Search results for: literary words of foreign origin

Authors: Musa Alghamdi

Abstract:

Although Saudi students’ motivation to learn English language as a foreign language in Saudi Arabia have been investigated by a number of studies; these have appeared almost completely as using the quantitative research paradigm. There is a significant lack of research that explores the Saudi students’ motivation using qualitative methods. It was essential, as an investigator, to be immersed in the community to understand the individuals under study via their actions and words, their thoughts, views and beliefs, and how those individuals credited to activities. Thus, the study aims to explore the Saudi students’ motivation to learn English language as a foreign language in Saudi Arabia employing qualitative methodology via applying ethnography. The study will be carried out in Saudi Arabia. Ethnography qualitative approach will be used in the current study by employing formal and informal interview instruments. Gardner’s motivation theory is used as frameworks for this study to aid the understanding of the research findings. The author, an English language lecturer, will undertake participant observations for 4 months. He will work as teaching-assistant (on an unpaid basis) with EFL lecturers in different discipline department at a Saudi university where students study English language as a minor course. The researcher will start with informal ethnographical interview with students during his existence with the informants in their natural context. Then the researcher will utilize the semi-structural interview. The informal interview will be with 14-16 students, then, he will carry out semi-structural interview with the same informants to go deep in their natural context to find out to what extent the Saudi university students are motivated to learn English as a foreign language. As well as, to find out the reasons that played roles in that. The findings of this study will add new knowledge about what factors motivate universities’ Saudi students to learn English language in Saudi Arabia. Very few chances have given to students to express themselves and to speak about their feelings in a more comfortable way in order to gain a clear image of those factors. The working author as an EFL teacher and lecturer will provide him secure access into EFL teaching and learning setting. It will help him attain richer insights into the nature EFL context in universities what will provide him with richer insights into the reasons behind the weakness of EFL level among Saudi students.

Keywords: motivation, ethnography, Saudi, language

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Authors: Anastasios Ntousas

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The purpose of the following paper is to analyze the relationship between the lexical quality and the self-teaching hypothesis and their impact on the reading ability. The following questions emerged, is there a correlation between the effective reading experience that the lexical quality hypothesis proposes and the self-teaching hypothesis, would the ability to read by analogy facilitate and create stable, synchronized four-word representational, and would word morphological knowledge be a possible extension of the self-teaching hypothesis. The lexical quality hypothesis speculates that words include four representational attributes, phonology, orthography, morpho-syntax, and meaning. Those four-word representations work together to make word reading an effective task. A possible lack of knowledge in one of the representations might disrupt reading comprehension. The degree that the four-word features connect together makes high and low lexical word quality representations. When the four-word representational attributes connect together effectively, readers have a high lexical quality of words; however, when they hardly have a strong connection with each other, readers have a low lexical quality of words. Furthermore, the self-teaching hypothesis proposes that phonological recoding enables printed word learning. Phonological knowledge and reading experience facilitate the acquisition and consolidation of specific-word orthographies. The reading experience is related to strong reading comprehension. The more readers have contact with texts, the better readers they become. Therefore, their phonological knowledge, as the self-teaching hypothesis suggests, might have a facilitative impact on the consolidation of the orthographical, morphological-syntax and meaning representations of unknown words. The phonology of known words might activate effectively the rest of the representational features of words. Readers use their existing phonological knowledge of similarly spelt words to pronounce unknown words; a possible transference of this ability to read by analogy will appear with readers’ morphological knowledge. Morphemes might facilitate readers’ ability to pronounce and spell new unknown words in which they do not have lexical access. Readers will encounter unknown words with similarly phonemes and morphemes but with different meanings. Knowledge of phonology and morphology might support and increase reading comprehension. There was a careful selection, discussion of theoretical material and comparison of the two existing theories. Evidence shows that morphological knowledge improves reading ability and comprehension, so morphological knowledge might be a possible extension of the self-teaching hypothesis, the fundamental skill to read by analogy can be implemented to the consolidation of word – specific orthographies via readers’ morphological knowledge, and there is a positive correlation between effective reading experience and self-teaching hypothesis.

Keywords: morphology, orthography, reading ability, reading comprehension

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Authors: Issam Ben Jami

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Information retrieval in digital libraries is very important because most famous historical documents occupy a significant value. The word spotting in historical documents is a very difficult notion, because automatic recognition of such documents is naturally cursive, it represents a wide variability in the level scale and translation words in the same documents. We first present a system for the automatic recognition, based on the extraction of interest points words from the image model. The extraction phase of the key points is chosen from the representation of the image as a synthetic description of the shape recognition in a multidimensional space. As a result, we use advanced methods that can find and describe interesting points invariant to scale, rotation and lighting which are linked to local configurations of pixels. We test this approach on documents of the 15th century. Our experiments give important results.

