interest and language learning development. Literature is an important part of the syllabus at most ELDs in the Kurdish universities. Although studies have shown the importance of the learners’ perception, no studies have examined the students’ perceptions towards their literature modules in the ELDs at the Kurdish universities. The study is based on the responses of 268 undergraduate students to a questionnaire consisting of close-ended, multiple choices (quantitative data) and open-ended questions (qualitative data). The quantitative data is analyzed using the statistical analysis software (SPSS) and the qualitative using thematic analysis. The majority of the students have positive perceptions towards literature integration in their study program. They show that it contributes to the their language development in general and their vocabulary, speaking and reading skills in particular and novel is selected as the most beneficial literary genre for language development. Additionally, literature contributes to develop the learners’ cultural awareness in general and helps to identify the similarities and differences between the English culture and the learners’ own culture. The study also shows the contribution of literature to the learners’ personal growth in terms of active participation in class activities, increasing their critical thinking and analytical skills and helps them to understand theirs and other people’s experiences. The students are satisfied with the selected literary texts and topics and to some extent with the teaching methods which are mostly teacher led, but they suggest more students’ involvement. However, students face some difficulties, mostly language difficulty, that need to be taken into consideration. Thus, it is recommended that literature should be kept in the ELDs curriculum and teachers and administrators should make students aware of the value of the literature, understand the students needs and work to overcome the problems they encounter in literature study. Generally, knowing the students’ perceptions towards literature classes will be helpful for the researchers, educational policy makers and the language teachers to determine English language learners’ genuine needs, motivation or challenges and issues in relation to the use of literary texts as teaching materials and to develop a suitable teaching approach to use the literary texts.

Languages vary in terms of whether they are stress or non-stress accent languages. Concerning whether Northern Kurdish is a stress or non-stress accent language, there is no experimental investigation which has ever examined the phonetic correlates of word-level prominence. This study aims to establish the acoustic correlates of word-level prominence in Northern Kurdish. It is based on the production of pairs of segmentally parallel syllables occurring in stressed vs. unstressed positions. The materials are produced by 30 native speakers. Measurements of f0, duration and intensity of the test syllables in each token were extracted. The hypothesis is that if Northern Kurdish is a stress-accent language, the values of all the variables will be higher in the stressed condition than in the unstressed condition, whereas if it is a non-stress-accent language, only f0 values are predicted to be higher in the stressed condition. The results indicate that Northern Kurdish is a stress-accent language in that it employs both tonal and non-tonal correlates, especially duration, cues to word-level prominence. Additionally, stress influences the durations of the segmental material of the stressed syllables, i.e. consonants and vowels.

In the study of syntax, a special attention is given to the verb as the main constituent in the structure of the predicate. However, there exists some constructions in which a noun, adjective or an adverb are the main constituents in the predicate. In Kurdish, there is a debate in the literature on the analysis of these verbless constructions. On one hand, they are considered nominal sentences which do not contain a verbal element. On the other hand, they are considered small verbal sentences in which the agreement markers on the predicate act as verbal element. The study is an attempt to analyse the structure of these verbless constructions within the framework of minimal program (Chomsky, 1995) in one of the widely spoken variety of Kurdish, Northern Kurmanji, Bahdinani subdialect. It contributes to resolve the existent debate in Kurdish linguistics concerning the structure of these constructions. Additionally, it contributes to the typological variation in the syntactic properties of these constructions in Kurdish.

It is generally believed that stress in Kurdish is word-final. However, previous work and closer examination in our study revealed a number of exceptions to this pattern which can be analysed in a more coherent approach. Our study proposes a unified analysis of regular and irregular stress patterns in Kurdish. We investigated one of the widely spoken dialects of Kurdish, namely Northern Kurmanji. The study analyses the stress-assignment rule on the basis of a framework of prosodic phonology that divides the representation of speech into hierarchically organised units. These units delimit the application of different phonological patterns. Contrary to previous accounts, we propose the phonological word as the domain of stress assignment rules and a number of other phonological processes such as glide insertion, resyllabification, vowel deletion, vowel shortening that affect stress assignment. Additionally, we propose a cyclic analysis for rule application. Cases of stress rule application violation are considered as instances of stress-shift which are conditioned by different phonological and syntactical factors. Other cases of violations are accounted for by using recursive structure and phrase stress rule.

