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This study aims to find out the frequently-used word-guessing clues by Chinese EFL learners in reading comprehension and examine the potential factors which affect their vocabulary acquisition performance. 60 Chinese students were required to complete a reading comprehension test and three questionnaires on their attitude and willingness to guess new words in an English article. The results indicate that (1) there is a relationship between Chinese learners’ word-guessing accuracy and their test scores for reading comprehension; (2) strategies Chinese EFL learners most frequently used may not effective as we expected in word acquisition; (3) Chinese learners with higher English proficiency tend to show more desirable performance in vocabulary acquisition. These findings provide pedagogical suggestions to English teachers on their instruction of effective unknown word guessing.
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The present study sought to evaluate the pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Spanish in regard to compliment sequences and the impact that pragmatic lessons would have on these students. To this end, pre and post tests to assess pragmatic recognition in regard to Spanish compliments were designed by the researchers and completed by the participants before and after a series of pragmatic interventions. Control and experimental groups were established in order to evaluate other potential variables involved. Additionally, the same lessons were implemented in two beginner L2 Spanish groups (one control and one experimental) as to determine whether or not the lessons were more suited for this demographic of students. Preliminary data suggest that the heritage groups of students already have high pragmatic competence in regard to compliments and that lessons do not have an impact on this type of learner. On the other hand, the beginner L2 Spanish students greatly benefited from the interventions and experienced statistically significant growth in the experimental group. The effect size was also calculated and found that the interventions had little to no impact on the heritage experimental group and a very large impact on the L2 experimental group. The conclusions of the study suggest that it may not be necessary to teach pragmatic norms to heritage language learners. Design, lessons, pedagogical interventions, and recommendations for future study are included.
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Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has been an attention-grabbing topic to many researchers in information, communication and technologies in language education. This paper investigates teachers’ perspectives towards CALL and teaching. teachers’ perspective towards CALL is analyzed by 4 sections in our research questionnaire which includes teachers’ general attitudes towards CALL, teachers’ conception to the content of CALL, teachers’ viewpoint towards the application of CALL and finally teachers’ perspective towards the use of CALL program in language education. The questionnaire is designed to elicit teachers’ perspective towards CALL. Participants of this study include 47 teachers from schools (primary, middle, high) and university English instructors. Results revel that teachers have positive attitudes towards the content, application and use of computers in language education. In terms of the content and application of CALL, it is also found that CALL program is beneficial to improve studetns’ listening, speaking skills and vocabulary knowledge rather than improving their reading and writing skills. Taking the content, application and use of computers into consideration, gender shows no difference in attitude towards the CALL in language education. Implication and further research suggestions are provided.
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The aim of this study is to understand English preparatory school students’ perceptions and preferences for self-regulated language learning with the aid of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The study was conducted with 85 prep-school language learners at Gaziantep University who got accepted to different majors. A questionnaire consisted of two parts including 5 Likert Scale questions measuring the participants’ self-efficacy for self-regulating via ICT, language backgrounds and demographic information of the participants was sent to the participants through an email. The study was based on quantitative data collection and analysis. In the process of data analysis, not only descriptive analysis but also Mann-Whitney U-test and chi-square test were calculated to understand the relations between self-regulated learning strategies with ICT and demographic variables. The main finding in this study was that there are no significant differences between female and male participants and low and upper level participants as well in terms of their ICT use for self-language learning experience. According to the results, the participants mostly preferred to practice their listening and vocabulary skills through ICT tools. Additionally, the results also show that students need help to use ICT in their self-learning outside the classroom. More researches should be done to direct teachers how to facilitate their students’ language learning process. For this reason, the other crucial point is that both teachers and students should be guided, trained and motivated to apply ICT tools in their language education process and students should be encouraged to manage their learning at their self-pace.
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Listening to songs is one of the most casual activities we do, and in recent years there has been a push to incorporate this activity into the L2 classroom as a pedagogical tool. While other studies have focused on songs and their use in the L2 classroom, this corpus-based study examined the potential for L2 learners to incidentally learn vocabulary from casually listening to songs outside the classroom. Results showed great potential for incidental learning because of the high coverage of the high-frequency word families, the repeated encounter with both function and content words as well as the repetitive nature of songs themselves, and the rich informative context in song lyrics. However, songs might not offer great potential for incidental learning of low-frequency words. Nevertheless, teachers should encourage their students to listen to songs outside the classroom.
