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The Internationalisation of Higher Education in Europe, published in Bulgarian by the New Bulgarian University Press in 2013, is a timely book. With Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union in 2007 and the reform of higher education in the pre-accession period (2000-2007), mobility and internationalisation of higher education became a priority for Bulgarian universities.
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A Plea for Rethinking Institutional Language Policy Documents. The present study aims to raise awareness on and to provide a synopsis of the role, function and relevance of language policy documents in HE, by bringing together some of the more recent conclusions of strategic papers or guidelines issued by representative bodies responsible for the standardization of language teaching and testing. The current definitions of and views on language policies invite reflections on the margins of the internationalisation of HE, the digitalisation of education and its tools, the role of the language instructors in the 21st century and, last but not least, the existence of institutional strategic documents. A local case (the language policy at Babeș-Bolyai University) is discussed against the backdrop of international frameworks for language instruction and in comparison with similar (national) language policies.
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Developing Language and Intercultural Skills through an IaH Programme at University. Following up on a project on the impact of study abroad on the language and intercultural skills of university students, this paper focuses on how such skills can be developed through a specific “Internationalisation at Home” (IaH) programme (Beelen & Jones 2015) that combines domestic students’ mentoring of international students (“study buddies”) with weekly language exchanges and an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course focusing on internationalisation and interculturality (Arnó et al. 2013). Based on previous findings that point to certain language and intercultural development as a result of a stay abroad (Cots et al., 2016; Llanes et al. 2016), we aim to find out if there are any changes among domestic students as a result of their participation in the programme. Language proficiency was measured in terms of the general score on a placement test as well as of oral skills measures. On the other hand, intercultural development was measured through closed questions about attitudes, knowledge, and behaviour—components of intercultural competence (Byram 1997)—together with open questions eliciting students’ perceptions of their participation in the programme. All in all, the results of this study can shed light on the provision of intercultural and international skills through EAP courses, based on expanded notions of EAP and ESP (English for Specific Purposes), which go beyond language to cover a wider range of skills.
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From CLILiG to Digital Tools: Developing Reading Strategies and Collaborative Skills for University Students. The article sets out to investigate how language awareness strategies found in the didactics of CLILiG (Content and Language Integrated Learning in German) can support, develop and train reading strategies and collaborative skills for university students. As a didactic concept, CLILiG is, on the one hand, the direct result of language policies. On the other hand, it is a natural response to the multilingual learner of today. The first part of the article focuses on CLILiG, its variants, main features (micro- and macro-scaffolding) and how digital tools for learning can be integrated in class, in order to make use of both language and specific content. The second part discusses two didactic examples designed for students studying in German Institutional Communication in the European Union at the Faculty of European Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The article offers a look into digital tools like Coggle and Padlet and how they can be used in class to train reading strategies and collaborative skills with university students. Students’ interaction with challenging texts in a foreign language and digital tools supporting a learning outcome can improve reading skills and allow students to find creative ways of understanding specialized content, especially because of the features digital apps like Coggle and Padlet have to offer.
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Webinar or Virtual Class in Language Learning. Currently, with the development of the new technologies that have revolutionized the world, language learning has also changed. Webinars or virtual classes or online seminars are increasingly present and appreciated for reduced cost and better time management. But are they as efficient as the traditional classroom? Webinars are an excellent solution for distance learning education and for foreign language learning. The webinar is an interactive seminar, conducted via the Internet, in real time. Not being required to attend the traditional classroom, students are able to follow the course from the comfort of home and, especially, are given the possibility of consulting later the teacher’s explanations, which offers more flexibility to the learning process, while the objectives pursued are the same as in the traditional classroom. The interaction remains similar to that of a face-to-face meeting and the learner is given immediate feedback, which helps him/her to discern strong and weak points, which is a very good modality of improving language skills. In the article entitled "Webinar or Virtual Class in Language Learning", we will present how to set up the webinar, the conditions of use, the succession of the training, the benefits and risks involved and examples and recommendations of good practice, so that teachers could make an informed choice when organizing a language class, whether traditional or virtual.
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A Review of Screen Capture Technology Feedback Research. Screen capture technology (SCT) is one of the most widely used technologies in teaching and learning. SCT allows the user to record the screen of their computer as if a video camera was pointed at it. Anything the user does on the screen is recorded as a video and their voice is also recorded. It is principally used to create learning assets. For example, a teacher can record themselves talking over a PowerPoint presentation or a graph and then share the resulting video with students. However, the same technology can be used to provide feedback on student’s written work. It is possible, for example, for a teacher to open a student’s written work onto the screen of their computer, mark the errors and problems with the work, turn on the SCT and record themselves working through the student’s work and providing feedback. The resulting video can then be sent to the student. The students can play back the video and see their teacher correcting their paper and they can also hear their teacher’s commentary. This idea has been quite extensively researched and has been enthusiastically received by both students and teachers. This paper attempts to summarise some of the findings from the growing body of research, much of which have been connected to the topic of English Language Learning. It also suggests possible directions for future research.
