November 2011

Invoking the community: Orality and cultural diversity in biographical narratives for children in Kenya

  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...

Author(s): Colomba Kaburi Muriungi

November 2011

The competition model: From language processing to pedagogical implications

  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...

Author(s): Farid Ghaemi and Mastaneh Haghani