Search results for: linguistic attitudes

Authors: Nicula Valentin, Andrei Virginia

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Nowadays, the individual plays a central role in the state’s architecture. This is why the subjective dimension of the security represents a key concept in risk assessment. The paper’s scope is to emphasize the discrepancy between expert and lay evaluations of national security hazards, which is caused by key factors like emotions, personal experience, knowledge and media. Therefore, we have chosen to apply, using these two different groups of respondents, the Q-sort method, which reveals individual beliefs, attitudes, preferences hidden behind the subjects’ own way of prioritizing the risks they are confronted with. Our study’s conclusions are meant to unveil significant indicators needed to be taken into consideration by a state’s leadership in order to understand the social perception of national security hazards, to communicate better with the public opinion and prevent or mitigate the overestimation of the severity or probability of these dangers.

Keywords: risk perception, Q-sort method, national security hazards, individual beliefs

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Authors: Angela Evans, Gabriel Gijon-Nogueron, Alfonso Martinez-Nova

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Background The health sector, whose mission is protecting health, also contributes to the climate crisis, the greatest health threat of the 21st century. The carbon footprint from healthcare exceeds 5% of emissions globally, surpassing 7% in the USA and Australia. Global recognition has led to the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and the World Health Organization's Climate Change Action Plan. It is agreed that the majority of health impacts stem from energy and resource consumption, as well as the production of greenhouse gases in the environment and deforestation. Many professional medical associations and healthcare providers advocate for their members to take the lead in environmental sustainability. Objectives To avail and expand ‘Green Podiatry’ via the three pillars of: Exercise ; Evidence ; Everyday changes; to highlight the benefits of physical activity and exercise for both human health and planet health. Walking and running are beneficial for health, provide low carbon transport, and have evidence-based health benefits. Podiatrists are key healthcare professionals in the physical activity space and can influence and guide their patients to increase physical activity and avert the many non-communicable diseases that are decimating public health, eg diabetes, arthritis, depression, cancer, obesity. Methods Publications, conference presentations, and pilot projects pertinent to ‘Green Podiatry’ have been activated since 2021, and a survey of podiatrist’s knowledge and awareness has been undertaken.The survey assessed attitudes towards environmental sustainability in work environment. The questions addressed commuting habits, hours of physical exercise per week, and attitudes in the clinic, such as prescribing unnecessary treatments or emphasizing sports as primary treatment. Results Teaching and Learning modules have been developed for podiatric medicine students and graduates globally. These will be availed. A pilot foot orthoses recycling project has been undertaken and will be reported, in addition to established footwear recycling. The preliminary survey found almost 90% of respondents had no knowledge of green podiatry or footwear recycling. Only 30% prescribe sports/exercise as the primary treatment for patients, and 45% do not to prescribe unnecessary treatments. Conclusions Podiatrists are in a good position to lead in the crucial area of healthcare and climate change implications. Sufficient education of podiatrists is essential for the profession to beneficially promote health and physical activity, which is beneficial for the health of all peoples and all communities.

Keywords: climate change, gait, green, healthcare, sustainability

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Authors: Radim Farana, Bogdan Walek, Michal Janosek, Jaroslav Zacek

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This paper presents the advantages of fuzzy control use in technological processes control. The paper presents a real application of the Linguistic Fuzzy-Logic Control, developed at the University of Ostrava for the control of physical models in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory. The paper presents an example of a sensitive non-linear model, such as a magnetic levitation model and obtained results which show how modern information technologies can help to solve actual technical problems. A special method based on the LFLC controller with partial components is presented in this paper followed by the method of automatic context change, which is very helpful to achieve more accurate control results. The main advantage of the used system is its robustness in changing conditions demonstrated by comparing with conventional PID controller. This technology and real models are also used as a background for problem-oriented teaching, realized at the department for master students and their collaborative as well as individual final projects.

