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English Medium Instruction Practices in Vietnamese Universities: Institutional, Practitioner and Student Perspectives (Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects #68)
by Min Pham Jenny BarnettThis book focuses on English as a Medium of Instruction practices in higher education in Vietnam, addressing institutional, practitioner and student perspectives. It presents theoretical standpoints and empirical experiences of how institutional policies are enacted in the offering of English as a Medium of Instruction programs in universities in Vietnam, and how the disciplinary content is taught and learned through English. The book showcases the enactment of curricular and pedagogical practices in the classroom, drawing on a range of different disciplines central to university education. It also explores the roles of mother tongues in the construction of disciplinary knowledge in English as a Medium of Instruction programs and courses. This book provides guidance and practical information for university English as a Medium of Instruction policy makers, lecturers and student support teams in English for academic purposes across disciplines, as well as to the theoretical framing of the English as a Medium of Instruction field itself.
Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction
by Evelyn Tsz ChanThis book focuses on the complex relationships between inheritance, work, and desert in literature. It shows how, from its manifestation in the trope of material inheritance and legacy in Victorian fiction, “inheritance” gradually took on additional, more modern meanings in Joseph Conrad’s fiction on work and self-making. In effect, the emphasis on inheritance as referring to social rank and wealth acquired through birth shifted to a focus on talent, ability, and merit, often expressed through work.The book explores how Conrad’s fiction engaged with these changing modes of inheritance and work, and the resulting claims of desert they led to. Uniquely, it argues that Conrad’s fiction critiques claims of desert arising from both work and inheritance, while also vividly portraying the emotional costs and existential angst that these beliefs in desert entailed. The argument speaks to and illuminates today’s debates on moral desert arising from work and inheritance, in particular from meritocratic ideals. Its new approach to Conrad’s works will appeal to students and scholars of Conrad and literary modernism, as well as a wider audience interested in philosophical and social debates on desert deriving from inheritance and work.
Franz Kafka and Chinese Culture
by Yanbing ZengThis book conducts a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of Franz Kafka’s relation to China. Commencing with an examination of the myriad Chinese cultural influences to which Kafka was exposed, it goes on to explore the ways in which they manifest themselves in canonical stories, such as Description of A Struggle, The Great Wall of China, and An Old Manuscript. This leads the way to thought-provoking comparative studies of Kafka and major Chinese writers and philosophers, such as Zhuang Tzu, Pu Songling, Qian Zhongshu, and Lu Xun. Highlighting kindred philosophical concepts, shared aesthetic tastes, and parallel narrative strategies, these comparisons transcend mere textual analysis, to explore the profound cultural, historical, and philosophical implications of Kafka’s works. Finally, the book turns to an examination Kafka’s impact on modern life in China, including its translation studies, literature, and even its mass culture.
Affective-Discursive Practice in Online Medical Consultations in China: Emotional and Empathic Acts, Identity Positions, and Power Relations (The Humanities in Asia #11)
by Yu ZhangThis book provides readers with the latest research on the affective aspect of online interactions between doctors and e-patients in the context of China from a poststructuralist discourse analysis perspective. At the heart of this book is the presentation of four chapters which address (1) indirect negative emotional acts by e-patients and empathic acts by doctors (constituting “affective practice”), (2) the interactional discursive features involved in the affective practice, (3) discursive positions of e-patients and doctors within the affective practice context, and (4) power relations that are reflected in the positionings. This book sheds light on the importance of examining the affective facet of medical consultation, when it comes to identifying non-traditional positions and power relations in doctor-patient communication. It also provides the implication that e-healthcare platforms, especially those with an e-commercialized model for healthcare services, have potential to produce a type of neo-liberal discourse—the e-commercialized medical consultation discourse—in which patients and caregivers, who are acknowledged as the less powerful group in the traditional healthcare activities, are empowered and privileged.
Current Issues in Descriptive Linguistics and Digital Humanities: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Eno-Abasi Essien Urua
by Moses Effiong Ekpenyong Imelda Icheji UdohThis book is a convergence of heterogeneous insights (from languages and literature, history, music, media and communications, computer science and information studies) which previously went their separate ways; now unified under a single framework for the purpose of preserving a unique heritage, the language. In a growing society like ours, description and documentation of human and scientific evidence/resources are improving. However, these resources have enjoyed cost-effective solutions for Western languages but are yet to flourish for African tone languages. By situating discussions around a universe of discourse, sufficient to engender cross-border interactions within the African context, this book shall break a dichotomy of challenges on adaptive processes required to unify resources to assist the development of modern solutions for the African domain.