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Within foreign language learning (FLL), it is very important to improve the students’ speaking skill. Students in beginner levels particularly have a slow tendency to acquire the speaking skill. Various factors explain this inclination. One, in particular, is because of the apprension of speaking and feeling too timid to communicate in foreign language. Speaking is certain in FLL. Therefore, the students need to continue their confidence in a non-threatening environment. The introduction of Adobe Connect Live Learning Program (LLP) between the students in Live Learning conversation classes and the instructor at a language school called, EFINST International House Istanbul has offered good opportunities to these facts. As much as the distance is regarded, LLP usage can acceptedly be compared with a face-to-face conversation. The results reveal that LLP enables the students time to be able to talk and practise a foreign language sooner than anticipated. Furthermore LLP becomes a motivation source for the students providing them provides rich information with the features of online learning. Additionally, the introduction of this online conversation program in FLL opens LL authentic resources and materials’ doors. It is also found that the introduction of LLP had valuable effects both as an online classroom which provides good opportunities for the students, and as a great teaching tool used in conversation classes.
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This paper studies the pragmatic competence of U.S. heritage learners of Spanish in an attempt to determine (a) the degree of pragmatic transfer from English to Spanish experienced by heritage learners when producing different types of requests in Spanish; and (b) how to best teach pragmatics to students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). Additionally, the study compared the differences and similarities between the development of the pragmatic competence in SHL students and in students of Spanish as a second language (L2). Oral and written discourse completion tasks were used to assess requests in Spanish HL/L2 pragmatics. The results indicate that the pragmatic interventions only helped the Spanish L2 group, and that the Spanish HL group was already aware of the pragmatic principles that regulate requests in Spanish. Furthermore, no cases of negative pragmatic transfer were found in the Spanish HL data, so the study concluded that there is no need to teach heritage students pragmatic norms.
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Over the last few decades, teaching English has become a phenomenon in Saudi Arabia, especially to young learners. English is taught as a main subject in kindergarten and elementary schools. Like any other children, Saudis accept new foreign languages easily, but they get bored very quickly if the teacher teaches them using the old conventional methods and techniques. The aim of this paper is to highlight that games are effective tools when devised to explain vocabularies and they make it easier to remember their meanings. This paper deals with a literature review of teaching English vocabulary to young learners using games. Then it discusses the importance of using games in teaching vocabulary and in what way using them is helpful. After that it investigates the practical implications of using games to teach vocabulary that includes the implementation of vocabulary games and some examples of games that could be used to teach vocabulary to children. And finally it examines challenges teachers face when teaching vocabulary using games to young learners.
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English songs are very popular with EFL learners and thanks to the natural repetitions of vocabulary they provide through choruses, repeated listening as well as through a special type of ‘language din’ in the head, they offer great opportunities for vocabulary learning. While most authentic texts have been shown previously to be too loaded with unfamiliar vocabulary for lower level learners, there are suggestions in the literature that songs have a light vocabulary load consisting mainly of high frequency vocabulary. The present study investigates these suggestions in a corpus of 177 English song lyrics that appeared in fourteen most recent albums by four artists. The data were analysed through vocabulary frequency profiling. The results indicated that around 95% of words in the songs were made up of the most frequent 1,000 words of English, suggesting that the vocabulary load of English songs is lighter than other authentic spoken genres. There were, however, differences among different artists and among different albums by the same artist. The vocabulary load of chorus sections was lighter than the rest of the songs. Songs are recommended as suitable for lower level EFL learners.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine emotional argumentation in the context of discursive strategies of persuasion, exploiting the rhetorical parameters of movere and delectare that govern the persuasive enterprise rooted in the deliberative dimension of film reviews. Based on one hundred reviews of three French popular comedies the author proposes to identify linguistic units related to the principle of affective and conative assignment of intensifying attribution and identification. Thus it is possible to lock the addressee in the discursive universe created by the addresser, which in many respects resembles the techniques used in the advertising argumentation.