Keywords: feature matching, historical documents, pattern recognition, word spotting

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Authors: Ying Zhu

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Recent years have witnessed a boom of foreign investments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Foreign investments provide critical capital for AI development but also trigger national security concerns of host states. A notable example is an increasing number of cases in which the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has denied Chinese acquisitions of US technology companies on national security grounds. On July 19, 2018, the Congress has reached a deal on the final draft of a new provision to strengthen CFIUS’s authority to review overseas transactions involving sensitive US technology. The question is: how to reconcile the emerging tension between, on the one hand, foreign AI investors’ expectations of a predictable investment environment, and on the other hand, host states’ regulatory power on national security? This paper provides a methodology to reconcile this tension under international investment law. Based on an examination, the national security exception clauses in international investment treaties and the application of national security justification in investor-state arbitration jurisprudence, the paper argues that a traditional interpretation of the national security exception, based on the necessity concept in customary international law, fails to take into account new risks faced by countries, including security concerns over strategic industries such as AI. To overcome this shortage, the paper proposes to incorporate an integrated national security clause in international investment treaties, which includes a two-tier test: a ‘self-judging’ test in the pre-establishment period and a ‘proportionality’ test in the post-establishment period. At the end, the paper drafts a model national security clause for future treaty-drafting practice.

Keywords: foreign investment, artificial intelligence, international investment law, national security exception

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Authors: Elizabeth Mahenge

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Unemployment is a problem that face many graduates all over the world. Every year universities in many parts of the world produce graduates who are looking for an employment. Swahili, a Bantu language originated in East African coast, can be used as an avenue for youth’s employment in South Africa. This paper helps youth to know about job opportunities available through teaching Swahili language. The objective of this paper is capacity building to youths to be teachers of Swahili and be ready to compete in the marketplace. The methodology was through two weeks online training on how to teach Swahili as a foreign language. The communicative approach and task-based approach were used.  Participants to this training were collected through a WhatsApp group advertisement about “short training for Swahili teachers for foreigners”. A total number of 30 participants registered but only 11 attended the training. Training was online via zoom. The contribution of this paper is that by being fluent in Swahili one would benefit with teaching job opportunities anywhere in the world. Hence the problem of unemployment among the youths would be reduced as they can employ themselves or being employed in academic institutions anywhere in the world. The paper calls for youths in South Africa to opt for Swahili language courses to be trained and become experts in the teaching Swahili as a foreign language.

Keywords: foreign language, linguistic market, Swahili, employment

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Authors: Paramet Damchoo

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The purpose of this study is to study the factors that influence the decision making of foreign volunteer tourists in Thailand. A sample size was 400 drawn from 10 provinces of Thailand using cluster sampling method. The factor analysis was used to analysis the data. The findings indicate that volunteer tourism which was based in Thailand contained a total of 45 activities which could be divided into 4 categories. The most of these tourists were from Europe including UK and Scandinavia which was 54.50 percent. Moreover, the tourists were male rather than female and 63.50 Percent of them ware younger than 20 years old. It is also found that there are 67.00 percent of the tourists used website to find where the volunteer tourism was based. Finally, the factors that influence the decision making of foreign volunteer tourists in Thailand consist of a wide variety of activities together with a flexibility in their activities and also low prices.

Keywords: decision making, volunteer tourism, special interest tourism, GAP year

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Authors: Noury Bakrim

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From the point of view of language morphodynamics, interpretative Readability of the text-result (the stasis) is not the external hermeneutics of its various potential reading events but the paradigmatic, semantic immanence of its dynamics. In other words, interpretative Readability articulates the potential tension between projection (intentionality of the discursive event) and the result (Readability within the syntagmatic stasis). We then consider that translation represents much more a metalinguistic conversion of neurocognitive bilingual sub-routines and modular relations than a semantic equivalence. Furthermore, the actualizing Readability (the process of rewriting a target text within a target language/genre) builds upon the descriptive level between the generative syntax/semantic from and its paradigmatic potential translatability. Translation corpora reveal the evidence of a certain focusing on the positivist stasis of the source text at the expense of its interpretative Readability. For instance, Fluchere's brilliant translation of Miller's Tropic of cancer into French realizes unconsciously an inversion of the hierarchical relations between Life Thought and Fable: From Life Thought (fable) into Fable (Life Thought). We could regard the translation of Bernard Kreiss basing on Canetti's work die englischen Jahre (les annees anglaises) as another inversion of the historical scale from individual history into Hegelian history. In order to describe and test both translation process and result, we focus on the pedagogical practice which enables various principles grounding in interpretative/actualizing Readability. Henceforth, establishing the analytical uttering dynamics of the source text could be widened by other practices. The reversibility test (target - source text) or the comparison with a second translation in a third language (tertium comparationis A/B and A/C) point out the evidence of an impossible event. Therefore, it doesn't imply an uttering idealistic/absolute source but the irreducible/non-reproducible intentionality of its production event within the experience of world/discourse. The aim of this paper is to conceptualize translation as the tension between interpretative and actualizing Readability in a new approach grounding in morphodynamics of language and Translatability (mainly into French) within literary and non-literary texts articulating theoretical and described pedagogical corpora.

Keywords: readability, translation as deverbalization, translation as conversion, Tertium Comparationis, uttering actualization, translation pedagogy

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Authors: Qi Wang

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Accurate pronunciation is the first condition of communication. Compared with the alphabetic languages, Chinese is more difficult for the foreigners to study as a second language, due to the tonal language with the meaningful characters as the written system, especially speaking. This research first presents the statistics of the typical errors of the pronunciations, based on the data of our two- year program of graduate students, which shown 90% of their speaking with strong foreign accents and no obvious change of the pitches, even if they could speak Chinese fluently. Second part, analyzed the caused reasons in the learning and teaching processes. Third part, this result of this research, based the theory of Chinese prosodic words, shown that the earlier the students get trained on prosodics at the beginning and suprasegmentals at intermediate and advanced levels, the better effects for them to communicate in Chinese as a second language.