Keywords: control, fuzzy logic, sensitive system, technological proves

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Authors: Young Ik Suh, Tywan G. Martin

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Sports apps in a smartphone provide up-to-date information and fast and convenient access to live games. The market of sports apps has emerged as the second fastest growing app category worldwide. Further, many sports fans use their smartphones to know the schedule of sporting events, players’ position and bios, videos and highlights. In recent years, a growing number of scholars and practitioners alike have emphasized the importance of interactivity with sports apps, hypothesizing that interactivity plays a significant role in enticing sports apps users and that it is a key component in measuring the success of sports apps. Interactivity in sports apps focuses primarily on two functions: (1) two-way communication and (2) active user control, neither of which have been applicable through traditional mass media and communication technologies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine whether the interactivity function on sports apps leads to positive outcomes such as intent to revisit. More specifically, this study investigates how three major functions of interactivity (i.e., two-way communication, active user control, and real-time information) influence the attitude of sports apps users and their intent to revisit the sports apps. The following hypothesis is proposed; interactivity functions will be positively associated with both attitudes toward sports apps and intent to revisit sports apps. The survey questionnaire includes four parts: (1) an interactivity scale, (2) an attitude scale, (3) a behavioral intention scale, and (4) demographic questions. Data are to be collected from ESPN apps users. To examine the relationships among the observed and latent variables and determine the reliability and validity of constructs, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is conducted. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is utilized to test hypothesized relationships among constructs. Additionally, this study compares the proposed interactivity model with a rival model to identify the role of attitude as a mediating factor. The findings of the current sports apps study provide several theoretical and practical contributions and implications by extending the research and literature associated with the important role of interactivity functions in sports apps and sports media consumption behavior. Specifically, this study may improve the theoretical understandings of whether the interactivity functions influence user attitudes and intent to revisit sports apps. Additionally, this study identifies which dimensions of interactivity are most important to sports apps users. From practitioners’ perspectives, this findings of this study provide significant implications. More entrepreneurs and investors in the sport industry need to recognize that high-resolution photos, live streams, and up-to-date stats are in the sports app, right at sports fans fingertips. The result will imply that sport practitioners may need to develop sports mobile apps that offer greater interactivity functions to attract sport fans.

Keywords: interactivity, two-way communication, active user control, real time information, sports apps, attitude, intent to revisit

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Authors: Jade Bitomsky

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We all consume films on a daily basis. Yet, we frequently fail to recognize that these narratives shape our social, political, cultural, and economic values and attitudes. Narratives influence our perception; specifically, for this research, our perception of women within the genre of film noir. This creative research project examines to what extent film noir has perpetuated the male gaze and how noir’s representation of women has scripted female gender identity through perpetuated performative acts of femininity. Evolving from this research will be a deconstruction and (re)presentation of the femininity in noir. It will go beyond reiterated examinations, which developed awareness of Hollywood’s oppressive cinematic structures, to subvert the usual phallic diegesis and construct a female gaze in neo-noir screenplay, The Lonely Drive.

Keywords: femme fatale, film noir (classic), male gaze, neo-noir (contemporary), scopophilia

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Authors: Temitope Faloye

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The absence of equity and transparency in Nigeria's economic system has resulted in unemployment. Women’s unemployment rate remains higher because women's range of jobs is often narrower due to discriminatory attitudes of employers and gender segregation in the labor market. Gender inequality is one of the strong factors of unemployment, especially in developing countries like Nigeria, where the female gender is marginalized in the labor force market. However, gender equality in terms of labor market access and employment condition has not yet been attained. Feminist theory is considered as an appropriate theory for this study. The study will use a mixed-method design, collecting qualitative and quantitative data to provide answers to the research questions. Therefore, the research study aims to investigate the present situation of gender inequality in the Nigerian labor market.

Keywords: unemployment, gender inequality, gender equality, labor market, female graduate

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Authors: Aulia Fitri

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This aims to seek which part of the linguistics with the common mistakes occurred between Instagram translation and human translation. Instagram is a social media account that is widely used by people in the world. Everyone with the Instagram account can consume the captions and pictures that are shared by their friends, celebrity, and public figures across countries. Instagram provides the machine translation under its caption space that will assist users to understand the language of their non-native. The researcher takes samples from an Indonesian public figure whereas the account is followed by many followers. The public figure tries to help her followers from other countries understand her posts by putting up the English version after the Indonesian version. However, the research on Instagram account has not been done yet even though the account is widely used by the worldwide society. There are 20 samples that will be analysed on the perspective of translation quality and linguistics tools. As the MT, Instagram tends to give a literal translation without regarding the topic meant. On the other hand, the human translation tends to exaggerate the translation which leads a different meaning in English. This is an interesting study to discuss when the human nature and robotic-system influence the translation result.