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This article aims to identify and analyze the metaphors in the business discourse because the metaphorical model is a productive means of representing the most relevant development of economic concepts. The study of metaphors is a particularly interesting subject and our attention will be focused on the metaphorical expressions of the three levels of the business discourse: the scientific business discourse, professional and lay business discourse. Metaphorical conceptualization is a fundamental process of thinking, widely implemented in scientific modeling, including the business discourse. Metaphor allows two disconnected universes to find points of convergence in order to maximize communication within the business discourse.
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The paper aims to identify and group the usual spatial metaphors, according to semantic criteria, used by French and Romanian speakers to describe navigation on the World Wide Web. The conceptual framework on which our research is based is provided primarily by the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1985) on the metaphors we live by that "help us structure our way of perceiving, thinking and doing", as well as those of Maglio and Matlock (1998), Jamet (2006), i.e. The corpus of our analysis will focus on computer-related texts (academic courses, IT print magazines) and scientific popularization (brochures, articles for the lay population) concerning the use of the Internet.
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Drawing on Borges’s idea, according to which man compensates the limits of reason in an effort to understand the most intimate mechanisms of existence through imagination, which creates myths and symbols, this paper aims at analyzing the metaphor which Sylvie Germain builds in her poetic novel Le Livre des Nuits. Metaphor is the ingredient of an alchemical writing supposed to catch the movement of ideas and feelings facing an aggressive and compelling reality. Metaphor is with Sylvie Germain a source of mythical innovation in the sense that it recalibrates the ancient myths in modern times' terms. If we were to define Germain’s metaphor by its sensory, pathos, esthetic and axiological traits, then we would turn to two of her works which help us see through it the “colours of the invisible” and hear the “echoes of silence” of her writing.
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The article deals with the primary factors of the Southern Ukraine mentality formation. Mentality is a national type of world attitude based on linguistic images and symbols (often subconscious) that determine stereotypes of behavior, psychological reactions, the evaluation of certain events or individuals, and the attitude towards the surrounding reality. One of the most significant factors influencing the mentality formation of the Sou-thern Ukraine population is the linguistic factor. The distinction of languages me-ans, first of all, the difference between worldviews. National mentality fulfills the functions of historical memory and allows the people preserving identity and ethnic self-consciousness. The rural population that kept the ancient agricultural traditions, the outlook of ancestors-rebels and defenders of the Fatherland had chances to rebuild the independent Ukrainian state based on its social ideal (land, freedom, individual economy, and cultural traditions). For that case, the peasantry of the South of Ukraine, which has accumulated in itself the most characteristic features of the ancient Ukrainian (life in the steppe, love for religion, and rejection of any power except its own), is indicative. / V tekstu se piše o osnovnyh faktorah formovanja južnoukrajinskogo mentaliteta. Jedin iz najvažnějših faktorov jest faktor jezyka. Narodna mentalnost imaje funkciju historičnoj paměti i davaje narodu jegovy identitet i etničnu svědomost. ukrajinsku državu formovalo sělsko nasěljenje i jegova starodavna zemjeděljska kultura.
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This is the second part of a paper dealing with the concept of English as a “world” or “global language”. Here, results from two research projects conducted in Denmark are presented. They investigated the role of languages in academia and in businesses with a global perspective. Data are taken from Denmark and in part Japan. Two different narratives of English as a world language emerge.
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The review of: Enkeleida Kapia, Studime në gjuhësi teorike dhe gjuhësi të zbatuar, QSA, IGJL, Tiranë, 2015, 253 f.
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Colours are crucial to what we may call “the visualization of identity.” There are numerous scientific disciplines that address the issue of colours. Chromatics as a discipline (focusing on the role of colours in communication) is of recent origin. It is the social context that makes colour important, gives it a social definition and meaning, creates codes and values. Messages that we receive contain different codes, which can be dominant (we accept them by default), subject to negotiation (we accept them partially) and oppositional (we reject them). If we change colours in a message (a flag, car, or sports jersey), our intention is to change the message as well. Misunderstanding arises when the two sides in communication understand a single sign or message differently (the so-called “noise in communication” according to Schram). Conflicts are mostly caused by differences in the interpretation of facts.
