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To This study aims to reveal the translation strategy used by Tiffany Tsao in rendering of CSIs in the novel “Paper Boats” by Dewi Lestari based on Baker's theory. This study is descriptive qualitative research. The data consist of lingual units, in the form of words or phrases, which contain culture-specific items. The source of data is taken from “Paper Boats” novel by Dewi Lestari that translated by Tiffany Tsao. The data were collected through observation and by taking notes and analyzed using the equivalent and referential methods. The findings show that there are six translation strategies used by Tiffani Tsao in rendering CSIs in Dewi Lestari's paper boats novel. Superordinate (translation by a more general word) becomes the most dominant translation strategies in rendering CSIs in this novel followed by translation using a loan word or loan word plus explanation, translation by cultural substitution, translation by paraphrase using related words, translation by paraphrase using unrelated words and translation by omission.

Advances in writing technologies have fostered the gradual move from Paper-Based (PB) to Computer-Based (CB) writing assessment in foreign language (FL) education. The trend was further boosted by the outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to drastic changes in teaching and assessment practices. In higher education (HE) contexts, writing assessment in English as a foreign language (EFL) is more and more often managed by means of online learning platforms, where students create and submit written assignments on the computer. This paper examines a sample of 100 EFL exam essays completed by 100 Italian university students. Half of the essays were computer-typed on Moodle from home during the Covid-19 lockdown, whereas the other half were handwritten on paper during a face-to-face exam session after the Covid-19 emergency. The study presented herein compares the amount and types of formal errors in the CB and PB written assignments respectively. The results of the comparison may be useful to suggest hypotheses on the impact that both writing modality and environment can have on the quality of EFL writing in assessment contexts.

This article analyses Italian illustrated editions of Little Women published between 1908 and 1945. After an overview of the publishing history of the novel in Italy, the paper will examine Italian illustrations as hermeneutic tools in order to examine their ideological function in the representation of gender. The belated reception of Alcott’s novel in Italy, caused by its representation of a nonconformist educational model for girls, is mirrored in the tension between the nationalistic drive and the influence of foreign models that can be pinpointed in the illustrated editions. By analyzing adaptations of American illustrations, original Italian creations, and omissions of iconic illustrations, this paper will unveil how much the visual element is embedded in the Italian historical and cultural context, as the choice (or omission) of particular images impacted the interpretation of the book. By examining the Italian editions of Little Women published in this time frame, we will also be able to retrace the links with the American illustrated history of the book and bear testimony to the powerful impact of the 1934 film version on printed editions.

The present paper is an introduction to and analysis of the article “Literary criticism must be scientific”, presented here for the first time in English translation. The original was published by Lotman in 1967 in the journal Voprosy Literatury. The article by Lotman is a part of a wider debate, started in 1963, that saw structuralists and their opponents dispute the validity and heuristic value of structuralist methodology in literary criticism. The aim of the introduction is to explore Lotman’s engagements with his intellectual context as they emerge in his 1967 article. The first part of the paper discusses the wider context of the debate, and explores the positions of the opponents of structuralism and the ways in which Lotman relates to them. The second part of the paper analyses how Lotman and his structuralist colleagues related to the official Soviet ideology, the diamat. In both cases, it will be seen how Lotman engaged certain aspects of his opponents’ ideas, as well as the official ideology, in order to further his goal of reconciling structuralism and historicism.

In the mid 1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American critic Logan Pearsall Smith on “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers”. Harper’s Bazaar, a commercial magazine to which Woolf contributed four short stories between 1930 and 1939, was a feminine periodical that exploited modernism’s distinction and high cultural capital to captivate a sophisticated, but essentially middle-class, readership by selling the illusion of upward cultural mobility. Although Woolf referred to her high-quality contributions to Harper’s Bazaar as “pot boiling stories for America” written “to make money”, it seems clear that her own engagement with a middlebrow publishing venue did not in the least affect her reputation as a highbrow intellectual and was indeed typical of the multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between the magazine and high modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing the boundaries between intellectual and popular culture. The publication of modernist content within the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar was advantageous to both modernists seeking to maintain their celebrity status and the periodical itself, which attempted to cultivate and sustain a refined audience. Much in line with her work of the 1930s, Woolf’s short stories engaged with social and ethical issues such as the righteousness of penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”), violence and decay (“The Shooting Party”), capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the Jeweler”), human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”). Though often considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as well as characterisation, and the commercial venue in which they appeared, the stories Woolf wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the preoccupations of the last decade of her career and are indicative of the tensions between high and low in modernist culture.

