Search results for: linguistic identities

Authors: Isaiah Ifeanyichukwu Agbo

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Human speech is capable of serving many purposes. Power and control are not always exercised overtly by linguistic acts, but maybe enacted and exercised in the myriad of taken-for-granted actions of everyday life. Domination, power control, discrimination and mind control exist in human speech and may lead to asymmetrical power relations. In discourse, there are persuasive and manipulative linguistic acts that serve to establish solidarity and identification with the 'we group' and polarize with the 'they group'. Political discourse is crafted to defend and promote the problematic narrative of outright controversial events in a nation’s history thereby sustaining domination, marginalization, manipulation, inequalities and injustices, often without the dominated and marginalized group being aware of them. They are designed and positioned to serve the political and social needs of the producers. Political crisis speeches in Nigeria, just like in other countries concentrate on positive self-image, de-legitimization of political opponents, reframing accusation to one’s advantage, redefining problematic terms and adopting reversal strategy. In most cases, the people are ignorant of the hidden ideological positions encoded in the text. Few researches have been conducted adopting the frameworks of critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics to investigate this situation in the political crisis speeches in Nigeria. In this paper, we focus attention on the analyses of the linguistic, semantic, and ideological elements in selected political crisis speeches in Nigeria to investigate if they create and sustain unequal power relations and manipulative tendencies from the perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Critical Discourse Analysis unpacks both opaque and transparent structural relationships of power dominance, power relations and control as manifested in language. Critical discourse analysis emerged from a critical theory of language study which sees the use of language as a form of social practice where social relations are reproduced or contested and different interests are served. Systemic function linguistics relates the structure of texts to their function. Fairclough’s model of CDA and Halliday’s systemic functional approach to language study are adopted in this paper. This paper probes into language use that perpetuates inequalities. This study demystifies the hidden implicature of the selected political crisis speeches and reveals the existence of information that is not made explicit in what the political actors actually say. The analysis further reveals the ideological configurations present in the texts. These ideological standpoints are the basis for naturalizing implicit ideologies and hegemonic influence in the texts. The analyses of the texts further uncovered the linguistic and discursive strategies deployed by text producers to manipulate the unsuspecting members of the public both mentally and conceptually in order to enact, sustain and maintain unhealthy power relations at crisis times in the Nigerian political history.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, language, political crisis, power relations, systemic functional linguistics

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Authors: Tannistha Dasgupta

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This study explores the aspects of second language (L2) spoken fluency that are related to L2 linguistic knowledge and processing skill. It draws on Levelt’s ‘blueprint’ of the L2 speaker which discusses the cognitive issues underlying the act of speaking. However, L2 speaking assessments have largely neglected the underlying mechanism involved in language production; emphasis is given on the relationship between subjective ratings of L2 speech sample and objectively measured aspects of fluency. Hence, in this study, the relation between L2 linguistic knowledge and processing skill i.e. Cognitive Fluency (CF), and objectively measurable aspects of L2 spoken fluency i.e. Utterance Fluency (UF) is examined. The participants of the study are L2 learners of English, studying at high school level in Hyderabad, India. 50 participants with intermediate level of proficiency in English performed several lexical retrieval tasks and attention-shifting tasks to measure CF, and 8 oral tasks to measure UF. Each aspect of UF (speed, pause, and repair) were measured against the scores of CF to find out those aspects of UF which are reliable indicators of CF. Quantitative analysis of the data shows that among the three aspects of UF; speed is the best predictor of CF, and pause is weakly related to CF. The study suggests that including the speed aspect of UF could make L2 fluency assessment more reliable, valid, and objective. Thus, incorporating the assessment of psycholinguistic mechanisms into L2 spoken fluency testing, could result in fairer evaluation.

Keywords: attention-shifting, cognitive fluency, lexical retrieval, utterance fluency

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Authors: Sadeq Al Yaari, Fayza Al Hammadi, Ayman Al Yaari, Adham Al Yaari, Montaha Al Yaari, Aayah Al Yaari, Sajedah Al Yaari, Salah Al Yami

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Background: When we further take Arabic grammatical issues into account in accordance with applied linguistic investigations on Arabic as Second Language (ASL) learners, a fundamental issue arises at this point as to the production of speech in Arabic: Oral grammatical errors committed by ASL learners. Aims: Using manual rating as well as computational analytic methodology to test a corpus of recorded speech by Second Language (ASL) learners of Arabic, this study aims to find the areas of difficulties in learning Arabic grammar. More specifically, it examines how and why ASL learners make grammatical errors in their oral speech. Methods: Tape recordings of four (4) Arabic as Second Language (ASL) learners who ranged in age from 23 to 30 were naturally collected. All participants have completed an intensive Arabic program (two years) and 20 minute-speech was recorded for each participant. Having the collected corpus, the next procedure was to rate them against Arabic standard grammar. The rating includes four processes: Description, analysis and assessment. Conclusions: Outcomes made from the issues addressed in this paper can be summarized in the fact that ASL learners face many grammatical difficulties when studying Arabic word order, tenses and aspects, function words, subject-verb agreement, verb form, active-passive voice, global and local errors, processes-based errors including addition, omission, substitution or a combination of any of them.

Keywords: grammar, error, oral, Arabic, second language, learner, applied linguistics.

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Authors: Tuğçe Kök, Gözen Güner Aktaş, Nur Ayalp

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In a global world, Social and cultural sustainability are subjects which have gained significant importance in recent years. The concept of sustainability was included in the document of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) by World Charter for Nature, adopted in 1982 for the first time. However, merged with urban sustainability a new phenomenon has emerged. Sustainability is an essential fact, This fact is discussed via the socio-cultural field of sustainability. Together with central government and local authorities, conservation activities have been intensified on the protection of values on an area scale. Today, local authorities play an important role in the urban historic site rehabilitation and re-construction of traditional houses projects in Ankara, Turkey. Many conservative acts have occurred after 1980’s. To give a remarkable example about the conservation implementations of traditional Turkish houses is ‘Hamamönü, Ankara Re-Construction Project which is one of the historical parts that has suffered from deterioration and unplanned urban development. In this region, preexisting but unused historic fibre of the site has been revised and according to result of this case-study, the relationship between users and re-construction were discussed. Most of the houses were re-constructed in order to build a new tourist attraction area. This study discusses the socio-cultural relations between the new built environment and the visitors, from the point of cultural sustainability. This study questions the transmission of cultural stimulations. A case study was conducted to discuss the perception of cultural aspects of the visitors in the site. The relationship between the real cultural identities and existent ones after the re-constructed project, Which has been transmitted through the visitors and the users of those spaces will be discussed. The aim of the study is to analyze the relation between the cultural identities, which have been tried to be protected with the re-construction project and the users. The purposes of this study are to evaluate the implementations of Altındağ Municipality in Hamamönü and examine the socio-cultural sustainability with the user responses. After the assessment of implementation under socio-cultural sustainability, some proposals for the future of Hamamönü were introduced.

