Search results for: written texts

Authors: Aula Khatteb Abu-Liel

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The study investigated the effects of diglossia and orthography on reading in Arabic, manipulating reading in Spoken Arabic (SA), using Arabizi, in which it is written using Latin letters on computers/phones, and the two forms of the conventional written form Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): vowelled (shallow) and unvowelled (deep). 77 skilled readers in 8th grade performed oral reading of single words and narrative and expository texts, and silent reading comprehension of both genres of text. Oral reading and comprehension revealed different patterns. Single words and texts were read faster and more accurately in unvoweled MSA, slowest and least accurately in vowelled MSA, and in-between in Arabizi. Comprehension was highest for vowelled MSA. Narrative texts were better than expository texts in Arabizi with the opposite pattern in MSA. The results suggest that frequency of the type of texts and the way in which phonology is encoded affect skilled reading.

Keywords: Arabic, Arabize, computer mediated communication, diglossia, modern standard Arabic

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Authors: Marie Komorna, Katerina Hadkova

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One reason why hearing disabilities as compared to other disabilities are considered to be less serious, is the belief that deaf and hard of hearing persons can read and write without problems and can therefore fairly easily compensate for problems related to their limited ability to hear sound. However in reality this is not the case, especially as regards written Czech, deaf persons are often not able to communicate their message clearly to its recipients. Their inability to communicate fully in written language is one of the most severe problems facing a number of deaf persons, a problem which they face and which makes it difficult for them to function in a sound-based environment. Despite this fact, this issue is one which has been given only a minimum of attention in the Czech Republic. That is why we decided to focus our research on this issue, specifically targeting written communication of deaf pupils in primary and secondary schools. The paper summarizes the background and objectives of this research. The written work of deaf respondents was obtained in response to a narrative based on a series of images which depicted a continuous storyline. Based on an analysis of the obtained written work we tried to describe the specifics of the narrative abilities of the deaf authors of these texts. We also analyzed other aspects and specific traits of text written by deaf authors at a phonetic-phonological, lexical-semantic, morphological and syntactic, respectively pragmatic level. Based on the results of the project it will be possible to increase knowledge of the communication abilities of deaf persons in written Czech. The obtained data may be used during future research and for teaching purposes and/or education concepts for teaching Czech to deaf pupils.

Keywords: communication competence, deaf, narrative, written texts

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Authors: Sara Zadunaisky Ehrlich, Batia Seroussi, Anat Stavans

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Text structure is a parameter of text quality. This study investigated the structure of written argumentative texts produced by elementary school age children. We set two objectives: to identify and trace the structural components of the argumentative texts and to investigate whether reading comprehension skills were correlated with text structure. 293 school children from 2nd to 5th grades were asked to write two argumentative texts about informal or everyday life controversial topics and completed two reading tasks that targeted different levels of text comprehension. The findings indicated, on the one hand, significant developmental differences between mature and more novice writers in terms of text length and mean proportion of clauses produced for a better elaboration of the different text components. On the other hand, with certain fluctuations, no meaningful differences were found in terms of presence of text structure: at all grade levels, elementary school children produced the basic and minimal structure that included the writer's argument and reasons or arguments' supports. Counter-arguments were scarce even in the upper grades. While the children captured that essentially an argument must be justified, the more the number of supports produced, the fewer the clauses the children produced. Last, weak to mild relations were found between reading comprehension and argumentative text structure. Nevertheless, children who scored higher on sophisticated questions that require inferential or world knowledge displayed more elaborated structures in terms of text length and size of supports to the writer's argument. These findings indicate how school-age children perceive the basic template of an argument with future implications regarding how to elaborate written arguments.

Keywords: argumentative text, text structure, elementary school children, written argumentations

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Authors: Jennifer Wallbrown

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It’s not uncommon in the US to see news article headlines about public school teachers being scrutinized for what they are teaching or see the general public weighing in on whether or not they think certain controversial subjects should be addressed in the classroom- such as LGBTQ+ or multicultural literature. Even though this is a subject that has been written about and discussed for years, it continues to be a relevant topic in education as it continues to be a struggle to implement more diverse texts. Although it is valid for teachers to fear controversy when they attempt to create a more diverse or inclusive curriculum, it is a fight worth fighting because of the benefits students can gain from being exposed to a wide range of texts. This paper is different from others of its kind because it addresses many of the counterarguments often made to implementing LGBTQ+ or multicultural literature in secondary classrooms. It not only encourages educators to try to include more diverse texts, but it gives them the tools to address common concerns and be sound in their reasoning for choosing these texts. This can be of interest to those educators who are not English teachers because a truly diverse and inclusive curriculum would include other subjects as well- including history, art, and more. By the end of my proposed paper, readers will feel encouraged to choose more diverse and inclusive texts for their classrooms. They can also be confident that if met with opposition or controversy, as is sometimes common when implementing new texts, that they have sound arguments and reasoning for why they chose to include these texts. This reasoning is that, based on the research, studies have found there are benefits to students studying texts about those different from themselves, because it teaches them empathy and helps fight prejudice.