The study deals with the analysis of repetitions, their phonetic structures and functions as demonstrated in the organisation of talk-in-interaction in Kurdish. The repetitions are described as complex phonetic objects whose design has received no previous attention and are neglected by the scholars in the fields of discourse and conversation analysis studies in Kurdish. The main aims of the study are to identify the phonetic characteristics of repetitions in Kurdish, their functions and the relationship between differences in the phonetic features and their functions in speech. The study integrates the methodology of conversation analysis and impressionistic and instrumental phonetics to show how repetitions in a conversation are managed by the participants. The data used in this study comes from different types of natural speech, namely, face to face conversations, radio-phone-ins of Northern Kurdish. 27 cases of self repetitions have been analysed and they are lexical, phrasal and clausal with a range of syntactic forms. The study contributes to the theoretical issues of the prosody-pragmatics interface and participants’ understanding of naturally occurring discourse. It is hoped that such a study may contribute to language and information processing by providing a detailed analysis of patterns and functions of repetition in social interaction.

One of the strategies used as a hiatus resolution is glide insertion. Previous Kurdish phonological works involve only a description of glide insertion in one dialect neglecting the segmental context. This study provides an analysis of glide insertion in word-medial vowel clusters in Kurdish and it is the first attempt to analyse the effects of dialect and segmental context. The speech material includes a set of words consisting of a stem plus a suffix with different vowel sequences at their boundaries. It is produced by four native speakers from four Kurdish speaking areas. The data analysis involves word transcription, their segmentation and the comparison of vowel sequences within and across the subdialects. The results indicate that glide insertion is not the only strategy used as word medial hiatus resolution, but it depends on the segmental context and dialect. Generally, the vowel hiatus is resolved by /j/ insertion. Vowel deletion is also used obligatorily in some segmental contexts when the second vowel in a sequence is /i/ and also when there are identical vowels in a sequences. Dialectal variations are observed in some vowel sequences in which /j/ insertion and vowel deletion both are used and when the first vowels in the sequence are the high back vowels in that /j/ and /w/ insertions are used. The findings suggests that /j/ insertion is the default strategy to resolve word-medial vowel clusters in Kurdish, the insertion of /w/ or vowel deletion are other strategies which are limited to some dialects and vowel sequences.

This paper deals with the formal style, its uses and features in Northern Kurmanji (NK) Kurdish. The formal style is one of the social styles of language. It is apparently used among people who are not familiar with each other and in various socially formal situations: formal conversations, religious, political and legal contexts, education, mass media, instructions, notices, official documents and so on. Besides, the formal style of speech is characterized by some features: grammatical features such as the use of passive voice, complete and complex sentences, impersonality and nominalization; vocabulary features like the use of formal words and expressions, the use of euphemism, and the use of learned vocabulary to show the speaker's educational background, honorifics, politeness markers; semantic features, for instance, objectivity, explicity, indirect speech acts and the like. The paper falls into three sections. Section one briefly introduces the notion of formal style, aims of the study , scope of the study, the source of the data and the models used in data analysis and the value of the study. Section two sheds light on the formal style and its uses in Northern Kurmanji. Section three is devoted to the study of grammatical, vocabulary and semantic features of the formal style. Finally, the paper presents the main points and conclusions arrived at through out the research.

The present study deals with consonant clusters in the Northern Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish especially the dialect spoken by the Kurdish people in Duhok. A consonant cluster is a sequence of consonants which come together without any intervening vowels. Languages phonotactics differ as to what consonant clusters they permit. In Kurdish, a few studies tackle the clusters the language permits. It is important to know the type of clusters Kurdish permits in order to differentiate it from other languages. The main finding of the study is that Kurdish permits consonants clusters, but it does not allow more than two consecutive consonants in one syllable. The study falls into three sections. Section one is an introductory one. It gives a brief introduction about the subject of the research, statement of the problem, aim and scope of the study, nature of the data, data analysis and the value of the study. Section two tackles the definitions of the syllable, its types and structure because most phonotactic analyses are based on the syllable. Section three deals with the consonant clusters in Kurdish and the possible consonant clusters in the onset and coda parts of the syllable.