Keywords: social sustainability, cultural sustainability, Hamamönü, Turkey, re-construction

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Authors: Enya Trenholm-Jensen

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This paper employs various semiotic methodologies to examine the mechanism of soft power. Soft power refers to a country’s global reputation and their ability to leverage that reputation to achieve certain aims. South Korea has invested heavily in their soft power strategy for a multitude of predominantly historical and geopolitical reasons. On account of this investment and the global prominence of their strategy, South Korea was considered to be the optimal candidate for the aims of this investigation. Having isolated the entertainment industry as one of the most heavily funded segments of the South Korean soft power strategy, the analysis restricted itself to this sector. Within this industry, two entertainment products were selected as case studies. The case studies were chosen based on commercial success according to metrics such as streams, purchases, and subsequent revenue. This criterion was deemed to be the most objective and verifiable indicator of the products general appeal. The entertainment products which met the chosen criterion were Netflix’ “Squid Game” and BTS’ hit single “Butter”. The methodologies employed were chosen according to the medium of the entertainment products. For “Squid Game,” an aesthetic analysis was carried out to investigate how multi- layered meanings were mobilized in a show popularized by its visual grammar. To examine “Butter”, both music semiology and linguistic analysis were employed. The music section featured an analysis underpinned by denotative and connotative music semiotic theories borrowing from scholars Theo van Leeuwen and Martin Irvine. The linguistic analysis focused on stance and semantic fields according to scholarship by George Yule and John W. DuBois. The aesthetic analysis of the first case study revealed intertextual references to famous artworks, which served to augment the emotional provocation of the Squid Game narrative. For the second case study, the findings exposed a set of musical meaning units arranged in a patchwork of familiar and futuristic elements to achieve a song that existed on the boundary between old and new. The linguistic analysis of the song’s lyrics found a deceptively innocuous surface level meaning that bore implications for authority, intimacy, and commercial success. Whether through means of visual metaphor, embedded auditory associations, or linguistic subtext, the collective findings of the three analyses exhibited a desire to conjure a form of positive arousal in the spectator. In the synthesis section, this process is likened to that of branding. Through an exploration of branding, the entertainment products can be understood as cogs in a larger operation aiming to create positive associations to Korea as a country and a concept. Limitations in the form of a timeframe biased perspective are addressed, and directions for future research are suggested. This paper employs semiotic methodologies to examine two entertainment products as mechanisms of soft power. Through means of visual metaphor, embedded auditory associations, or linguistic subtext, the findings reveal a desire to conjure positive arousal in the spectator. The synthesis finds similarities to branding, thus positioning the entertainment products as cogs in a larger operation aiming to create positive associations to Korea as a country and a concept.

Keywords: BTS, cognitive semiotics, entertainment, soft power, south korea, squid game

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Authors: Katalin Kovacs

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In most forms of violence the perpetrators intend to hide their identities. Terrorism is different. Terrorist groups often take responsibility for their attacks, and consequently they reveal their identities. This unique characteristic of terrorism has been largely overlooked, and scholars are still puzzled as to why terrorist groups claim responsibility for their attacks. Certainly, the claim of responsibility is worth analysing. It would help to have a clearer picture of what terrorist groups try to achieve and how, but also to develop an understanding of the strategic planning of terrorist attacks and the message the terrorists intend to deliver. The research aims to answer the question why terrorist groups choose to claim responsibility for some of their attacks and not for others. In order to do so the claim of responsibility is considered to be a tactical choice, based on the assumption that terrorists weigh the costs and benefits of claiming responsibility. The main argument is that terrorist groups do not claim responsibility in cases when there is no tactical advantage gained from claiming responsibility. The idea that the claim of responsibility has tactical value offers the opportunity to test these assertions using a large scale empirical analysis. The claim of responsibility as a tactical choice depends on other tactical choices, such as the choice of target, the internationality of the attack, the number of victims and whether the group occupies territory or operates as an underground group. The structure of the terrorist groups and the level of decision making also affects the claim of responsibility. Terrorists on the lower level are less disciplined than the leaders. This means that the terrorists on lower levels pay less attention to the strategic objectives and engage easier in indiscriminate violence, and consequently they would less like to claim responsibility. Therefore, the research argues that terrorists, who are on a highest level of decision making would claim responsibility for the attacks as those are who takes into account the strategic objectives. As most studies on terrorism fail to provide definitions; therefore the researches are fragmented and incomparable. Separate, isolated researches do not support comprehensive thinking. It is also very important to note that there are only a few researches using quantitative methods. The aim of the research is to develop a new and comprehensive overview of the claim of responsibility based on strong quantitative evidence. By using well-established definitions and operationalisation the current research focuses on a broad range of attributes that can have tactical values in order to determine circumstances when terrorists are more likely to claim responsibility.

Keywords: claim of responsibility, leadership, tactical choice, terrorist group

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Authors: Julianne Viola

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Young people are at a critical stage in their lives, developing from young participants to adult participants in democratic society. At this time, civic engagement is crucial for young people’s sense of belonging and future participation in their communities. In adolescence, individuals form their own identities and associations with others and may accomplish this with the help of technology and social media. In the Digital Age, young people and adults use technology as a platform to discuss political issues, including human rights and social justice but do not always engage in civil discourse. There is an urgent need to investigate this complex interplay of social media, identity formation, and civil discourse as it relates to how teenagers become participants in democratic society and how they engage in civil discourse. This qualitative study draws on theories of identity formation in adolescence and is situated within the literature surrounding teen civic engagement and technology use. Through in-depth interviews with participants ages 14 through 17, this study investigates the ways in which teens conceptualize their civic identities and engagement, presence online, and civil discourse. The context in which the young people in this study have grown up has the potential to impact and inform these processes. Early results of this study illustrate what it means to be a young person in today’s world, and how perceptions of others’ opinions may influence young people’s engagement in their communities and online. Participants in this study often indicated concerns of their age as a constraint on participation in their communities and in society, and a self-imposed restriction around the people with whom they engage in conversation about political and social issues. While the participants shared common concerns and experiences, each participant’s unique perspectives and beliefs are viewed with equal importance. The results from this research will help students, teachers, and community groups learn about the reasons for engagement and disengagement among this age group, and how technology has influenced teens’ dialogue about political issues. With this knowledge, academics and school leaders can devise new ways to best teach citizenship skills and civil discourse to students in the Digital Age.