Keywords: second language, prosodic word, foot, suprasegmental

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Authors: Rupali Chaudhary

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Shakespeare has been widely revisited by dramatists, critics, filmmakers and scholars around the globe. Shakespeare's kaleidoscopic work has been borrowed and redesigned into resonant patterns by artists, thus weaving myriad manifestations to pick from. Along with adaptation into wholly verbal medium (e.g., translations) the practice of indigenization through performing arts has played a great role in amplifying the reach of plays. The proliferation of Shakespeare's oeuvre commenced with the spread of colonialism itself. The plays illustrating the core values of Western tradition were introduced in the colonies. Therefore, the colonial domination extended to cultural domination. The plays were translated and adapted by the locals at times as it is and sometimes intermingled with the altered landscape and culture. The present paper discusses the global dimensions of Shakespearean cinema along with the historical cinematic shift from silent era to spoken dialogue in multiple languages. The methodology followed is descriptive in nature, and related information is availed from related literature, i.e., books, research articles and films. America and Europe dominated the silent era Shakespearean film production, thereby giving the term 'global' a less broad meaning. Five nations that dominated silent Shakespearean cinema were the United States, England, Italy, France, and Germany. Gradually the work of the exemplary figure with artistic and literary greatness surpassed the boundaries of the colonies and became a global legacy. Presently apart from English speaking nations Shakespearean films have been shot or produced in many of non-Anglophone locales. The findings indicate that when discussing about global dimensions of Shakespearean cinema various factors can be considered: involvement of actors and directors of foreign origin, transportability and universal comprehensibility of visual imagery across geographical borders, commodification of art or West's use of it as a tool of cultural hegemony or promotion of international amity, propagation of interculturalism through individual director's cultural translations and localization of Western art. Understanding of Shakespeare as a global export also depends on how an individual Shakespearean film works. Shakespeare's global appeal for cinema does not reside alone in his exquisite writings, distinctive characters, the setting, the story and the plots that have nurtured cinema since the medium's formative years. Shakespeare's global cinematic appeal is present in the spirit of cinema itself, i.e., the moving images capturing human behaviour and emotions that the plays invoke in audiences.

Keywords: adaptation, global dimensions, Shakespeare, Shakespearean cinema

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Authors: Narimen Rdhaounia Mohamed Kouni

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Our aim in this paper is to identify the origins of inflation in Tunisia on the period from 1988 to 2018. In order to estimate the model, an ARDL methodology is used. We studied also the effect of informal economy on inflation. Indeed, we estimated the size of the informal economy in Tunisia based on Gutmann method. The results showed that there are three main origins of inflation. In fact, the first origin is the fiscal policy adopted by Tunisia, particularly after revolution. The second origin is the increase of monetary variables. Finally, informal economy played an important role in inflation.

Keywords: inflation, consumer price index, informal, gutmann method, ARDL model

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Authors: R. Vidhya

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Nigeria, the seat of canonical literature in Africa, though widely acclaimed as the literary capital of the continent, it failed to produce women writers in its literary arena till the 1960s. Only after 1966, with the publication of the first novel by a women writer, Nigeria saw the emergence of women’s writing through which the world witnessed an upsurge in the sensitization of women’s issues in Africa. The Nigerian Igbo women’s writing threw light on gender discrimination in postcolonial Africa. Their works were instrumental in bringing a remarkable change in the perception of gender in a male dominated society. The social mindscape of the land which strongly believed that feminist ideologies could be highly detrimental to its patriarchal setup is slowly changed through the changing perspectives of gender. This paper aims to analyse the select works of Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to deconstruct the dialectics of gender, which has been realised in the works of these women writers.

Keywords: gender discrimination, Igbo women's writings, postcolonial Africa, changing perspective

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Authors: Eleonora Sasso

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This paper takes as its starting point the notions of cognitive linguistics and lexical blending, and uses both these theoretical concepts to advance a new reading of Margaret Atwood’s latest writings, one which sees them as paramount literary examples of norm and usage in bilingual Canadian lexicography. Atwood’s prose seems to be imbued with Canadianisms and neologisms, lexical blends of zoomorphic forms, a kind of meeting-point between two conceptual structures which follow the principles of lexical economy and asyntactic relation. Atwood’s neologisms also attest to the undeniable impact on language exerted by Canada’s aboriginal peoples. This paper aims to track through these references and with the aid of the Eskimo-English dictionary look at the linguistic issues – attitudes to contaminations and hybridisations, questions of lexical blending in literary examples, etc – which they raise. Atwood’s fiction, whose cognitive linguistic strategy employs ‘the virtues of scissors and matches’, always strives to achieve isomorphism between word form and concept.

