User:Ibrahim M Al-Shaer

Ibrahim Al-Shaer is currently the Minister of Social Development in the 17th government of the State of Palestine. He has 25 years of experience in higher education, holding different academic and administrative positions. Al-Shaer was a recipient of a 1998 scholarship from ASAI in conjunction with Al-Quds Open University to study for a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading, where he wrote a very interesting thesis on the application of prototype theory to grammatical categories. The core of the thesis offered a very detailed and insightful analysis of the result of various psycholinguistics experiments examining the relative speed of verification of various grammatical constructions. The thesis demonstrated clearly that individual lexical items and context play a very large role in determining speed of verification and understanding. The study raised important questions for the development of the model known as "Construction Grammar". Al-Shaer was also a recipient of a 1989 scholarship from the British Council, to study for a Master of Linguistics for ELT at Lancaster University. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English language and a Diploma in secondary education in 1986 from Bethlehem University. Al-Shaer’s main research interests are in the fields of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, construction grammar, semantics, syntax, ELT applications, writing skill, corpus linguistics, e-learning, innovation, leadership and creativity.