Keywords: civics, digital age, discourse, sociology of youth, youth studies

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Authors: Karen Butler

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The LGBTQ youth of color face stigma related to both race and gender identity. Effectively dealing with racial/ethnic discrimination requires strong connections to family and one’s racial/ethnic group. However, LGBTQ youth of color seldom receive support from family, peer groups or church groups. Moreover, ethnic communities often perceive LGBTQ identities as a rejection of ethnic heritage. Thus, stigma places these young people at greater risk for substance use, violence, risky sexual behaviors, suicide, and homelessness. Offering a Queer Studies (QS) class is one way to facilitate a safer and more inclusive environment for LGBTQ students, faculty and staff. The discipline of Queer Studies encompasses theories and thinkers from numerous fields: cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, race studies, women's studies, media, postmodernism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis and more. We began our course development by researching existing programs and classes. Several course syllabi were examined and course materials such as readings, videos, and guest speakers were assessed for possible inclusion. We also employed informal survey methods with students and faculty in order to gauge interest in the course. We then developed a sample course syllabus and began the process of new course approval. Feedback thus far indicates that students of various sexual orientations and gender identities are interested in the course and understand the need to offer it; faculty in Psychology, Social Work, and Interdisciplinary Studies are interested in cross-listing the course; library staff is willing to assist with course material acquisition, and the administration is supportive. The purpose of this session is to 1) explore the various health and wellness issues facing LGBTQ students of color and 2) share our experience of developing a QS course in health education in order to address these needs. This process, from initial recognition of the need to a course offering, will be described and discussed in the hopes that participants will increase their awareness of the issues. A QS course would be an appropriate requirement for any number of majors as well as an elective for any major.

Keywords: black colleges, health education, LGBTQ, queer studies

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Authors: Martina Katalin Szabó, Bernadett Lipóczi, Csenge Guba, István Uveges

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In this study, an exhaustive analysis was carried out about the historical development of negative emotive intensifiers in the Hungarian language via NLP methods. Intensifiers are linguistic elements which modify or reinforce a variable character in the lexical unit they apply to. Therefore, intensifiers appear with other lexical items, such as adverbs, adjectives, verbs, infrequently with nouns. Due to the complexity of this phenomenon (set of sociolinguistic, semantic, and historical aspects), there are many lexical items which can operate as intensifiers. The group of intensifiers are admittedly one of the most rapidly changing elements in the language. From a linguistic point of view, particularly interesting are a special group of intensifiers, the so-called negative emotive intensifiers, that, on their own, without context, have semantic content that can be associated with negative emotion, but in particular cases, they may function as intensifiers (e.g.borzasztóanjó ’awfully good’, which means ’excellent’). Despite their special semantic features, negative emotive intensifiers are scarcely examined in literature based on large Historical corpora via NLP methods. In order to become better acquainted with trends over time concerning the intensifiers, The exhaustively analysed a specific historical corpus, namely the Magyar TörténetiSzövegtár (Hungarian Historical Corpus). This corpus (containing 3 millions text words) is a collection of texts of various genres and styles, produced between 1772 and 2010. Since the corpus consists of raw texts and does not contain any additional information about the language features of the data (such as stemming or morphological analysis), a large amount of manual work was required to process the data. Thus, based on a lexicon of negative emotive intensifiers compiled in a previous phase of the research, every occurrence of each intensifier was queried, and the results were stored in a separate data frame. Then, basic linguistic processing (POS-tagging, lemmatization etc.) was carried out automatically with the ‘magyarlanc’ NLP-toolkit. Finally, the frequency and collocation features of all the negative emotive words were automatically analyzed in the corpus. Outcomes of the research revealed in detail how these words have proceeded through grammaticalization over time, i.e., they change from lexical elements to grammatical ones, and they slowly go through a delexicalization process (their negative content diminishes over time). What is more, it was also pointed out which negative emotive intensifiers are at the same stage in this process in the same time period. Giving a closer look to the different domains of the analysed corpus, it also became certain that during this process, the pragmatic role’s importance increases: the newer use expresses the speaker's subjective, evaluative opinion at a certain level.

Keywords: historical corpus analysis, historical linguistics, negative emotive intensifiers, semantic changes over time

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Authors: Natsuko D'Aprile

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The construction of Nation-States is a historical process that produces a type of national identity and culture that States nowadays mobilise for global outreach. National culture, as a set of norms and values influencing individuals’ actions and decisions, produces a type of policy making of various strategies that impact how a Nation is promoted overseas. The 1990s were marked by a resurgence of the debates on national identity. This period is believed to have paved the way for nationalism and witnessed increased attention to analytical approaches to identity. Public diplomacy is a concrete example of how national culture is mobilised to project a favourable image of a Nation abroad, especially in the narratives on national identity mobilised by diplomatic actors. Public diplomacy is understood as providing tools for States to build and project strategic narratives that represent events and identities in an attempt to influence domestic and foreign audiences, be they domestic or foreign. France and Japan received little attention on the matter. This research hence aims to investigate how France and Japan have mobilised narratives on national identity since the 1990s in the context of their public diplomacy. To understand how identities are framed, qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis has been performed on a corpus of various speeches held by French and Japanese political actors in which they present their diplomacy goals, as well as official documents provided by both Ministries of Foreign Affairs. This analysis showed that the French discourse integrates a narrative on France’s universal vocation, relying on the expression of a Nation whose model is worldly applicable and has the legitimacy to influence international decisions. The Japanese discourse does not concretely emphasise Japanese or Asian values, except for some narratives integrating Confucian and Shintō values. It rather revolves around the need for Japan to ensure its citizens’ security and prosperity, hence the need for the Government to contribute to peace in the Asia-Pacific region and the world.

Keywords: comparative politics, culture, discourse analysis, narratives, public diplomacy

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Authors: Iryna Biskub

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The interdisciplinary approach to modern linguistic studies is exemplified by the merge of various research methods, which sometimes causes complications related to the verification of the research results. This methodological confusion can be resolved by means of creating new techniques of linguistic analysis combining several scientific paradigms. Modern linguistics has developed really productive and efficient methods for the investigation of cognitive and communicative phenomena of which language is the central issue. In the field of discourse studies, one of the best examples of research methods is the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA can be viewed both as a method of investigation, as well as a critical multidisciplinary perspective. In CDA the position of the scholar is crucial from the point of view exemplifying his or her social and political convictions. The generally accepted approach to obtaining scientifically reliable results is to use a special well-defined scientific method for researching special types of language phenomena: cognitive methods applied to the exploration of cognitive aspects of language, whereas communicative methods are thought to be relevant only for the investigation of communicative nature of language. In the recent decades discourse as a sociocultural phenomenon has been the focus of careful linguistic research. The very concept of discourse represents an integral unity of cognitive and communicative aspects of human verbal activity. Since a human being is never able to discriminate between cognitive and communicative planes of discourse communication, it doesn’t make much sense to apply cognitive and communicative methods of research taken in isolation. It is possible to modify the classical CDA procedure by means of mapping human cognitive procedures onto the strategic communicative planning of discourse communication. The analysis of the electronic petition 'Block Donald J Trump from UK entry. The signatories believe Donald J Trump should be banned from UK entry' (584, 459 signatures) and the parliamentary debates on it has demonstrated the ability to map cognitive and communicative levels in the following way: the strategy of discourse modeling (communicative level) overlaps with the extraction of semantic macrostructures (cognitive level); the strategy of discourse management overlaps with the analysis of local meanings in discourse communication; the strategy of cognitive monitoring of the discourse overlaps with the formation of attitudes and ideologies at the cognitive level. Thus, the experimental data have shown that it is possible to develop a new complex methodology of discourse analysis, where cognition would meet communication, both metaphorically and literally. The same approach may appear to be productive for the creation of computational models of human-computer interaction, where the automatic generation of a particular type of a discourse could be based on the rules of strategic planning involving cognitive models of CDA.