Keywords: human translation, machine translation (MT), translation quality, linguistic tool

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Authors: Alalddin Al-Tarawneh

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In its literal translation, the Qur’an is frequently subject to misinterpretation as a result of failures to deliver its meaning into any language. This paper relies on the genuine aspect that the Qur’an is an oral performance in its nature; and the objective of any Qur’an translation is to deliver its meaning in English. Therefore, it approaches the translation of the Qur’an beyond the usual formal linguistic approach in order to include an extra-textual factor. This factor is the recitation or oral performance of the Qur’an, that is, tajweed as it is termed in Arabic. The translations used in this paper to apply the suggested approach were carefully chosen to be representative of the problems that exist in many Qur’an translations. These translations are The Meaning of the Holy Quran: Translation and Commentary by Ali (1989), The Meaning of the Glorious Koran by Pickthall (1997/1930), and The Quran: Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meanings by Sahih (2010). Through the examples cited in this paper, it is suggested that the agents involved in producing a ‘translation’ of the Holy Qur’an have to take into account its oral aspect which yields additional senses and meanings that are not being captured by adhering to the words of the ‘written’ discourse. This paper attempts in its translation into English.

Keywords: oral performance, tajweed, Qur'an translation, recitation

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Authors: Qianxi Lv, Junying Liang

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Among the various modes of interpreting, simultaneous interpreting (SI) is regarded as a ‘complex’ and ‘extreme condition’ of cognitive tasks while consecutive interpreters (CI) do not have to share processing capacity between tasks. Given that SI exerts great cognitive demand, it makes sense to posit that the output of SI may be more compromised than that of CI in the linguistic features. The bulk of the research has stressed the varying cognitive demand and processes involved in different modes of interpreting; however, related empirical research is sparse. In keeping with our interest in investigating the quantitative linguistic factors discriminating between SI and CI, the current study seeks to examine the potential lexical simplification, syntactic complexity and sequential organization mechanism with a self-made inter-model corpus of transcribed simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, translated speech and original speech texts with a total running word of 321960. The lexical features are extracted in terms of the lexical density, list head coverage, hapax legomena, and type-token ratio, as well as core vocabulary percentage. Dependency distance, an index for syntactic complexity and reflective of processing demand is employed. Frequency motif is a non-grammatically-bound sequential unit and is also used to visualize the local function distribution of interpreting the output. While SI is generally regarded as multitasking with high cognitive load, our findings evidently show that CI may impose heavier or taxing cognitive resource differently and hence yields more lexically and syntactically simplified output. In addition, the sequential features manifest that SI and CI organize the sequences from the source text in different ways into the output, to minimize the cognitive load respectively. We reasoned the results in the framework that cognitive demand is exerted both on maintaining and coordinating component of Working Memory. On the one hand, the information maintained in CI is inherently larger in volume compared to SI. On the other hand, time constraints directly influence the sentence reformulation process. The temporal pressure from the input in SI makes the interpreters only keep a small chunk of information in the focus of attention. Thus, SI interpreters usually produce the output by largely retaining the source structure so as to relieve the information from the working memory immediately after formulated in the target language. Conversely, CI interpreters receive at least a few sentences before reformulation, when they are more self-paced. CI interpreters may thus tend to retain and generate the information in a way to lessen the demand. In other words, interpreters cope with the high demand in the reformulation phase of CI by generating output with densely distributed function words, more content words of higher frequency values and fewer variations, simpler structures and more frequently used language sequences. We consequently propose a revised effort model based on the result for a better illustration of cognitive demand during both interpreting types.

Keywords: cognitive demand, corpus-based, dependency distance, frequency motif, interpreting types, lexical simplification, sequential units distribution, syntactic complexity

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Authors: Yunice Karina Tumewang

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As we have seen, the number of Muslim and their awareness toward financial products and services that conform to Islamic principles are growing rapidly today. Thus, it makes the market environment potentially beneficial for Shari-compliant funds with the expanding prospective client base. However, over the last decade, only small portion of this huge potential market has been covered by the established Islamic asset management firms. This study aims to examine the factors of this untapped market particularly in the demand side. This study will use the qualitative method with primary data through a questionnaire distributed to 500 samples of Muslim population. It will shed light on Muslim attitudes and expectations toward Sharia-compliant retirement planning and pensions. It will also help to raise the awareness of market players to see Islamic pension fund as a promising industry in the foreseeable future.