Loanwords are those words that are taken from other languages to be incorporated into a recipient language to be part of its linguistic system. However, using loanwords is influenced by different factors and differs from one language or dialect to another. The current study compares the usage of loanwords in the written texts of two dialects of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji dialect (NK) and Middle Kurmanji dialect (MK) to identify which dialect uses loanwords more frequently than the other. Avro and Khabat, the two local dailies, are used representing NK and MK respectively. In addition, the content of some of their articles are analysed according to the topics, i.e. politics, economics, law, science, arts and sport. Moreover, loanwords of each topic are categorized according to the number of occurrence, donor language and part of speech. The results show that MK dialect uses loanwords more frequently compared to NK. There are inter and intra-dialectal variation according to factors such as the topic and donor language while no differences are realised according to the part of speech. Thus, the current study reveals how adopting and using loanwords is significantly influenced by different factors such as dialect, topic, linguistic category and donor language.

Intonation phrase is one of the prosodic units in the prosodic structure hierarchy and it is the domain of intonational patterns. Although the importance of intonation phrase has been acknowledged by Kurdish intonational studies, there are no detailed and systematic analyses of this prosodic unit and its structure. This study is an attempt to systematically investigate the intonation phrase, its structure and the criteria used for its identification in one of the most widely spoken varieties of Kurdish, namely Northern Kurmanji dialect. The study is mainly centred on recordings of read speech which consists of experimentally sentences and a short story. The data is produced by 30 Kurdish native speakers who are undergraduate and staff at University of Duhok. The recordings were carried out at the University of Duhok using PRAAT. The data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the ToBI system. The intonation phrase is identified as a prosodic unit in the Kurdish prosodic structure hierarchy. Different parameters are identified for intonational phrasing in Kurdish as in other languages: phonetic cues (such as pause and pre-boundary lengthening), phonological parameters and syntactic-prosodic criteria. The study is a first attempt to systematically investigate the intonation phrase in Kurdish. It contributes to fill a gap in the Kurdish phonological studies. Besides, the study is a step in enriching the typological studies of intonation by adding another language to the ones already investigated, and to pave the way to a more refined theory of intonation by comparing and contrasting a greater number of languages.

Languages vary in terms of whether they are stress or non-stress accent languages. Concerning whether Northern Kurdish is a stress or non-stress accent language, there is no experimental investigation which has ever examined the phonetic correlates of word-level prominence. This study aims to establish the acoustic correlates of word-level prominence in Northern Kurdish. It is based on the production of pairs of segmentally parallel syllables occurring in stressed vs. unstressed positions. The materials are produced by 30 native speakers. Measurements of f0, duration and intensity of the test syllables in each token were extracted. The hypothesis is that if Northern Kurdish is a stress-accent language, the values of all the variables will be higher in the stressed condition than in the unstressed condition, whereas if it is a non-stress-accent language, only f0 values are predicted to be higher in the stressed condition. The results indicate that Northern Kurdish is a stress-accent language in that it employs both tonal and non-tonal correlates, especially duration, cues to word-level prominence. Additionally, stress influences the durations of the segmental material of the stressed syllables, i.e. consonants and vowels.

One of the strategies that are used to avoid vowel sequences is glide insertion (GI) (Zygiz, 2009; Uffman,2007). GI has not been studied properly in the previous works in Kurdish phonology which involve only an intuitive description of this process in one dialect (for example, Thackston, 2006 and Hasan, 2012 for NK Kurdish). No studies have described GI across a number of dialects to observe whether there are any dialectal variations. Additionally, the effects of segmental context on GI have not been investigated yet. This study provides an analysis of GI in word-medial vowel clusters at root-suffix boundary in Kurdish and it is the first attempt to analyse the effects of dialect and segmental context on GI. It describes this phonological process across four different sub-dialects and across different segmental contexts.