Keywords: cognition, communication, discourse, strategy

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Authors: Veronika Solopova, Oana-Iuliana Popescu, Tim Landgraf, Christoph Benzmüller

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Beginning in 2014, slowly building geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe led to a full-blown conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine that generated an unprecedented amount of news articles and data from social media data, reflecting the opposing ideologies and narratives as a background and the essence of the ongoing war. These polarized informational campaigns have led to countless mutual accusations of misinformation and fake news, shaping an atmosphere of confusion and mistrust for many readers all over the world. In this study, we analyzed scraped news articles from Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian and English-speaking news outlets, on the eve of 24th of February 2022, compared to day five of the conflict (28th of February), to see how the media influenced and mirrored the changes in public opinion. We also contrast the sources opposing and supporting the stands of the Russian government in Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian media spaces. In a data-driven way, we describe how the narratives are spread throughout Eastern and Central Europe. We present predictive linguistic features surrounding war propaganda. Our results indicate that there are strong similarities in terms of rhetoric strategies in the pro-Kremlin media in both Ukraine and Russia, which, while being relatively neutral according to surface structure, use aggressive vocabulary. This suggests that automatic propaganda identification systems have to be tailored for each new case, as they have to rely on situationally specific words. Both Ukrainian and Russian outlets lean towards strongly opinionated news, pointing towards the use of war propaganda in order to achieve strategic goals.

Keywords: linguistic, news, propaganda, Russia, ukraine

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Authors: S. H. J. Liu

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This paper aims to explore the role of peer Corrective Feedback (CF) in improving written productions by English-as-a- foreign-language (EFL) learners who work together via Wikispaces. It attempted to determine the effect of peer CF on form accuracy in English, such as grammar and lexis. Thirty-four EFL learners at the tertiary level were randomly assigned into the experimental (with peer feedback) or the control (without peer feedback) group; each group was subdivided into small groups of two or three. This resulted in six and seven small groups in the experimental and control groups, respectively. In the experimental group, each learner played a role as an assessor (providing feedback to others), as well as an assessee (receiving feedback from others). Each participant was asked to compose his/her written work and revise it based on the feedback. In the control group, on the other hand, learners neither provided nor received feedback but composed and revised their written work on their own. Data collected from learners’ compositions and post-task interviews were analyzed and reported in this study. Following the completeness of three writing tasks, 10 participants were selected and interviewed individually regarding their perception of collaborative learning in the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) environment. Language aspects to be analyzed included lexis (e.g., appropriate use of words), verb tenses (e.g., present and past simple), prepositions (e.g., in, on, and between), nouns, and articles (e.g., a/an). Feedback types consisted of CF, affective, suggestive, and didactic. Frequencies of feedback types and the accuracy of the language aspects were calculated. The results first suggested that accurate items were found more in the experimental group than in the control group. Such results entail that those who worked collaboratively outperformed those who worked non-collaboratively on the accuracy of linguistic aspects. Furthermore, the first type of CF (e.g., corrections directly related to linguistic errors) was found to be the most frequently employed type, whereas affective and didactic were the least used by the experimental group. The results further indicated that most participants perceived that peer CF was helpful in improving the language accuracy, and they demonstrated a favorable attitude toward working with others in the CMC environment. Moreover, some participants stated that when they provided feedback to their peers, they tended to pay attention to linguistic errors in their peers’ work but overlook their own errors (e.g., past simple tense) when writing. Finally, L2 or FL teachers or practitioners are encouraged to employ CMC technologies to train their students to give each other feedback in writing to improve the accuracy of the language and to motivate them to attend to the language system.

Keywords: peer corrective feedback, computer-mediated communication (CMC), second or foreign language (L2 or FL) learning, Wikispaces

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Authors: Gal Belsitzman, Rose Stamp, Atay Citron, Wendy Sandler

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Sign languages are considered endangered. The vitality of sign languages is compromised by its unique sociolinguistic situation, in which hearing parents that give birth to deaf children usually decide to cochlear implant their child. Therefore, these children don’t acquire their natural language – Sign Language. Despite this, many sign languages, such as Israeli Sign Language (ISL) are thriving. The continued survival of similar languages under threat has been associated with the remarkable resilience of the language community. In particular, deaf literary traditions are central in reminding the community of the importance of the language. One example of a deaf literary tradition which has received increased popularity in recent years is deaf theatre. The Ebisu Sign Language Theatre Laboratory, developed as part of the multidisciplinary Grammar of the Body Research Project, is the first deaf theatre company in Israel. Ebisu Theatre combines physical theatre and sign language research, to allow for a natural laboratory to analyze the creative use of the body. In this presentation, we focus on the recent theatre production called ‘Their language’ which tells of the struggle faced by the deaf community to use their own natural language in the education system. A thorough analysis unravels how linguistic properties are integrated with the use of poetic devices and physical theatre techniques in this performance, enabling wider access by both deaf and hearing audiences, without interpretation. Interviews with the audience illustrate the significance of this art form which serves a dual purpose, both as empowering for the deaf community and educational for the hearing and deaf audiences, by raising awareness of community-related issues.