Keywords: education, diverse, inclusive, multicultural, lgbtq+, pedagogy

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Authors: Hyung Jun Ahn

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With the growing importance of social media, it is imperative to analyze it to understand the users. Users share useful information and their experience through social media, where much of what is shared is in the form of texts. This study focused on blogs and aimed to test whether the psycho-linguistic characteristics of blog texts vary with the subject or the type of experience of the texts. For this goal, blog texts about four different types of experience, Go, skiing, reading, and musical were collected through the search API of the Tistory blog service. The analysis of the texts showed that various psycholinguistic characteristics of the texts are different across the four categories of the texts. Moreover, the machine learning experiment using the characteristics for automatic text classification showed significant performance. Specifically, the ensemble method, based on functional tree and bagging appeared to be most effective in classification.

Keywords: blog, social media, text analysis, psycholinguistics

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Authors: Masoud Hassanzade Novin, Bahloul Salmani

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The process of the translation is not merely the linguistic aspects. It is also considered in the cultural framework of both the source and target text cultures. The translation process and translated texts are confronted the new aspect in 20th century which is considered mostly in the patronage framework and ideological grillwork of the target language. To have these factors scrutinized in the process of the translation both micro-element factors and macro-element factors can be taken into consideration. For the purpose of this study through a qualitative type of research based on critical discourse analysis approach, the case study of the novel “1984” written by George Orwell was chosen as the corpus of the study to have the contrastive analysis by its Persian translated texts. Results of the study revealed some distortions embedded in the target texts which were overshadowed by ideological aspect and patronage network. The outcomes of the manipulated terms were different in various categories which revealed the manipulation aspects in the texts translated.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, ideology, patronage network, translated texts

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Authors: Nudrat Kamal

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Scholarship exploring the development of the literary tradition of feminist utopias, especially in the sociopolitical context of Europe and North America, has been important and meaningful, but it is, in large part, still restricted to Euro-American texts. This paper will explore Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland (1915) with another feminist utopia written just a decade before, but in a widely different sociopolitical context: Bengali feminist writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s English short story Sultana’s Dream (1905). The paper will argue that both texts, despite being written in such different cultural and historical contexts, utilize and subvert the public versus private/domestic sphere dichotomy and the restricted gender roles associated with each sphere in order to conceive of specific formulations of feminist modernities that reflect the sociopolitical contexts and feminist movements both writers were writing within. By bringing Gilman’s Herland into conversation with Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, the paper hopes to illuminate the new meanings that might emerge if the scholarship on Western feminist utopias was to open itself up to the feminist utopias written elsewhere.

Keywords: comparative literature, feminist utopias, modernity, South Asian literature, utopias

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Authors: Jutta Ransmayr

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The digital age has long arrived at Austrian schools, so both society and educationalists demand that digital means should be integrated accordingly to day-to-day school routines. Therefore, the Austrian school-leaving exam (A-levels) can now be written either by hand or by using a computer. However, the choice of writing medium (pen and paper or computer) for written examination papers, which are considered 'high-stakes' exams, raises a number of questions that have not yet been adequately investigated and answered until recently, such as: What effects do the different conditions of text production in the written German A-levels have on the component of normative linguistic accuracy? How do the spelling skills of German A-level papers written with a pen differ from those that the students wrote on the computer? And how is the teacher's assessment related to this? Which practical desiderata for German didactics can be derived from this? In a trilateral pilot project of the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities (ACDH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna in cooperation with the Austrian Ministry of Education and the Council for German Orthography, these questions were investigated. A representative Austrian learner corpus, consisting of around 530 German A-level papers from all over Austria (pen and computer written), was set up in order to subject it to a quantitative (corpus-linguistic and statistical) and qualitative investigation with regard to the spelling and punctuation performance of the high school graduates and the differences between pen- and computer-written papers and their assessments. Relevant studies are currently available mainly from the Anglophone world. These have shown that writing on the computer increases the motivation to write, has positive effects on the length of the text, and, in some cases, also on the quality of the text. Depending on the writing situation and other technical aids, better results in terms of spelling and punctuation could also be found in the computer-written texts as compared to the handwritten ones. Studies also point towards a tendency among teachers to rate handwritten texts better than computer-written texts. In this paper, the first comparable results from the German-speaking area are to be presented. Research results have shown that, on the one hand, there are significant differences between handwritten and computer-written work with regard to performance in orthography and punctuation. On the other hand, the corpus linguistic investigation and the subsequent statistical analysis made it clear that not only the teachers' assessments of the students’ spelling performance vary enormously but also the overall assessments of the exam papers – the factor of the production medium (pen and paper or computer) also seems to play a decisive role.

