Search results for: English movies

Authors: Vivian Franco

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There has been a great deal of research about vowel production of second language learners of Spanish, vowel variation across Spanish dialects, and more recently, research related to Spanish heritage speakers’ vowel production based on speech style. However, there is little investigation reported on Spanish heritage speakers’ vowel production in regard to task modality by incorporating own comparison groups of monolinguals and late bilinguals. Thus, the present study investigates the influence of speech style on Spanish heritage speakers’ vowel production by comparing Spanish-English early and late bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. The study was guided by the following research question: How do early bilinguals (heritage speakers) differ/relate to advanced L2 speakers of Spanish (late bilinguals) and Spanish monolinguals in their vowel quality (acoustic distribution) and quantity (duration) based on speech style? The participants were a total of 11 speakers of Spanish: 7 early Spanish-English bilinguals with a similar linguistic background (simultaneous bilinguals of the second generation); 2 advanced L2 speakers of Spanish; and 2 Spanish monolinguals from Mexico. The study consisted of two tasks. The first one adopted a semi-spontaneous style by a solicited narration of life experiences and a description of a favorite movie with the purpose to collect spontaneous speech. The second task was a reading activity in which the participants read two paragraphs of a Mexican literary essay 'La nuez.' This task aimed to obtain a more controlled speech style. From this study, it can be concluded that early bilinguals and monolinguals show a smaller formant vowel space overall compared to the late bilinguals in both speech styles. In terms of formant values by stress, the early bilinguals and the late bilinguals resembled in the semi-spontaneous speech style as their unstressed vowel space overlapped with that of the unstressed vowels different from the monolinguals who displayed a slightly reduced unstressed vowel space. For the controlled data, the early bilinguals were similar to the monolinguals as their stressed and unstressed vowel spaces overlapped in comparison to the late bilinguals who showed a more clear reduction of unstressed vowel space. In regard to stress, the monolinguals revealed longer vowel duration overall. However, findings of duration by stress showed that the early bilinguals and the monolinguals remained stable with shorter values of unstressed vowels in the semi-spontaneous data and longer duration in the controlled data when compared to the late bilinguals who displayed opposite results. These findings suggest an implication for Spanish heritage speakers and L2 Spanish vowels research as it has been frequently argued that Spanish bilinguals differ from the Spanish monolinguals by their vowel reduction and centralized vowel space influenced by English. However, some Spanish varieties are characterized by vowel reduction especially in certain phonetic contexts so that some vowels present more weakening than others. Consequently, it would not be conclusive to affirm an English influence on the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Keywords: Spanish-English bilinguals, Spanish monolinguals, spontaneous and controlled speech, vowel production.

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Authors: Pooja Booluck

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A U-shaped learning curve entails a three-step process: a good performance followed by a bad performance followed by a good performance again. U-shaped curves have been observed not only in language acquisition but also in various fields such as temperature face recognition object permanence to name a few. Building on previous studies of the curve child language acquisition and Second Language Acquisition this empirical study seeks to investigate the relevance of the U-shaped learning model to the acquisition of the difference between cest and il est in the English Learners of French context. The present study was developed to assess whether older learners of French in the ELF context follow the same acquisition pattern. The empirical study was conducted on 15 English learners of French which lasted six weeks. Compositions and questionnaires were collected from each subject at three time intervals (after one week after three weeks after six weeks) after which students work were graded as being either correct or incorrect. The data indicates that there is evidence of a U-shaped learning curve in the acquisition of cest and il est and students did follow the same acquisition pattern as children in regards to rote-learned terms and subject clitics. This paper also discusses the need to introduce modules on U-shaped learning curve in teaching curriculum as many teachers are unaware of the trajectory learners undertake while acquiring core components in grammar. In addition this study also addresses the need to conduct more research on the acquisition of rote-learned terms and subject clitics in SLA.

Keywords: child language acquisition, rote-learning, subject clitics, u-shaped learning model

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Authors: Kate Benedicta Amenador, Dianjian Wang, Bright Nkrumah

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This extensive bibliometric study explores the dynamic influence of artificial intelligence in the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) between 2012 and 2024. The study, which examined 4,500 articles from Google Scholar, Modern Language Association Linguistics Abstracts, Web of Science, Scopus, Researchgate, and library genesis databases, indicates that AI integration in EFL is on the rise. This notable increase is ascribed to a variety of transformative events, including increased academic funding for higher education and the COVID-19 epidemic. The results of the study identify leading contributors, prominent authors, publishers and sources, with the United States, China and the United Kingdom emerging as key contributors. The co-occurrence analysis of key terms reveals five clusters highlighting patterns in AI-enhanced language instruction and learning, including evaluation strategies, educational technology, learning motivation, EFL teaching aspects, and learner feedback. The study also discusses the impact of various AIs in enhancing EFL writing skills with software such as Grammarly, Quilbot, and Chatgpt. The current study recognizes limitations in database selection and linguistic constraints. Nevertheless, the results provide useful insights for educators, researchers and policymakers, inspiring and guiding a cross-disciplinary collaboration and creative pedagogical techniques and approaches to teaching and learning in the future.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, bibliometrics study, VOSviewer visualization, English as a foreign language

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Authors: Ayşe Yurdakul, Eckehard Schnieder

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Because of the growing multidisciplinarity and multilinguality, communication problems in different technical fields grows more and more. Therefore, each technical field has its own specific language, terminology which is characterised by the different definition of terms. In addition to definition problems, there are also relation problems between terms. Among these problems of relation, there are the synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy/hyponymy, ambiguity, risk of confusion, and translation problems etc. Thus, the terminology management system iglos of the Institute for Traffic Safety and Automation Engineering of the Technische Universität Braunschweig has the target to solve these problems by a methodological standardisation of term definitions with the aid of the iglos sign model and iglos relation types. The focus of this paper should be on solving definition and relation problems between terms in English navigation terminology.