Keywords: deaf theatre, empowerment, language revitalization, sign language

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Authors: Gabriela Steffen

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Learning in a bilingual classroom not only implies learning in two languages or in an L2, it also means learning content subjects through the means of bilingual or plurilingual resources, which is of a qualitatively different nature than ‘monolingual’ learning. These resources form elements of a didactics of plurilingualism, aiming not only at the development of a plurilingual competence, but also at drawing on plurilingual resources for nonlinguistic subject learning. Applying a didactics of plurilingualism allows for taking account of the specificities of bilingual content subject learning in bilingual education classrooms. Bilingual education is used here as an umbrella term for different programs, such as bilingual education, immersion, CLIL, bilingual modules in which one or several non-linguistic subjects are taught partly or completely in an L2. This paper aims at discussing first results of a study on pupil group work in bilingual classrooms in several Swiss primary schools. For instance, it analyses two bilingual classes in two primary schools in a French-speaking region of Switzerland that follows a part of their school program through German in addition to French, the language of instruction in this region. More precisely, it analyses videotaped classroom interaction and in situ classroom practices of pupil group work in a mathematics lessons. The ethnographic observation of pupils’ group work and the analysis of their interaction (analytical tools of conversational analysis, discourse analysis and plurilingual interaction) enhance the description of whole-class interaction done in the same (and several other) classes. While the latter are teacher-student interactions, the former are student-student interactions giving more space to and insight into pupils’ talk. This study aims at the description of the linguistic and multimodal resources (in German L2 and/or French L1) pupils mobilize while carrying out a mathematical task. The analysis shows that the accomplishment of the mathematical task takes place in a bilingual mode, whether the whole-class interactions are conducted rather in a bilingual (German L2-French L1) or a monolingual mode in L2 (German). The pupils make plenty of use of German L2 in a setting that lends itself to use French L1 (peer groups with French as a dominant language, in absence of the teacher and a task with a mathematical aim). They switch from French to German and back ‘naturally’, which is regular for bilingual speakers. Their linguistic resources in German L2 are not sufficient to allow them to (inter-)act well enough to accomplish the task entirely in German L2, despite their efforts to do so. However, this does not stop them from carrying out the task in mathematics adequately, which is the main objective, by drawing on the bilingual resources at hand.

Keywords: bilingual content subject learning, bilingual primary education, bilingual pupil group work, bilingual teaching/learning resources, didactics of plurilingualism

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Authors: Vidyarini Dwita, Rebecca Fanany

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This study will discuss the growth of the market for smartphone technology in Indonesia. This country, with the world’s fourth largest population, has a reputation as the social media capital of the world, and this reputation is largely justified. The penetration of social media is high in Indonesia which has one of the largest global markets. Most Indonesian users of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms access the sites from their mobile phones. Indonesia is expected to continue to be a major market for digital mobile devices, such as smartphone and tablets that can access the internet. The aim of this study to describe the way responses of Indonesian consumers to smartphone advertising using English and Indonesian will impact on their perceptions of the prestige and product image of the advertised items and thus influence consumer intention to purchase the item. Advertising for smartphones and similar products is intense and dynamic and often draws on the social attitudes of Indonesians with respect to linguistic and cultural content and especially appeals to their desire to be part of global mainstream culture. The study uses a qualitative method based on in-depth interviews with 30 participants. Content analysis is employed to analyse the responses of Indonesian consumers to smartphone advertising that uses English and Indonesian text. Its findings indicate that consumers’ impressions of English and Indonesian slogans influence their attitudes toward smartphones, suggesting that linguistic context plays a role in influencing consumer purchases.

Keywords: consumer purchases, marketing communication, product image, smartphone advertising, sociolinguistic

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Authors: Asmaa Fathy Mohamed Desoky

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The subject of this research is the inference of intentionality and context from the verses of the Meccan surahs, which include the paradox of reward and punishment, applied to the duality of disbelief and faith; The Holy Quran is the most important sacred linguistic reference in the Arabic language because it is rich in all the rules of the language in addition to the linguistic miracle. the Quranic text is a first-class intentional text, sent down to convey something to the recipient (Muhammad first and then communicates it to Muslims) and influence and convince him, which opens the door to many Ijtihad; a desire to reach the will of Allah and his intention from his words Almighty. Intentionality as a term is one of the most important deliberative terms, but it will be modified to suit the Quranic discourse, especially since intentionality is related to intention-as it turned out earlier - that is, it turns the reader or recipient into a predictor of the unseen, and this does not correspond to the Quranic discourse. Hence, in this research, a set of dualities will be identified that will be studied in order to clarify the meaning of them according to the opinions of previous interpreters in accordance with the sanctity of the Quranic discourse, which is intentionally related to the dualities of reward and punishment, such as: the duality of disbelief and faith, noting that it is a duality that combines opposites and Paradox on one level, because it may be an external paradox between action and reaction, and may be an internal paradox in matters related to faith, and may be a situational paradox in a specific event or a certain fact. It should be noted that the intention of the Qur'anic text is fully realized in form and content, in whole and in part, and this research includes a presentation of some applied models of the issues of intention and context that appear in the verses of the paradox of reward and punishment in the Meccan surahs in Quraan.

Keywords: intentionality, context, the paradox, reward, punishment, Meccan surahs

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Authors: Khalid El Asri

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Culture influences lexicalization of salient concepts in a society. Hence, languages often have different degrees of equivalence regarding lexical items of different fields. The present study focuses on the field of emotions in English and Moroccan Arabic. Findings of a comparative study that involved fifty English emotions revealed that Moroccan Arabic has equivalence of some English emotion terms, partial equivalence of some emotion terms, and no equivalence for some other terms. It is hypothesized then that emotion terms that have near equivalence in Moroccan Arabic will be easier to acquire for EFL learners, while partially equivalent terms will be difficult to acquire, and those that have no equivalence will be even more difficult to acquire. In order to test these hypotheses, the participants (104 advanced Moroccan EFL learners and 104 native speakers of English) were given two tests: the first is a receptive one in which the participants were asked to choose, among four emotion terms, the term that is appropriate to fill in the blanks for a given situation indicating certain kind of feelings. The second test is a productive one in which the participants were asked to give the emotion term that best described the feelings of the people in the situations given. The results showed that conceptually equivalent terms do not pose any problems for Moroccan EFL learners since they can link the concept to an already existing linguistic category; whereas the results concerning the acquisition of partially equivalent terms indicated that this type of emotion terms were difficult for Moroccan EFL learners to acquire, because they need to restructure the boundaries of the target linguistic categories by expanding them when the term includes other range of meanings that are not subsumed in the L1 term. Surprisingly however, the results concerning the case of non-equivalence revealed that Moroccan EFL learners could internalize the target L2 concepts that have no equivalence in their L1. Thus, it is the category of emotion terms that have partial equivalence in the learners’ L1 that pose problems for them.