Keywords: exam paper assessment, pen and paper or computer, learner corpora, linguistics

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Authors: Defne Akinci Midas

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The aim of this study was to determine the minimum, and maximum number of words that would be sufficient to fulfill the writing task in the local English Proficiency Exam (EPE) produced and administered at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. The relationship between the number of words and the scores of the written products that had been awarded by two raters in three online EPEs administered in 2020 was examined. The means, standard deviations, percentages, range, minimum and maximum scores as well as correlations of the scores awarded to written products with the words that amount to 0-50, 51-100, 101-150, 151-200, 201-250, 251-300, and so on were computed. The results showed that the raters did not award a full score to texts that had fewer than 100 words. Moreover, the texts that had around 200 words were awarded the highest scores. The highest number of words that earned the highest scores was about 225, and from then onwards, the scores were either stable or lower. A positive low to moderate correlation was found between the number of words and scores awarded to the texts. We understand that the idea of ‘the longer, the better’ did not apply here. The results also showed that words between 101 to about 225 were sufficient to fulfill the writing task to fully display writing skills and language ability in the specific case of this exam.

Keywords: English proficiency exam, number of words, scoring, writing task

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Authors: Cristina Felipeto, Catherine Bore, Eduardo Calil

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This work aims to analyze and compare the punctuation marks (PM) in school texts of Brazilian and French students and the comments on these PM made spontaneously by the students during the ongoing text. Assuming textual genetics as an investigative field within a dialogical and enunciative approach, we defined a common methodological design in two 1st year classrooms (7 years old) of the primary school, one classroom in Brazil (Maceio) and the other one in France (Paris). Through a multimodal capture system of writing processes in real time and space (Ramos System), we recorded the collaborative writing proposal in dyads in each of the classrooms. This system preserves the classroom’s ecological characteristics and provides a video recording synchronized with dialogues, gestures and facial expressions of the students, the stroke of the pen’s ink on the sheet of paper and the movement of the teacher and students in the classroom. The multimodal register of the writing process allowed access to the text in progress and the comments made by the students on what was being written. In each proposed text production, teachers organized their students in dyads and requested that they should talk, combine and write a fictional narrative. We selected a Dyad of Brazilian students (BD) and another Dyad of French students (FD) and we have filmed 6 proposals for each of the dyads. The proposals were collected during the 2nd Term of 2013 (Brazil) and 2014 (France). In 6 texts written by the BD there were identified 39 PMs and 825 written words (on average, a PM every 23 words): Of these 39 PMs, 27 were highlighted orally and commented by either student. In the texts written by the FD there were identified 48 PMs and 258 written words (on average, 1 PM every 5 words): Of these 48 PM, 39 were commented by the French students. Unlike what the studies on punctuation acquisition point out, the PM that occurred the most were hyphens (BD) and commas (FD). Despite the significant difference between the types and quantities of PM in the written texts, the recognition of the need for writing PM in the text in progress and the comments have some common characteristics: i) the writing of the PM was not anticipated in relation to the text in progress, then they were added after the end of a sentence or after the finished text itself; ii) the need to add punctuation marks in the text came after one of the students had ‘remembered’ that a particular sign was needed; iii) most of the PM inscribed were not related to their linguistic functions, but the graphic-visual feature of the text; iv) the comments justify or explain the PM, indicating metalinguistic reflections made by the students. Our results indicate how the comments of the BD and FD express the dialogic and subjective nature of knowledge acquisition. Our study suggests that the initial learning of PM depends more on its graphic features and interactional conditions than on its linguistic functions.