Development of science and academic knowledge has led to changes in academic language and transfer of information and knowledge. In this regard, the present study is an attempt to investigate lexico-grammaticality in academic abstracts and their full research papers in Linguistics, Chemistry and Electrical engineering papers published during 1991-2015 in academic journals from a diachronic perspective through quantitative research design. The focus of this paper is on transitivity, mood and theme analysis in the corpus according to Halliday's (1994) systemic functional linguistics model. So, all the attempts are to find the changes in abstracts and research papers of these disciplines and how they are to be positioned in different linguistic contexts over time. The results revealed that research papers employ the spectrum of possible lexical realization quite differently as compared to general English, especially concerning the use of specific lexical items. Also, the results of chi-squares of each discipline showed that there are significant differences between papers over time at .05 level of significance (.000< .05) with regard to the transitivity, mood, and theme.

The purpose of this study was to examine if the annual English exam question papers of first year accurately reflected the synchronisation of the National Curriculum Benchmarks (2006) with the questions on the test administered by the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education Sukkur. Annual question papers from BISE Sukkur's XI courses were chosen to examine content validity across a five-year period (2014-18). A survey questionnaire was used to obtain data from ELT experts. When compared to the Benchmarks of the National Curriculum of English Language (2006), the data revealed that the items on the annual question papers had very low content validity. The study recommends some effective ways for developing effective question papers aligned with Benchmarks.

Academic writing, particularly writing research articles, is an indispensable part of every major in higher education. Hyland (2004) argued that a valuable means of exploring academic writing, and comparing the rhetorical features and preferences of different discourse communities, is through the metadiscourse analysis of the text. The present study examines the differences in the use, type, and frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in the introduction and conclusion sections of research papers across the two disciplines of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. To this end, 42 research articles (21 Mechanical and 21 Electrical Engineering) written by English native speakers were randomly selected from two major international journals. The current study made use of Hyland’s (2005) model for analyzing the interactional metadiscourse markers used in the selected corpus, consisting of 41484 words. To analyze the data, the frequency, patterns of use, and type of interactional metadiscourse markers were elicited both through a manual corpus analysis and concordance package. Furthermore, to examine whether there is any significant difference in the use of metadiscourse markers in the introduction and conclusion sections of these papers, a Chi-square analysis was run. The results of the quantitative analysis revealed that although there were some minor differences in the frequency and type of these metadiscourse markers, there was no statistically significant difference across the disciplines, which can be attributed to the close nature of these fields. The findings of this study may render some pedagogical implications for ESP courses and especially writing research papers.

Abstract

Computer technology has provided language testing experts with opportunity to develop computerized versions of traditional paper-based language tests. New generations of TOEFL and Cambridge IELTS, BULATS, KET, PET are good examples of computer-based language tests. Since this new method of testing introduces new factors into the realm of language assessment ( e.g. modes of test delivery, familiarity with computer, etc.),the question may be whether the two modes of computer- and paper-based tests comparably measure the same construct, and hence, the scores obtained from the two modes can be used interchangeably. Accordingly, the present study aimed to investigate the comparability of the paper- and computer-based versions of a writing test. The data for this study were collected from administering the writing section of a Cambridge Preliminary English Test (PET) to eighty Iranian intermediate EFL learners through the two modes of computer- and paper-based testing. Besides, a computer familiarity questionnaire was used to divide participants into two groups with high and low computer familiarity. The results of the independent samples t-test revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between the learners' computer- and paper-based writing scores. The results of the paired samples t-test showed no statistically significant difference between high- and low-computer-familiar groups on computer-based writing. The researchers concluded that the two modes comparably measured the same construct.

