An Investigation of English as Foreign Language Students' Attitudes Toward Improving Their Speaking Abilities at KRI Universities

The study examines English as Foreign Language (EFL) students’ attitude towards developing their speaking abilities at KRI University in order to better understand the disparities in speaking competency among undergraduates. The study utilized a quantitative approach and employed a 4-item interview survey to gather data for the study. The survey interview questionnaire was adopted from Wang, Kim, Bong, and Ahan (2013) and administered to 100 students in the departments of English of six universities in Iraq's Kurdistan Region. A semi-structured interview was developed for EFL students. The questionnaire was online and an open-ended one. The data from the participants was analyzed using thematic analysis with (SPSS) software. The finding revealed a perceived failure in EFL students' English-speaking skills and this was reported along with causes of the perceived difficulty. The finding also revealed a poor level of speaking ability among EFL undergraduates as well as little education in the skill at the university level. Apart from these, the study discovered some major challenges for EFL students such as lack of confidence, lack of planning, a demotivating atmosphere, incorrect word choice, poor gestures, and incorrect style which made the students not to be successful in their speaking abilities. The study suggested that EFL learners' competency should be securitized to strengthen their speaking abilities in the light of the results of the study. Speaking is a crucial ability in language acquisition and EFL teachers should help their students acquire it. As a means of improving students' communicative ability, task-based instruction should be utilized in educational institutions and universities. The implication of this paper is that speaking difficulties among EFL students in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region institution can be solved by putting greater focus on this ability. There are several issues to consider, including teachers, instructional methodologies, the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and assessment rules.

Robust Osberver Synthesis for Lipschitz and One-Sided Lipschitz Nonlinear Systems

Practically, system dynamics are nonlinear, requiring the estimation of unknown states, which encourages the observer schemes to be implanted in control structures. This dissertation presents estimation andltering of the Lipschitz and one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear systems and provides robustness against L2 normbounded disturbances and parameter uncertainties for state estimation. The developed approaches overcome the practical consequences of time-delays, perturbations and disturbances. Robust state estimation for Lipschitz and one-sided Lipschitz nonlinear systems is established by the adoption of Luenberger-like observer scheme, which is extended to the generalizedltering scheme to exhibit diverging manifolds, namely, the conventional static-gainlter and dynamiclter as speci c scenarios. Further, the presented estimation schemes unfolded the application based designs, including observer-based control of the nonlinear systems. Observer-based controller application is a duple process: It requires the estimation of unknown states atrst step, while in second stage, a controller is designed using these estimated states. A decoupling condition, necessary and su cient, for the presented approach, is explored to obtain controller and observer gains. Moreover, the controller scheme is further extended to overcome time-varying parametric uncertainties and norm-bounded disturbances. Convex optimization is adopted to solve the nonlinear constraints by combining nested bilinear-term-solver approach with a nonlinear optimization-based cone complimentary linearization. Comprehending the contributions of this dissertation, robust estimation based approaches for Lipschitz and one-sided Lipschitz systems are explored under output delays. Delay-range-dependent stability criterion is adopted to establish the stability, which foregrounds less conservative schemes. Robust generalizedltering for delayed nonlinear systems extends the concept of estimation tolter the noises and perturbations. Furthermore, robust estimation scheme for the nonlinear systems against parametric uncertainties is provided under measurement delay. Robust observer-based controller schemes as applications of the proposed estimation methods are studied. Numerical simulation results of practical systems are provided.