Keywords: collaborative writing, erasure, graphic marks, learning, metalinguistic awareness, textual genesis

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Authors: Anne-Marie Dionne

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Teacher reading aloud to students is a practice that is well established in preschool and primary classrooms. Many benefits of this pedagogical activity have been highlighted in multiple studies. However, it has also been shown that teachers are not keen on choosing informational texts for their read aloud, as their selections for this venue are mainly fictional stories, mostly written in a unique narrative story-like structure. Considering that students soon have to read complex informational texts by themselves as they go from one grade to another, there is cause for concern because those who do not benefit from an early exposure to informational texts could be lacking knowledge of informational text structures that they will encounter regularly in their reading. Exposing students to informational texts could be done in different ways in classrooms. However, since read aloud appears to be such a common and efficient practice in preschool and primary grades, it is important to examine more deeply the factors taken into account by teachers when they are selecting their readings for this important teaching activity. Moreover, it seems critical to know why teachers are not inclined to choose more often informational texts when they are reading aloud to their pupils. A group of 22 preschool or primary grade teachers participated in this study. The data collection was done by a survey and an individual semi-structured interview. The survey was conducted in order to get quantitative data on the read-aloud practices of teachers. As for the interviews, they were organized around three categories of questions (exploratory, analytical, opinion) regarding the process of selecting the texts for the read-aloud sessions. A statistical analysis was conducted on the data obtained by the survey. As for the interviews, they were subjected to a content analysis aiming to classify the information collected in predetermined categories such as the reasons given to favor fictional texts over informative texts, the reasons given for avoiding informative texts for reading aloud, the perceptions of the challenges that the informative texts could bring when they are read aloud to students, and the perceived advantages that they would present if they were chosen more often for this activity. Results are showing variable factors that are guiding the teachers when they are making their selection of the texts to be read aloud. As for example, some of them are choosing solely fictional texts because of their convictions that these are more interesting for their students. They also perceive that the informational texts are not good choices because they are not suitable for pleasure reading. In that matter, results are pointing to some interesting elements. Many teachers perceive that read aloud of fictional or informational texts have different goals: fictional texts are read for pleasure and informational texts are read mostly for academic purposes. These results bring out the urgency for teachers to become aware of the numerous benefits that the reading aloud of each type of texts could bring to their students, especially the informational texts. The possible consequences of teachers’ perceptions will be discussed further in our presentation.

Keywords: fictional texts, informational texts, preschool or primary grade teachers, reading aloud

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Authors: Beata Grymska

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The research studies on academic discourse focus in general on lexical bundles, epistemic modality markers, or interactions between writers and readers. Following the research into the written forms of the academic community, this study concentrates on adjectives in research articles. The study investigates the distribution of adjectives in research articles in two academic disciplines: linguistics and medicine. It is corpus-based in design and consists of 100 linguistic and 100 medical research articles all written in English. The aim of the study is to compare the distribution of adjectives between the two corpora and four main parts of articles: IMRD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). The second aim is to see if the two corpora share common core adjectives, e.g., different, important, specific, and if there are discipline-specific adjectives. The further part of the paper elaborates on adjectives use in the corpora together with examples. The results indicate that the two corpora do not differ in the distribution of adjectives to a great extent. The occurrences of the most frequently used adjectives depend on the academic discipline of the research articles. The concluding part reflects upon the role of adjectives in academic discourse and also presents how corpora can be helpful in composing academic texts.

Keywords: academic discourse, academic texts, adjectives, corpus analysis, research articles

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Authors: Masoud Hassanzade Novin, Bahloul Salmani

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Translation cannot be considered as a simple linguistic act. Through the rise of descriptive approach in the late 1970s and 1980s, translation process managed to meet the requirements of social aspects as well as linguistic approaches. To have the translation considered as the cross-cultural communication through which various cultures communicate in ideological and cultural constraints, the contrastive analysis was conducted in this paper to reveal the distortions imposed in the translated texts. The corpus of the study involved the novel 1984 written by George Orwell and its Persian translated texts which were analyzed through the qualitative type of the research based on critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Toury's norms as well as Lefever's concepts of ideology. Results of the study revealed the point that ideology and the cultural constraints were considered as an important stimulus which can control the process of the translation.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, ideology, norms, translated texts

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Authors: Luis Pascasio

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In a time when murky debates on US immigration policy are polarizing a nation steeped in partisan and nativist politics, certain media texts are proposing to challenge the dominant ways in which immigrant discourses are shaped in political debates. The paper will examine how two media texts perform counter-hegemonic discourses against institutionalized concepts on citizenship. The article looks at Documented (2014), a documentary film, written and directed by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer-winning journalist-turned-activist and a self-proclaimed undocumented immigrant; and DefineAmerican.com, an online media platform that articulates the convergence of multiple voices and discourses about post-industrial and post-semiotic citizenship. As sites of meaning production, the two media texts perform counter-narratives that inspire new forms of mediated social activism and postcolonial identities. The paper argues that a closer introspection of the media texts reveals emotional, thematic and ideological claims to an interrogation of a diasporic discourse on redefining the rules of inclusion and exclusion within the postmodern dialogic of citizenship.