Keywords: Atwood, Canadianisms, cognitive science, Eskimo/English dictionary

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Authors: Waseem Al Talalwah, Shorok Ali Al Dorazi, Roger Soames

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The inferior gluteal artery is a largest branch of the anterior division of internal iliac artery. It escapes from the pelvic cavity through the greater sciatic foramen below the lower edge of piriformis. In gluteal region, it provides several muscular branches to gluteal maximus and articular branch to hip joint. Further, it provides sciatic branch to sciatic nerve. Present study explores the origin of the inferior gluteal artery of 41 cadavers in Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, University of Dundee, UK. It arose directly from the anterior division of internal iliac artery in 39% and 45.7% indirectly as with the internal pudendal artery. Further, it arose indirectly from anterior division with internal pudendal and obturator arteries in 1.5% referred as obturatogluteopudendal trunk in 1.5%. Therefore, it arose from the anterior division of the internal iliac artery in 86.2%. However, it found to be as a branch of the posterior division of internal iliac artery in 7.7% which is either a direct branch in 6.2% as or indirect branch (as from the sciatic artery) in 1.5%. It neither arose from anterior or posterior division in 1.5% as from gluteopudendal trunk arising from the internal iliac artery bifurcation site. In few cases, the inferior gluteal artery found to be congenital absence in 4.6% which is compensated by the persistent sciatic artery. Therefore, radiologists have to aware of the origin variability of the inferior gluteal artery to alert surgeons. Knowing the origin of the inferior gluteal artery may help the surgeons to avoid iatrogenic sciatic neuropathy or gluteal claudication due to prolonged ligation in pelvic procedures such as removing prostate or of uterine fibroid.

Keywords: inferior gluteal artery, internal pudendal, sciatic nerve, sciatic artery, gluteal claudication, sciatic neuopathy

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Authors: Daphne Dean C. Arenos, Glorificacion L. Quinopez

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This study has been conducted to describe the digitized stories authored by a Grade 1 pupil struggling in reading. The main goal was to find out the effect of authoring digital stories on the reading skill of a grade 1 pupil in terms of vocabulary and sequencing skills. To be able to explicate the data collected, a case study approach has been chosen. This case study focused on a 6 years old Filipino child born and raised in Spain and has just transferred to a private school a year ago. The pupil’s struggles in reading, as well as her experiences with digitized stories, were further described. The findings revealed that authoring digital stories facilitate the reading progress of a struggling pupil. The presence of literary elements in the pupil’s stories built her vocabulary and sequencing skills. Hence, authoring digital stories serve as an appropriate and effective scaffold for struggling readers.

Keywords: literary elements, reading skill, scaffold, sequencing skill, vocabulary

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Authors: Shilpi Tripathi

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After independence, Bangladesh had to learn to survive on its own without any economic crutches (aid). Foreign direct investment (FDI) became a crucial economic tool for the country to become economically independent. The government started removing restrictions to encourage foreign investment, economic growth, international trade, and the environment. FDI is considered as a way to bridge the saving-investment gap, reduce poverty, balance trade, create jobs for its vast labour force, increase foreign exchange earnings and acquire new modern technology and management skills in the country. At the same time, spillovers of foreign investments in Bangladesh, such as low wages (compared to laborers of developed countries), poor working conditions and unbridled exploitation of the domestic resources, environmental externalities, etc., cannot be ignored. The most important adverse implications of FDI inflows noticed are the environmental problems, which are further impacting the health and society of the country. This paper empirically studies the relationship between FDI, economic growth, international trade (exports and Imports), and the environment since 1996. The first part of the paper focuses on the background and trends of FDI, GDP, trade, and environment (CO₂). The second part focuses on the literature review on the relationship between all the variables. The last part of the paper examines the results of empirical analysis like co-integration and Granger causality. The findings of the paper reveal that a uni-directional relationship exists between FDI, CO₂, and international trade (exports and imports). The direction of the causality reveals that FDI inflow is one of the major contributors to high-volume international trade. At the same time, FDI and international trade both are contributing to carbon emissions in Bangladesh. The paper concludes with the policy recommendations that will ensure environmentally friendly trade, investment, and growth in Bangladesh for the future.

Keywords: foreign direct investment, GDP, international trade, CO₂, Granger causality, environment

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Authors: O. Yeret

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Visual resources are all around us, especially in today's media-driven world, which gravitates, more and more, towards the visual. As a result, authentic resources, such as television advertisements, become testaments – authentic cultural materials – that reflect the landscape of certain groups and communities during a specific point in time. Engaging language students with popular advertisements can provide a great opportunity for developing cultural awareness, a component that is sometimes overlooked in the foreign language classroom. This paper will showcase practical examples of using Israeli Television Ads in various Modern Hebrew language courses. Several approaches for combining the study of language and culture, through the use of advertisements, will be included; for example, targeted assignments based on students' proficiency levels, such as: asking to recognize vocabulary words and answer basic information questions, as opposed to commenting on the significance of an ad and analyzing its particular cultural elements. The use of visual resources in the language classroom does not only enable students to learn more about the culture of the target language, but also to combine their language skills. Most often, interacting with an ad requires close listening and some reading (through captions or other data). As students analyze the ad, they employ their writing and speaking skills by answering questions in text or audio form. Hence, these interactions are able to elicit complex language use across the four domains: listening, speaking, writing, and reading. This paper will include examples of practical assignments that were developed for several Modern Hebrew language courses, together with the specific advertisements and questions related to them. Conclusions from the process and recent feedback notes received from students regarding the use of visual resources will be mentioned as well.