Keywords: Islamic marketing, Islamic finance, Islamic asset management, Islamic pension fund

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Authors: Zhuo Jing-Schmidt, Jun Lang

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Numeral classifiers are common in Asian languages. Research on numeral classifiers primarily focuses on noun classifiers that quantify and individuate nominal referents. There is a scarcity of research on event quantification using verb classifiers. This study aims to understand the semantic and conceptual basis of event quantification in Chinese. From a usage-based Construction Grammar perspective, this study presents a corpus analysis of event quantification in Chinese. Drawing on a large balanced corpus of contemporary Chinese, we analyze 667 NOUN col-lexemes totaling 31136 tokens of a productive numeral classifier construction in Chinese. Using collostructional analysis of the collexemes, the results show that the construction quantifies and classifies dramatic events using a theater-based conceptual metaphor. We argue that the usage patterns reflect the cultural entrenchment of theater as in Chinese conceptualization and the construal of theatricality in linguistic expression. The study has implications for cognitive semantics and construction grammar.

Keywords: event quantification, classifier, corpus, metaphor

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Authors: Elif Esiyok

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Brand placement practices have become a popular advertising strategy, which is widely used in movies. Whether these brands are remembered by the audience after the film, or if they affect the purchasing preferences of the consumers has become one of the most important topics in the field of advertising. From this point, in this study, the "Devil Wears Prada" movie which includes high amount of brand placements is chosen. The movie watched to the undergraduate students in Turkey to measure the impact of brand placements on the attitudes of the consumers relating with a specific brand. In total 100 students were the subjects of this study. The participants were selected through using a simple random sampling method. The findings revealed that there is a significant difference between male and females in terms of brand recall. Female students were remembered the fashion brands more than the males, whereas males generally recalled the automotive brands and restaurant names.

Keywords: brand placement, brand recall, advertising, media

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Authors: Li Yuqing

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Fostering the development of intercultural (communicative) competence (IC) is one way to equip our students with the linguistic and cultural skills to communicate effectively with people from diverse backgrounds, particularly English majors who are most likely to encounter multicultural work environments in the future. The purpose of this study is to compare the English majors' intercultural competence in terms of cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects before and after a ten-week telecollaboration program between 23 English majors at a Chinese university and 23 American students enrolled in a Chinese class at an American university, and analyze their development during the program. The results indicate that subjects' cognitive, affective, and behavioral perceptions of IC improved significantly over time. In addition, the program had significant effects on the participants' “Interaction Confidence,” “Interaction Engagement,” and “Interaction Enjoyment” - three components of intercultural sensitivity - as well as their overall intercultural effectiveness (except for “Message Skills”). With the widespread use of the internet, this type of online cultural exchange has a promising future, as suggested by the findings of the current study.

Keywords: intercultural competence, English majors, computer-mediated communication, telecollaboration

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Authors: Polamorn Tamprateep, Warapong Thakanun

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This researchs' objectives are: 1. To study the customer demographics that affects the purchasing behavior; 2. To study the marketing mix that affects the purchasing behavior; 3. To study the relationship between purchasing behavior and customers’ perception of Brand Equity. Population of this research is Starbucks Coffee (Thailand) customers in Bangkok. The tool used in this study was questionnaire created from concepts, theories and related researches. The study showed that, of 400 respondents, overall opinion received high score (xˉ= 3.77). When each item is considered, it was found that ‘Staff are knowledgeable in providing service.’, ‘ Staff are friendly.’, ‘Staff possess good communication skill with customers.’, ‘Staff know all types of coffee well.’, and ‘Staff are enthusiastic in giving service.’, all these items received high score with a mean of 3.92, 3.87, 3.77, 3.71 and 3.63, respectively.