Philosophical Semiotics: The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning
by Yiheng ZhaoThis book attempts to solve the question whether semiotics is a methodology as is generally held and if the studies of meaning and the mind can shed light on a series of metaphysical issues, so that the edifice of semiotics could be erected on a philosophical ground. It proposes that a philosophical semiotics is, by necessity, a semiotic phenomenology about the construction of the “world of meaning” by signs, and any discussion about semiotics has to proceed around two core issues: meaning and the mind.This book particularly exemplifies the semiotic connections in various schools of traditional Chinese philosophies. In the “Pre-Imperial Age” (before BC 300), there emerged an abundance of semiotic thinking in China, from Yijing the first sign system that aims to explain everything in the world, to the Namists’s subtle argument about the form of meaning, from the Yin-Yang/five elements of the Han, to the “Things are non-existent while mind is non-non-existent” principle of the Vijñāptimātratāsiddhi School of Buddhism in the Tang, and from the Sudden Revelation of Chan Buddhism to the “Nothing outside the mind” endorsed by the Mindist Confucianism in the Ming. The mighty trend of philosophical heritage provides rich food to our understanding of the form of meaning.
Eighty Years of Archaeology at Liangzhu (Liangzhu Civilization)
by Yefei ZhuThis book summary introduces the key research findings, exploration and excavation works carried out during the 80 years of archaeological endeavours entirely devoted to Liangzhu historical sites. Xingeng SHI first discovered of neolithic remains in 1936, followed along with designation of official name which was given by Nai XIA in 1959. Another perspective also indicates finding of several pieces of black pottery at the Qipanfen historical site in the year 1936 till the latest over 1200 pieces of jades unearthed in Fanshan cemetery in the year 1986. A brief timeline history as listed above has been demonstrated that the great efforts and sacrifices had made by earlier generations of archaeologist in Liangzhu as witness to explore the origin of the 5000 years of Chinese civilization. The public is more familiar with Fanshan cemetery and Liangzhu ancient city as well as precious cultural relics such as jade Cong and jade Yue. Through the 80 years of archaeological ruins of Liangzhu field works that performed, in fact, there are existing historical monuments for example as places of Zhucundou and Wujiabu and ordinary objects include pottery and stoneware, they remain unknown to the general public. This book offers the readers a unique perspective, is the first research to focus on the Liangzhu Archaeological Team members’ viewpoint of exploring the perceived value of an extraordinary experience and compare it with an ordinary experience behind the 80 years of archaeology of the Liangzhu site.
Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties: Conversations between Teacher, Students and Researchers
by Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile Dennis A. ConradThis book invites readers to challenge, corroborate, and add to the discourse on more inclusive pedagogical practice. Presenting theoretically and empirically informed research, it highlights potential considerations regarding the intersections of diversity, literacy, and learner difficulties. These three areas provide a stage where opposing paradigms often pose challenges for educators and create unnecessary barriers to providing the best education for all learners. These barriers might reveal how students are positioned through a deficit lens rather than one that recognizes individual differences and how these learner differences sometimes result in labels or put students at increased risk of encountering difficulties. The contributing authors’ goals are to start and sustain a conversation that examines these perspectives and to offer counter-narratives to the deficit lens by recognizing that individual difference does not need to be a barrier to educational access. By examining opportunities for more inclusive educational success, this book encourages discourse among key stakeholders; further, it goes beyond problematizing to offer new avenues for optimal learning and inclusive pedagogy across multiple contexts.
New Directions in Linguistic Geography: Exploring Articulations of Space
by Greg NiedtThis collection brings together contributions from a new wave of research into language, space, and place, at the intersection of various disciplines, from geography to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The authors investigate the myriad ways that people conceive of—and thereby describe—the world around them, studying the impact these ideas have on their identities, and highlighting the tension between conflicting ontologies of space.It is a timely and invaluable new resource for researchers and students in linguistics, geography, anthropology and communication.
Liangzhu in the Eyes of an Archaeological Journalist: One Dig for Five Millennia (Liangzhu Civilization)
by Li MaThis book traces archaeological exploration and discoveries as early as 2012 and reveals Liangzhu culture by reviewing seven years of archaeological findings at the Liangzhu historical site, developments in archaeology history, the psychological journeys of archaeologists, as well as the collision of schools of thought. It also contains in-depth interviews with archaeological experts and other specialists, building a bridge between popular interest and academic interest, and showcases Liangzhu civilization and archaeology for professionals and the general public alike.