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a diachronic study of acknowledgement practices in 300 randomly collected research papers published during three different periods (1998, 2004 and 2012) in the most prestigious American and European astrophysics journals written in English. In order to investigate the influence of these practices on authorship patterns, we analyzed the distribution over time of a series of quantitative variables (number, length and types of acknowledgements, mean number of words/number of acknowledgements per research paper and mean number of acknowledgements/number of authors per research paper, number of named and unnamed acknowledgees, number of identified and anonymous referees, and number of emotionally charged-words). Comparisons between periods were carried out and Student’s t-tests were applied to the quantitative results. Our main findings show that acknowledgements are very common in astrophysics since they are present in 96% of the whole corpus. Financial, mainly public, and instrumental supports are the most frequently acknowledged categories. The number and length of acknowledgements and the mean number of words/number of acknowledgements per research paper grow over time. Financial, instrumental and conceptual assistance, unnamed individuals and anonymous referees increase over time, whereas moral, editorial and unclassified supports, named individuals and identified referees, and emotionally-charged words decline. If we focus on each journal publication context, we can observe that the research papers published in the American journals include more and longer acknowledgements, with a higher mean number of acknowledgements per author, more financial and instrumental supports, and a lower percentage of emotionally-charged words, whereas the European journals contain more conceptual and editorial supports. All these data can be understood in the frame of growing scientific professionalism, while a detailed cross-journal analysis may occasionally suggest honorary/guest/gift authorship.

This volume comprises sixteen peer-reviewed selected papers presented at the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), that took place on May 6–9, 2015, at the University of Campinas, Brazil. United by a common goal – the formal analysis of Romance languages –, these papers focus on a wide range of topics in different areas of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, plus interfaces), and in different research domains (L1 grammar, L2 acquisition, variation and change, bilingualism and language contact, code-switching). The Romance languages represented in this volume include Peninsular and American Spanish; European, Brazilian and Mozambican (Maputo) Portuguese; French; Italian and Italian dialects (especially Borgomanerese); and Palenquero, a Spanish-based creole. Most papers assume a comparative approach to the discussed topics. Overall, the papers present new data and new approaches to familiar structures, as well as new developments for less known phenomena.

Academic writing has always been one of the hardest skills to develop as it requires mastery of the language. With the unforeseen pandemic, developing the said skills of the learners in this generation has become harder as new modes of instruction that are unfamiliar to both teachers and students emerge. With that, the main focus of this study is to identify the types and frequency of errors the students commit in writing academic papers in an attempt to provide the best possible interventions to remediate them. To achieve these objectives, 15 position papers were collected and analyzed. Error analysis designed by Gass and Selinker in 2008 was applied. In the end, results have been tabulated in descending sequence in which grammar appeared as the most frequent error. Strategies, such as the use of AI in checking grammar, and interventions, such as giving feedback and drafting, are recommended.

Metadiscourse is a recent enterprise of applied linguists through which the text-internalnature of discourse is explored with reference to persuasion, negotiation, and engagement of the writers with their own discourses and the readers too (Hyland, 2005). Metadiscourse, with respect to genre, register, and cultural situatedness,has been the major foci of inquiries till now. However, patterns of interaction situatedamong differentdiscourse communities of academics through metadiscourse need more attention in general and, in Pakistani context, in particular. Therefore, the current study intends to investigate interactiveand interactional metadiscourse in Pakistani research discourses of English, Education, and History. For this purpose, we collected 52 research articles comprising corpus of 231529words published in research journals recognized by Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. We applied Hyland’s framework of metadiscoursefor mapping expressions as metadiscursive. For identification of 300 metadiscursive markers proposed by Hyland, a recent corpus tool named MetaPak (Abbas et al. 201b) was used successfully. The study revealed noticeable variation in occurrenceand prototypicalityof metadiscourse employment in Pakistani research discourses while comparing with other international studies. This variation, consequently, may be considered one of the important factors causing dialogic closurein order to achieve persuasion, negotiation, and engagement of the international gate keepers, reviewers, and readers.

