Search results for "English Language"
showing 10 items of 165 documents
English Language Policy in Relation to Teachers and Teacher Educators in Latvia: Insights from Activity Systems Analysis
2020
The ambitious objectives of European language policy and the strive for competitiveness have led to an increasing emphasis on foreign language competence at the level of national education systems. Using Spolsky’s onion model of language policy (2004) and Engeström’s Expansive Learning theory (1987, 2008), the study attempts to determine the formative influence of the existing multilayered language policy on the professional development of Latvian educators with the aim to compare the situation for teachers and teacher educators in respect of their English language proficiency.Given the prioritisation of English and strategic differences in foreign language management in relation to teacher…
Protocol for a systematic review of guidelines for rigour in the design, conduct and analysis of biomedical experiments involving laboratory animals
2018
Objective Within the last years, there has been growing awareness of the negative repercussions of unstandardized planning, conduct and reporting of preclinical and biomedical research. Several initiatives have set the aim of increasing validity and reliability in reporting of studies and publications, and publishers have formed similar groups. Additionally, several groups of experts across the biomedical spectrum have published experience and opinion-based guidelines and guidance on potential standardized reporting. While all these guidelines cover reporting of experiments, an important step prior to this should be rigours planning and conduction of studies. The aim of this systematic revi…
From engl-isc to whatever-ish: a corpus-based investigation of -ish derivation in the history of English
2020
Drawing on a wide array of historical and contemporary corpora, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of the intricately related functional changes that -ish underwent in the course of English language history. By investigating the distribution of -ish formations, the analysis sheds light on the productivity of the suffix, which does not only become evident in the numerous hapax legomena, but also in the trajectory of change itself in which -ish occurs with ever new base categories and new functions. Moreover, the article revisits theoretical claims made in the literature about the diachronic development and synchronic properties of -ish and reassesses them in the light …
Assessment of proneness to distraction: English adaptation and validation of the Attention-Related Driving Errors Scale (ARDES) and cross-cultural eq…
2016
Abstract Prior research developed the Attention-Related Driving Errors Scale (ARDES), a 19-item questionnaire aimed at evaluating the drivers’ predisposition to attentional error, and also provided validity evidence of ARDES measures across two countries: Argentina and Spain. In the current work we adapt the Spanish version of the ARDES to the English language and the culture, traffic regulations and driving habits of the UK, and then provide new evidence of the cross-cultural equivalence of the scale. First, an improved forward and backward translation design was used to translate the Spanish ARDES into English. A committee-approach review process was also performed during the translation …
Analysis of New Concept English from the Perspective of Cross-cultural Communication–A Case Study in Book 2
2018
New Concept English (NCE) is a series of English language textbooks, four volumes in total, which have gained national popularity and wide acceptance by English teachers, learners and parents in China. In the academic circle, apart from the analysis of the contents of NCE, which has been mostly discussed, many contrast studies between NCE and other English course-books are not new topics either. This paper focuses on the analysis of NCE from the perspective of cross-cultural communication and develops a detailed study on the second volume based on eight parameters: norm, value, art, custom, religion, language, ways of life, material culture. Hopefully, the current study will shed new light …
The Loss of Grammatical Gender and Case Features Between Old and Early Middle English: Its Impact on Simple Demonstratives and Topic Shift
2017
AbstractIn this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle Englishϸe(‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties o…
Tongan-English language contact and kinship terminology
2016
‘[D]o all humans mean the same things by words that can be used successfully to point to the same thing?’ (Leavitt 2015: 51). This study shows that the same words used in different English varieties might not have the same meaning. The typological comparison of standardised English and Tongan kinship terminology reveals that the categorisation is based on different underlying features. While standardised English focuses on the concept of ‘core family’, Tongan merges ‘same-sex siblings’ and emphasises the concept of ‘extended family’. The emerging contact phenomenon in Tongan English is the use of English terminology according to Tongan categorisation, that is, a case of semantic transfer.
Strategic Processing of Chinese Young English Language Learners in an International Standardized English Language Test
2018
Strategic competence is acknowledged to be able to explain variations in language test performance. Research with adult language test-takers has shown that strategic competence has dual components: strategic knowledge and strategic processing. Of the two components, strategic processing, which is state-like, unstable, and tends to fluctuate from contexts to contexts, is more closely related to language test performance. To date, none of the existing studies investigates strategic processing with children English language learners (ELLs) and explores the relationship between strategic processing in all the four skills of language learning and the test performance. Addressing these gaps, the …
STANCE BUNDLES IN ENGLISH-TO-POLISH TRANSLATION: A CORPUS-INFORMED STUDY
2018
In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the textual fit of English-to-Polish translation of a peculiar type of multi-word units known in corpus linguistic literature as lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999). Inspired by a study conducted by Grabar and Lefer (2015), we used the English-Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pezik 2016) and the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) to extract and explore the use - in terms of frequency distributions - of the Polish equivalents of selected English lexical bundles expressing attitudinal and epistemic stance. More precisely, we used the NKJP corpus to check whether the Polish equivalents are typical of contemporary Polish as found in native texts. The r…
Teaching perspectives on CLIL in different educational contexts. Italy, Spain and Turkey
2020
La tesis realiza un estudio comparado internacional sobre el Aprendizaje Integrado de Contenidos y Lenguas Extranjeras (AICLE; en inglés Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL) basado en la impartición de diversas materias de una etapa educativa en inglés. El estudio se lleva a cabo en centros educativos de Italia, España y Turquía. El diseño de investigación utiliza un enfoque mixto cualtitativo-cualitativo, con cuestionarios y entrevistas en profundidad como herramientas de recolección de datos. Los datos de la investigación muestran la importancia de la colaboración del profesorado en cuanto a la creación de proyectos, el diseño de materiales, la planificación de las clases y la …