Keywords: iglos, iglos sign model, methodological resolutions, navigation terminology, common language, technical language, positioning, definition problems, relation problems

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Authors: Craig Mertens

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Teaching art history or any other academic subject to EFL students can be done successfully. A course called Western Images was created to teach Japanese students art history while only using English in the classroom. An approach known as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) was used as a basis for this course. This paper’s purpose is to state the reasons why learning about art history is important, go through the process of creating content for the course, and suggest multiple tasks to help students practice the critical thinking skills used in analyzing and drawing conclusions of works of art from western culture. As a guide for this paper, Brown’s (1995) six elements of a language curriculum will be used. These stages include needs analysis, goals and objectives, assessment, materials, teaching method and tasks, and evaluation of the course. The goal here is to inspire debate and discussion regarding CLIL and its pros and cons, and to question current curriculum in university language courses.

Keywords: art history, EFL, content and language integration learning, critical thinking

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Authors: Feng Ke

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Henry Purcell's opera ‘Dido and Aeneas’ is still highly appreciated by music critics and occupies an important place in the repertoire of theaters around the world. Presented for the first time in 1689 by pupils of a boarding school in Chelsea, it turned out to be the only one of its kind not only in English but also in world opera music. Up-to-date data on the first productions of the opera are available in the Paxton article. The composer, for whom English masks served as examples of his first works in this genre, departed in ‘Dido’ from the so-called seven-opera with spoken dialogues and created a work that corresponded to his understanding of opera as ‘singing accompanied by an appropriate action’, ‘Dido and Aeneas’ differs from the Italian operas of that time in its chamber, stylistic rigor, it is full, on the one hand, of elegiac languor and subtle feelings, on the other – of genre ensemble and choral scenes saturated with lively energy.

Keywords: Henry Purcell, baroque opera, vocal part of the area, genuine virtuosity from the performer

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Authors: Eric Enongene Ekembe

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Recent calls on EFL teaching posit the centrality of context factors and argue for a correlation between effectiveness in teaching with the learners’ culture in the EFL classroom. Context is not everything; it is defined with indicators of learners’ cultural artifacts and stereotypes in meaningful interactions in the language classroom. In keeping with this, it is difficult to universalise pedagogic procedures given that appropriate procedures are context-sensitive- and contexts differ. It is necessary to investigate what counts as cultural specificities or stereotypes of specific learners to reflect on how different language learning contexts affect or are affected by English language teaching procedures, most especially in under-represented cultures, which have appropriated the English language. This paper investigates cultural stereotypes of EFL learners in the culturally diverse Cameroon to examine how they mediate teaching and learning. Data collected on mixed-method basis from 83 EFL teachers and 1321 learners in Cameroon reveal a strong presence of typical cultural artifacts and stereotypes. Statistical analysis and thematic coding demonstrate that teaching procedures in place were insensitive to the cultural artifacts and stereotypes, resulting in trending tension between teachers and learners. The data equally reveal a serious contradiction between the communicative goals of language teaching and learning: what teachers held as effective teaching was diametrically opposed to success in learning. In keeping with this, the paper argues for a ‘decentred’ teacher preparation in Cameroon that is informed by systemic learners’ feedback. On this basis, applied linguistics has the urgent task of exploring dimensions of what actually counts as contextualized practice in ELT.

Keywords: cultural stereotypes, EFL, implications, procedures

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Authors: Sikander Ali

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English is being used as linguafranca in most of the formal and informal situations of Pakistan. This extensive use has been rapidly replacing the identity of national language of Pakistani.e. Urdu. The nature of syntactic representation has always been the matter of confusion among linguists. Being unaware of the correct plural forms the non-natives commit mistakes while making plurals. But the situation is reverse when non-natives of English irrespective of knowing the right plurals make wrong plurals usually talking in their native language. The observation method was opted to check this hypothesis. Along with it, a checklist has been made in which these certain occurrences have been mentioned, where this flouting of the norms is a normal routine. The result confirms that Pakistani commit this mistake, i.e. ‘tablian’ the plural of tables, ‘filain’ the plural of files, though this is done by them on unconscious level. This emerging trend of unconscious mistake is leading Pakistani bilinguals towards a diglossic situation where they are coining portmanteau.