In the area of writing, research has yet to explore EFL learners’ ability to use varied vocabulary. Although vocabulary teaching has enriched learners’ knowledge of lexical items, whether they can use the words they have learned remains to be seen. It is important, therefore, to investigate their lexical richness in their academic writing. Lexical richness, defined as the presence of different words in a text, is commonly measured through type-token ratio (TTR). The present study set out to identify the lexical richness of senior students by comparing them to academic papers written by their lecturers. There are four objectives: (1) to determine the difference between the type-token ratio (TTR) in students’ essays and that in their lecturers’ essays; (2) to determine the difference between the use of 2000-word level (henceforth K2) in students’ essays and that in their lecturers’ essays; (3) to determine the difference between the use of academic words in students’ essays and that in their lecturers’ essays; (4) to determine the difference between the students’ essays and their lecturers’ in terms of the use of words other than the 2000-word level and the academic words (designated “off-list words”). The essays written by the respondents were submitted to a website for vocabulary profiling (http://www.lextutor/ca/vp). This analysis shows that the lecturers fare better in terms of TTR and academic words, but write slightly fewer 2000-word level and off-list words than their students. While the differences in TTR and academic words are significant, the differences in the use of 2000-word level and off-list are not significant. The subsequent discussion addresses possible causes of these differences, and offers some implications for the teaching of vocabulary and writing.

It comprises Publication Ethics, Author Guidelines, Paper Template, Back Cover

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on genre-based approaches to writing instruction. However, scant attention has been paid to the use of genre-based scaffolding in the realm of academic writing. Hence, in an attempt to tackle the problems prevalent in academic writing, this study set out to investigate the effect of genre-based scaffolding through sentence starters and writing frames on MA candidates’ research paper writing. To this end, twenty MA candidates majoring in ELT were randomly assigned to two homogenous groups, one control and one experimental group, each including 10 participants. Both groups were exposed to a five-session genre-based instruction while the experimental group benefitted from the additional provision of sentence starters and writing frames relevant to different sections of a research paper. The analysis of the results, using independent sample of t-test, reveals that genre-based instruction can be a useful tool in improving academic writing. Moreover, the outperformance of the participants of the experimental group is indicative of the beneficial effect of scaffolding through starters and frames.

El present treball és una anàlisi de l'evolució dels exàmens de llengua castellana de l'anomenada selectivitat (les actuals Proves d'Accés a la Universitat - PAU) durant vint anys (1992-2017), a partir de la pròpia experiència com a corrector durant tot aquest temps i com subcoordinador de la matèria durant els últims dotze anys (2006-2017). Per això s'analitza, principalment, d'una banda, tant la presència com el pes en la qualificació global dels continguts gramaticals, sobretot els relacionats amb la sintaxi, en les diferents parts d'aquests exàmens; i, de l'altra, la seva dificultat o, més ben dit, els coneixements que hauria de tenir un estudiant de Batxillerat per poder-los gestionar amb total èxit. De l'estudi realitzat es desprèn com els continguts gramaticals en general, i en particular els de sintaxi, han anat perdent importància progressivament dins de la tipologia de la prova durant tots aquests anys, mentre que els aspectes relacionats amb el comentari de textos i amb la lectura obligatòria d'obres literàries l'han anat guanyant, com a conseqüència directa dels diferents canvis que han sofert les lleis d'educació que afectaven la programació de l'Batxillerat

The present volume contains a selection of twelve peer-reviewed papers presented at Going Romance in 2011. Celebrating its 25th edition, the conference took place on December 8-10, in Utrecht, Holland, where the event was first held in 1986. While keeping the focus on the formal study of the Romance languages, the articles represent a wide range of topics related to different research areas, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and language acquisition. The papers are arranged in alphabetical order by author.