English Produced by Japanese L2 Users: A Preliminary Analysis of Grammatical Forms
by Toshiko YamaguchiThis book discusses eight grammatical items, with main focus on prepositions and plural nouns, to illustrate the structure of Japanese English or the English spoken by 32 Japanese nationals who are the L2 users of English. Adopting an inductive, theory-neutral, analysis of empirical data collected from recordings of presentational talks, the author demonstrates how standard and nonstandard grammatical forms are distributed, and categorizes these based largely on functional factors. The book describes grammatical forms as a fundamental aspect of linguistic study and adopts a corpus-driven approach to qualify structural features characterizing usage data. This formalization of language usage patterns also facilitates the development of ‘locally’ relevant norms and thus presents alternatives to the normative varieties traditionally adopted. It examines the effects of multicompetence and unpacks the grammar of Japanese English. The book is of interest to researchers, educators, and students concerned with issues related to World Englishes, English as a lingua franca, English language teaching, and multilingualism, this text is vital to studies in global English language use.
A Systemic Functional Grammar of Chinese Nominal Groups: A Text-Based Approach (The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series)
by Jing FangThis book describes the grammar of Chinese nominal groups for the purpose of text analysis, drawing upon Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model. Exploring the metafunctional grammatical resources in nominal groups, the book provides a new perspective on conducting text analysis by focusing on the metafunctions performed by various elements in the nominal group. The observations on nominal groups presented here are based on both a working corpus of 180 texts of various types and a large referential corpus of over 16 billion tokens. With clear descriptions of the terminology used, the book presents a case study at the end of each major chapter, which demonstrates how the grammatical resources discussed can be applied to the delicate analysis of authentic texts. This monograph is more than a grammar book, for it offers a new way to engage with a text microscopically and enables readers to approach and analyse a text by focusing on grammatical units below the clause level. The book provides an accessible and valuable resource for readers who are interested in SFL-based typological description, text analysis, translation studies between English and Chinese, English–Chinese comparative linguistic studies, and Chinese language teaching and learning.
World Englishes, Global Classrooms: The Future of English Literary and Linguistic Studies
by Kirsten Hemmy Chandrika BalasubramanianThis book provides a critical overview of contemporary world issues in Language and Literary Studies. It offers specific ideas as to how to move away from the traditional literary canon, on the one hand, and traditional native-speaker norms in English language teaching, on the other. It delivers a global perspective of both the growth and the challenges in ELT studies around the world. Following the introduction, the first section of the book contains chapters from international scholars on recognizing and diversifying Englishes in today’s language and translation classrooms. Specifically, the chapters focus on issues such as the cultural hegemony of a monolithic English, English and university pedagogy, English as a gatekeeper, and the role of a reconceived English education in promoting cross-cultural understanding. The second section focuses on the interaction of literature and culture, with specific chapters focusing on decolonizing the traditional literary canon, defining a global text, representing cultural interactions in literary texts, and emerging genres in contemporary English literature. Both sections of the book question the existing boundaries in a post-2020 world, specifically in a non-western world. It is an indispensable resource for scholars in cultural studies, linguistics, and literary studies.
A Student’s Guide to the Language of Finance: Essential Expressions for Business, Finance, and Banking Students
by Steve HartThis book focuses on improving reading comprehension by targeting the jargon, idiomatic language and academic expressions used in the business world. A Student’s Guide to the Language of Finance is a reference textbook designed to unlock the jargon of the business and finance world for international students, improving the reading comprehension and writing skill of English language learners by targeting the jargon, idiomatic language, and academic expressions employed in the business, finance, and banking fields. Covering terms not always captured in business dictionaries or workbooks, the resource also contains sections on spoken business English, key academic terms found in textbooks and journals and useful expressions to employ when writing an academic paper. It is specifically targeted at students whose first language is not English.
Discursive Mediation in Translation: Living History and its Chinese Translations
by Hui WangThis book explores the actual process of mediation operation in the translation process and the interaction between mediation and social structure. It defines mediation in translation in a parameterized manner, characterizing the linguistic properties of mediation for ease of mediation identification. On this basis, it puts forward an integrated systematic approach to map out mediation operation at the text level and discuss the interactive relationship between mediation and social structure, with a view to unveiling how the source text is altered for the purpose of power balance in the translation process. It is a key read for those interested in better understanding of how translators mediate in the translation process so as to maneuver a text to achieve a certain purpose, thereby increasing mediation efficiency and avoiding potential pitfalls in mediation operation. It will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies, professional translators, as well as those working in language and culture, intercultural communication, and cultural studies.