Keywords: bilinguals, emerging trend, portmanteau, trends

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Authors: Mei Lin, Chang Liu

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Argumentative writing is the most prevalent genre in diverse writing tests. How to construct academic arguments is often regarded as a difficult task by most English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A failure to generate enough ideas and organise them coherently and logically as well as a lack of competence in supporting their arguments with relevant evidence are frequent problems faced by EFL learners when approaching an English argumentative writing task. Overall, these problems are closely related to planning, and planning an argumentative writing at pre-writing stage plays a vital role in a good academic essay. However, how teachers can effectively guide students to generate ideas is rarely discussed in planning English argumentative writing, apart from brainstorming. Brainstorming has been a common practice used by teachers to help students generate ideas. However, some limitations of brainstorming suggest that it can help students generate many ideas, but ideas might not necessarily be coherent and logic, and could sometimes impede production. It calls for a need to explore effective instructional strategies at pre-writing stage of English argumentative writing. This paper will first examine how a Six Thinking Hats approach can be used to provide a dialogic space for EFL learners to experience and collaboratively generate ideas from multiple perspectives at pre-writing stage. Part of the findings of the impact of a twelve-week intervention (from March to July 2021) on students learning to generate ideas through engaging in group discussions of using Six Thinking Hats will then be reported. The research design is based on the sociocultural theory. The findings present evidence from a mixed-methods approach and fifty-nine participants from two first-year undergraduate natural classes in a Chinese university. Analysis of pre- and post- questionnaires suggests that participants had a positive attitude toward the Six Thinking Hats approach. It fosters their understanding of prewriting and argumentative writing, helps them to generate more ideas not only from multiple perspectives but also in a systematic way. A comparison of participants writing plans confirms an improvement in generating counterarguments and rebuttals to support their arguments. Above all, visual and transcripts data of group discussion collected from different weeks throughout the intervention enable teachers and researchers to ‘see’ the hidden process of learning to generate ideas in action.

Keywords: argumentative writing, innovative pedagogy, six thinking hats, dialogic space, prewriting, higher education

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Authors: Helena Sit

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Developing skills in using ICT in the language classroom has been discussed at all educational levels. Digital tools and learning management systems enable teachers to transform their instructional activities while giving learners the opportunity to engage with virtual communities. In the field of English as a second language (ESL) teaching and learning, the use of technology-enhanced learning and diverse pedagogical practices continues to grow. Whilst technology and multimodal learning is a way of the future for education, second language teachers now face the predicament as to whether implementing these newer ways of learning is, in fact, beneficial or disadvantageous to learners. Research has shown that integrating multimodality and technology can improve students’ engagement and participation in their English language learning. However, students can experience anxiety or misunderstanding when engaging with E-learning or digital-mediated learning. This paper aims to explore how ESL teaching and learning are transformed via the use of educational technology and what impact it has had on student teachers. Case study is employed in this research. The study reviews the growing presence of technology and multimodality in university language classrooms, discusses their impact on teachers’ pedagogical practices, and proposes scaffolding strategies to help design effective English language courses in the Australian education context. The study sheds light on how pedagogical integration today may offer a way forward for language teachers of tomorrow and provides implications to implement an evidence-informed approach that blends knowledge from research, practice and people experiencing the practice in the digital era.

Keywords: educational technology, ICT in higher education, curriculum design and innovation, teacher education, multiliteracies pedagogy

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Authors: Supranee Wattanasin

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The purpose of this research was to enhance student’s media literacy. The process was divided into 4 periods: the first phase was to hold the meeting for 100 representatives from various institutions in Thailand; the second phase allowed them to design activities to be used in their institutions; the third implemented activities to reach other target groups; and the last phase was to summarize results. It was found that the participants had clear understanding on media literacy. They knew well about the media. In other words, they knew the difference between creative media and bad ones. Students could use analytical process when searching for information. Thus, the project enabled the students to use analytical thinking skills in designing new activities. Therefore, they could creatively integrate Thai folk song with short movies and cartoons. To increase students’ media literacy, there should be chances for them to gain first-hand experience.

Keywords: media literacy, mechanism development, youth, project radio-television

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Authors: Naira Poghosyan

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In knowledge society the content of the studies, the methods used and the requirements for an educator’s professionalism regularly undergo certain changes. It follows that in knowledge society the aim of education is not only to educate professionals for a certain field but also to help students to be aware of cultural values, form human mutual relationship, collaborate, be open, adapt to the new situation, creatively express their ideas, accept responsibility and challenge. In this viewpoint, the development of communicative language competence requires a through coordinated approach to ensure proper comprehension and memorization of subject-specific words starting from high school level. On the other hand, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teachers and practitioners are increasingly faced with the task of developing and exploiting new ways of assessing their learners’ literacy while learning and teaching ESP. The presentation will highlight the latest achievements in this field. The author will present some practical methodological issues and principles associated with learning, teaching and assessing ESP skills of the learners, using the two software programs of EXE 2.0 and Hot Potatoes 6. On the one hand the author will display the advantages of the two programs as self-learning and self-assessment interactive tools in the course of academic study and professional development of the CLIL learners, on the other hand, she will comprehensively shed light upon some methodological aspects of working out appropriate ways of selection, introduction, consolidation of subject specific materials via EXE 2.0 and Hot Potatoes 6. Then the author will go further to distinguish ESP courses by the general nature of the learners’ specialty identifying three large categories of EST (English for Science and Technology), EBE (English for Business and Economics) and ESS (English for the Social Sciences). The cornerstone of the presentation will be the introduction of the subject titled “The methodology of teaching ESP in non-linguistic institutions”, where a unique case of teaching ESP on Architecture and Construction via EXE 2.0 and Hot Potatoes 6 will be introduced, exemplifying how the introduction, consolidation and assessment can be used as a basis for feedback to the ESP learners in a particular professional field.

