Search results for "English"

English as a lingua franca – a native-culture-free code? Language of communication vs. language of identification

2011

English has become the dominant means of international communication. Its non-native speakers now far outnumber the conventional native speakers in the UK, the USA, Canada etc. Against this background, a number of authors have recently stressed the functions for which foreign languages are learned. They make a distinction between a ‘language of communication’ and a ‘language of identification’. The terms, which were coined by the German applied linguist Werner Hüllen (1992), have recently been popularised in the context of English as a lingua franca. English, it is said, can be used as a language of communication without necessarily being a language of identification. As it is used for prac…

“I know that the natives must suffer every now and then”: Native / non-native indexing language ideologies in Finnish higher education

2015

This article examines the construction of“native”and“non-native”English use in Finnish higher education. Previous studies on the Finnish situationimplicate not just language ideological but political hierarchies which favour stu-dents from the traditional, hegemonic“Inner circle”countries such as the UnitedKingdom, United States, Australia, Anglophone Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.This hegemonic position of the inner circle variants is being challenged by anemerging normative ELF ideology. Our article tackles the meeting point ofthese ideological positions. We aim to understand how native English speakerideologies might be changing as a result of globalization. We have combineddata from o…

Positivity as a resource for learning : enjoyment in the English classroom in Finland

2017

Tunteet ovat osa arkielämää, ja koulussa oppilaat kokevat sekä positiivisia että negatiivisia tunteita jatkuvasti. Positiivinen psykologia tutkimusalana tutkii myönteisiä tunteita, joilla on mm. todettu olevan yhteys hyvinvointiin ja henkilökohtaiseen kasvuun, mutta niitä ei ole juuri tutkittu oppimisen kontekstissa omana tutkimuskohteenaan. Tämä tutkimus tarkastelee iloon tai mielihyvään rinnastettavissa olevaa tunnetta (engl. enjoyment) kielenopiskelussa, jonka on havaittu vaihtelevan esimerkiksi iän, sukupuolen, koulumenestyksen tai opiskeltujen kielten määrän mukaan. Tutkimus koostui kahdesta osasta: ensimmäinen osa tutki monivalintakyselyn avulla tilastollisin menetelmin, kokevatko suo…

Specialized Translators at work during the Risorgimento: the Biblioteca dell'Economista and the English-Italian translations (1851-1867).

2013

During the Risorgimento, with the establishment of the Italian state and its liberal institutions, Political Economy became a subject of particular interest in many cultural and political environments all over the country. Considered the best discipline to cope with the new political situation, its study was promoted by a network of social institutions and individuals whose purpose of spreading an interest in economics led to the publication of a large number of informative texts such as books and book series, handbooks, encyclopaedias and specialized dictionaries. Between 1850 and 1860 Francesco Ferrara, the Sicilian economist, edited the Biblioteca dell’Economista (BE), a collection of ec…

Sharing Mare Nostrum: An analysis of Mediterranean maritime history articles in English-language journals

2015

This discussion paper is a follow-up to a previous bibliometric analysis of articles published in The International Journal of Maritime History and maritime-themed articles published in other economic and business history journals over the last 25 years. The paper looks more closely at articles dealing with the Mediterranean and articles written by scholars from the Mediterranean countries. The article is structured around five propositions about current trends in Mediterranean maritime history publishing in English-language journals. nonPeerReviewed

Los hábitos lectores en inglés de futuros maestros: Implicaciones didácticas

2014

Se presenta un estudio exploratorio y descriptivo sobre los hábitos lectores en inglés de estudiantes universitarios españoles para detectar cuáles son las áreas de atención prioritaria para poder seguir un Grado en inglés según el EEES. Se midió el nivel de inglés mediante el Oxford Online Placement Test. Se evaluaron los hábitos lectores y el tipo de materiales académicos que los estudiantes leen en inglés mediante un cuestionario. Gran parte de la muestra se encontraba en los niveles elementales e intermedios de dominio del inglés. Un porcentaje muy elevado de estudiantes declaró no tener el hábito de leer en inglés y leer solo materiales académicos obligatorios. Sin embargo, existe una …

"Por si las flais, ni flowers y en off": morphology of loanwords from english as idiomatic words in spanish idioms.

2020

En el presente artículo pretendemos ofrecer un análisis de la configuración formal de un tipo muy concreto de palabras idiomáticas: tres préstamos léxicos procedentes de la lengua inglesa que sobreviven insertos en locuciones españolas. Para ello, delimitaremos en primer lugar los conceptos de palabra idiomática, préstamo léxico y anglicismo. A continuación explicaremos el procedimiento metodológico para recopilar este tipo de piezas léxicas en dos diccionarios generales actuales del español, el DLE y el DEA, basado en el especial tratamiento lexicográfico que estas reciben debido a sus características, limitándonos a las unidades fraseológicas que conocemos como locuciones. Realizaremos un…

The English Pronunciation Teaching in Europe Survey : Factors Inside and Outside the Classroom

2015

In the past two decades, a number of studies have looked at how English pronunciation is taught, focusing on teaching practices, materials, training and attitudes to native speaker models from both the teachers’ and the learners’ perspective. Most of these studies have been conducted in English-speaking countries such as the USA (Murphy, 1997), Great Britain (Bradford and Kenworthy, 1991; Burgess and Spencer, 2000), Canada (Breitkreutz, Derwing and Rossiter, 2001; Foote, Holtby and Derwing, 2011), Ireland (Murphy, 2011) and Australia (Couper, 2011; Macdonald, 2002). In Europe, pronunciation teaching has been studied in Spain (Walker, 1999) and, more recently, in Finland (Tergujeff, 2012, 20…

Polysemy in Controlled Natural Language Texts

2015

Computational semantics and logic-based controlled natural languages (CNL) do not address systematically the word sense disambiguation problem of content words, i.e., they tend to interpret only some functional words that are crucial for construction of discourse representation structures. We show that micro-ontologies and multi-word units allow integration of the rich and polysemous multi-domain background knowledge into CNL thus providing interpretation for the content words. The proposed approach is demonstrated by extending the Attempto Controlled English (ACE) with polysemous and procedural constructs resulting in a more natural CNL named PAO covering narrative multi-domain texts.

2020

In order to ensure the concentration, compliance and motivation of the participants, a short version of 12 items was extracted from the “Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire (ECR)”. Even though this short English version shows equally good validity and reliability as the long version, there have been no representative norm values and psychometric characteristics available for the short version in German. Therefore, the German 12-item ECR was implemented in a representative sample of 1,127 males and 1,237 females (mean age M = 49.93; SD = 12.31) from the general public (N = 2,364). The reliability values of the German 12-item ECR in the representative sample are not as good as th…