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Linguistics

SelectedWorks

2014

Articles 1 - 15 of 15

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Aligning Goals, Objectives, And Assessments: A Multiliteracies Perspective, Kate Paesani, Heather Willis Allen Nov 2014

Aligning Goals, Objectives, And Assessments: A Multiliteracies Perspective, Kate Paesani, Heather Willis Allen

Kate Paesani

In this session, we show how goals, objectives, and assessments in introductory foreign language (FL) programs can be articulated to reflect principles of the multiliteracies framework. Using the backward design model, we consider how to create instructional goals that reflect linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural dimensions of literacy and how to align objectives with principles of interpretation, collaboration, problem solving, and reflection. We further argue that to effectively measure objectives, assessments should view language and literacy broadly, be multidimensional, and link clearly to teaching and learning. This literacy-based approach thus represents a shift away from the emphasis on acquisition of language …

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Sequencing The Presentation Of Grammar Items To Attract Student Interest, Arshad Abd Samad Oct 2014

Sequencing The Presentation Of Grammar Items To Attract Student Interest, Arshad Abd Samad

Arshad Abd Samad

The teaching of grammar is a challenging task as teachers need to present technical information about the language in such a way that would interest and attract the attention of students. In addition to the lesson itself, the presentation sequence of grammatical items as in the grammar syllabus can also influence how well students respond. Teachers often decide to present and focus on grammatical items to beginner, intermediate and advanced level students based on criteria such as level of difficulty and order of acquisition. Biber (1998), however, proposed that grammar should be presented according to narrative, informational and interactive text …

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Translation Of Legal Texts Between Arabic And English: The Case Study Of Marriage Contracts, Mohammed H. Al Aqad Jul 2014

Translation Of Legal Texts Between Arabic And English: The Case Study Of Marriage Contracts, Mohammed H. Al Aqad

Mohammed H. M. Al Aqad

Over decades, there used to be a number of studies on Legal translation since it was one of the most challenging issues for translators and it still a critical and authoritative translation produced by legal bodies. Actually, translating legal texts might raise some problems in translation pertaining to the differences between the Source and Target Texts. Thus, it can result in a certain amount of ambiguity with respect to the legal texts, as it belongs to people‟s beliefs and cultures. This study investigates the quality of the translated message from Arabic into English. Hence, the focus is on the changes …

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Deployment Of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor In English Academic Discourse, Yang Lian, Bahram Kazemian Mr. May 2014

Deployment Of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor In English Academic Discourse, Yang Lian, Bahram Kazemian Mr.

Bahram Kazemian

In the past three decades, the scholars both abroad and in China have done a lot of studies on grammatical metaphor from different perspectives. However, the deployment of grammatical metaphor in English academic discourse did not catch so much of scholars' attention. Besides, most of the studies on grammatical metaphor have been done in qualitative analysis, which leads to inadequate research in quantitative analysis. Therefore, the present study aims to fill the research gap of empirically grounded studies on grammatical metaphor in English academic discourse by making an exploration on its actual realization and distribution. The present study is based …

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Nominalizations In Scientific And Political Genres: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective, Bahram Kazemian, Somayyeh Hashemi Mar 2014

Nominalizations In Scientific And Political Genres: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective, Bahram Kazemian, Somayyeh Hashemi

Bahram Kazemian

Language, science and politics go together and learning these genres is to learn a language created for codifying, extending and conveying scientific and political knowledge. Grammatical metaphor is divided into two broad areas: ideational and interpersonal. This article focuses on the first type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. the ideational one, which includes process types and nominalization. The principal objective of the current work is to analyze a corpus comprising 10 scientific and 10 political texts. The Ideational Grammatical Metaphor framework was used to carry out an analysis on these texts to pinpoint their similarities and dissimilarities. The analysis indicates that …

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Alternative Translation Approach – Part I: "Labor Division", Ludvig Glavati Mar 2014

Alternative Translation Approach – Part I: "Labor Division", Ludvig Glavati

Ludvig Glavati

No abstract provided.

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English As A Lingua Franca In Higher Education In Malaysia, Azirah Hashim Mar 2014

English As A Lingua Franca In Higher Education In Malaysia, Azirah Hashim

Azirah Hashim

This paper examines the role of English in higher education in Malaysia within the context of Southeast Asia, ASEAN, and the global challenges the country faces. It surveys the uses, functions of and demand for English in Malaysia and the region. The practices and needs of higher education institutions are contextualized within the progression from secondary education upwards and the history of educational policies. This paper discusses English needs of higher education as set inside multilingual contexts where English functions as the default language. The nature of English in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia is highly diverse and variable and …

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Applications Of Language Policy And Planning To Deaf Education, Sarah Compton, Francis M. Hult Jan 2014

Applications Of Language Policy And Planning To Deaf Education, Sarah Compton, Francis M. Hult

Sarah Compton

No abstract provided.