English Bilingual Project: Exploring the Pedagogical Function of Mentalese
by Mathew VargheseToday, English is the global lingua franca and competent English communication skills should be one of the rights of all educated individuals irrespective of any socio-cultural limits. By introducing a new method, this book focuses on helping any learner to get sufficient communication skills in English as much as in the native language. This method helps one to avoid translating from mother tongue to English. And by using the method of thinking in English, one could acquire the required English bilingual skills naturally. The method is founded on the philosophical idea of mentalese—mind language as the base language of thinking available for humans for constructing thoughts. The proposed English Bilingual Project (EBP) helps one to transfer thoughts from a structureless mentalese to the grammatical structure of any language English/Japanese/Chinese. The method described in this book works in two ways: one it helps one to intuitively understand the working of mentalese; the other is by practicing think in English with the mentalese, one could generate the bilingual brain. The main procedure for transferring thoughts from the mentalese to English is through writing one’s thoughts. This helps one to think effectively in English like one’s own mother tongue. This method works as a prime requirement model for one to generate multilingual skills. The book resourced the idea of mentalese from the classical philosophy, reflects it with the modern generative theories, links it with the studies in neuro-linguistic studies on bilingualism and the bilingual brain.
Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection
by James SherrySelfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task with a network model of connectivity that scales from the individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in support of environmental diversity.
Gendered Identity and the Lost Female: Hybridity as a Partial Experience in the Anglophone Caribbean Performances
by Shrabani BasuThis book offers an exploration of the postcolonial hybrid experience in anglophone Caribbean plays and performance from a feminist perspective.In a hitherto unattempted consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance, this study of gendered identities chronicles the postcolonial hybrid experience – and how it varies in the context of questions of sex, performance and social designation. In the process, it examines the diverse performances of the anglophone Caribbean. The work includes works by Caribbean anglophone playwrights like Derek Walcott, Mustapha Matura, Michael Gikes, Dennis Scott, Trevor Rhone, Earl Lovelace and Errol John with more recent works of Pat Cumper, Rawle Gibbons and Tony Hall. The study would also engage with Carnival, calypso and chutney music, while commenting on its evolving influences over the hybrid imagination.Each section covers the dominant socio-political thematics associated with the tradition and its effect on it, followed by an analysis of contemporaneously significant literary and cultural works – plays, carnival narrative and calypso and chutney lyrics as well as the experiences of performers. From Lovelace’s fictional Jestina to the real-life Drupatee, the book critically explores the marginalization of female performances while forming a hybrid identity.
Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern American Literature
by Lovorka Gruic Grmusa Biljana OklopcicThis book discusses how American literary modernism and postmodernism interconnect memory and identity and if, and how, the intertwining of memory and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural trends in the United States or the specific historical contexts in the world. The book’s opening chapter is the interrogation of the narrator’s memories of Jay Gatsby and his life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The second chapter shows how in William Faulkner’s Light in August memory impacts the search for identities in the storylines of the characters. The third chapter discusses the correlation between memory, self, and culture in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Discussing Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party, the fourth chapter reveals that memory and identity are contextualized and that cognitive processes, including memory, are grounded in the body’s interaction with the environment, featuring dehumanized characters, whose identities appear as role-plays. The subsequent chapter is the analysis of how Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated deals with the heritage of Holocaust memories and postmemories. The last chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the reconstructive nature of memory, and the politics and production of identity in Southeastern Europe.
Continuing Professional Development of English Language Teachers: Perspectives and Practices from India
by Senkamalam Periyasamy DhanavelThis book provides a comprehensive understanding of India's continuing professional development (CPD) landscape. It examines the issues surrounding the professional development of English language teachers in India at the tertiary level from multiple perspectives. Further, it evaluates various models of continuing professional learning (CPL) and emphasizes the transformative model as a solution to the social, administrative, or other impediments teachers encounter in their lives. Importantly, it presents examples, solving academic and non-academic problems in formal and informal, and face-face and technology-mediated forms of teaching and learning by teachers of English in different contexts. It discusses the latest developments in the literature related to the transformative and reflective approach to classroom problems faced by teachers on the ground such as classroom environment, students' socio-economic background, teachers education, and teacher assessment. Also, it positions continuing professional development (CPD) as having transformative power in teaching English in India and how it can improve students' learning opportunities. The book is relevant to English language teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in India and across the globe to address significant issues in the field: how to handle every classroom situation and how to train oneself as a teacher as well as a teacher educator.