Keywords: acquisition, culture, emotion terms, lexical equivalence

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Authors: Tuyuan Cheng

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As we age, many things become more difficult. Among the abilities are the linguistic and cognitive ones. Competing theories have shown that these two functions could diminish together or that one is selectively affected by the other. In other words, some proposes aging affects sentence production in the same way it affects sentence comprehension and other cognitive functions, while some argues it does not.To address this question, the current investigation is conducted into the critical aspect of sentences as well as cognitive abilities – the syntactic complexity and the number of perspective shifts being contained in the elicited production. Healthy non-pathological aging is often characterized by a cognitive and neural decline in a number of cognitive abilities. Although the language is assumed to be of the more stable domain, a variety of findings in the cognitive aging literature would suggest otherwise. Older adults often show deficits in language production and multiple aspects of comprehension. Nevertheless, while some age differences likely reflect cognitive decline, others might reflect changes in communicative goals, and some even display cognitive advantages. In the domain of language processing, research efforts have been made in tests that probed a variety of communicative abilities. In general, there exists a distinction: Comprehension seems to be selectively unaffected, while production does not. The current study raises a novel question and investigates whether aging affects the production of relative clauses (RCs) under the cognitive factor of perspective shifts. Based on Perspective Hypothesis (MacWhinney, 2000, 2005), our cognitive processes build upon a fundamental system of perspective-taking, and language provides a series of cues to facilitate the construction and shifting of perspectives. These cues include a wide variety of constructions, including RCs structures. In this regard, linguistic complexity can be determined by the number of perspective shifts, and the processing difficulties of RCs can be interpreted within the theory of perspective shifting. Two experiments were conducted to study language production under controlled conditions. In Experiment 1, older healthy participants were tested on standard measures of cognitive aging, including MMSE (Mini-Mental State Examination), ToMI-2 (a simplified Theory of Mind Inventory-2), and a perspective-shifting comprehension task programmed with E-Prime. The results were analyzed to examine if/how they are correlated with aging people’s subsequent production data. In Experiment 2, the production profile of differing RCs, SRC vs. ORC, were collected with healthy aging participants who perform a picture elicitation task. Variable containing 0, 1, or 2 perspective shifts were juxtaposed respectively to the pictures and counterbalanced presented for elicitation. In parallel, a controlled group of young adults were recruited to examine the linguistic and cognitive abilities in question. The results lead us to the discussion whetheraging affects RCs production in a manner determined by its semantic structure or the number of perspective shifts it contains or the status of participants’ mental understanding. The major findingsare: (1) Elders’ production on Chinese RCtypes did not display intrinsic difficulty asymmetry. (2) RC types (the linguistic structural features) and the cognitiveperspective shifts jointly play important roles in the elders’ RCproduction. (3) The production of RC may defy the aging in the case offlexibly preserved cognitive ability.

Keywords: cognition aging, perspective hypothesis, perspective shift, relative clauses, sentence complexity

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Authors: Despoina Mouratidis, Katia Lida Kermanidis

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Machine translation (MT) is a very important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). MT evaluation is crucial in MT development, as it constitutes the means to assess the success of an MT system, and also helps improve its performance. Several methods have been proposed for the evaluation of (MT) systems. Some of the most popular ones in automatic MT evaluation are score-based, such as the BLEU score, and others are based on lexical similarity or syntactic similarity between the MT outputs and the reference involving higher-level information like part of speech tagging (POS). This paper presents a language-independent machine learning framework for classifying pairwise translations. This framework uses vector representations of two machine-produced translations, one from a statistical machine translation model (SMT) and one from a neural machine translation model (NMT). The vector representations consist of automatically extracted word embeddings and string-like language-independent features. These vector representations used as an input to a multi-layer neural network (NN) that models the similarity between each MT output and the reference, as well as between the two MT outputs. To evaluate the proposed approach, a professional translation and a "ground-truth" annotation are used. The parallel corpora used are English-Greek (EN-GR) and English-Italian (EN-IT), in the educational domain and of informal genres (video lecture subtitles, course forum text, etc.) that are difficult to be reliably translated. They have tested three basic deep learning (DL) architectures to this schema: (i) fully-connected dense, (ii) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and (iii) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Experiments show that all tested architectures achieved better results when compared against those of some of the well-known basic approaches, such as Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Better accuracy results are obtained when LSTM layers are used in our schema. In terms of a balance between the results, better accuracy results are obtained when dense layers are used. The reason for this is that the model correctly classifies more sentences of the minority class (SMT). For a more integrated analysis of the accuracy results, a qualitative linguistic analysis is carried out. In this context, problems have been identified about some figures of speech, as the metaphors, or about certain linguistic phenomena, such as per etymology: paronyms. It is quite interesting to find out why all the classifiers led to worse accuracy results in Italian as compared to Greek, taking into account that the linguistic features employed are language independent.

Keywords: machine learning, machine translation evaluation, neural network architecture, pairwise classification

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Authors: Boikanyego Sebina

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The present study investigates the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism on the Setswana speech rhythm of Batswana (citizens) children aged 6-7 years with typical development born and residing in Botswana. Botswana is a country in which there is a diglossic Setswana/English language setting, where English is the dominant high-status language in educational and public contexts. Generally, children from low SES have lower linguistic and cognitive profiles than their age-matched peers from high SES. A greater understanding of these variables would allow educators to distinguish between underdeveloped language skills in children due to impairment and environmental issues for them to successfully enroll children in language development enhancement programs specific to the child’s needs. There are 20 participants: 10 high SES private English-medium educated early sequential Setswana-English bilingual children, taught full-time in English (L2) from the age of 3 years, and for whom English has become dominant; and 10 low SES children who are educated in public schools for whom English is considered a learner language, i.e., L1 Setswana is dominant. The aim is to see whether SES and bilingualism, have had an effect on the Setswana speech rhythm of children in either group. The study primarily uses semi-spontaneous speech based on the telling of the wordless picture storybook. A questionnaire is used to elicit the language use pattern of the children and that of their parents, as well as the education level of the parents and the school the children attend. A comparison of the rhythm shows that children from high SES have a lower durational variability than those from low SES. The findings of the study are that the low durational variability by children from high SES may suggest an underdeveloped rhythm. In conclusion, the results of the present study are against the notion that children from high SES outperform those from low SES in linguistic development.

Keywords: bilingualism, Setswana English, socio-economic status, speech-rhythm

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Authors: Xu Zhang

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This article unveils an indicator of language contact between English and Cantonese in one of the Outer Circle Englishes, Hong Kong (HK) English, through an empirical investigation into 1000 tokens from the Global Web-based English (GloWbE) corpus, employing frequency analysis and logistic regression analysis. It is perceived that Cantonese and general Chinese are contextually marked by an integral underlying thinking pattern. Chinese speakers exhibit a reliance on semantic context over syntactic rules and lexical forms. This linguistic trait carries over to their use of English, affording greater flexibility to formal elements in constructing English sentences. The study focuses on the syntactic positioning of the focusing subjunct ‘also’, a linguistic element used to add new or contrasting prominence to specific sentence constituents. The English language generally allows flexibility in the relative position of 'also’, while there is a preference for close marking relationships. This article shifts attention to Hong Kong, where Cantonese and English converge, and 'also' finds counterparts in Cantonese ‘jaa’ and Mandarin ‘ye’. Employing a corpus-based data-driven method, we investigate the syntactic position of 'also' in both HK and GB English. The study aims to ascertain whether HK English exhibits a greater 'syntactic freedom,' allowing for a more distant marking relationship with 'also' compared to GB English. The analysis involves a random extraction of 500 samples from both HK and GB English from the GloWbE corpus, forming a dataset (N=1000). Exclusions are made for cases where 'also' functions as an additive conjunct or serves as a copulative adverb, as well as sentences lacking sufficient indication that 'also' functions as a focusing particle. The final dataset comprises 820 tokens, with 416 for GB and 404 for HK, annotated according to the focused constituent and the relative position of ‘also’. Frequency analysis reveals significant differences in the relative position of 'also' and marking relationships between HK and GB English. Regression analysis indicates a preference in HK English for a distant marking relationship between 'also' and its focused constituent. Notably, the subject and other constituents emerge as significant predictors of a distant position for 'also.' Together, these findings underscore the nuanced linguistic dynamics in HK English and contribute to our understanding of language contact. It suggests that future pedagogical practice should consider incorporating the syntactic variation within English varieties, facilitating leaners’ effective communication in diverse English-speaking environments and enhancing their intercultural communication competence.