Keywords: mix attitude of the product, consumer, buying behavior, Starbucks

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Authors: Matthew J. Zagumny

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The current study reports an examination of the QUEST-25 (Q-Assessment of Undergraduate Epistemology and Scientific Thinking) online version for assessing the dispositional attitudes toward scientific thinking and intellectual curiosity among undergraduate students. The QUEST-25 consists of scientific thinking (SIQ-25) and intellectual curiosity (ICIQ-25), which were correlated in hypothesized directions with the Religious Commitment Inventory, Curiosity and Exploration Inventory, Belief in Science scale, and measures of academic self-efficacy. Additionally, concurrent validity was established by the resulting significant differences between those identifying the centrality of religious belief in their lives and those who do not self-identify as being guided daily by religious beliefs. This study demonstrates the utility of the QUEST-25 for research, evaluation, and theory development.

Keywords: guided-inquiry learning, intellectual curiosity, psychometric assessment, scientific thinking

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Authors: Dalila Souilem, Salma Boumiza, Abdelkarim Abdelkader

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The Clarifier Dialogue Interface (CDI) is a part of an online teaching system based on human-machine communication in learning situation. This interface used in the system during the learning action specifically in the evaluation step, to clarify ambiguities in the learner's response. The CDI can generate patterns allowing access to an information system, using the selectors associated with lexical units. To instantiate these patterns, the user request (especially learner’s response), must be analyzed and interpreted to deduce the canonical form, the semantic form and the subject of the sentence. For the efficiency of this interface at the interpretation level, a set of substitution operators is carried out in order to extend the possibilities of manipulation with a natural language. A second approach that will be presented in this paper focuses on the object languages with new prospects such as combination of natural language with techniques of handling information system in the area of online education. So all operators, the CDI and other interfaces associated to the domain expertise and teaching strategies will be unified using FRAME representation form.

Keywords: dialogue, e-learning, FRAME, information system, natural language

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Authors: Barbara Behre, Verolien Cauberghe, Dieneke Van de Sompel

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Sustainable consumption is on the rise, yet it has still not entered the mainstream in several industries, such as the fashion industry. In online fashion contexts, sustainability cues have been used to signal the sustainable benefits of certain garments to promote sustainable consumption. These sustainable cues may focus on the ecological or social dimension of sustainability. Since sustainability, in general, relates to distant, abstract benefits, the current study aims to examine if and how psychological distance may mediate the effects of exposure to different sustainability cues on consumption outcomes. Following the framework of Construal Level Theory of Psychological Distance, reduced psychological distance renders the construal level more concrete, which may influence attitudes and subsequent behavior in situations like fashion shopping. Most studies investigated sustainability as a composite, failing to differentiate between ecological and societal aspects of sustainability. The few studies examining sustainability more in detail uncovered that environmental sustainability is rather perceived in abstract cognitive construal, whereas social sustainability is linked to concrete construal. However, the construal level affiliation of the sustainability dimensions likely is not universally applicable to different domains and stages of consumption, which further suggest a need to clarify the relationships between environmental and social sustainability dimensions and the construal level of psychological distance within fashion brand consumption. While psychological distance and construal level have been examined in the context of sustainability, these studies yielded mixed results. The inconsistent findings of past studies might be due to the context-dependence of psychological distance as inducing construal differently in diverse situations. Especially in a hedonic consumption context like online fashion shopping, the role of visual processing of information could determine behavioural outcomes as linked to situational construal. Given the influence of the mode of processing on psychological distance and construal level, the current study examines the moderating role of verbal versus non-verbal presentation of the sustainability cues. In a 3 (environmental sustainability vs. social sustainability vs. control) x 2 (non-verbal message vs. verbal message) between subjects experiment, the present study thus examines how consumers evaluate sustainable brands in online shopping contexts in terms of psychological distance and construal level, as well as the impact on brand attitudes and buying intentions. The results among 246 participants verify the differential impact of the sustainability dimensions on fashion brand purchase intent as mediated by construal level and perceived psychological distance. The ecological sustainability cue is perceived as more concrete, which might be explained by consumer bias induced by the predominance of pro-environmental sustainability messages. The verbal versus non-verbal presentation of the sustainability cue neither had a significant influence on distance perceptions and construal level nor on buying intentions. This study offers valuable contributions to the sustainable consumption literature, as well as a theoretical basis for construal-level framing as applied in sustainable fashion branding.