Music, Mathematics and Language: The New Horizon of Computational Musicology Opened by Information Science
by Keiji Hirata Satoshi Tojo Masatoshi HamanakaThis book presents a new approach to computational musicology in which music becomes a computational entity based on human cognition, allowing us to calculate music like numbers. Does music have semantics? Can the meaning of music be revealed using symbols and described using language? The authors seek to answer these questions in order to reveal the essence of music. Chapter 1 addresses a very fundamental point, the meaning of music, while referring to semiotics, gestalt, Schenkerian analysis and cognitive reality. Chapter 2 considers why the 12-tone equal temperament came to be prevalent. This chapter serves as an introduction to the mathematical definition of harmony, which concerns the ratios of frequency in tonic waves. Chapter 3, “Music and Language,” explains the fundamentals of grammar theory and the compositionality principle, which states that the semantics of a sentence can be composed in parallel to its syntactic structure. In turn, Chapter 4 explains the most prevalent score notation – the Berklee method, which originated at the Berklee School of Music in Boston – from a different point of view, namely, symbolic computation based on music theory. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce readers to two important theories, the implication-realization model and generative theory of tonal music (GTTM), and explain the essence of these theories, also from a computational standpoint. The authors seek to reinterpret these theories, aiming at their formalization and implementation on a computer. Chapter 7 presents the outcomes of this attempt, describing the framework that the authors have developed, in which music is formalized and becomes computable. Chapters 8 and 9 are devoted to GTTM analyzers and the applications of GTTM. Lastly, Chapter 10 discusses the future of music in connection with computation and artificial intelligence.This book is intended both for general readers who are interested in music, and scientists whose research focuses on music information processing. In order to make the content as accessible as possible, each chapter is self-contained.
Language Studies in India: Cognition, Structure, Variation
by Rajesh Kumar Om PrakashThis book addresses a wide range of aspects of the study of language in a variety of domains such as cognition, change, acquisition, structure, philosophy, politics, and education. It offers a renewed discussion on normative understanding of these concepts and opens up avenues for a fresh look at these concepts. Each contribution in this book captures a wide range of perspectives and underlines the vigorous role of language, which happens to be central to the arguments contained therein. The uniqueness of this book lies in the fact that it presents simplified perspective on various complex aspects of language. It addresses a wide range of audiences, who do not necessarily need to have a technical background in linguistics. It focuses on complex relations between language and cognition, politics, education to name a few with reference to cognition, change, and acquisition. This book is for researchers with an interest in the field of language studies, applied linguistics, and socio-linguistics.
Language Learning Motivation and L2 Pragmatic Competence
by He YangThis book provides comprehensive investigation of the effect of motivation on L2 learners’ pragmatic learning, which has been discussed for a long time but remains under-explored. This study examines whether and to what extent learners’ levels of motivation influence their pragmatic awareness, comprehension and production in an EFL context. It presents an original study that not only enriches our knowledge of the feasibility of modern technology in collecting large-scale data related to pragmatic competence but also eminently connects L2 pragmatics more closely with mainstream second language acquisition research by focusing on the role of motivation in pragmatic learning. This book will be of great value to researchers and postgraduates interested in second language acquisition, especially those who work on L2 pragmatics and individual variation among learners.
Primitive Characters of Liangzhu: Paintings and Symbols (Liangzhu Civilization)
by Yong Xia Xuefei ZhuThis book mainly focuses on the roles of engraved symbols and ornamentation in Liangzhu culture. It categorizes the engraved symbols discovered in Liangzhu culture as means of ideographical expression and decoration, aspects that are explored in detail. Further, the engraved symbols and ornamentation are subdivided in terms of certain similarities, including the dragon and bird systems. A separate chapter is especially designed to help readers appreciate the typical paintings and symbols in selected objects and vessels. In this way, the book seeks to analyze and generate a particular formula so as to explore patterns in the thinking of Liangzhu’s people, thus deciphering the spiritual code of the Liangzhu world.
The Role of Language in Content Pedagogy: A Framework for Teachers’ Knowledge (Studies in Singapore Education: Research, Innovation & Practice #4)
by Lay Hoon Seah Rita Elaine Silver Mark Charles BaildonThis book explores the importance of language in content learning. It focuses on teachers’ roles, knowledge and understanding of language in school contexts (including academic language and disciplinary languages) to support students. It examines teachers' language-related knowledge base for content teaching, which include teachers' knowledge of and about language, knowledge of (their) students and their pedagogical knowledge. This book also explores how teachers’ knowledge of language, students and content are linked as part of a larger pedagogical content knowledge, which includes knowledge of the role of language in content learning. As well, it further considers literacy (and literacies) as part of this examination of teachers’ knowledge of language.