This article intended to investigate whether the gender-preferential linguistic elements found by Argomon, Koppel, Fine and Shimoni (2003) show the same gender-linked frequencies in applied linguistics research papers written by non-native speakers of English. In so doing, a sample of 32 articles from different journals was collected and the proportion of the targeted features to the whole number of words was calculated. The results indicated that, although the gender-linked patterns of use for many of those features were also observed in our sample, the difference between men and women in the frequency of using those elements was not statistically significant. This non-significant difference shows that either the confinements of genre or those of using a second language or both are keeping L2 writers from expressing their gender to its fullest capacity in the texts they produce.

Thesis Papers in Progress

This paper examines a corpus of 150 titles of research articles published between 2010 and 2013 in Anglo-American natural sciences journals (physics, chemistry and biology) in order to determine their lexical density and grammatical and morphosyntactic features. Towards that end, the frequency of present and past participles, prepositions, coordinating and subordinate conjunctions, and the frequency and length of compound words was recorded in each title. The total number of content and function words was also recorded so as to determine title lexical density. ANOVA tests were applied in order to assess whether statistically significant differences in the frequency of the above mentioned variables were detected within and across disciplines and in the whole corpus. Our results showed that, in the three disciplines, the frequency of the past participle is higher than that of the present participle (p = 0,04). They also disclosed that prepositions are the most frequently used function words and that they outnumber coordinating conjunctions (p = 0,02). Compound words were found to be very frequent, especially 2- and 3-word ones. As for title lexical density, it was found to be similar across disciplines (3,1). The only statistically significant cross-disciplinary difference detected was that present participles are more frequently used in chemistry than in biology (p= 0,001). Our findings reflect the complexity of the scientific concepts expressed in natural sciences research article titles. Because titles are frequently the only section of a paper scientists read so as to decide whether to read on or not, we present a few pedagogical tips that could be applied in reading and/or writing ESP courses. DOI: 10.20420/rlfe.2015.0012

Gender differences in reading are a common finding in international assessments with girls usually outperforming boys. This article investigates such gender differences by looking at test modes (paper-based versus digital assessments), reading purpose (literary versus informational), text features (associations between reading scores and how much students like a text) and item format characteristics (multiple choice versus constructed response items). All analyses are based on data of Norwegian fifth-grade students (n = 3610) from the most recent cycle of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Survey (PIRLS and ePIRLS) 2016. The results point towards a general mode effect between the paper-based and digital assessment for constructed response items. This effect seems to be less strong in boys, indicating that boys may be motivated to type responses on a keyboard as opposed to writing with a pen on paper. For text features, we found that boys might be disengaged from reading when the text shows female characteristics such as a female protagonist, leading to boys’ lack of interest and, subsequently, to lower scores. The results are discussed in the light of the test design of PIRLS and ePIRLS.

This paper is part of a wider research project which studies the academic writing of the dental Hispano-American community. It aims to describe and to analyze which hedging strategies are used and for what purpose in 40 dental research papers published in Hispano-American journals (1 Venezuelan, 1 Cuban and 2 Spanish) between 1999 and 2005. The frequency of use of hedges in the different rhetorical sections of the dental papers is analyzed: introduction, method, results, discussion and conclusions. In addition, we compare the use of hedging strategies according to the section, journal and nationality. It was found that impersonal constructions and approximators predominated, followed by shields. However, deictics and the compound hedges reported less frequency. Introduction and discussion were the most heavily hedged sections. Nevertheless, hedges were also registered, mainly impersonal type, in method and results sections. Conclusion was the least hedged section. Shields, deictics and compound hedges were found mainly in the introduction and the discussion sections. On the other hand, approximators, shields and impersonal constructions were used in all the sections. The comparisons of our results show statistically significant differences in the use of hedges according to the rhetorical section, and the nationality; we also found differences between the frequencies of use of the five hedging strategies. Hedging is a very frequent strategy in the dental Hispanic RP; therefore, we propose its formal teaching in the dental academic writing courses.