Keywords: construal level theory, environmental vs social sustainability, online fashion shopping, sustainable fashion

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Authors: Zoran Spasovski

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The paper shortly discusses the significance and the benefits of the historical approach in the research of languages by presenting examples of it in the fields of phonetics and phonology, lexicology, morphology, syntax, and even in the onomastics (toponomy and anthroponomy). The examples from the field of phonetics/phonology include insights into animal speech and its evolution into human speech, the evolution of the sounds of human speech from vocals to glides and consonants and from velar consonants to palatal, etc., on well-known examples of former researchers. Those from the field of lexicology show shortly the formation of the lexemes and their evolution; the morphology and syntax are explained by examples of the development of grammar and syntax forms, and the importance of the historical approach in the research of place-names and personal names is briefly outlined through examples of place-names and personal names and surnames, and the conclusions that come from it, in different languages.

Keywords: animal speech, glotogenesis, grammar forms, lexicology, place-names, personal names, surnames, syntax categories

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Authors: Kelsi Matwick, Keri Matwick

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This presentation focuses on national campaigns as a government tactic of social behavior and order. Focusing on one of Singapore’s first national campaigns, Keep Singapore Clean (1968), particularly its iterations of public hygiene in recent years: Keep the Toilets Clean (2012-2019) and UnLittering with Mary Chongo (2019), the study examines how humor and the use of multimodality reflect contemporary practices in political practice. A critical social semiotic analysis involving the textual (linguistic and visual design) and material (print cartoons and videos) is undertaken to show how these messages are communicated. Incongruity and parody are humorous mechanisms used to project the government as likeable, effectively capture the public attention, and instill individual responsibility for the greater community. In focusing on public hygiene national campaigns, the study further illustrates how humor offers a polite way to address crude behavior while providing models of exemplary behavior.

Keywords: communication strategies, critical social semiotics, humor, national campaigns

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Authors: Sultan Ahmed Arishi

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The objective of the study was to investigate the attitude of the Saudi students attending the English Language programmes of the Royal Commission for Jubail towards using CALL, as well as to discover whether computer-assisted teaching is useful and valuable for students in learning English. Data were collected with the help of interviews and survey questionnaires. The outcomes of the investigation showed that students had a positive attitude towards CALL. Moreover, the listening skills of the students had the most substantial effect on students learning English through CALL. Unexpectedly, the teaching staff, equipment, curriculum, or even a student's poor English background was a distinct barrier that attributed to any weaknesses of using CALL, or in other words, all these factors were of a similar attitude.

Keywords: CALL, teaching aids, teaching technology, teaching English with technology, teaching English in Saudi Arabia

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Authors: Najeebah Almahmeed

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Risk Management is an evolving subject among organizations that include corporations, governments, non-governmental organizations, and not-for-profit corporations. In order to enhance awareness around the importance of Risk Management and make sure everyone is using it in their day-to-day job, the Risk Culture topic has emerged and gained importance not only in the Finance Sector but also in the National Oil Companies in Kuwait. Risk Culture can be defined as the shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors within a company that guide its approach to managing risks. It acts as a connecting force that links policies, procedures, and individuals, influencing how risks are understood and tackled through activities. In this research, benefits of Risk Culture are shared, guidelines are presented to promote a risk aware culture, and fully embed and enforce Risk-based processes and procedures. Moreover, this research demonstrates methodologies of measuring the Risk Culture using specific dimensions and clusters.

Keywords: clusters, dimensions, national oil companies, risk culture, risk management

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Authors: Victor Ademulegun Arijeniwa

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This is a sociolinguistic study of Olu Obafemi’s Naira Has No Gender as a microcosm of life experiences. The paper assesses how Olu Obafemi’s use of language in the dramatic world serves as both social relationships and symbolic order of communicative roadmap that are capable of yielding well expressed and richly articulated sociolinguistic implications. Being the interface between language and social institutions, sociolinguistics and its application is highly utilitarian in linguistics analysis, especially where the language of a text appears to be deeply tensed, such as found in dramatic texts. The aim of this paper has been (i) to assess the symbolic orderly presentation of form in Olu Obafemi’Naira Has No Gender; (ii) to find out the linguistic elements and textual organization that represent social relationships in Olu Obafemi’s Naira Has No Gender. Using qualitative research design in data generation with insights from John Gumperz Interactional Sociolinguistics Theory with particular reference to contextualization cues and miscommunication, the paper identifies the implication of the dramatic discourse on society.