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Borders or Bridges? The Current Challenges of Revisiting the Concepts of National Identity and Transnational Culture. The current paper aims to revisit the concept of national identity in relation to that of border and bordering as well as with the notions of otherness and othering. The current paper thus discusses the idea of borders and isolation as opposed to that of intercultural communication and cultural dialogue. Culture is discussed as an essential environment for identity development and in the same time as a transnational phenomenon. Another dimension of the debate proposed by the paper is related to the challenges of teaching the topics of national identity, diversity and bordering within the current educational environment, characterised by the increased internationalisation of higher education. This also takes into account the author’s experience of teaching these topics to international groups of students and is supported by a survey conducted with Political Science students on the issue of the perception of otherness and internationalisation.
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Filling the Gap between Target Needs and Student Wants in English for Academic Environmental Purposes. The present paper sets out to bring forward some of the current issues in nowadays ESP teaching, such as, in what ways can ESP teachers produce and design a balanced approach to their syllabi in terms of content needed by their ESP students, but not necessarily wanted or liked by those. To be more precise, we are going to use a deductive method to find out what freshmen students from the faculties of Biology and Environmental Science and Engineering would want and like in their EAEP course and see if it matches or not with the teacher’s intended EAEP curriculum.
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The idea of progression in designing the curriculum of Romanian as a foreign language (RFL). Although it constitutes a constant reality in teaching foreign languages and, even more, in the process of designing the curriculum, the idea of progression has been, in turn, glorified, marginalised or even crucified by didacticians, especially during the heyday of the communicative methods and the action-perspective on teaching. Lately, the theoretical debates from the outside medium have been trying to rehabilitate it, starting from the idea that a natural language is, practically, infinite and that, in the didactic context, it is required to find an “end” in order to establish accurately the fundamental reference points for a teaching-learning-evaluating path that is as efficient as possible. In the case of the RFL, grammatical progression has remained a central point of interest for specialists for over three decades. However, the echoes of communicative methods, though perceptively diminished in intensity in the Western world, have lately determined them to increasingly favour communicativeness and authenticity, at least at the declarative level, considering that in this way they will guarantee the “modernity” of the discourse. Yet, the resurrection of enthusiasm for the two concepts has sometimes led to exaggerated attitudes that disapproved of the proposals of progressive description and organisation of the teaching contents, because of too rigid and inadequate an understanding of the notion of progression. In our study, we intend to sensitise Romanian specialists to the need of looking at the idea of progression with more flexibility, without which designing a didactic process that is coherently articulated is inconceivable, especially in the first stages of RFL acquisition and, especially, when one does not resort to any other contact language while teaching it.
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Swedish as an optional course. Different techniques to evaluate grammar, orally and in writing. The general purpose of this article is to analyze different aspects related to the evaluation of Swedish language skills in the case of students enrolled in an optional course, intermediate level. In order to understand the students' perspective on grammatical exercises, we designed and provided them with a feedback questionnaire regarding both written and oral evaluation.
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Contemplating Japanese Language – Idiomatic Expressions as a Cultural Experience of Linguistic Creativity. Taking into account the semiotic nature of the language seen as a datum, and approaching linguistic creation as a fact determined by the needs of verbal communication, the present study analyzes Japanese idiomatic expressions which enable the circulation of cultural meanings. An idiomatic expression resembles the folk saying, as they both experience and highlight the conative function of language, and is a complex syntactic-semantic unit, often replaceable by one single word, which can be interpreted as a semiotic sign within a significant system of an ethnic group’s mentality. The Japanese idiomatic structure is a fixed form that belongs to the lexicalized repertory of language, resulting from syntactic linguistic phenomena which capitalize upon the possibilities of the system. The purpose of this process is to achieve expressivity, which works not just through emotional response or perceptual information, but also as encyclopedic knowledge. Both these linguistic and extralinguistic contexts call for a hermeneutic approach, in inter- and multidisciplinary terms.
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The article aims at analysing Aristophanes’ Clouds through certain miraculous elements among the poetic devices for evoking the audience’s laughter. The miraculous is present at different levels of the comic text, in explicit or in more implicit form. In Clouds the type of education in sophistry represented here by “Socrates” could be defined first of all as miraculous. Aristophanes uses mainly verbal mechanisms to make the spectators laugh. The speeches throughout the plot are strange, absurd and funny. Typical comic turns of the situation and of the opinions of the characters are observed, too. The end of the play is unexpected and to a degree “tragic.” The extant text of Clouds is a revision of an earlier unsuccessful play. This failure is discussed in the parabasis: although through irony and boasts, the self-referential view of the poet on writing a good comedy becomes clear.
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If we think of depictions of monstrosity in ancient literature, the comedy would not be the first genre to come to our mind. This does not mean that the comedy does not depict mythological monstrous creatures, usually hybrid monsters. However, unlike the other genres and dramatic uses of such mythological figures the comedy does not aim to provoke fear by describing them – it usually presents monstrosity in a grotesque way. The mythological monsters in Aristophanes are not frightful, their monstrous nature is tamed and ‘normalized’ to the level of everyday experience. The current analysis focuses on the monstrous (in terms of usual mythological strategies of depiction) characteristics of king Tereus and his companions in the comedy Birds. It analyses the dwelling of Tereus, his depiction and the subtle references to ancient Thracian religious concepts related to his biographical survival after metamorphosis.