Keywords: ESP competences, ESP skill assessment/ self-assessment tool, eXe 2.0 / HotPotatoes software program, ESP teaching strategies and techniques

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Authors: Kenji Tanaka, Kazumi Sugita, Yuto Mizushima

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This paper introduces a noteworthy form of English communication training for the officers and operators of the Osaka-Bay Marine Traffic Information Service (Osaka MARTIS) of the Japan Coast Guard working in the congested area at the Akashi Strait in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. The authors of this paper, Marine Technical College’s (MTC) English language instructors, have been holding about forty lectures and exercises in basic and normal Maritime English (ME) for several groups of MARTIS personnel at Osaka MARTIS annually since they started the training in 2005. Trainees are expected to be qualified Maritime Third-Class Radio Operators who are responsible for providing safety information to a daily average of seven to eight hundred vessels that pass through the Akashi Strait, one of Japan’s narrowest channels. As of 2022, the instructors are conducting 55 remote lessons at MARTIS. One lesson is 90 minutes long. All 26 trainees are given oral and written assessments. The trainees need to pass the examination to become qualified operators every year, requiring them to train and maintain their linguistic levels even during the pandemic of Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19). The vessel traffic information provided by Osaka MARTIS in Maritime English language is essential to the work involving the use of very high frequency (VHF) communication between MARTIS and vessels in the area. ME is the common language mainly used on board merchant, fishing, and recreational vessels, normally at sea. ME was edited and recommended by the International Maritime Organization in the 1970s, was revised in 2002, and has undergone continual revision. The vessel’s circumstances are much more serious at the strait than those at the open sea, so these vessels need ME to receive guidance from the center when passing through the narrow strait. The imminent and challenging situations at the strait necessitate that textbooks’ contents include the basics of the phrase book for seafarers as well as specific and additional navigational information, pronunciation exercises, notes on keywords and phrases, explanations about collocations, sample sentences, and explanations about the differences between synonyms especially those focusing on terminologies necessary for passing through the strait. Additionally, short Japanese-English translation quizzes about these topics, as well as prescribed readings about the maritime sector, are include in the textbook. All of these exercises have been trained in the remote education system since the outbreak of COVID-19. According to the guidelines of ME edited in 2009, the lowest level necessary for seafarers is B1 (lower individual users) of The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR). Therefore, this vocational ME language training at Osaka MARTIS aims for its trainees to communicate at levels higher than B1. A noteworthy proof of improvement from this training is that most of the trainees have become qualified marine radio communication officers.

Keywords: akashi strait, B1 of CEFR, maritime english communication training, osaka martis

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Authors: Peniah Mabaso-Shamano

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The paper evaluates Shona terms that were created to teach Phonetics and Phonology courses at Great Zimbabwe University (GZU). The phonetics and phonology terms to be discussed in this paper were created using different processes and strategies such as translation, borrowing, neologising, compounding, transliteration, circumlocution among many others. Most phonetics and phonology terms are alien to Shona and as a result, there are no suitable Shona equivalents. The lecturers and students for these courses have a mammoth task of creating terminology for the different modules offered in Shona and other Zimbabwean indigenous languages. Most linguistic reference books are written in English. As such, lecturers and students translate information from English to Shona, a measure which is proving to be too difficult for them. A term creation workshop was held at GZU to try to address the problem of lack of terminology in indigenous languages. Different indigenous language practitioners from different tertiary institutions convened for a two-day workshop at GZU. Due to the 'specialized' nature of phonetics and phonology, it was too difficult to come up with 'proper' indigenous terms. The researcher will consult tertiary institutions lecturers who teach linguistics courses and linguistics students to get their views on the created terms. The people consulted will not be the ones who took part in the term creation workshop held at GZU. The selected participants will be asked to evaluate and back-translate some of the terms. In instances where they feel the terms created are not suitable or user-friendly, they will be asked to suggest other terms. Since the researcher is also a linguistics lecturer, her observation and views will be important. From her experience in using some of the terms in teaching phonetics and phonology courses to undergraduate students, the researcher noted that most of the terms created have shortcomings since they are not user-friendly. These shortcomings include terms longer than the English terms as some terms are translated to Shona through a whole statement. Most of these terms are neologisms, compound neologisms, transliterations, circumlocutions, and blends. The paper will show that there is overuse of transliterated terms due to the lack of Shona equivalents for English terms. Most single English words were translated into compound neologisms or phrases after attempts to reduce them to one word terms failed. In other instances, circumlocution led to the problem of creating longer terms than the original and as a result, the terms are not user-friendly. The paper will discuss and evaluate the different phonetics and phonology terms created and the different strategies and processes used in creating them.

Keywords: blending, circumlocution, term creation, translation

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Authors: Reza Beheshti

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This paper examines remedies for defective manufactured goods in commercial circular economic transactions. The linear ‘take-make-dispose’ model fits well with the conventional remedial framework in which damages are considered the primary remedy. Damages under English Sales Law encourages buyers to look for a substitute seller with broadly similar goods to the ones agreed on in the original contract, enter into contract with this new seller and hence terminate the original contract. By doing so, the buyer ends the contractual relationship. This seems contrary to the core principles of the circular economy: keeping products, components, and materials in longer use, which can partly be achieved by product refurbishment. This process involves returning a product to good working condition by replacing or repairing major components that are faulty or close to failure and making ‘cosmetic’ changes to update the appearance of a product. This remedy has not been widely accepted or applied in commercial cases, which in turn flags up the secondary nature of performance-related remedies. This paper critically analyses the laws concerning the seller’s duty to cure in English law and the extent to which they correspond with core principles of the circular economy. In addition, this paper takes into account the potential of circular economic transactions being characterised as something other than sales. In such situations, the likely outcome will be a license to use products, which may limit the choice of remedy further. Consequently, this paper suggests an outline remedial framework specifically for commercial circular economic transactions in manufactured goods.