The importance of intonation has been unanimously agreed-upon among Kurdish linguists (Majid, 1987; Hasan, 2005; Mosa, 2009). However, there is no detailed description of Kurdish tonal events and their interaction with other prosodic and segmental features. This study is a first attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the tonal events of one of the most widely spoken varieties of Kurdish, namely, Northern Kurmanji (NK) within the framework of autosegmental-metrical phonology (AM). The present investigation which is part of a larger study is based on recordings of read speech which consists of experimentally designed sentences and a short story. The data is produced by 30 NK native speakers, undergraduate and staff at the University of Duhok. The data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the ToBI system (Beckman and Hirschberg, 1994; Beckman and Elam, 1997; Beckman, et al, 2005) to prepare the material for paradigmatic and syntagmatic comparisons of prominence marking and demarcation of boundary tones. We identified four bitonal pitch accents associated with the prominent syllables in NK, i.e. H*L, HL*, L*H and LH*. The pitch accents may be right-headed or left-headed. The starred tones are invariably timed to be associated with the accented syllable, whereas the unstarred tones are variable in their association and alignment, i.e. they may be associated with the accented syllable, in the following syllable(s), in the preceding syllable(s) (in the case of HL* and LH*) or they may be delayed to be aligned with the end of the intonation phrase (IP). All of these tonal events were found in nuclear position but only one type, namely L*H appears in the prenuclear position. Moreover, the pitch accents in NK are not specific to the accented lexical item and can never contrast different lexical items, but can contrast different intonational meanings. Additionally, it is shown that NK Kurdish is a stress-accent language in which both tonal and non-tonal features, especially duration, are used to indicate prominence. Furthermore, NK has a limited pitch accent distribution, i.e. pitch accents do not occur on every phonological word (PW) in an IP because it is governed by information context, utterance-type and sometimes the speaker. In our study, we also identified four types of boundary tones: L%, H%, LH% and 0%. It is observed that the co-occurrences of the boundary tones depend on the type of the pitch accent, i.e. the falling pitch accents (H*L and HL*) only co-occur with either H% or 0%, the rising pitch accent L*H co-occur with L%, LH% or 0%, and the rising pitch accent LH* co-occur with either L% or LH% boundary tones. The study contributes to the debate of a number of unsolved issues in the AM approach, such as the existence or non-existence of phrase accents and the (co-) occurrence of trailing and leading tones in bitonal pitch accents. It supports the motivation of trailing tones and following a number of authors (e.g. Ladd, 1983 and Gussenhoven, 1984), it indicates that there is no motivation for positing a phrase accent, i.e. in H*L and L*H pitch accents the trailing L and H tones undergoes a tone spreading rule or the other possibility is that their association is delayed to the IP-final and there is no obvious phonetic basis for inserting a phrase accent. Furthermore, the study not only contributes to fill a gap in the Kurdish phonological studies, but also can be considered the first step towards developing NK-ToBI, a language specific intonational transcription tool that adapts the leading framework for annotation of intonation in the field. Besides, the study is a step in enriching the typological studies of intonation by adding another language to those that have already been investigated, and to pave the way to a more refined theory of intonation by comparing and contrasting a greater number of languages.