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First section of this paper assesses the importance of tadmin, “implication of meaning,” in medieval Arabic literature, and also reflects on its significance for the language today. What is particularly interesting about the term is that once its usage became fully established it was employed not only by some of the grammarians but also a number of scholars of rhetoric and legal theory. A further important aspect of tadmin addressed by this essay is its relationship to other syntactic and rhetorical devices. In the second section, the author handled issue of tadmīn how it transformed from a prosodic defect to a poetic device in an earlier article. But when he looked at this subject with only perspective, he felt the need to write a new article dealing with reasonable causes of this development and detailed kinds of tadmīn. In this article, he examined tadmīn in detail by separating into three as “grammatical tadmīn”, “rhetorical tadmīn” and “hermeneutic tadmīn”.
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In “Homo viator” Gabriel Marcel says: “We cannot help seeing that there is the closest of connections between the soul and hope. I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. (…) It is precisely the soul that is the traveler; it is of the soul and of the soul alone that we can say with supreme truth that „being” necessarily means „being on the way” (en route)”1. And thus man on the way is precisely a man of hope, whether traveling in space, time, imagination, oneself, etc.Since the time of Modernism the so-called existential traveler turned into a preferred character in the vast literary field. He is so irresistibly attractive probably because the existential traveler is homo viator par excellence, most vividly expressing the idea of the modern mobility in a broader sense – as freedom and search through the world, but also into oneself – and expressing hope eventually. Regardless of how different existential travelers are within and among themselves, no matter how various they sound like and how we are accustomed to perceiving them, after all, they represent some expression of hope – an escape of the terrifying and insurmountable issues that weigh above the human situation. Furthermore, since hope is a knowing which outstrips the unknown2, in a way, hope represents an excess. Hence, by analogy, hope is deviation, hope is strange, hope is even bizarre. Man on the way, or the travelling man, is often a strange man, or at least he is a stranger. And then the strangest of the strange is perhaps the one who gives the most hope in his own way. It happened so that Modernism transformed the literary narrative into an institution of the modern society and artistic shape of time. The author, as a creator, turned into original paradigm of human being, respectively the existential traveler – into original paradigm of travelling man; into homo viator par excellence. He articulated his own cultural and civilizational code through writing. Modernist narrative was his transcendent achievement. And its strangest of the strange, its most bizarre manifestations, which we here refer as bizarrism, were often its highest efforts. Thus the most bizarre travels of the existential traveler turned into ultimate travels – travels par excellence – the furthest trips of hope.
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This article aims to interpret in a comparative aspect five Dalchev’s poetry, in which the leading image is the rain. The aim is to clarify the presence of “rainyness” as a poetic figure that defines the parameters of being as meaning, and which characterizes Atanas-Dalche‘s artistic reasoning and self-reliance. Interesting is the ambiguous sign that embodies the image of “rain” – death and birth, light and darkness, anxiety and consolation, poetically expressed with philosophical depth and awareness. It turns out that the rain is a “black mirror” in which the self-assimilation and self-acceptance of the human in the illusory search of the truth for the Other as availability and absence is carried out.
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After the National Socialists came to power in March 1938 a group of 15 and 16 year-old classmates of Jewish heritage met for the last time and promised to keep in contact with one another as a group. The boys’ original promise resulted in a group correspondence, or “round letter” as they called it, which stretched over more than a decade and crisscrossed three continents. Drawing on the essay „What is Agency“ by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, Vansant examines the correspondence as an expression of shared agency. It provided the youth with a means to act at a time when their options were severely restricted and it allowed them to resist the efforts of the new regime to destroy their community. Indeed, the establishment, the survival, and the archiving of the group correspondence or “round robin” are all expressions of the boys’ agency. In this essay, the letters are a window into the drama of the period and they serve as witness to the boys’ inventiveness as well as their familiarity with a lost letter-writing culture. The correspondence, which consists of 106 round letters for a total of 675 individual letters, has been housed in the Archive of the History of Austrian Sociology in Graz, Austria since 1994.
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The bibliography is selective and composed of two sections (scientific and literary publications). In section I (research papers) it was strived for completeness; thus all original research works have been shown there: monographs, articles, chapters. To other types (reviews, chronicles, translations) a selection has been used; only publications of lasting value were included. In section II (literary works and critical literary works), due to the author’s extensive work, strict rules of selection were applied. Only compacted publications (monographs, poetry and prose volumes as well as their editorials) and wider articles and chapters have been shown, and the reviews and translations were given quantitatively. A total of 715 items were compiled, including 305 scientific and 410 literary works. In the group of scientific publications, 189 papers were devoted to media studies and 116 to philosophy. In the group of literary works there are 47 books (11 of them are original poetry volumes), 23 articles and over 340 reviews. The bibliography is preceded by a short methodological sketch, a discussion of the main works and the statistics of the author’s work.
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