Keywords: circular economy, contract law, remedies, English Sales Law

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Authors: Lulu Wang, Yongjun Xu, Xiaoyang Qiao

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The Forbidden City is well known for being full of Chinese cultural and historical relics. However, the Masters in the Forbidden City, a documentary film, doesn’t just dwell on the stories of the past. Instead, it focuses on ordinary people—the restorers of the relics and antiquities, which has caught the sight of Chinese audiences. From this popular documentary film, a new way can be considered, that is to show the relics, antiquities and painting with a character of modern humanities by films and TV programs. Of course, it can’t just like a simple explanation from tour guides in museums. It should be a perfect combination of scenes, heritages, stories, storytellers and background music. All we want to do is trying to dig up the humanity behind the heritages and then create a virtual scene for the audience to have emotional resonance from the humanity. It is believed that there are two problems. One is that compared with the entertainment shows, why people prefer to see the boring restoration work. The other is that what the interaction is between those history documentary films, the heritages, the audiences and collective memory. This paper mainly used the methods of text analysis and data analysis. The audiences’ comment texts were collected from all kinds of popular video sites. Through analyzing those texts, there was a word cloud chart about people preferring to use what kind of words to comment the film. Then the usage rate of all comments words was calculated. After that, there was a Radar Chart to show the rank results. Eventually, each of them was given an emotional value classification according their comment tone and content. Based on the above analysis results, an interaction model among the audience, history films/TV programs and the collective memory can be summarized. According to the word cloud chart, people prefer to use such words to comment, including moving, history, love, family, celebrity, tone... From those emotional words, we can see Chinese audience felt so proud and shared the sense of Collective Identity, so they leave such comments: To our great motherland! Chinese traditional culture is really profound! It is found that in the construction of collective memory symbology, the films formed an imaginary system by organizing a ‘personalized audience’. The audience is not just a recipient of information, but a participant of the documentary films and a cooperator of collective memory. At the same time, it is believed that the traditional background music, the spectacular present scenes and the tone of the storytellers/hosts are also important, so it is suggested that the museums could try to cooperate with the producers of movie and TV program to create a vivid scene for the people. Maybe it’s a more artistic way for heritages to be open to all the world.

Keywords: audience, heritages, history movies, TV programs

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Authors: Cathy Basterfield

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Issue: To engage in one’s own health care, health professionals need to be aware of an individual’s specific skills and abilities for best communication. One of the most discussed is health literacy. One of the assumed skills and abilities for adults is an individuals’ health literacy. Background: A review of publicly available health content appears to assume all adult readers will have a broad and full capacity to read at a high level of literacy, often at a post-school education level. Health information writers and clinicians need to recognise one critical area for why there may be little or no change in a person’s behaviour, or no-shows to appointments. Perhaps unintentionally, they are miscommunicating with the majority of the adult population. Health information contains many literacy domains. It usually includes technical medical terms or jargon. Many fact sheets and other information require scientific literacy with or without specific numerical literacy. It may include graphs, percentages, timing, distance, or weights. Each additional word or concept in these domains decreases the readers' ability to meaningfully read, understand and know what to do with the information. An attempt to begin to read the heading where long or unfamiliar words are used will reduce the readers' motivation to attempt to read. Critically people who have low literacy are overwhelmed when pages are covered with lots of words. People attending a health environment may be unwell or anxious about a diagnosis. These make it harder to read, understand and know what to do with the information. But access to health information must consider an even wider range of adults, including those with poor school attainment, migrants, and refugees. It is also homeless people, people with mental health illnesses, or people who are ageing. People with low literacy also may include people with lifelong disabilities, people with acquired disabilities, people who read English as a second (or third) language, people who are Deaf, or people who are vision impaired. Outcome: This paper will discuss Easy English, which is developed for adults. It uses the audiences’ everyday words, short sentences, short words, and no jargon. It uses concrete language and concrete, specific images to support the text. It has been developed in Australia since the mid-2000s. This paper will showcase various projects in the health domain which use Easy English to improve the understanding and functional use of written information for the large numbers of adults in our communities who do not have the health literacy to manage a range of day to day reading tasks. See examples from consent forms, fact sheets and choice options, instructions, and other functional documents, where Easy English has been developed. This paper will ask individuals to reflect on their own work practice and consider what written information must be available in Easy English. It does not matter how cutting-edge a new treatment is; when adults can not read or understand what it is about and the positive and negative outcomes, they are less likely to be engaged in their own health journey.

Keywords: health literacy, inclusion, Easy English, communication

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Authors: Yea-Mei Leou, Shiu-Hsung Huang, T. C. Shen, Chin-Ya Fang

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The purposes of this study were to explore how to establish a professional learning community for English teachers at a junior high school, and to explore how teachers and students think about the guided reading program. The participants were three experienced English teachers and their ESL seventh-grade students from three classes in a junior high school. Leveled picture books and worksheets were used in the program. Questionnaires and interviews were used for gathering information. The findings were as follows: First, most students enjoyed this guided reading program. Second, the teachers thought the guided reading program was helpful to students’ learning and the discussions in the professional learning community refreshed their ideas, but the preparation for the teaching was time-consuming. Suggestions based on the findings were provided.

Keywords: ESL students, guided reading, leveled books, professional learning community

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Authors: Xiangyu Yang

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Xiao Qian (1910-1999) was a prolific literary translator between Chinese and English in both directions and an influential commentator on Chinese translation practices for nearly 70 years (1931-1998). During his stay in Britain from 1939 to 1946, Xiao self-translated and published a series of short stories, essays, and feature articles. With Pedersen's theoretical framework, the paper finds that Xiao flexibly adopted seven translation strategies (i.e. phonemic retention, specification, direct translation, generalization, substitution, omission, and official equivalent) to deal with the expressions specific to Chinese culture, struggling to seek a balance between adequate translation and acceptable translation in a historical condition of the huge gap between China and the west in the early twentieth century. Besides, the study also discovers that Xiao's translation strategies were greatly influenced by his own translational purpose as well as the literary systems, ideologies, and patronage in China and Britain in the 1940s.