Intonation patterns vary systematically between utterance types (Grabe & Post, 2002, Grabe, et al, 2003, 2008 & Grabe 2004). Differences in the intonational make-up of utterances may also be the result of intra- and inter-speaker variation (Peppe, et al, 2000 and Grabe & Post, 2002). Cross-utterance and cross-speaker variation of intonation patterns has largely been ignored in studies of Kurdish intonation. A few descriptive analyses of intonation patterns in specific utterance types have been carried out (e.g. Majid, 1987 & Mosa, 2009) but no comparative investigation of cross-utterance variation has been conducted to identify language specific intonational characteristics in Kurdish. Similarly, cross-speaker variation has not been considered. Previous work has focused solely on the analysis of individual speakers in a specific contexts (e.g. Hasan, 2005 & Mosa, 2009) without reference to the prosodic production of other speakers in similar situations. The present paper is part of a larger study and investigates the intonational patterns across-speakers and across utterance types in a Kurdish variety spoken in Northern Kurmanji (NK), employing the autosegmental-metrical framework (Pierrehumbert, 1980). The study is based on a set of designed sentences of different syntactic types, namely statements, declarative questions, wh-questions, exclamations and imperatives. The experimental design of the sentences controlled for voiced/sonorant portions, word lengths and stress placement. The data were produced by 30 native speakers of NK, 15 male and 15 female. The recordings were carried out in the University of Duhok using PRAAT software and were made directly onto a Dell computer laptop using a Creative Headset HS-600 microphone. The data were analysed in two stages. Firstly, the data were phonetically and prosodically annotated in adaptation of the IViE (Grabe et al, 1998) including orthographic and phonetic transcription, demarcation of break index and prominent syllables, annotation of phonetic and phonological pitch targets. In the second stage, paradigmatic and syntagmatic comparisons were made within and across the different utterance types. The identification of specific prosodic cues allows for an investigation of phrasing, location of the primary prominence and the shape of the f0 contour, characteristics that have been shown to provide salient acoustic cues in the perception of speech (Grabe, Nolan & Farrer, 1998). The results show that both utterance type and speaker have an effect on intonation in Kurdish. First, there is less cross utterance and cross-speaker variation in phrasing in comparison to the other two aspects of intonation because most of the utterances are produced as one intonational phrase. Second, there is a considerable variation in the location of the primary prominence which seems to largely depend on sentence type, i.e. in statements, primary prominence is placed on the preverbal element, either on the verb or the preverbal element in declarative questions, in the question word in the wh-questions, in the exclamation marker in the exclamations and in the first syllable of the verb in the imperatives. Thirdly, there is variation in the shape of the f0 contour within and across utterance types: • More than one f0 pattern is realised for each utterance type, e.g. four for statements (rise-fall, rise-fall-level, falling & falling-level) two for declarative questions (rise-fall-rise & fall-rise), three for wh-questions (rise-fall, rise-fall-level, rise-fall-rise), two for exclamations (rise-fall & rise-fall-level) and four for imperatives (rise-fall, falling, rise-fall-level, falling-level). • There is an overlap between some utterance types, for instance, the contour rise-fall-level is realised in four of the utterance types examined (statements, wh-questions, exclamations and imperatives). • Some patterns are found more commonly in some utterance types but less in others, e.g. rise-fall-rise is more frequent in the declarative questions but less frequent in the wh-questions. • Finally, some other patterns are restricted to one utterance type, for example, the fall-rise is only realised in declarative questions. The findings not only provide a description of the NK intonational system in different sentence types, but also contributes to our knowledge of the organisation of intonational phonological systems. The understanding of regional variability in the systematic organisations of intonational patterns and other prosodic cues will allow for a deeper understanding of prosodic and intonational typology and phonology.

The workshop will cover empirical and theoretical approaches in the study of low- resource languages. It offers a unique opportunity to learn various perspectives regarding passive and relative clause structures. Moreover, the relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches will be discussed in open discussion sessions. In addition, this year we are offering a lecture series on open access publications, and we have two guests from Glossa and Language Science Press. Various topics related to the publication of articles and books will be discussed during these sessions. We will also provide presentations on PhD admission formalities alongside workshops on different grant possibilities for MA and PhD students as well as postdocs. The workshop on empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of low-resource languages introducing a range of techniques for data collection, their weaknesses and strengths. This may be of interest to researchers from the fields of linguistic typology, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and empirical linguistics as well as to researchers working on applied linguistics. During the workshop, participants with an interest in different linguistic approaches will be able to discuss their ideas and methodology with members of the teaching team. The first day will provide a general introduction to passive and relative clause structures. From day two, we will offer a range of empirical, typological, and experimental methods in analyzing data. Participants of the workshop will be doing exercises on some of the languages to get practical experience at working with their object languages. All participants are invited to join a series of plenary research talks on the different topics and also to participate in the general question and answer sessions. The workshop will be held as a hybrid event, i.e. an online-offline event. In the event of any COVID restrictions, the summer school participants will be notified in advance and the event will become fully online.

English Language Department in collaboration with Language Center is organizing a workshop for all the teachers involved in teaching Academic English as a unified non-departmental curriculum in the departments of University of Zakho. The aim of the workshop is to give an introduction to the process of teaching the course, the handbook, the assessment strategies and explain the nature of the recorded and in class lectures which will be used in the course. Finally, the suggestions and questions of the teachers will be discussed.