Keywords: counter-narratives, documentary filmmaking, postmodern citizenship, diaspora media

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Authors: Sidi Ahmed Maouloud, Cheikh Ba

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Much of West Africa’s cultural heritage is written in the Al-Soudani Arabic script, which was widely used in West Africa before the time of European colonization. This Al-Soudani Arabic script is an African version of the Maghrebi script, in particular, the Al-Mebssout script. However, the local African qualities were incorporated into the Al-Soudani script in a way that gave it a unique African diversity and character. Despite the existence of several Arabic datasets in Oriental script, allowing for the analysis, layout, and recognition of texts written in these calligraphies, many Arabic scripts and written traditions remain understudied. In this paper, we present a dataset of words from Al-Soudani calligraphy scripts. This dataset consists of 100 images selected from three different manuscripts written in Al-Soudani Arabic script by different copyists. The primary source for this database was the libraries of Boston University and Cambridge University. This dataset highlights the unique characteristics of the Al-Soudani Arabic script as well as the new challenges it presents in terms of automatic word recognition of Arabic manuscripts. An HTR system based on a hybrid ANN (CRNN-CTC) is also proposed to test this dataset. SAMRA is a dataset of annotated Arabic manuscript words in the Al-Soudani script that can help researchers automatically recognize and analyze manuscript words written in this script.

Keywords: dataset, CRNN-CTC, handwritten words recognition, Al-Soudani Arabic script, HTR, manuscripts

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Authors: Rafat Y. Alwazna

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Certain religious texts are deemed part of legal texts that are characterised by high sensitivity and sacredness. Amongst such religious texts are Islamic legal texts that are replete with Islamic legal terms that designate particular legal concepts peculiar to Islamic legal system and legal culture. However, from the syntactic perspective, Islamic legal texts prove lengthy, condensed and convoluted, with little use of punctuation system, but with an extensive use of subordinations and co-ordinations, which separate the main verb from the subject, and which, of course, carry a heavy load of legal detail. The present paper seeks to examine the syntactic features of Islamic legal texts through analysing a short text of Islamic jurisprudence in an attempt at exploring the syntactic features that characterise this type of legal text. A translation of this text into legal English is then exercised to find the translation implications that have emerged as a result of the English translation. Based on these implications, the paper compares and contrasts the syntactic features of Islamic legal texts to those of legal English texts. Finally, the present paper argues that there are a number of syntactic features of Islamic legal texts, such as nominalisation, passivisation, little use of punctuation system, the use of the Arabic cohesive device, etc., which are also possessed by English legal texts except for the last feature and with some variations. The paper also claims that when rendering an Islamic legal text into legal English, certain implications emerge, such as the necessity of a sentence break, the omission of the cohesive device concerned and the increase in the use of nominalisation, passivisation, passive participles, and so on.

Keywords: English legal texts, Islamic legal texts, nominalisation, participles, passivisation, syntactic features, translation implications

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Authors: Reza Nozadheravi, Masoud Hasanzade Novin

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Those techniques of translation which are engaged with short textual segments and mostly are prescriptive can be considered as micro level elements. Macro levels, however, refer to those translation strategies and those external factors that affect the translator’s decisions and have descriptive nature. What was scrutinized in details in the paper reveals the ‎macro-elements which are crucial in canonized translated texts, moreover, different aspects ‎of the patronage, which can be considered as the important factors from having the texts ‎chosen to the final translation products, have been observed in translated texts of Najaf ‎Darya-Bandarie, the well-known Iranian Translator. What is probed in this paper ‎reveals that marco-elements along with the linguistic aspects of the texts, micro-elements, ‎are considered as the significant aspects in translation process and even final translated ‎texts.

Keywords: canolized translated texts‎, culture‎, macro-elements‎, patronage

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Authors: J. Chow

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In laboratory settings, this study measured and reported the effects of undergraduate students watching animated videos on learning microeconomics as compared with the effectiveness of reading written texts. The study described an experiment on learning microeconomics in higher education using two different types of learning materials. It reported the effectiveness on microeconomics learning of watching animated videos and reading written texts. Undergraduate students in the university were randomly assigned to either a ‘video group’ or a ‘text group’ in the experiment. Previously-validated multiple-choice questions on fundamental concepts of microeconomics were administered. Both groups showed improvement between the pre-test and post-test. The experience of learning using text and video materials was also assessed. After controlling the student characteristics variables, the analyses showed that both types of materials showed comparable level of perceived learning experience. The effect size and statistical significance of these results supported the hypothesis that animated video is an effective alternative to text materials as a learning tool for students. The findings suggest that such animated videos may support teaching microeconomics in higher education.