Keywords: self-translation, extralinguistic cultural reference, Xiao Qian, Pedersen

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Authors: Alfonsina Buoniconto

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The aim of this study is to investigate the degree of cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the encoding of motion events (MEs) in English and Italian, these being typologically different languages both showing signs of disobedience to their respective types. As a matter of fact, the traditional typological classification of MEs encoding distributes languages into two macro-types, based on the preferred locus for the expression of Path, the main ME component (other components being Figure, Ground and Manner) characterized by conceptual and structural prominence. According to this model, Satellite-framed (SF) languages typically express Path information in verb-dependent items called satellites (e.g. preverbs and verb particles) with main verbs encoding Manner of motion; whereas Verb-framed languages (VF) tend to include Path information within the verbal locus, leaving Manner to adjuncts. Although this dichotomy is valid altogether, languages do not always behave according to their typical classification patterns. English, for example, is usually ascribed to the SF type due to the rich inventory of postverbal particles and phrasal verbs used to express spatial relations (i.e. the cat climbed down the tree); nevertheless, it is not uncommon to find constructions such as the fog descended slowly, which is typical of the VF type. Conversely, Italian is usually described as being VF (cf. Paolo uscì di corsa ‘Paolo went out running’), yet SF constructions like corse via in lacrime ‘She ran away in tears’ are also frequent. This paper will try to demonstrate that such a typological overlapping is due to the fact that the semantic units making up MEs are distributed within several loci of the sentence –not only verbs and satellites– thus determining a number of different constructions stemming from convergent factors. Indeed, the linguistic expression of motion events depends not only on the typological nature of languages in a traditional sense, but also on a series morphological, lexical, and syntactic resources, as well as on inferential, discursive, usage-related, and cultural factors that make semantic information more or less accessible, frequent, and easy to process. Hence, rather than describe English and Italian in dichotomic terms, this study focuses on the investigation of cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation in the use of all the strategies made available by each linguistic system to express motion. Evidence for these assumptions is provided by parallel corpora analysis. The sample texts are taken from two contemporary Italian novels and their respective English translations. The 400 motion occurrences selected (200 in English and 200 in Italian) were scanned according to the MODEG (an acronym for Motion Decoding Grid) methodology, which grants data comparability through the indexation and retrieval of combined morphosyntactic and semantic information at different levels of detail.

Keywords: construction typology, motion event encoding, parallel corpora, satellite-framed vs. verb-framed type

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Authors: Oluwaseun Ijiwade, Chris Davison, Kelvin Gregory

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In Australia, like other parts of the world, the debate on how to enhance teachers using assessment data to inform teaching and learning of English as an Additional Language (EAL, Australia) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL, United States) have occupied the centre of academic scholarship. Traditionally, this approach was conceptualised as ‘Formative Assessment’ and, in recent times, ‘Assessment for Learning (AfL)’. The central problem is that teacher-made tests are limited in providing data that can inform teaching and learning due to variability of classroom assessments, which are hindered by teachers’ characteristics and assessment literacy. To address this concern, scholars in language education and testing have proposed a uniformed large-scale computer-based assessment program to meet the needs of teachers and promote AfL in language education. In Australia, for instance, the Victoria state government commissioned a large-scale project called 'Tools to Enhance Assessment Literacy (TEAL) for Teachers of English as an additional language'. As part of the TEAL project, a tool called ‘Reading and Vocabulary assessment for English as an Additional Language (RVEAL)’, as a diagnostic language assessment (DLA), was developed by language experts at the University of New South Wales for teachers in Victorian schools to guide EAL pedagogy in the classroom. Therefore, this study aims to provide qualitative evidence for understanding beliefs about the diagnostic language assessment (DLA) among EAL teachers in primary and secondary schools in Victoria, Australia. To realize this goal, this study raises the following questions: (a) How do teachers use large-scale assessment data for diagnostic purposes? (b) What skills do language teachers think are necessary for using assessment data for instruction in the classroom? and (c) What factors, if any, contribute to teachers’ beliefs about diagnostic assessment in a large-scale assessment? Semi-structured interview method was used to collect data from at least 15 professional teachers who were selected through a purposeful sampling. The findings from the resulting data analysis (thematic analysis) provide an understanding of teachers’ beliefs about DLA in a classroom context and identify how these beliefs are crystallised in language teachers. The discussion shows how the findings can be used to inform professional development processes for language teachers as well as informing important factor of teacher cognition in the pedagogic processes of language assessment. This, hopefully, will help test developers and testing organisations to align the outcome of this study with their test development processes to design assessment that can enhance AfL in language education.

Keywords: beliefs, diagnostic language assessment, English as an additional language, teacher cognition

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Authors: Narges Hamidipour

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VOD, which stands for "video on demand", is one kind of watching movies and series on web platforms that, by using them, individuals can access lots of video content by paying abonnement. The first platform in Iran was funded in 2014, and in the last 10 years, it has become the main part of the movie and series industry. There are 374 VOD platforms in Iran, but just three of them are in the mainstream. However, in these years, they have been developed and famed in different ways. This article focuses on the reasons for this development in the past years. For the framework, "digital economy", "media industries," and "political economy" have been used with the interview method. In this research, some experts in SATRA (regulatory organization of inclusive audio and video media in Iran), owners or managers of VODs and some others who directly have been in the system conveyed their opinions. By the way, some documents and analysis statistics are invoked to reach complete results.