This paper presents the results from the project Language Infrastructure made Accessible (LIA) which had as its main goal to digitize and make accessible old recordings of spoken Norwegian and Sámi from various archives, first and foremost from the four partner institutions University of Oslo, University of Bergen, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The infra­structures resulting from the project can be summarized as 1) a file depot of Norwegian dialect recordings, 2) three corpora of spoken Norwegian and one for North Sámi, 3) various language technology resources such as an openly available tree bank, a morphological taggar and a parser for Norwegian dialects, upgrading of the corpus interface Glossa and more. The paper exemplifies how the corpus can be utilized.

The intention of this paper is to present first observations and findings from a study on attributes in academic texts written by students. The present paper analyses the use of genitive attributes in master’s theses written by students of German philology, who are Polish native speakers. The purpose of this study is to identify tendencies in the use of the genitive attribute and its prepositional counterpart in students’ works as well as to indicate some of the potential problems the Polish authors writing in German can have with using these constructions. The analysed collection of data encompasses 250 examples of noun phrases with at least one genitive attribute and 48 examples of phrases with the preposition von gathered from five students’ texts. Because of the limited number of examined texts the results of the analysis should be interpreted with caution and it would be advisable to extend the analysis to more texts in the future. The paper begins by describing the primary syntactic properties of academic texts. Section 3 focuses on the genitive attribute and its counterparts and discusses potential problems these constructions can present to Polish native speakers. The next section presents the results of qualitative analysis of the data. The concluding section 5 sums up the presented study and offers some recommendations for further research.

The paper aims at elaborating on prefixal verbs, particularly those containing the morpheme durch, with regard to cognitive grammar. The reflections are carried out against the background of cognitive theories. They revolve around phenomena such as metonymy and conceptual metaphors – regarded as ubiquitous processes enabling us to capture the notion of abstract entities, and based on an inborn ability of the human mind to create analogies. The paper is dedicated to metaphorical extensions that play a vital role contributing to the expansion of radial semantic networks described according to Langacker. Crucial prominence is given to conceptual blending that allows to use certain prefixes with noticeable efficacy.

In this paper, the study of the syntactic-functional behaviour and the categorial identification of the hin/her-prep. in close connections with verbs in German (e.g. hineingehen, hinaufarbeiten, hinzufügen, herausfinden, herausfordern, hereinfallen, etc.) has been addressed. In the literature, different syntactic functions have been attributed to hin/her-prep., depending on their positions in the sentence, the type of verb involved, as well as their relationship with other sentence elements (especially with the noun). Moreover, two more tests were applied to the selected complexes to find out whether hin/her-prep. occur in pre-field and whether the complexes are interruptible in the contact position by other elements. My proposed solution for the categorial identification of hin/her-prep. is based on Zeller’s (2001) thesis. Based on the generative definition of verb-particles, in this paper hin/her-prep. were evaluated using three tests (interchangeability between hin and her, (re)constructability of prepositional phrase and exchangeability of the preposition of prepositional phrase) to filter out from the “hodgepodge” of hin/her-prep. those genuine verb-particles. The corpus analysis shows that the subclasses of hin/her-prep. can be evaluated either as pro-adverbs or as (semi-)verb particles, depending on the complex or the reading.

This Research paper examines how Tolkien's novels, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," incorporate labyrinthine elements into their fictional worlds. In these literary works, events primarily unfold in open landscapes, but there are elements that evoke complex and dangerous mazes, where certain heroes assume roles similar to that of Theseus. Thus, this analysis explores the representations of the Labyrinth myth through Tolkien's writing, highlighting both the similarities and differences between these structures in the two contexts, while emphasizing the symbolism of the subterranean world, akin to a cave, as a site of transformation where heroes emerge metamorphosed, invoking both death and rebirth. The paper suggests the use of mythocriticism to analyze the reiterations and variations of Labyrinth mythemes in these novels.