Keywords: animated videos for education, laboratory experiment, microeconomics education, undergraduate economics education

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Authors: Bastian Haarmann, Likas Sikorski

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In this paper, we introduce an NLG application for the automatic creation of ready-to-publish texts from big data. The fully automatic generated stories have a high resemblance to the style in which the human writer would draw up a news story. Topics may include soccer games, stock exchange market reports, weather forecasts and many more. The generation of the texts runs according to the human language production. Each generated text is unique. Ready-to-publish stories written by a computer application can help humans to quickly grasp the outcomes of big data analyses, save time-consuming pre-formulations for journalists and cater to rather small audiences by offering stories that would otherwise not exist.

Keywords: big data, natural language generation, publishing, robotic journalism

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Authors: Raziyeh Mashhadi Moghadam

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Persian writings in the form of stories, scientific articles, historiographies, biographies, and philosophical, religious, and poetic arguments have established their presence in the past and present. Any piece of text is composed in a unique style depending on its content and subject. In this paper, a manuscript called Falnama of the Prophet is reviewed. Only a few scattered pages of this version are extant, and the author, using the name of twenty-four prophets, seeks to explore the presence and future of the reader. This version is analyzed based on Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to unravel the underlying processes in this type of manuscript. The spelling of some words and sentences is different from that of the new written Persian version.

Keywords: application of Falnama texts, critical discourse analysis, Fairclough’s approach

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Authors: Ana Maria Reis d'Azevedo Breda, Catarina Maria Neto da Cruz

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The role of images/illustrations in communicating meanings and triggering emotions assumes an increasingly relevant role in contemporary texts, regardless of the age group for which they are intended or the nature of the texts that host them. It is no coincidence that children's books are full of illustrations and that the image/text ratio decreases as the age group grows. The vast majority of children's books can be considered multimodal texts containing text and images/illustrations interacting with each other to provide the young reader with a broader and more creative understanding of the book's narrative. This interaction is very diverse, ranging from images/illustrations that are not essential for understanding the storytelling to those that contribute significantly to the meaning of the story. Usually, these books are also read by adults, namely by parents, educators, and teachers who act as mediators between the book and the children, explaining aspects that are or seem to be too complex for the child's context. It should be noted that there are books labeled as children's books that are clearly intended for both children and adults. In this work, following a qualitative and interpretative methodology based on written productions, participant observation, and field notes, we will describe the perceptions of future teachers of the 1st cycle of basic education, attending a master's degree at a Portuguese university, about the role of the image in literary and non-literary texts, namely in mathematical texts, and how these can constitute precious resources for emotional regulation and for the design of creative didactic situations. The analysis of the collected data allowed us to obtain evidence regarding the evolution of the participants' perception regarding the crucial role of images in children's literature, not only as an emotional regulator for young readers but also as a creative source for the design of meaningful didactical situations, crossing other scientific areas, other than the mother tongue, namely mathematics.

Keywords: children’s literature, emotions, multimodal texts, soft skills

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Authors: Brady, Imelda Katherine, Da Cunha Fanego, Iria

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Today's university students are considered digital natives and the use of Information Technologies (ITs) forms a large part of their study and learning. In the context of language studies, applications that help with revisions of grammar or vocabulary are particularly useful, especially if they are open access. There are studies that show the effectiveness of this type of application in the learning of English as a foreign language and that using IT can help learners become more autonomous in foreign language acquisition, given that these applications can enhance awareness of the learning process; this means that learners are less dependent on the teacher for corrective feedback. We also propose that the exploitation of these technologies also enhances the work of the language instructor wishing to incorporate IT into his/her practice. In this context, the aim of this paper is to present the creation of a repository of tools that provide support in the writing and correction of texts in English and the assessment of their usefulness on behalf of university students enrolled in the English Studies Degree. The project seeks to encourage the development of autonomous learning through the acquisition of skills linked to the self-correction of written work in English. To comply with the above, our methodology follows five phases. First of all, a selection of the main open-access online applications available for the correction of written texts in English is made: AutoCrit, Hemingway, Grammarly, LanguageTool, OutWrite, PaperRater, ProWritingAid, Reverso, Slick Write, Spell Check Plus and Virtual Writing Tutor. Secondly, the functionalities of each of these tools (spelling, grammar, style correction, etc.) are analyzed. Thirdly, explanatory materials (texts and video tutorials) are prepared on each tool. Fourth, these materials are uploaded into a repository of our university in the form of an institutional blog, which is made available to students and the general public. Finally, a survey was designed to collect students’ feedback. The survey aimed to analyse the usefulness of the blog and the quality of the explanatory materials as well as the degree of usefulness that students assigned to each of the tools offered. In this paper, we present the results of the analysis of data received from 33 students in the 1st semester of the 21-22 academic year. One result we highlight in our paper is that the students have rated this resource very highly, in addition to offering very valuable information on the perceived usefulness of the applications provided for them to review. Our work, carried out within the framework of a teaching innovation project funded by our university, emphasizes that teachers need to design methodological strategies that help their students improve the quality of their productions written in English and, by extension, to improve their linguistic competence.