Keywords: also, Cantonese, English, focus marker, frequency analysis, language contact, logistic regression analysis

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Authors: Derya Duran, Christine Jacknick

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Despite a growing body of research on classroom, especially language classroom interactions, much more is yet to be discovered on how interaction is organized in higher education settings. This study investigates how the discourse marker 'I mean' in teacher questioning turns functions as a resource to promote student participation as well as to enhance collective understanding in whole-class discussions. This paper takes a conversation analytic perspective, drawing on 30-hour video recordings of classroom interaction in an English as a medium of instruction university in Turkey. Two content classrooms (i.e., Guidance) were observed during an academic term. The course was offered to 4th year students (n=78) in the Faculty of Education; students were majoring in different subjects (i.e., Early Childhood Education, Foreign Language Education, Mathematics Education). Results of the study demonstrate the multi-functionality of discourse marker 'I mean' in teacher questioning turns. In the context of English as a medium of instruction classrooms where possible sources of confusion may occur, we found that 'I mean' is primarily used to indicate upcoming adjustments. More specifically, it is employed for a variety of interactional purposes such as elaboration, clarification, specification, reformulation, and reference to the instructional activity. The study sheds light on the multiplicity of functions of the discourse marker in academic interactions and it uncovers how certain linguistic resources serve functions to the organization of repair such as the maintenance of understanding in classroom interaction. In doing so, it also shows the ways in which participation is routinely enacted in shared interactional events through linguistic resources.

Keywords: conversation analysis, discourse marker, English as a medium of instruction, repair

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Authors: Jolanta Jonak, Sylvia Tolczyk

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Students demonstrate various learning preferences and learning styles that range from visual, auditory to kinesthetic preferences. These learning preferences are further impacted by individual cognitive make up that characterizes itself in linguistic strengths, logical- special, inter-or intra- personal, just to name a few. Students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CLD) have an increased risk of being misunderstood by many school systems and even medical personnel. CLD students are influenced by many factors (like acculturation and experience) that may impact their achievements and functioning levels. CLD students who develop initial or basic interpersonal communication proficiency skills in the target language are even at a higher risk for being suspected of learning disability when they are underachieving academically. Research indicates that large numbers of students arenot provided the type of education and types of supports they need in order to be successful in an academicenvironment. Multiple research findings indicate that significant numbers of school staff self-reports that they do not feel adequately prepared to work with CLD students. It is extremely important for the school staff, especially school psychologists, who often are the first experts that are consulted, to be educated about overlapping symptoms and settle differences between learning difference and disability. It is equally important for medical personnel, mainly pediatricians, psychologists, and psychiatrists, to understand the subtle differences to avoid inaccurate opinions. Having the knowledge, school staff can avoid unnecessary referrals for special education evaluations and avoid inaccurate decisions about the presence of a disability. This presentation will illustrate distinctions based on research between learning differences and disabilities, how to recognize them, and how to assess for them.

Keywords: special education, learning disability, differentiation, differences

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Authors: Gaston Bacquet

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The purpose of this research is to explore how language and culture shape a learner’s identity as they immerse themselves in the world of second language learning and how teachers can assist in the process of identity construction within a classroom setting. The study will be conducted as an in-classroom ethnography, using a qualitative methods approach and analyzing students’ experiences as language learners, their degree of investment, inclusion/exclusion, and attitudes, both towards themselves and their social context; the research question the study will attempt to answer is: What kind of pedagogical interventions are needed to help language learners in the process of identity construction so they can offset unequal conditions of power and gain further social inclusion? The following methods will be used for data collection: i) Questionnaires to investigate learners’ attitudes and feelings in different areas divided into four strands: themselves, their classroom, learning English and their social context. ii) Participant observations, conducted in a naturalistic manner. iii) Journals, which will be used in two different ways: on the one hand, learners will keep semi-structured, solicited diaries to record specific events as requested by the researcher (event-contingent). On the other, the researcher will keep his journal to maintain a record of events and situations as they happen to reduce the risk of inaccuracies. iv) Person-centered interviews, which will be conducted at the end of the study to unearth data that might have been occluded or be unclear from the methods above. The interviews will aim at gaining further data on experiences, behaviors, values, opinions, feelings, knowledge and sensory, background and demographic information. This research seeks to understand issues of socio-cultural identities and thus make a significant contribution to knowledge in this area by investigating the type of pedagogical interventions needed to assist language learners in the process of identity construction to achieve further social inclusion. It will also have applied relevance for those working with diverse student groups, especially taking our present social context into consideration: we live in a highly mobile world, with migrants relocating to wealthier, more developed countries that pose their own particular set of challenges for these communities. This point is relevant because an individual’s insight and understanding of their own identity shape their relationship with the world and their ability to continue constructing this relationship. At the same time, because a relationship is influenced by power, the goal of this study is to help learners feel and become more empowered by increasing their linguistic capital, which we hope might result in a greater ability to integrate themselves socially. Exactly how this help will be provided will vary as data is unearthed through questionnaires, focus groups and the actual participant observations being carried out.

Keywords: identity construction, second-language learning, investment, second-language culture, social inclusion

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Authors: Min Bao

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The teacher is at the core of the three fundamental factors in international Chinese language teaching, the other two being the textbook and the method. Professional development of the teacher comprises a self-renewing process that is characterized by knowledge impartment and self-reflection, in which individual agency plays a significant role. Agency makes a positive contribution to teachers’ teaching practice and their life-long learning. This study, taking Chinese teaching and learning in Minsk State Linguistic University of Belarus as an example, attempts to understand agency by investigating the teacher’s strategic adaptation of textbooks to meet local needs. Firstly, through in-depth interviews, teachers’ comments on textbooks are collected and analyzed to disclose their strategies of adapting and localizing textbooks. Then, drawing on the theory of 'The chordal triad of agency', the paper reveals the process in which teacher agency is exercised as well as its rationale. The results verify the theory, that is, given its temporal relationality, teacher agency is constructed through a combination of experiences, purposes and aims, and context, i.e., projectivity, iteration and practice-evaluation as mentioned in the theory. Evidence also suggests that the three dimensions effect differently; It is usually one or two dimensions that are of greater effects on the construction of teacher agency. Finally, the paper provides four specific insights to teacher development in international Chinese language teaching: 1) when recruiting teachers, priority be given on candidates majoring in Chinese language or international Chinese language teaching; 2) measures be taken to assure educational quality of the two said majors at various levels; 3) pre-service teacher training program be tailored for improved quality, and 4) management of overseas Confucius Institutions be enhanced.