Keywords: sociolinguistics, Microcosm, contextualisation, miscommunication variable, identity, symbolic order

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Authors: Kairat Kurakbayev, Dina Gungor, Adil Ashirbekov, Assel Kambatyrova

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Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet economy located in the Central Asia, is making great efforts to internationalize its national system of education. The country is very ambitious in making the national economy internationally competitive and education has become one of the main pillars of the nation’s strategic development plan for 2030. This paper discusses the role of professional teacher development in upgrading the secondary education curriculum with the introduction of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in grades 10-11 grades. Having Kazakh as the state language and Russian as the official language, English bears a status of foreign language in the country. The development of trilingual education is very high on the agenda of the Ministry of Education and Science. It is planned that by 2019 STEM-related subjects – Biology, Chemistry, Computing and Physics – will be taught in EMI. Introducing English-medium education appears to be a very drastic reform and the teaching cadre is the key driver here. At the same time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the teaching profession is still struggling to become attractive in the eyes of the local youth. Moreover, the quality of Kazakhstan’s secondary education is put in question by OECD national review reports. The paper presents a case study of the nation-wide professional development programme arranged for 5 010 school teachers so that they could be able to teach their content subjects in English starting from 2019 onwards. The study is based on the mixed methods research involving the data derived from the surveys and semi-structured interviews held with the programme participants, i.e. school teachers. The findings of the study imply the significance of the school teachers’ attitudes towards the top-down reform of trilingual education. The qualitative research data reveal the teachers’ beliefs about advantages and disadvantages of having their content subjects (e.g. Biology or Chemistry) taught in EMI. The study highlights teachers’ concerns about their professional readiness to implement the top-down reform of English-medium education and discusses possible risks of academic underperforming on the part of students whose English language proficiency is not advanced. This paper argues that for the effective implementation of the English-medium education in secondary schools, the state should adopt a comprehensive approach to upgrading the national academic system where teachers’ attitudes and beliefs play the key role in making the trilingual education policy effective. The study presents lessons for other national academic systems considering to transfer its secondary education to English as a medium of instruction.

Keywords: teacher education, teachers' beliefs, trilingual education, case study

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Authors: Hanane Sarnou, Sabri Koç

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In this paper, the interconnection between curriculum development for basic education and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the classroom referring to the Licence, Master's and Doctorate (LMD) benefits under such link will be presented and analysed. This study seeks to achieve to what extent LMD, competency-based approach (CBA) and ICTs use are interrelated. Likewise, the data collected from the responses of our teachers and learners who are concerned with LMD impact on their learning and teaching through interviews will be discussed, analysed, and classified. This paper is divided into two sections. The first section is about the curriculum development for basic education and its relation with higher education under the LMD and its link with ICTs in the university while the second section is about the classification of learners’ and teachers’ positive/negative responses concerning their positive or negative attitudes towards the ICT integration. The focus will be on the positive aspects of students’ expectations, opinions and assumptions regarding the integration of ICTs into the classroom under LMD and CBA.

Keywords: LMD system, CBA approach, curriculum development, ICT

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Authors: Astrid de Leeuw, Pierre Valois

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Environmental education is the key to enhancing or changing students’ ways of thinking and acting in order to create an environmentally robust future for all. The present study investigates the beliefs of 812 primary school students, which merit consideration when developing educational interventions. Results of multiple regression analyses reveal that educational interventions should focus on promoting students’ feelings of control over pro-environmental behaviors (PEB). For example, schools could provide recycling bins on the premises. Furthermore, it is critical to develop positive attitudes in students by stressing the various benefits of PEB for keeping our planet clean and protecting wildlife. Unfortunately, our results indicate that students believe that PEB is boring and annoying. Suggestions are offered for making PEB more interesting and relevant. Further research is needed to test the effectiveness of interventions based on the present results.