Keywords: digital economy, political economy, VOD, interview, iran

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Authors: Najib Khumaidillah

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A conversation needs skills to create the good flow of it. The skills also need to be paid attention by a host like Oprah Winfrey and Justin Bieber as an artist. This study is aimed at describing turn taking strategies and adjacency pairs used by the speakers. The data are from one segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show’s transcription with Justin Bieber. Those are analyzed by Stenstorm’s turn taking theories and adjacency pairs theories. From the analysis, it was found that both speakers use various turn taking strategies and adjacency pairs. These findings are hoped to be an example for non-native English speaker in doing English conversation and advance people’s comprehension of how to organize good conversation structure.

Keywords: adjacency pairs, conversation structure, the Oprah Winfrey show, turn taking

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Authors: Russell Rosen

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American Sign Language (ASL) has been developed and used by signing deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) individuals in the American Deaf community since early nineteenth century. In the last two decades, secondary schools in the US offered ASL for foreign language credit to secondary school learners. The learners who learn ASL as a foreign language are largely American native speakers of English. They not only learn ASL in US schools but also create spaces under certain interactional and social conditions in their home communities outside of classrooms and use ASL with each other instead of their native English. This phenomenon is a transmigration of language from a native social group to a non-native, non-kin social group. This study looks at the transmigration of ASL from signing Deaf community to the general speaking and hearing American society. Theoretical implications of this study are discussed.

Keywords: American Sign Language, Foreign Language, Language transmission, United States

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Authors: Numra Qayyum, Samina Sarwat, Noor ul Ain

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Bilingual speakers generally can speak both languages with the same competency without mixing them intentionally and making mistakes, but sometimes errors occur in language selection. This quantitative study particularly deals with the language errors made by Urdu-English bilinguals. In this research, researchers have given special attention to the part played by bottom-up priming and top-down cognitive control in these errors. Unstable Urdu-English bilingual participants termed pictures and were prompted to shift from one language to another under the pressure of time. Different situations were given to manipulate the participants. The long and short runs trials of the same language were also given before switching to another language. The study is concluded with the findings that bilinguals made more errors when switching to the first language from their second language, and these errors are large in number, especially when a speaker is switching from L2 (second language) to L1 (first language) after a long run. When the switching is reversed, i.e., from L2 to LI, it had no effect at all. These results gave the clear responsibility of all these errors to top-down cognitive control.

Keywords: bottom up priming, language error, language switching, top down cognitive control

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Authors: Khadija Refouh

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Culture bound-expressions have been a bottleneck for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and comprehension, especially in the case of machine translation (MT). In the last decade, the field of machine translation has greatly advanced. Neural machine translation NMT has recently achieved considerable development in the quality of translation that outperformed previous traditional translation systems in many language pairs. Neural machine translation NMT is an Artificial Intelligence AI and deep neural networks applied to language processing. Despite this development, there remain some serious challenges that face neural machine translation NMT when translating culture bounded-expressions, especially for low resources language pairs such as Arabic-English and Arabic-French, which is not the case with well-established language pairs such as English-French. Machine translation of opaque idioms from English into French are likely to be more accurate than translating them from English into Arabic. For example, Google Translate Application translated the sentence “What a bad weather! It runs cats and dogs.” to “يا له من طقس سيء! تمطر القطط والكلاب” into the target language Arabic which is an inaccurate literal translation. The translation of the same sentence into the target language French was “Quel mauvais temps! Il pleut des cordes.” where Google Translate Application used the accurate French corresponding idioms. This paper aims to perform NMT experiments towards better translation of opaque idioms using high quality clean multilingual corpus. This Corpus will be collected analytically from human generated idiom translation. AutoML translation, a Google Neural Machine Translation Platform, is used as a custom translation model to improve the translation of opaque idioms. The automatic evaluation of the custom model will be compared to the Google NMT using Bilingual Evaluation Understudy Score BLEU. BLEU is an algorithm for evaluating the quality of text which has been machine-translated from one natural language to another. Human evaluation is integrated to test the reliability of the Blue Score. The researcher will examine syntactical, lexical, and semantic features using Halliday's functional theory.

Keywords: multilingual corpora, natural language processing (NLP), neural machine translation (NMT), opaque idioms

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Authors: Dennis Infante, Leonora Yambao

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The Philippines is a multilingual community. A Filipino learns at least three languages throughout his lifespan. Since languages are learned and picked up simultaneously in the environment, a student naturally develops a language system that combines features of at least three languages: the local language, English and Filipino. This study seeks to investigate this particular phenomenon and aspires to propose a theoretical framework of unique language acquisition in the elementary, high school and college in the three languages spoken and used in media, community, business and school: Kapampangan, the local language; Filipino, the national language; and English. The study randomly selects five students from three participating schools in order to acquire language samples. The samples were analyzed in the subsentential, sentential and suprasentential levels using grammatical theories. The data are classified to map out the pattern of substitution or shifting from one language to another.