Keywords: international Chinese language teaching, teacher agency, textbooks, localization

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Authors: Austin Vander Wel, Katherin Vargas Henao

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Washington, DC, is a city in which Spanish, along with several other minority languages, is prevalent not only among tourists but also those living within city limits. In response to this linguistic diversity and DC’s adoption of the Language Access Act in 2004, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) committed to addressing the need for equal linguistic representation and established a five-step plan to provide the best multilingual information possible for public transportation users. The current study, however, strongly suggests that this de jure policy does not align with the reality of Spanish’s representation on DC public transportation–although perhaps doing so in an unexpected way. In order to investigate Spanish’s de facto representation and how it contrasts with de jure policy, this study implements a linguistic landscapes methodology that takes critical language-policy as its theoretical framework (Tollefson, 2005). Specifically concerning de facto representation, it focuses on the discrepancies between digital spaces and the actual physical spaces through which users travel. These digital vs. in situ conditions are further analyzed by separately addressing aural and visual modalities. In digital spaces, data was collected from WMATA’s website (visual) and their bilingual hotline (aural). For in situ spaces, both bus and metro areas of DC public transportation were explored, with signs comprising the visual modality and recordings, driver announcements, and interactions with metro kiosk workers comprising the aural modality. While digital spaces were considered to successfully fulfill WMATA’s commitment to representing Spanish as outlined in the de jure policy, physical spaces show a large discrepancy between what is said and what is done, particularly regarding the bus system, in addition to the aural modality overall. These discrepancies in situ spaces place Spanish speakers at a clear disadvantage, demanding additional resources and knowledge on the part of residents with limited or no English proficiency in order to have equal access to this public good. Based on our critical language-policy analysis, while Spanish is represented as a right in the de jure policy, its implementation in situ clearly portrays Spanish as a problem since those seeking bilingual information can not expect it to be present when and where they need it most (Ruíz, 1984; Tollefson, 2005). This study concludes with practical, data-based steps to improve the current situation facing DC’s public transportation context and serves as a model for responding to inadequate enactment of de jure policy in other language policy settings.

Keywords: Urban landscape, language access, critical-language policy, spanish, public transportation

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Authors: Hana Drštičková

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The paper describes the findings of a qualitative, engaged research focused on the intersection between transgender and autistic identity in a politically engaged setting of activist (trans, queer, crip, disability justice or any combination thereof) groups. It explores the relationship that autistic and trans people have towards activism and how do they feel their identity(ies) impact the kind of political action they take. Geographically, the research terrain is located mainly in Czechia; however, there are important overlaps with other Eastern European countries. The basis of the research’s approach is built on the interconnected principles of the feminist theory of intersectionality, queer/trans studies, disability studies and the concept of the Neurodiversity Paradigm. This paper argues that the social phenomenon of autism and transness is formed differently in Czechia/Eastern Europe and, therefore, deserves additional attention. Nevertheless, it points out that, even though the socio-political context is different, the fact that these identities have a radical political potential to disrupt normative structures in society remains the same. The measure of oppression these structures generate, and the near absence of any public discourse beyond the pathological paradigm in the chosen terrain contributes to the emergence of mainly queer and trans-activist, and to a lesser extent crip, disability justice or mad activist groups, that attract trans and autistic membership. The subsections of the research focus on the topics of the mutual influence of both identities in flux within individual participants, the perceived (dis)connection of networks of oppression or, conversely, support and identification with the community or communities, and the question of how the trans* and autistic members feel their presence affects the activity, internal dynamics, thematic scope and general values of the activist groups they participate in. The research methodology includes participant observation and active participation in groups where the researcher acts as a partial insider, semi-structured in-depth interviews and a critical participatory methodology. Also included is the reflection of not only the combination of researcher and insider roles but also the combination of research and activist intent.

Keywords: activism, autism, queer, neurodiversity, neuroqueer, transgender

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Authors: A. Van Staden, A. Tolmie, E. Vorster

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Research confirms the multifaceted nature of spelling development and underscores the importance of both cognitive and linguistic skills that affect sound spelling development such as working and long-term memory, phonological and orthographic awareness, mental orthographic images, semantic knowledge and morphological awareness. This has clear implications for many South African English second language spellers (L2) who attempt to become proficient spellers. Since English has an opaque orthography, with irregular spelling patterns and insufficient sound/grapheme correspondences, L2 spellers can neither rely, nor draw on the phonological awareness skills of their first language (for example Sesotho and many other African languages), to assist them to spell the majority of English words. Epistemologically, this research is informed by social constructivism. In addition the researchers also hypothesized that the principles of the Overlapping Waves Theory was an appropriate lens through which to investigate whether L2 spellers could significantly improve their spelling skills via the implementation of an alternative route to spelling development, namely the orthographic route, and more specifically via the application of visual imagery. Post-test results confirmed the results of previous research that argues for the interactive nature of different cognitive and linguistic systems such as working memory and its subsystems and long-term memory, as learners were systematically guided to store visual orthographic images of words in their long-term lexicons. Moreover, the results have shown that L2 spellers in the experimental group (n = 9) significantly outperformed L2 spellers (n = 9) in the control group whose intervention involved phonological awareness (and coding) including the teaching of spelling rules. Consequently, L2 learners in the experimental group significantly improved in all the post-test measures included in this investigation, namely the four sub-tests of short-term memory; as well as two spelling measures (i.e. diagnostic and standardized measures). Against this background, the findings of this study look promising and have shown that, within a social-constructivist learning environment, learners can be systematically guided to apply higher-order thinking processes such as visual imagery to successfully store and retrieve mental images of spelling words from their output lexicons. Moreover, results from the present study could play an important role in directing research into this under-researched aspect of L2 literacy development within the South African education context.

Keywords: English second language spellers, phonological and orthographic coding, social constructivism, visual imagery as spelling strategy

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Authors: Dina Alnefaie

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This poster presents a study of a Discord private server with thirteen multilingual gamers, aiming to explore the elements that construct a multilingual online gaming community. The study focuses on the communication practices of four Saudi female and male gamers, using various data collection methods, including online observations through recorded videos and screenshots, interviews, and informal conversations for one year. The primary findings show that translanguaging was a prominent feature of their verbal and textual communication practices. Besides, these practices that mostly accompany cultural ones were used to facilitate communication and express their identities in an intercultural context.

Keywords: online community construction, perceptions, multilingualism, digital identity

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