Keywords: pro-environmental behavior, primary school students, theory of planned behavior, beliefs, educational interventions

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Authors: Mohammed Saleh Lahmdi, Hassan Obeid Alfadly

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This study explores an optimality-theoretic account of Indian loanwords in Hadhrami Arabic (henceforth HA), a variety of Arabic spoken in Hadhramout Province in the coastal areas and Hadhramout Valley. The purpose of this paper is to find out how the phonological forms of Indian loanwords can be accounted for from an OT standpoint. To achieve this purpose, two main instruments were implemented: participant observation and interview. The sample of this study was selected carefully with certain characteristics by judgment sampling consisting of eleven informants. An ethnographic qualitative approach was employed to find out the phonological articulations that the researcher encountered during the implementation. Many phonological processes are used and several markedness and faithfulness constraints have been interacted in conflict in order to choose the optimal form of Hadhrami realisations. The findings of the study confirm that the Hadhrami syllable structure prevails over the donor language, i.e., the Indian (mainly Urdu) language. Specifically, markedness constraints dominate faithfulness ones when most of the Indian loanwords are incorporated into HA.

Keywords: linguistic borrowing, optimality theory, Hadhrami Arabic, loanword, phonological processes

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Authors: Sonakshi Saxena, Moosath Harishankar Vasudevan

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The current study seeks to investigate the differences in the psychological impact of movies in their original and translated versions. International cinema is exemplar of the success of globalization. The multitude of languages in the global village does not seem to impede the common cinematic goal of filmmakers across linguistic boundaries. To understand, hence, whether the psychological impact of movies, intentional or otherwise, is preserved when the original is translated into a different language, an experimental design was adopted. Multilingual participants in the age group 18-25 years were recruited for the same. A control group and an experimental group were randomly assigned and the psychological impacts of movies were studied under two conditions- a) watching the movie in its original language, and b) watching the movie in its original language as well as translated version. For the second condition, the experimental group was further divided into two groups randomly to balance order effects. The major aspects of psychological impact assessed were emotional impact and attitude towards the movie. The scores were compared for the two groups. It is further discussed whether the experience is salient across language or do languages inherently possess the ability to alter experiences of the audience.

Keywords: experimental design, movies, psychological impact, translation

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Authors: Alma Sobrevilla

Abstract:

Using panel data from Mexico, this paper studies the determinants of women’s intrahousehold decision-making power using a generalised ordered logit model. Fixed effects estimations are also carried out to solve potential endogeneity coming from unobservable time-invariant factors. Finally, the paper analyses quadratic and community divergence effects of education on power. Results show heterogeneity in the effect of each of the determinants across different levels of decision-making power and suggest the presence of a significant quadratic effect of education. Having more education than the community average has a negative effect on power, supporting the notion that women tend to compensate their success outside the household with submissive attitudes at home.

Keywords: women, decision-making power, intrahousehold, Mexico

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Authors: Valentine Ubanako

Abstract:

This paper investigates a situation that has given rise to a particular kind of variety or category of users of English in Cameroon which I have called here Non-native expatriate English (Users). This paper asserts that Non-expatriates in Cameroon (those who work for native speakers of English) use English in a peculiar manner which is worth investigating. This paper thus looks into the kind of English they use and their attitudes towards other users of different varieties of English and how these non-native expatriates form new identities and try to negotiate social ascendency within a local context. Data for this paper is collected through observation, interviews and questionnaires. Some Cameroonians, especially the educated, believe that they must move to Europe or America, study to a very high level and struggle to be like the white man whereas, the lowly educated (working with native English expatriates), are living their European and American dream in Cameroon among their brothers. Thus, educational attainment is not a necessary criterion for social ascendency.

Keywords: non-native expatriate English, native expatriates, varieties of English, English language, linguistics

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Authors: Eman Mohamed Abdelwahab, Badreyya Alkhanbooli

Abstract:

This study focuses on exploring the challenges encountered by English language teachers in same-ability English language classrooms in the United Arab Emirates public schools. This qualitative study uses open-ended questions for data collection from teacher participants. The study sample includes the participation of 60 English language teachers from 8 public schools across 4 emirates/cities in the United Arab Emirates. The study results highlight a number of challenges that are mostly encountered by English language teachers in their classrooms while teaching in same-ability classrooms, including lack of diversity in abilities, class-time limitation, difficulty in engaging all students (especially lower-achieving students), limited opportunities for peer learning and limited linguistic diversity. A set of suggestions is to be provided by participating teachers and researchers to improve the same-ability teaching and learning experience in English language classrooms.

Keywords: English language teaching, same ability grouping, ESL, English language learners

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