Keywords: authentic materials, cultural awareness, second language acquisition, visual resources

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Authors: Ayala Amir

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The paper presents interdisciplinary research which draws on the literary study and the cultural study of photography to explore a literary genre defined by nostalgia – the photographed book for children. This genre, which was popular in the second half of the 20th century, presents the romantic, nostalgic image of childhood created in the visual arts in the 18th century (as suggested by Ann Higonnet). At the same time, it capitalizes on the nostalgia inherent in the event of photography as formulated by Jennifer Green-Lewis: photography frames a moment in the present while transforming it into a past longed for in the future. Unlike Freudian melancholy, nostalgia is an effect that enables representation by acknowledging the loss and containing it in the very experience of the object. The representation and preservation of the lost object (nature, childhood, innocence) are in the center of the genre of children's photography books – a modern version of ancient pastoral. In it, the unique synergia of word and image results in a nostalgic image of childhood in an era already conquered by modernization. The nostalgic effect works both in the representation of space – an Edenic image of nature already shadowed by its demise, and of time – an image of childhood imbued by what Gill Bartholnyes calls the "looking backward aesthetics" – under the sign of loss. Little critical attention has been devoted to this genre with the exception of the work of Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, who noted the nostalgic effect of the well-known series of photography books by Astrid Lindgren and Anna Riwkin-Brick. This research aims to elaborate Kümmerling-Meibauer's approach using the theories of the study of photography, word-image studies, as well as current studies of childhood. The theoretical perspectives are implemented in the case study of photography books created in one of the most innovative social structures in our time – the Israeli Kibbutz. This communal way of life designed a society where children will experience their childhood in a parentless rural environment that will save them from the fate of the Oedipal fall. It is suggested that in documenting these children in a fictional format, photographers and writers, images and words cooperated in creating nostalgic works situated on the border between nature and culture, imagination and reality, utopia and its realization in history.

Keywords: nostalgia, photography , childhood, children's books, kibutz

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Authors: Christopher Dick

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While the translation of 'literal language' poses numerous challenges for the translator, the translation of 'figurative language' creates even more complicated issues. It has been only in the last several decades that scholars have attempted to propose theories of figurative language translation, including metaphor translation. Even less work has applied these theories to metaphoric translation in literary texts. And almost no work has linked an analysis of metaphors in translation with the recent scholarship on conceptual metaphors. A study of literature in translation must not only examine the inevitable shifts that occur as specific metaphors move from source language to target language but also analyze the ways in which these shifts impact conceptual metaphors and, ultimately, the text as a whole. Doing so contributes to on-going efforts to bridge the sometimes wide gulf between considerations of content and form in literary studies. This paper attempts to add to the body of scholarly literature on metaphor translation and the function of metaphor in a literary text. Specifically, the study examines the metaphoric expressions in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. First, the issue of Hemingway and metaphor is addressed. Next, the study examines the specific metaphors in the original novel in English and the German translations, first in Annemarie Horschitz’s 1928 German version and then in the recent Werner Schmitz 2013 translation. Hemingway’s metaphors, far from being random occurrences of figurative language, are linguistic manifestations of deeper conceptual metaphors that are central to an interpretation of the text. By examining the modifications that are made to these original metaphoric expressions as they are translated into German, one can begin to appreciate the shifts involved with metaphor translation. The translation of Hemingway’s metaphors into German represents significant metaphoric loss and shifting that subsequently shakes the important conceptual metaphors in the novel.

Keywords: Hemingway, Conceptual Metaphor, Translation, Stylistics

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Authors: Sabitha Rahim

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In the context of teaching vocabulary of English as Foreign Language (EFL), the confluence of memory and retention is one of the most significant factors in students' language acquisition. The progress of students engaged in foreign language acquisition is often stymied by vocabulary attrition, which leads to learners' lack of confidence and motivation. However, among other factors, little research has investigated the importance of neuroplasticity in Foreign Language acquisition and how underused neural pathways lead to the loss of plasticity, thereby affecting the learners’ vocabulary retention and motivation. This research explored the effect of enhancing vocabulary acquisition of EFL students in the Foundation Year at King Abdulaziz University through various methods and neuroplasticity exercises that reinforced their attention, motivation, and engagement. It analyzed the results to determine if stimulating the brain of EFL learners by various physical and mental activities led to the improvement in short and long term memory in vocabulary retention. The main data collection methods were student surveys, assessment records of teachers, student achievement test results, and students' follow-up interviews. A key implication of this research is for the institutions to consider having multiple varieties of student activities promoting brain plasticity within the classrooms as an effective tool for foreign language acquisition. Building awareness among the faculty and adapting the curriculum to include activities that promote brain plasticity ensures an enhanced learning environment and effective language acquisition in EFL classrooms.

Keywords: language acquisition, neural paths, neuroplasticity, vocabulary attrition

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Authors: Chong Jiang, Liang Zhao, Hua Jian, Xiaoguang Wang