Keywords: language acquisition, mother tongue, multiculturalism, multilingual education

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Authors: Sabrina Tabassum

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Using Census Data for Housing and Population of Australia 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016, this paper shows the existence of wage differences between natives and immigrants in Australia. Addressing the heterogeneous nature of immigrants, this study group the immigrants in three broad categories- migrants from English speaking countries and migrants from India and China. Migrants from English speaking countries and India earn more than the natives per week, whereas migrants from China earn far less than the natives per week. Oaxaca decomposition suggests that major part of this differential is unexplained. Using the occupational segregation concept and Brown decomposition, this study indicates that migrants from India and China would have been earned more than the natives if they had the same occupation distribution as natives due to their individual characteristics. Within occupation, wage differences are more prominent than inter-occupation wage differences for immigrants from China and India.

Keywords: Australia, labour, migration, wage

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Authors: Sukhvinder Singh

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Punjabi language is related to the languages of New Indo-Aryan group that, in turn, is related to the branch of Indo-European language family. Punjabi language covers the areas of Western part (that is in Pakistan) and Eastern part (the Punjab state, Haryana, Delhi Himachal and J&K) and abroad (particularly Canada, USA, U.K. and Arab Emirates), where it is spoken widely. Besides India and Pakistan, Punjabi is the third language spoken in Canada after English, French having more than one hundred millions speakers worldwide. It is the fourth language spoken in Canada after English, French, and Chinese. It is also being taught as second language in most of the community school of British Columbia. The total number of Punjabi speakers is more than one hundred millions including India, Pakistan and abroad. Punjabi has a long tradition of linguistic tradition. A large number of scholars have studied Punjabi at different linguistic levels. Various studies are devoted to its special phonological characteristics, especially the tone, which has now started disappearing in favour of aspiration, a rare example of a language change in progress in its reversal direction. This process of language change in progress in reversal is dealt with in this paper a change towards a loss of linguistic indigeneity. The tone being a distinctive linguistic feature of Punjabi language is getting lost due to the increasing influence of Hindi and English particularly in the speech Urban Punjabi and Punjabi settled abroad. In this paper, an attempt has been made to discuss the sociolinguistics and sociology of Punjabi language and Punjab to trace the initiation and progression of this change towards a loss of Linguistic Indigeneity.

Keywords: language change in reversal, reaspiration, detonalization, new Indo-Aryan group

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Authors: Chau So Ling

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I.INTRODUCTION: Educators have always been interested in exploring factors that contribute to students’ academic success. It is beyond question that language, as a medium of instruction, will affect student learning. This paper tries to investigate whether language is a crucial factor in determining students’ achievement in their studies. II. BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY: The issue of using English as a medium of instruction in Hong Kong is a special topic because Hong Kong is a post-colonial and international city which a British colony. In such a specific language environment, researchers in the education field have always been interested in investigating students’ language proficiency and its relation to academic achievement and other related educational indicators such as motivation to learn, self-esteem, learning effectiveness, self-efficacy, etc. Along this line of thought, this study specifically focused on business education. III. METHODOLOGY: The methodology in this study involved two sequential stages, namely, a focus group interview and a data analysis. The whole study was directed towards both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The subjects of the study were divided into two groups. For the first group participating in the interview, a total of ten high school students were invited. They studied Business Studies, and their English standard was varied. The theme of the discussion was “Does English affect your learning and examination results of Business Studies?” The students were facilitated to discuss the extent to which English standard affected their learning of Business subjects and requested to rate the correlation between English and performance of Business Studies on a five-point scale. The second stage of the study involved another group of students. They were high school graduates who had taken the public examination for entering universities. A database containing their public examination results for different subjects has been obtained for the purpose of statistical analysis. Hypotheses were tested and evidence was obtained from the focus group interview to triangulate the findings. V. MAJOR FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION: By sharing of personal experience, the discussion of focus group interviews indicated that higher English standards could help the students achieve better learning and examination performance. In order to end the interview, the students were asked to indicate the correlation between English proficiency and performance of Business Studies on a five-point scale. With point one meant least correlated, ninety percent of the students gave point four for the correlation. The preliminary results illustrated that English plays an important role in students’ learning of Business Studies, or at least this was what the students perceived, which set the hypotheses for the study. After conducting the focus group interview, further evidence had to be gathered to support the hypotheses. The data analysis part tried to find out the relationship by correlating the students’ public examination results of Business Studies and levels of English standard. The results indicated a positive correlation between their English standard and Business Studies examination performance. In order to highlight the importance of the English language to the study of Business Studies, the correlation between the public examination results of other non-business subjects was also tested. Statistical results showed that language does play a role in affecting students’ performance in studying Business subjects than the other subjects. The explanation includes the dynamic subject nature, examination format and study requirements, the specialist language used, etc. Unlike Science and Geography, students in their learning process might find it more difficult to relate business concepts or terminologies to their own experience, and there are not many obvious physical or practical activities or visual aids to serve as evidence or experiments. It is well-researched in Hong Kong that English proficiency is a determinant of academic success. Other research studies verified such a notion. For example, research revealed that the more enriched the language experience, the better the cognitive performance in conceptual tasks. The ability to perform this kind of task is particularly important to students taking Business subjects. Another research was carried out in the UK, which was geared towards identifying and analyzing the reasons for underachievement across a cohort of GCSE students taking Business Studies. Results showed that weak language ability was the main barrier to raising students’ performance levels. It seemed that the interview result was successfully triangulated with data findings. Although education failure cannot be restricted to linguistic failure and language is just one of the variables to play in determining academic achievement, it is generally accepted that language does affect students’ academic performance. It is just a matter of extent. This paper provides recommendations for business educators on students’ language training and sheds light on more research possibilities in this area.

Keywords: academic performance, language, learning, medium of instruction

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