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The present article focuses on the use of critical thinking skills and techniques during a Business English class on the topic of problem-solving. I included four activities to which students were asked to apply critical thinking skills such as: analysis, interpretation, inference, explanation and evaluation. Students' positive feedback to the practice of critical thinking principles, as well as their active participation in that lesson, add to the other advantages of such a practical approach: a better understanding of the problem solving concept and an increased ability to solve business problems.
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The aim of this article is to offer readers an overview on how linguistic skills can be improved through a non-formal way of learning called Family Learning (FL). We discuss and establish what is commonly understood by FL throughout Europe and present methods and examples of FL practitioners that have managed to improve the linguistic skills of their target groups. Family Learning generically means an informal method of learning born from work undertaken in the voluntary sector and spread by Family Literacy programmes in the USA. The focus of FL is to value learning that takes place within the home and from the family. FL course provision shares strategies to make the home an effective place for learning and to support the learning ambitions of both adults and children.
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This article aims to analyse gendered instances of violence, as they are described in a number of novels written in English by authors of South-Asian origin, among which Shame, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, or The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Institutional violence against women includes rape, sutee/sati (the ritual of self-immolation of Hindu women at the death of their husbands), wearing the Islamic symbol of burqa, or keeping women in purdah (Muslim women’s confinement to the private sphere). In the case of men, the best known is male circumcision for Muslims or the male sterilisation campaign in the Emergency period in India. The trans-gendered body is also explored, with an emphasis on the hijras in India, men who undergo a castration ceremony in order to become guardians of women or artists.
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The study is part of a larger investigation on extreme right policies in Europe, achieved within the framework of the European Laboratory of Social Psychology, with the aim of understanding why it is we are witnessing the revival of the extreme right in some European countries. The investigation is defined by two analytical axes: the motivations of the adherence and the political route of the members of the party; and the social representations and practices of the supporters and the common knowledge concerning the right policy. A sample of subjects (supporters and militants of the right wing) have participated in an interview, and the data was processed through a categorial-frequencial "hand-made" analysis of the content which permitted to realize an "a posteriori" system of categories, on which the presentation and discussion are based.
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This article explores the basic varieties of organisational culture and some of the influencing factors that determine a certain type of organisational structure. The analysis does not make explicit reference to the teaching profession (except for one instance) but has been carried out in the hope that professionals in the teaching area will be able to reflect more on the type of organisation they work in and define with grater accuracy their teaching environment, the relationships between them and the management of their organisation at different levels. I believe it is often taken for granted that because the teachers' work is almost the same irrespective of their institution, their organisational environment should be very similar. This paper is an invitation to challenge this view and offers some basic instruments for an analysis that can be carried out both at an individual level and at an organisational level.
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The Games Theory is focused on strategy issues that imply interdependences between participants' decisions and actions. In particular, this theory deals with situations in which one's gains depend on another’s decisions and actions, so that each person involved has to identify the best reaction to possible actions of all the others. The Games Theory has been applied to understand and explain the behavior of an oligopoly firm. One of the most well known activities is the Prisoner dilemma. Two prisoners are asked to recognize the crimes they committed in a specific period of time. The prisoners are separated and cannot communicate with each other. Each of them has to make a decision by himself, but the decision he will make depends on the other's decision that affects him a lot. The prisoner dilemma model is used to explain the decisions that two competitive firms have to make regarding their spending for advertising.
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The main idea of this article is the concept of global culture as it is perceived nowadays due to the spreading of the American life style, goods and values worldwide. The idea of a global culture wasn't possible only during the global modernity time. The cultural writings can overcome the political and linguistic borders on condition that they are translated in the languages of the interested cultural communities. For centuries this process was hindered by the geographical distances and the technical difficulties. With the mondialisation development facilitated by mass-media and the contemporary means of transport, the writings' circulation becomes wider.
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This article analyzes political television interviews in the two languages (French and Dutch) of federal Belgium. Clayman and Heritage (2002) have listed the communicative characteristics of news interviews and have set forth a framework for analysing them. We have applied their findings to the corpus we have collected from the two public broadcasting stations in Belgium. The focus of this paper is on the specific characteristics of interviews with politicians interviewed both in their native and their non-native tongue. We have especially focused on the interviewer's role in communication. It turns out that the interviewing styles on both channels analyzed are equally adversarial, but that the ways in which this adversarialness is achieved, differ.
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Due to the communicational vocation of fictional works, the pragmatic values of literary speech conceal the construction of the self – both the writer's and the reader's. Thus it may be asserted that each enunciation comprises the author’s marks of substance, even in highly metaphorical uses of the language. These marks, always detectable, lead to the identity of the literary author. Once the author steps on the fiction stage, the dialogue with the reader begins. The latter – a faceless image – has a portrait more or less predictable before writing the text, but is definitely reshaped through the reading as mediated interaction with alterity. The two identities – the author's and the reader's – are consequently (re)shaped simultaneously in a secret synergy.
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This article examines the problematic relationship of the self to patterns of all kind as reflected in post-World War 2 American short fiction and highlights specific ways in which language is used to organise the character’s 'reality'. We point out how the minimalist orientation in the American short fiction of the late 70s and early 80s, through reductive and allusive techniques, explores the contemporary loss of a sense of history and the moral authority of marginality. Characters in minimalist short fiction are shown to have a static view of life in which things felt but left unstated have value.
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This paper focuses on a deconstructionist perspective on meaning that is perfectly compatible with, yet utterly different from Derrida’s antilogocentric “thesis” of the impossibility of a “transcendental signified”: Paul de Man’s conception of the disruptive and rhetorical nature of language. It analyses de Man’s scepticism about the epistemological reliability of language, his indebtedness to the groundbreaking linguistic insights of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as his deconstructionist re-reading of their texts. It shows Demanian reading as perpetually incapable of distinguishing between the literal and the figural, and fascinated by the indeterminacy that turns texts into forever “unreadable” enigmas.
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The paper proposes a new analysis and interpretation of Hecuba’s dream in Euripides’ tragedy Hecabe (Euripid, Hecabe, 68-97), produced in 425 BC. The play begins with an introduction from the ghost of dead Polydorus -- Priam and Hecabe's youngest son who was sent away with treasures to stay with a family friend, Polymestor, in Thrace for safekeeping. The motiv of the dream is an integral part of the Polydorus monologue in the prologos (1-58); it is embedded in a specific man-ner throughout the entire (whole) tragic developments. The analysis proposes a new interpretation of Hecabe’s dream vision in a purely Dionysian context. It finds exact matches in vase painting plots and allows identification of the vision images with specific Dionysian characters and Dionysian ritual situations.
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Following the essay of Konstantin Kristoforidhi, in the year 1863 due to informative purposes the British Bible Society delegated Alexander Thompson (the British Bible Society representative in the Ottoman Empire 1860-1896) to visit Albanian lands. Thompson was a polyglot and a linguist, who in particular studied the dialects of Albanian language. While visiting Bosnia province, amongst others he met the governor of a city to whom he presented the publications of British Bible Society.
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The author comments the Bulgarian dream- books from 19th century as a possible optic for researching of the Balkan values and common cultural models. A special attention is paid to the dreams of father Neophyte Rilsky documented in his diary.
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