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The belief that there is a strong relationship between reading narrative and morality has generally become the basic assumption of scholars, philosophers, critics, and cultural critics. The virtuality constructed by literary novels inspires readers to regard the narrative as a thinking experiment, creating the distance between readers and events so that they can freely and morally experience the positions of different roles. Therefore, the virtual narrative combined with literary characteristics is always considered as a "moral laboratory." Well-established findings revealed that people show less lying and deceptive behaviors in the morning than in the afternoon, called the morning morality effect. As a limited self-regulation resource, morality will be constantly depleted with the change of time rhythm under the influence of the morning morality effect. It can also be compensated and restored in various ways, such as eating, sleeping, etc. As a common form of entertainment in modern society, literary novel reading gives people more virtual experience and emotional catharsis, just as a relaxing afternoon tea that helps people break away from fast-paced work, restore physical strength, and relieve stress in a short period of leisure. In this paper, inspired by the compensation control theory, we wonder whether reading literary novels in the digital environment could replenish a kind of spiritual energy for self-regulation to compensate for people's moral loss in the afternoon. Based on this assumption, we leverage the social annotation text content generated by readers in digital reading to represent the readers' reading attention. We then recognized the semantics and calculated the readers' moral motivation expressed in the annotations and investigated the fine-grained dynamics of the moral motivation changing in each time slot within 24 hours of a day. Comprehensively comparing the division of different time intervals, sufficient experiments showed that the moral motivation reflected in the annotations in the afternoon is significantly higher than that in the morning. The results robustly verified the hypothesis that reading compensates for moral motivation, which we called the moral afternoon tea effect. Moreover, we quantitatively identified that such moral compensation can last until 14:00 in the afternoon and 21:00 in the evening. In addition, it is interesting to find that the division of time intervals of different units impacts the identification of moral rhythms. Dividing the time intervals by four-hour time slot brings more insights of moral rhythms compared with that of three-hour and six-hour time slot.

Keywords: digital reading, social annotation, moral motivation, morning morality effect, control compensation

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Authors: Zhepeng Rui, Zhenyu Gu, Caitilin de Bérigny

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In the current study, we designed an interactive meditation and brain painting application to cultivate users’ creativity, promote meditation, reduce stress, and improve cognition while attempting to learn a foreign language. User tests and data analyses were conducted on 42 male and 42 female participants to better understand sex-associated psychological and aesthetic differences. Our method utilized brain-computer interfaces to import meditation and attention data to create artwork in meditation-based applications. Female participants showed statistically significantly different language learning outcomes following three meditation paradigms. The art style of brain painting helped females with language memory. Our results suggest that the most ideal methods for promoting memory attention were meditation methods and brain painting exercises contributing to language learning, memory concentration promotion, and foreign word memorization. We conclude that a short period of meditation practice can help in learning a foreign language. These findings provide new insights into meditation, creative language education, brain-computer interface, and human-computer interactions.

Keywords: brain-computer interface, creative thinking, meditation, mental health

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Authors: Takashi Mitsuishi

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Fuzzy logic has gained acceptance in the recent years in the fields of social sciences and humanities such as psychology and linguistics because it can manage the fuzziness of words and human subjectivity in a logical manner. However, the major field of application of the fuzzy logic is control engineering as it is a part of the set theory and mathematical logic. Mamdani method, which is the most popular technique for approximate reasoning in the field of fuzzy control, is one of the ways to numerically represent the control afforded by human language and sensitivity and has been applied in various practical control plants. Fuzzy logic has been gradually developing as an artificial intelligence in different applications such as neural networks, expert systems, and operations research. The objects of inference vary for different application fields. Some of these include time, angle, color, symptom and medical condition whose fuzzy membership function is a periodic function. In the defuzzification stage, the domain of the membership function should be unique to obtain uniqueness its defuzzified value. However, if the domain of the periodic membership function is determined as unique, an unintuitive defuzzified value may be obtained as the inference result using the center of gravity method. Therefore, the authors propose a method of circular-polar-coordinates transformation and defuzzification of the periodic membership functions in this study. The transformation to circular polar coordinates simplifies the domain of the periodic membership function. Defuzzified value in circular polar coordinates is an argument. Furthermore, it is required that the argument is calculated from a closed plane figure which is a periodic membership function on the circular polar coordinates. If the closed plane figure is continuous with the continuity of the membership function, a significant amount of computation is required. Therefore, to simplify the practice example and significantly reduce the computational complexity, we have discretized the continuous interval and the membership function in this study. In this study, the following three methods are proposed to decide the argument from the discrete polygon which the continuous plane figure is transformed into. The first method provides an argument of a straight line passing through the origin and through the coordinate of the arithmetic mean of each coordinate of the polygon (physical center of gravity). The second one provides an argument of a straight line passing through the origin and the coordinate of the geometric center of gravity of the polygon. The third one provides an argument of a straight line passing through the origin bisecting the perimeter of the polygon (or the closed continuous plane figure).

Keywords: defuzzification, fuzzy membership function, periodic function, polar coordinates transformation

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Authors: Shima Behkami, Nor Shahirul Umirah Idris, Sharifuddin Md. Zain, Kah Hin Low, Mehrdad Gholami, Nima A. Behkami, Ahmad Firdaus Kamaruddin

Abstract:

In this work, Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS), Isotopic Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) and Ultrasound Milko Tester were used to study milk samples obtained from various geographical locations in Malaysia. ICP-MS was used to determine the concentration of trace elements in milk, water and soil samples obtained from seven dairy farms at different geographical locations in peninsular Malaysia. IRMS was used to analyze the milk samples for isotopic ratios of δ13C, 15N and 18O. Nutritional parameters in the milk samples were determined using an ultrasound milko tester. Data obtained from these measurements were evaluated by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Analysis (HA) as a preliminary step in determining geographical origin of these milk samples. It is observed that the isotopic ratios and a number of the nutritional parameters are responsible for the discrimination of the samples. It was also observed that it is possible to determine the geographical origin of these milk samples solely by the isotopic ratios of δ13C, 15N and 18O. The accuracy of the geographical discrimination is demonstrated when several milk samples from a milk factory taken from one of the regions under study were appropriately assigned to the correct PCA cluster.