Keywords: academic blog, open access tools, online self-correction, written production in English, university learning

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Authors: Abdelmagid Basyouny Sakr

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Terminological variation is a reality and it is now recognized by terminologists. This paper investigates the terminological variation in the context of specialized economic texts in Italian. It aims to find whether certain patterns or tendencies can be derived from the analysis of these texts. Term variants pose two different kinds of difficulties. The first one is being able to recognize linguistic expressions that denote the same concept in running text. Another one lies in knowing which variant should be considered and for what purpose. This would help to differentiate between variants that could be candidates for inclusion in terminological resources and the ones which are synonyms or contextual variants. New insights about terminological variation in specialized texts could contribute to improve specialized dictionaries which will better account for the different ways in which a given thought is expressed.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, specialized communication, terms and concepts, terminological variation

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Authors: Carmela Perta

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Among the studies flourished in the field of historical sociolinguistics, mainly in the strand devoted to English history, during its Medieval and early modern phases, multilingual texts had been analysed using theories and models coming from contact linguistics, thus applying synchronic models and approaches to the past. This is true also in the case of contact phenomena which would transcend the writing level involving the language systems implicated in contact processes to the point of perceiving a new variety. This is the case for medieval administrative-commercial texts in which, according to some Scholars, the degree of fusion of Anglo-Norman, Latin and middle English is so high a mixed code emerges, and there are recurrent patterns of mixed forms. Interesting is a collection of multilingual business writings by John Balmayn, an Englishman overseeing a large shipment in Tuscany, namely the Cantelowe accounts. These documents display various analogies with multilingual texts written in England in the same period; in fact, the writer seems to make use of the above-mentioned patterns, with Middle English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and the newly added Italian. Applying an atomistic yet dynamic approach to the study of contact phenomena, we will investigate these documents, trying to explore the nature of the switching forms they contain from an intra-writer variation perspective. After analysing the accounts and the type of multilingualism in them, we will take stock of the assumed mixed code nature, comparing the characteristics found in this genre with modern assumptions. The aim is to evaluate the possibility to consider the switching forms as core elements of a mixed code, used as professional variety among merchant communities, or whether such texts should be analysed from a switching perspective.

Keywords: historical sociolinguistics, historical code switching, letters, medieval england

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Authors: Chek Kim Loi

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The study attempts to undertake an error analysis of prepositions employed in the written work of Form 4 Malay ESL (English as a Second Language) students in Malaysia. The error analysis is undertaken using Richards’s (1974) framework of intralingual and interlingual errors and Bennett’s (1975) framework in identifying prepositional concepts found in the sample. The study first identifies common prepositional errors in the written texts of 150 student participants. It then measures the relative intensities of these errors and finds out the possible causes for the occurrences of these errors. In this study, one significant finding is that among the nine concepts of prepositions examined, the participant students tended to make errors in the use of prepositions of time and place. The present study has pedagogical implications in teaching English prepositions to Malay ESL students.

Keywords: error, interlingual, intralingual, preposition

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Authors: Dayane de Almeida

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This work aims at presenting a study that demonstrates the usability of categories of analysis from Discourse Semiotics – also known as Greimassian Semiotics in authorship cases in forensic contexts. It is necessary to know if the categories examined in semiotic analysis (the ‘grammar’ of the content plane) can distinguish authors. Thus, a study with 4 sets of texts from a corpus of ‘not on demand’ written samples (those texts differ in formality degree, purpose, addressees, themes, etc.) was performed. Each author contributed with 20 texts, separated into 2 groups of 10 (Author1A, Author1B, and so on). The hypothesis was that texts from a single author were semiotically more similar to each other than texts from different authors. The assumptions and issues that led to this idea are as follows: -The features analyzed in authorship studies mostly relate to the expression plane: they are manifested on the ‘surface’ of texts. If language is both expression and content, content would also have to be considered for more accurate results. Style is present in both planes. -Semiotics postulates the content plane is structured in a ‘grammar’ that underlies expression, and that presents different levels of abstraction. This ‘grammar’ would be a style marker. -Sociolinguistics demonstrates intra-speaker variation: an individual employs different linguistic uses in different situations. Then, how to determine if someone is the author of several texts, distinct in nature (as it is the case in most forensic sets), when it is known intra-speaker variation is dependent on so many factors?-The idea is that the more abstract the level in the content plane, the lower the intra-speaker variation, because there will be a greater chance for the author to choose the same thing. If two authors recurrently chose the same options, differently from one another, it means each one’s option has discriminatory power. -Size is another issue for various attribution methods. Since most texts in real forensic settings are short, methods relying only on the expression plane tend to fail. The analysis of the content plane as proposed by greimassian semiotics would be less size-dependable. -The semiotic analysis was performed using the software Corpus Tool, generating tags to allow the counting of data. Then, similarities and differences were quantitatively measured, through the application of the Jaccard coefficient (a statistical measure that compares the similarities and differences between samples). The results showed the hypothesis was confirmed and, hence, the grammatical categories of the content plane may successfully be used in questioned authorship scenarios.

