Invoking the community: Orality and cultural diversity in biographical narratives for children in Kenya
November 2011
This study aimed to examine how orality was utilized in biographical narratives. The study argued that orality as a stylistic device not only helped in creating a narrative structure that tells the stories of specific personalities, but this device also helped in summoning literature from different Kenyan communities. The study examined three biographies from the Lion’s series of biographies...
The competition model: From language processing to pedagogical implications
November 2011
The competition model is a psycholinguistic model which was first introduced to account for language processing, yet over time, the model was generalized to deal with the areas of first and second language acquisition. As a functionalist model, the ‘competition model’ suggests that language forms are at the service of communicative functions. It also draws on connectionism, and thus emphasizes the...
Gender bias ideology as manifested in the grammar of Afan Oromo
October 2011
The purpose of this research was to investigate and explain how the grammatical structure of Afan Oromo reveals social gender bias ideology. Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected from primary and secondary sources of the Macha dialect, the grammatical structure of Afan Oromo was analyzed in the light of the socio-cultural lives of the language community. The theoretical base of this study was...
Fu Lei’s translation activity and legacy
October 2011
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the survival of the one and only freelance translator in mainland China, whose name was Fu Lei. Fu’s selection of source texts was affected by the ideological factors of the day. His financial conditions were intimately related to the change of the country’s policy on royalties, but his translation quality almost remained at the same level. His repeated revisions of...
Co-enrollment as a facilitator of English as a second language (ESL) students’ transition to non-ESL college courses
October 2011
English as a second language (ESL) educators face with special challenges in their field since the ESL students experience dramatic cultural and social transitions beside the educational changeover. Newcomers with different traditions, moral values and ethical standards are faced with more difficulties in or out of the classrooms. Such potential difficulties naturally negatively affect overall language...
The English language as an instrument of exploitation in Colonial Nigeria: Instances from Icheoku
September 2011
Among the most important and lasting legacies left behind by the British in Nigeria is the English language. While English has been one of the most unifying factors in Nigeria and has been the means of socio-economic upliftment for many individuals, it has also served some selfish and exploitative purposes. This paper studies how the few Nigerians (and Africans) who had acquired English in the early times...
Cultural influences on the fictional expressions of Nigerian Igbo speaking writers
September 2011
The study examined the fictional expression of Igbo writers in English to determine its underlying influences and to evaluate the effects which it has on its non-Igbo audience. It specifically examined selected works of Elechi Amadi and John Munonye who adopted an indigenized form of English in which features of Igbo language, culture and world-view were either wholly or partially imported into standard...
Managing popular entertainment for national identity and nation building
August 2011
This study strived to extricate the significance of managing popular entertainment for national identity and nation building. It observed that popular entertainment stems from the culture of a people as social, political, economic and technological experiences and could be in form of carnival, storytelling, ritual performance, dance, music, drama, magical feat as well as reflects other values and norms of the...
The effect of teaching culturally-based texts on the Persian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ motivation and reading performance
August 2011
The paper served as an attempt to investigate whether teaching the culturally-loaded texts to Persian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners bear any influence on their performance on reading comprehension tests. The paper, in addition, explores the any interrelationship between the teaching of culture-oriented texts and the motivation level of language learners.To achieve such objectives,102 Persian...
The position of language in development of colonization
July 2011
Language as communication and as culture is then products of each other and Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world. Language is thus inseparable from us as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the...
A lexico-syntactic exploration of Ondo and Ikale dialects of the Yoruba Language
July 2011
The study was a comparative study of Ondo and Ikale dialects of the Yoruba Language with a view to finding the areas of convergence and divergence between the two dialects. The study was based on 50 sentences from each of the dialects, but only 25 of the sentences were presented. They were anaylsed from the perspective of Halliday Systemic Function Grammar (SFG) in order to identify the prominent lexemes and...
“My name is Khan and I am not a Terroristâ€: Representation of Muslims in ‘My name is Khan’
June 2011
The media plays a pivotal position in society today and its ubiquitous presence signifies the potential the media has in transferring information, about every day issues, to the masses. The media not only transfers information but has the ability to mold the viewers’ perceptions about what should and should not be a reality. In recent developments, Bollywood has taken an interest in the...
The effects of code-mixing, thematic clustering, and contextualization on L2 vocabulary recognition and production
June 2011
To investigate the effects of code-mixing, thematic clustering, and contextualization on L2vocabulary recognition and production, a sample of 120 EFL students of Zaban Negar institute in Qazvin, Iran were divided into three groups. Each group received vocabulary instruction in one of the aforementioned techniques. Multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blanks vocabulary tests were used to measure the...
Investigating factors contributing to grade nine students’ spelling errors at Don Bosco High and Preparatory School in Batu
June 2011
This study investigates the causes of grade nine students’ spelling errors at Don Bosco High and Preparatory School in Batu, Ethiopia in 2009/2010. Fifty-two students were included in the study using simple random sampling techniques, and ten teachers who taught other subjects in English were selected using availability sampling. The research revealed that the origin of English Language words is...
Buddhist way of life and environmental concerns
May 2011
Environmental concerns in the 20th century have been thrown into sharp relief because of the growing consciousness about environmental disasters of cataclysmic dimensions staring us in the face. The Green Peace Movement, World Wildlife Fund, the Chipko Movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan and many more such movements and organizations working for the preservation of Nature have fore grounded...
Situating African languages in the global village for sustainable development: Attractions and challenges for Zimbabwe
May 2011
While dissenting voices view ex-colonial languages as contributing to marginalisation,(Bentahila, 1988:338) argues that, in contrast to Arabic, French is consistently associatedwith modernity, education and sophistication as well as...