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American Sign Language As A Heritage Language, Sarah Compton Jan 2014

American Sign Language As A Heritage Language, Sarah Compton

Sarah Compton

This chapter considers how American Sign Language (ASL)—a visual-manual language—is a heritage language of deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing people in the United States. Traditionally, heritage language education and maintenance efforts have centered on spoken languages. This chapter aims to broaden the scope to include signed languages. It begins with a historical overview of ASL, explicates for whom ASL is a heritage language, and examines the influence of current policy trends and technological advancements on language shift and language maintenance. Particular attention is drawn to the role of deaf communities in fostering language maintenance despite concerted efforts to restrict …

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Cecl: A New Baseline And A Non-Compositional Approach For The Sick Benchmark., Yves Bestgen Jan 2014

Cecl: A New Baseline And A Non-Compositional Approach For The Sick Benchmark., Yves Bestgen

Yves Bestgen

This paper describes the two procedures for determining the semantic similarities between sentences submitted for the SemEval 2014 Task 1. MeanMaxSim, an unsupervised procedure, is proposed as a new baseline to assess the efficiency gain provided by compositional models. It outperforms a number of other baselines by a wide margin. Compared to the word-overlap baseline, it has the advantage of taking into account the distributional similarity between words that are also involved in compositional models. The second procedure aims at building a predictive model using as predictors MeanMaxSim and (transformed) lexical features describing the differences between each sentence of a …

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Sentence-Initial Adverbials And Text Comprehension., Yves Bestgen, Sophie Piérard Jan 2014

Sentence-Initial Adverbials And Text Comprehension., Yves Bestgen, Sophie Piérard

Yves Bestgen

In the last thirty years, numerous linguists have stressed the discourse functions of adverbials. More specifically, sentence-initial temporal and spatial adverbials are often seen as signals that highlight the beginning of a new discourse unit for which they provide the setting. These expressions are thus supposed to affect the reading processes. This paper reports psycholinguistic experiments in which the impact on comprehension of sentence-initial adverbials has been specifically studied. In the first section, we summarize the two discourse functions these adverbials should play according to linguistic theories: signalling the beginning of a new textual unit (the segmenting function) and setting …

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Extraction Automatique De Collocations : Peut-On Étendre Le Test Exact De Fisher À Des Séquences De Plus De 2 Mots?, Yves Bestgen Jan 2014

Extraction Automatique De Collocations : Peut-On Étendre Le Test Exact De Fisher À Des Séquences De Plus De 2 Mots?, Yves Bestgen

Yves Bestgen

In textual statistics, as in natural language processing and corpus linguistics, the study of sequences of contiguous words that occur together more often than by chance is a major topic of interest. In the case of pairs of words, Fisher's exact test is becoming the reference index to identify them. The objective of this study is to propose a generalization of this index to the analysis of trigrams and longer sequences using a Monte-Carlo procedure. The results of an initial evaluation suggest that this approach could complement other indices, but also that it has a major drawback: a large number …

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Quantifying The Development Of Phraseological Competence In L2 English Writing: An Automated Approach, Yves Bestgen, Sylviane Granger Jan 2014

Quantifying The Development Of Phraseological Competence In L2 English Writing: An Automated Approach, Yves Bestgen, Sylviane Granger

Yves Bestgen

Based on the large body of research that shows phraseology to be pervasive in language, this study aims to assess the role played by phraseological competence in the development of L2 writing proficiency and text quality assessment. We propose to use CollGram, a technique that assigns to each pair of contiguous words (bigrams) in a learner text two association scores (mutual information and t-score) computed on the basis of a large reference corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Applied to the Michigan State University Corpus of second language writing, CollGram shows a longitudinal decrease in the use of collocations …

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Voicing And Tongue-Palate Contact Differences In Japanese Obstruents, Alexei Kochetov Jan 2014

Voicing And Tongue-Palate Contact Differences In Japanese Obstruents, Alexei Kochetov

Alexei Kochetov

The paper presents an electropalatographic investigation of supralaryngeal correlates of voicing in Japanese obstruents. Intervocalic voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives in different vowel contexts were elicited from 5 Japanese speakers wearing custom-made artificial palates with 64 electrodes. The results revealed systematic differences between voiced and voiceless consonants of the same place and manner, yet markedly different for stops and fricatives. While voiced stops showed less linguopalatal contact than voiceless stops, voiced fricatives showed the opposite – more contact and a narrower central groove than the respective voiceless fricatives. Both patterns are consistent with previous findings on voicing in other …

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Aesthetic Functionality And Genericism, Charles E. Colman Jan 2014

Aesthetic Functionality And Genericism, Charles E. Colman

Charles E. Colman

This presentation, the basis for a working article, begins by positing that U.S. trademark law's denial of exclusive rights in "generic" words and phrases is, in essence, a proxy for what might be called "linguistic functionality." In other words, the doctrine of genericism is simply one iteration of trademark law's general principle that no one may claim exclusive rights where recognition of such rights would produce anticompetitive results. Unfortunately, when it comes to non-word marks -- and perhaps most notably, product-design "trade dress" -- courts have neglected to establish a uniform, coherent, and fully theorized test for evaluating "genericism." The …

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