Keywords: inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy ICP-MS, isotope ratio mass spectroscopy IRMS, ultrasound, principal component analysis, hierarchical analysis, geographical origin, milk

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Authors: Lokman Gozcu, Sule Deniz Gozcu

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This study aims to analyze the skills of speaking in the acquisition of Turkish as a foreign language. One of the most important things for the individual who learns a foreign language is to be successful in the oral communication (speaking) skills and to interact in an understandable way. Speech skill requires much more time and effort than other language skills. In this direction, it is necessary to make an analysis of these oral communication skills, which is important in Turkish language acquisition as a foreign language and to draw out a road map according to the result. The aim of this study is to determine the competence and attitudes of speaking competence according to the individuals who learn Turkish as a foreign language and to be considered as speaking skill elements; Grammar, emphasis, intonation, body language, speed, ranking, accuracy, fluency, pronunciation, etc. and the results and suggestions based on these determinations. A mixed method has been chosen for data collection and analysis. A Likert scale (for competence and attitude) was applied to 190 individuals who were interviewed face-to-face (for speech skills) with a semi-structured interview form about 22 participants randomly selected. In addition, the observation form related to the 22 participants interviewed were completed by the researcher during the interview, and after the completion of the collection of all the voice recordings, analyses of voice recordings with the speech skills evaluation scale was made. The results of the research revealed that the speech skills of the individuals who learned Turkish as a foreign language have various perspectives. According to the results, the most inadequate aspects of the participants' ability to speak in Turkish include vocabulary, using humorous elements while speaking Turkish, being able to include items such as idioms and proverbs while speaking Turkish, Turkish fluency respectively. In addition, the participants were found not to feel comfortable while speaking Turkish, to feel ridiculous and to be nervous while speaking in formal settings. There are conclusions and suggestions for the situations that arise after the have been analyses made.

Keywords: learning Turkish as a foreign language, proficiency criteria, phonetic (modalities), speaking skills

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Authors: Maria Lina Garrido

Abstract:

This paper aims to reflect upon instruction in English classes with the specific purpose of reading comprehension development, having as its paradigm the considerations presented by William Grabe, in his book Reading in a Second Language: Moving from theory to practice. His concerns regarding the connection between research findings and instructional practices have stimulated the present author to re-evaluate both her long practice as an English reading teacher and as the author of two reading textbooks for graduate students. Elements of the reading process such as linguistic issues, prior knowledge, reading strategies, critical evaluation, and motivation are the main foci of this analysis as far as the activities developed in the classroom are concerned. The experience with university candidates on postgraduate courses with different levels of English knowledge in Bahia, Brazil, has definitely demanded certain adjustments to this author`s classroom setting. Word recognition based on cognates, for example, has been emphasized given the fact that academic texts use many Latin words which have the same roots as the Brazilian Portuguese lexicon. Concerning syntactic parsing, the tenses/verbal aspects, modality and linking words are included in the curriculum, but not with the same depth as the general English curricula. Reading strategies, another essential predictor for developing reading skills, have been largely stimulated in L2 classes in order to compensate for a lack of the appropriate knowledge of the foreign language. This paper presents results that demonstrate that this author`s teaching practice is compatible with the implications and instruction concerning the reading process outlined by Grabe, however, it admits that each class demands specific instructions to meet the needs of that particular group.

Keywords: classroom practice, instructional activities, reading comprehension, reading skills

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Authors: Sheraz Ahmad Choudhary

Abstract:

Health plays a vital role in the growth. The study examined the effect of health indicator on the growth of Pakistan. ARDL model is used to check the growth rate which is affected by the health by using the time series date of Pakistan from 1990 to 2017. Health indicator, fertility rate, life expectancy, foreign direct investment, and infant mortality rate are variables Where the unit root is applied to check the stationarity of the model. consequences find a significant relationship between GDP, foreign direct investment, fertility rate, and life expectancy in the short run, whereas mortality rate effected negatively to economic growth but have significant values. In the long run, foreign direct investment (FDI) and fertility rate(FR) have significantly influenced the GDP. The results show thateconomic growth is positively stimulated by most of the health indicators. The study accomplishes that nations can achieve a high level of economic growth by increasing wellbeing human capital.

Keywords: economic growth, health expenditures, fertility rate, human capital, life expectancy, foreign direct investment, and infant mortality rate

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Authors: Fitria Ningsih

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This study concerns on the process of making corpus obtained from Indonesian year 4 students’ free writing compared to the vocabulary taught in English language textbooks. 369 students’ sample writings from 19 public elementary schools in Malang, East Java, Indonesia and 5 selected English textbooks were analyzed through corpus in linguistics method using AdTAT -the Adelaide Text Analysis Tool- program. The findings produced wordlists of the top 100 words most frequently used by students and the top 100 words given in English textbooks. There was a 45% match between the two lists. Furthermore, the classifications of the top 100 most frequent words from the two corpora based on part of speech found that both the Indonesian and English languages employed a similar use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Moreover, to see the contextualizing the vocabulary of learning materials towards the students’ need, a depth-analysis dealing with the content and the cultural views from the vocabulary taught in the textbooks was discussed through the criteria developed from the checklist. Lastly, further suggestions are addressed to language teachers to understand the students’ background such as recognizing the basic words students acquire before teaching them new vocabulary in order to achieve successful learning of the target language.