Principals and teachers’ perceptions of communication and human resources management and their compliance with culture in Nigerian educational system
May 2011
This paper attempted to establish the influence of communication in human resource management and its compliance with culture in Nigeria educational system. To achieve this, three research questions and three hypotheses were formulated to guide the study based on a correlational design. The population of the study included all principals and teachers for public secondary schools in Delta State. Form the...
Ibibio predicative copular constructions
April 2011
The Ibibio language is a member of the lower cross group of languages within the (New) Benue-Congo sub-family of the Niger-Congo family. It is predominantly spoken in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Ibibio has two types of copular construction; a locative copular construction and a predicative copular one. This paper provides a descriptive account of the predicative sub type of copular construction in Ibibio and...
L2 acquisition of Spanish clitic case morphology: A generative approach
April 2011
The present study has investigated the phenomenon of morphological variability in interlanguage grammars. Current L2 research does not seem to agree on whether erroneous morphological forms noticeable even in advanced and end-state. L2 grammars are due to an underlying syntactic impairment or learners’ performance limitations. The use of Spanish direct and indirect object pronouns (known as clitics) by...
Architectural background of Kerman
March 2011
This text is an effort to describe the Kerman architectural history since initialization till now, which refers to the placement of the city and its history since the architecture is affected by historical conditions. We describe the history of the city briefly and later classify the effective factors on the shape of ancient architecture and finally discuss the present condition and the kind of behavior with...
A nigger in the woodpile? A racist incident on a South African University campus
March 2011
This case study starts by providing a brief background description of the shock value of swearwords and derogatory terms before moving to a more focused discussion of the social and psycholinguistic features associated with their use. After a brief overview of the history of highly-charged taboo words referring to black African people in South Africa, the paper then discusses the repercussions of a recent and...
Literacy in primary and secondary education in Nigeria
February 2011
Literacy is a condition whereby one can successfully function at certain levels in a society where literacy plays a role in providing access to power and resources. Thus, what counts as literacy is determined by the cultural, political, and historical contexts of the community in which it is used. The purpose of education is the preparation for life and for giving an individual wholesome development....
Reticence and anxiety in Chinese university ESP poetry class: A case study
February 2011
This paper reports on the results of a case study on reticence and anxiety in a Chinese ESP (English for specific purposes) poetry class at the tertiary level. A class of 24 undergraduates and their course teacher participated in the study. Analyses of the data collected via survey, observation and semi-structured interview revealed that: (1) the students were willing to interact with others; however, many...
The identity and L2 accent from an EIL angle
January 2011
The relationship between identity and pronunciation has been adequately researched from a wide variety of political, social and linguistic perspectives. Pronunciation, in a narrower sense accent, is proclaimed one of the prime determinants of identity construction and L2 learners, intentionally or not, manipulate it either to diverge from or converge towards the target speech communities. There are some...
Assessing a culture of religious devotion in Cameroon: Comparing word frequencies in the corpus of Cameroon English with reference to the London/Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpus
January 2011
This contribution assesses the degree of religious (Christian) devotion within the Cameroonian evangelical community, based on word frequencies from the Religious component (96,380 running words) of the Corpus of Cameroon English (CCE), and similar data from Category D (Religion) of the LOB (London/Oslo-Bergen) corpus. Overall, the study analyses 21 religious related words and notions such as faith, worship,...
Marxist feminism and postmodernism
November 2010
Arguing that it is too easy to release postmodernism as just another example of Western intellectual's separation from activism, this essay considers the connection between feminism and postmodernism as a largely anti-Marxist endeavour. The type of post-modern feminist theory that has blossomed, has presented distinct and well-documented challenges. It has destabilised previously secured categories...
The interaction between bilingualism, educational and social factors and foreign language learning in Iran
November 2010
The main concern of the present study was to probe the probable differences between Iranian bilingual/monolingual learners of English regarding their syntactic knowledge. It was an attempt to investigate whether bilingual and monolingual learners of English differ significantly in learning embedded question, preposition stranding and pied piping knowledge. To carry out this study, a total of 399 male and...
A novel system of telling the time: The case of midday and midnight as focal points in a home sign language
August 2010
Previous studies on clocks have mostly worked on the development of clock knowledge. It is implicitly assumed that there seems to be no basic difference in the way people read a clock. This study highlights a big difference found in the language of a home signer. She reads the clock by referring to midnight and midday. For example when we say “nine o’clock (in the morning)” she would say - or rather...
Iosipos Moisiodax, John Locke and the post-European enlightenment quest for modernity in Greece
August 2010
Iosipos Moisiodax (c.1725 - 1800) a highly controversial figure was the first eighteenth-century Greco-Bulgarian-Romanian intellectual in the Balkans to voice the ideas of the enlightenment in public forums, justifying his efforts with philosophical theorizing and using many of the ideas of John Locke. He made various wide-ranging pronouncements in favour of cultural change leading to Greek modernity which...
Cameroon English accent: Issues of standardization, attitudes and pedagogic concerns
April 2010
The twists and turns that the English language has undergone in Cameroon, as a result of the ecological, sociolinguistic and cultural realities of this postcolonial multilingual setting, make this New English, like other New Englishes, significantly different from older or traditional native Englishes, such as British and American Englishes. In spite of efforts made so far to describe Cameroon English at all...
The writing performance of undergraduates in the University of Technology, Mara, Terengganu, Malaysia
April 2010
Writing well and effectively helps our students achieve three important objectives. Firstly, it reinforces the grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary. Secondly, writing provides opportunities for our students to be more adventurous with the language, to go beyond what they have learnt and to take risks with the effects of writing. And, finally, the importance of writing lies in the ability to develop...
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