New media and perennial problems in foreign language learning and teaching
The book concerns the ways in which the new media shape communication along with educational expectations and practices in foreign language classrooms. Although foreign language learners have cheap and easy access to information and ways of communication, they also wrestle with problems that have always accompanied language learning. The focus of the book is two-fold. On the one hand, the authors demonstrate how using social networks, videoconferencing, mobile phones, wikis, and computer-mediated interaction contributes to the development of language skills, negotiated interaction, autonomy, and intercultural competence. On the other, they discuss “old” issues pertaining to the role of voca…
Casual, Colloquial, Commonsensical: A News Values Stylistic Analysis of a Populist Newsfeed
This study explores a mediated variety of right-wing populist discourse in the digital context, given the populists’ inclination to bypass legacy media to connect directly to the citizens to garner political support. It analyzes a sample of the Tea Party’s newsfeed headlines posted in the spring of 2019. A corpus of 308 headlines collected according to a “constructed week” formula has been coded first according to selected news values parameters (Bednarek and Caple 2017), and then with respect to stylistic devices operationalized in terms of “casual,” “colloquial” and “commonsensical” expressions. Methodologically, the study aims to combine the perspectives of newsworthiness and stylistics …
Some Implications for Developing Learners’ Figurative Language Competence Across Modalities: Metaphor, Metonymy and Blending in the Picture Modality
The paper argues for developing learners’ figurative language competence across modalities. Specifically, focusing on the picture modality, the article attempts to show the importance of figurative thinking in the new media age multimodal communication. The sample analysis of pictures and images representing the recent issue of the EU crisis addresses the significance of three conceptual phenomena, namely, metaphor, metonymy, and blending, in the conceptualization of such a highly abstract phenomenon. In general, it is argued that language users almost invariably turn to figurative language resources to conceptualize abstract phenomena that cannot be conceptualized by means of literal langu…