Keywords: corpus, frequency, English, Indonesian, linguistics, textbooks, vocabulary, wordlists, writing

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Authors: Zerrin Erginkaya, Gözde Konuray

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Microbial degradation of foods is defined as a decrease of food safety due to microorganism activity. Organic acids, sulfur dioxide, sulfide, nitrate, nitrite, dimethyl dicarbonate and several preservative gases have been used as chemical preservatives in foods as well as natural preservatives which are indigenous in foods. It is determined that usage of herbal preservatives such as blueberry, dried grape, prune, garlic, mustard, spices inhibited several microorganisms. Moreover, it is determined that animal origin preservatives such as whey, honey, lysosomes of duck egg and chicken egg, chitosan have antimicrobial effect. Other than indigenous antimicrobials in foods, antimicrobial agents produced by microorganisms could be used as natural preservatives. The antimicrobial feature of preservatives depends on the antimicrobial spectrum, chemical and physical features of material, concentration, mode of action, components of food, process conditions, and pH and storage temperature. In this review, studies about antimicrobial components which are indigenous in food (such as herbal and animal origin antimicrobial agents), antimicrobial materials synthesized by microorganisms, and their usage as an antimicrobial agent to preserve foods are discussed.

Keywords: animal origin preservatives, antimicrobial, chemical preservatives, herbal preservatives

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Authors: Carla Lopes

Abstract:

It is clear nowadays that the proper performance of different speech acts is one of the most difficult obstacles that a foreign language learner has to overcome to be considered communicatively competent. This communication presents the results of an investigation on the pragmatic performance of Portuguese Language students at the University of Macau. The research discussed herein is based on a survey consisting of fourteen speaking situations to which the participants must respond in writing, and that includes different types of speech acts: apology, response to a compliment, refusal, complaint, disagreement and the understanding of the illocutionary force of indirect speech acts. The responses were classified in a five levels Likert scale (quantified from 1 to 5) according to their suitability for the particular situation. In general terms, we can summarize that about 45% of the respondents' answers were pragmatically competent, 10 % were acceptable and 45 % showed weaknesses at socio-pragmatic competence level. Given that the linguistic deviations were not taken into account, we can conclude that the faults are of cultural origin. It is natural that in the presence of orthogonal cultures, such as Chinese and Portuguese, there are failures of this type, barely solved in the four years of the undergraduate program. The target population, native speakers of Cantonese or Mandarin, make their first contact with the English language before joining the Bachelor of Portuguese Language. An analysis of the socio - pragmatic failures in the respondents’ answers suggests the conclusion that many of them are due to the lack of cultural knowledge. They try to compensate for this either using their native culture or resorting to a Western culture that they consider close to the Portuguese, that is the English or US culture, previously studied, and also widely present in the media and on the internet. This phenomenon, known as 'pragmatic transfer', can result in a linguistic behavior that may be considered inauthentic or pragmatically awkward. The resulting speech act is grammatically correct but is not pragmatically feasible, since it is not suitable to the culture of the target language, either because it does not exist or because the conditions of its use are in fact different. Analysis of the responses also supports the conclusion that these students present large deviations from the expected and stereotyped behavior of Chinese students. We can speculate while this linguistic behavior is the consequence of the Macao globalization that culturally casts the students, makes them more open, and distinguishes them from the typical Chinese students.

Keywords: Portuguese foreign language, pragmatic failures, pragmatic transfer, pragmatic competence

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Authors: Enayatollah Yazdani

Abstract:

In the post-Cold War era, the world is facing a new emerging global order with the rise of multiple actors in the international arena. China, as a rising global power, has great leverage in internal relations. In particular, during the last two decades, China has rapidly transformed its economy into a global leader in advanced technologies. As a rising power and as one of the two major founding members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), China has tried to use this regional organization, which has the potential to become an important political and security organization of the major states located in the vast Eurasian landmass, for its “go global” strategy. In fact, for Beijing, the SCO represents a new and unique cooperation model, reflecting its vision of a multipolar world order. China has used the SCO umbrella as a multilateral platform to address external threats posed by non-state actors on its vulnerable western border; to gain a strong economic and political foothold in Central Asia without putting the Sino-Russian strategic partnership at risk; and to enhance its energy security through large-scale infrastructure investment in, and trade with, the Central Asian member states. In other words, the SCO is one of the successful outcomes of Chines foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. The expansion of multilateral ties all over the world by dint of pursuing institutional strategies as SCO identifies China as a more constructive power. SCO became a new model of cooperation that was formed on the remains of collapsed Soviet system and predetermined China's geopolitical role in the region. As the fast developing effective regional mechanism, SCO now has more of an external impact on the international system and forms a new type of interaction for promoting China's grand strategy of 'peaceful rise.' This paper aims to answer this major question: How the Chinese government has manipulated the SCO for its foreign policy and global and regional influence? To answer this question, the main discussion is that with regard to the SCO capabilities and politico-economic potential, this organization has been used by China as a platform to expand influence beyond its borders.

Keywords: China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Central Asia, global policy, foreign policy

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