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This study comparatively analyses swearing material in the Slovenian and Estonian languages in order to show the lexical and structural similarities/differences between swearing and incantations present in the material and to argue that swearing is not only a way to give voice to taboos, but is similar to incantations. The basic premise underlying the analysis is the existence of the “go to X” formula found both in the material and in the two genres analysed. Place X is the place of origin, non-existence or chaos to which the unwanted is sent. There are more than 50 different variants of the formula “go to X” that we can detect in both Estonian and Slovenian languages; in addition, we consider the phrases which carry the idea to fend off someone or send them somewhere, but they are in a different formulation. The adverbial slot in the phrase ‘go to X’ may be filled by a variety of expressions, all of which have had different connotations throughout time, although they are connected with chaos, in which nothing living exists, or the place of origin to send the evil back to from where it came (spells are also expelled by counting back, but it does not reveal in swearwords). In swearing we can specify three major groups of mentioned places to which one expels another person: 1) places linked with religion and the supernatural; 2) sexual and reproductive organs as a place of extinction; 3) places signified by non-taboo expressions that connote taboo words. The analysis of Slovenian and Estonian swearing expressions with the formula “go to X” showed not only that this material has preserved some pagan gods and concepts of sacred places (Svarun, Perun, concept of forest, swamp mountains, etc.), which are not alive in religious contexts anymore, but also the concepts of places in which a human does not live, and places of chaos and emptiness, which can also be linked with incantations. These swearing formulas are similar to incantations, i.e., words and rituals to expel the evil, including curses. Incantations send the curse into emptiness or back to its origin. Similarly, swearwords with the formula “go to X” send another person into his or her origin (inherent in the physical conception), or into chaos, which is the conceptually fitting hell or devil’s place. At the same time, it reveals a different concept of human origin and existence: when religion and god were on a pedestal and higher forces gave life to the human being, the worst violation was mentioning god and devil in swearing. When someone was sent to hell, he or she vanished into chaos and destruction. By accepting that a human being originates in a human body as a result of sexual intercourse, and by accepting the world of intimacy as an important part of human existence, swearing gained lexis from the field of reproductive and intimate organs and sexual intercourse. Sending the person back into mother’s uterus or even further, into the penis (which would be pre-conception period, pre-existence), can show us the sender’s aim to negate the existence of that person. In both cases utterances with the formula “go to X” deal with the person’s origin, birth, and existence, trying to negate him or her or to fend them off, as if the “persecuted person” were the evil, a curse which has been brought upon someone and needs to be expelled; we exorcise the person, trying to negate him or her. With his or her death, all the headaches and illnesses originating from them would vanish; our life would become nicer and calmer. With these swearwords a person can be expelled either to the place where no (religious/Christian) soul exists, like hell, or into their point of origin, with the idea that if they had not been born, if they returned to cunt or dick, wherever they came from, life would gain colours again (Nežmah 1997: 131). Therefore, these places – either places of non-existence or places of origin – have the function of places of dissolution. Both concepts of these places send one into nothingness, non-existence, where nothing living exists. What becomes obvious is the fact that in both concepts – religious or physical – places of dissolution are directly connected with the concept of our existence and socialisation. Swearwords with the formula “go to X” try to negate our existence either way.
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This paper examines postproverbial constructions involving sex-related Yoruba proverbs and proverbial expressions, and their effects on the original meaning of these proverbs. Fifteen randomly selected sex-related proverbs and proverbial expressions as well as their postproverbial constructions were subjected to critical analysis. The study revealed that while sex-related Yoruba proverbs are essentially meant for communicating frank, stark and direct situations, postproverbial constructions of the proverbs have distorted the use of sex-related proverbs, and especially proverbial expression in communication, because of the sexual images that were made more visible in the sex-related postproverbials. The study observes that, other than for visual symbolism, the mentioning of sex organs in sex-related proverbs has no implications on original meaning of proverbs but this is not the case with postproverbials as the sex image and sexual performance becomes the main focus. The paper, therefore, urges Yoruba language speakers to be conscious of the influence of these postproverbials on the use of the sex-related Yoruba proverbs and their distorted meanings which are quite different from the original, intended philosophical, meanings.
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