Dr. Abdulrahman Ali Al-Amri

Dr. Abdulrahman Ali Al-Amri has been the assistant deputy minister for international cooperation at the Ministry of Education since April. Prior to his new position, Al-Amri served as a full-time consultant for international cooperation at the ministry from November 2019 to March 2021. In 1999, Al-Amri received a bachelor’s degree in English from King Saud University (KSU), where he also attained a master’s degree in applied linguistics eight years later for his thesis on evaluating the sixth-grade English language textbook for Saudi boys’ schools. In 2011, he received another master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, after he successfully defended his thesis on neighborhood density in spoken word recognition in Arabic. Six years later, Al-Amri obtained a doctorate in linguistics from the same university. His doctoral thesis was titled “Phonological, Semantic and Root Activation in Spoken Word Recognition in Arabic: Evidence from Eye Movements.” From 1999 to 2008, Al-Amri was an English language teacher at a public school. For two years, he also served as an English instructor at a Royal Saudi Air Force school.

From August 2008 to November 2017, he worked as an instructor at the department of English language and literature at KSU, also serving there as assistant professor of psycholinguistics in the department of linguistics beginning in September 2017. Moreover, he chaired the statistics and information unit of the university’s College of Arts. He has also been the director of the English language program for Al-Farabi Colleges since September 2018.

With an interest in language testing and assessment, Al-Amri was a part-time consultant at the National Center for Assessment (Qiyas) from 2018 to 2019. He is also interested in statistical analyses, international exams, standardized tests, large-scale surveys and quality management.