Keywords: authorship attribution, content plane, forensic linguistics, greimassian semiotics, intraspeaker variation, style

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Authors: Raja Al-Ghamdi

Abstract:

This paper aims to systematically assess the translation of key cultural texts. The paper, therefore, proposes a modification of the discourse analysis model for translation quality assessment introduced by the linguist Juliane House (1977, 1997, 2015). The data for analysis has been chosen from a religious text that has never been investigated before. It is an overt translation of the biography of Prophet Mohammad. The book is written originally in Arabic and translated into English. A soft copy of the translation, entitled The Sealed Nectar, is posted on numerous websites including the Internet Archive library which offers a free access to everyone. The text abounds with linguistic and cultural phenomena relevant to Islamic and Arab lingua-cultural context which make its translation a challenge, as well as its assessment. Interesting findings show that (1) culturemes are rich points and both the translator’s subjectivity and intervention are apparent in mediating them, (2) given the nature of historical narration, the source text reflects the author’s positive shading, whereas the target text reflects the translator’s axiological orientation as neutrally shaded, and, (3) linguistic gaps, metaphorical expressions and intertextuality are major stimuli to compensation strategies.

Keywords: Arabic-English discourse analysis, key cultural texts, overt translation, quality assessment

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Authors: Amira Dhokar, Lobna Hlaoua, Lotfi Ben Romdhane

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Tweet contextualization (TC) is a new issue that aims to answer questions of the form 'What is this tweet about?' The idea of this task was imagined as an extension of a previous area called multi-document summarization (MDS), which consists in generating a summary from many sources. In both TC and MDS, the summary should ideally contain the most relevant information of the topic that is being discussed in the source texts (for MDS) and related to the query (for TC). Furthermore of being informative, a summary should be coherent, i.e. well written to be readable and grammatically compact. Hence, coherence is an essential characteristic in order to produce comprehensible texts. In this paper, we propose a new approach to improve readability and coherence for tweet contextualization based on bipartite graphs. The main idea of our proposed method is to reorder sentences in a given paragraph by combining most expressive words detection and HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search) algorithm to make up a coherent context.

Keywords: bipartite graphs, readability, summarization, tweet contextualization

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Authors: Wided Bakari, Patrce Bellot, Mahmoud Neji

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With the development of electronic media and the heterogeneity of Arabic data on the Web, the idea of building a clean corpus for certain applications of natural language processing, including machine translation, information retrieval, question answer, become more and more pressing. In this manuscript, we seek to create and develop our own corpus of pair’s questions-texts. This constitution then will provide a better base for our experimentation step. Thus, we try to model this constitution by a method for Arabic insofar as it recovers texts from the web that could prove to be answers to our factual questions. To do this, we had to develop a java script that can extract from a given query a list of html pages. Then clean these pages to the extent of having a database of texts and a corpus of pair’s question-texts. In addition, we give preliminary results of our proposal method. Some investigations for the construction of Arabic corpus are also presented in this document.

Keywords: Arabic, web, corpus, search engine, URL, question, corpus building, script, Google, html, txt

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Authors: Janaka B. Lewis

Abstract:

“Narratives of Slavery and the Culture of Play” examines how play is discussed in early African American literature by both men and women to illustrate ways that they negotiated the hierarchy and oppression of enslavement. Reading narratives categorized as “slave narratives,” including those written by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Olaudah Equiano, through the lens of play theory offers an illuminated analysis of the significance of play culture in these texts. It then reads late nineteenth-century play culture (or absence thereof) portrayed in literature as a lens for more contemporary African American oral and literary culture. These discussions of social constructions through literature bridge analyses of African American-authored texts and create a larger conversation about print media as a tool of activism and resistance. This essay also contributes to a larger body of analysis of nineteenth-century African American culture through literature.

Keywords: childhood, slavery, consciousness of play, 19th century African American culture

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