Choice Of English Research Articles

EVALUATING TEACHER’S USE OF L1 IN ENGLISH EDUCATION PROGRAMS FOR UNDERGRADUATES IN CHINA

This paper delves into the contentious issue of language choice in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms, particularly focusing on whether teachers should use students' first language (L1) or exclusively employ English (L2). The debate surrounding this topic has persisted for years, with proponents of L2 immersion arguing for increased English input to enhance language proficiency, while others advocate for the multifaceted roles L1 can play in the learning process. Adopting questionnaires and a focus group interview to analyze the current state of English teaching for undergraduates in Chinese universities, this study reveals the challenges faced by students, including dissatisfaction with existing teaching methods and their own proficiency levels. The research sheds light on the prevalent bilingual approach employed by teachers, balancing English and Chinese based on specific classroom situations. Despite efforts to implement monolingual classrooms, challenges arise due to linguistic diversity among students and the complexities of teaching intricate concepts solely in English. The paper also examines historical pedagogical methods, emphasizing the use of L1 to facilitate understanding and emotional connection, and contrasting approaches advocating maximal L2 input. By critically assessing language choice based on teaching goals, students' needs, and contextual factors, educators can strike a delicate balance, fostering linguistic development and preparing students for the globalized world effectively. This study emphasizes the importance of justifying language choices in ESL classrooms, ensuring a conducive learning environment while optimizing language input for students' benefit.

Advantages and disadvantages o the establishment of local self-government in the Federal Republic of Germany during the First World War

The scientific article is devoted to the issue of researching the advantages and disadvantages of the formation and development of local self­government in Germany in the period before the First World War, when it was Germany that chose the model of local self-government. The article reveals the main issues of the genesis of local self-government in Germany. The article reveals the issues of legislative regulation of local self­government in Germany at various historical stages. The scientific article states that by the end of the 19th century. only Prussia retained open voting, and other parts of the German Empire implemented secret voting; the principles of counting votes also differed; with the same number of votes, a draw was held; in Bavaria and Baden at the beginning of the 20th century. the system of proportional representation was introduced. The article stated that the specified period included demands for universal secret direct suffrage for all German citizens aged 20 and over, proportional elections, full provincial, district and community self-government through officials elected on the basis of universal suffrage, and stipulated the abolition of all local governments appointed by the state. The struggle for universal suffrage is revealed, gender policy in the field of local self­government is given, in particular, the possibility of women to participate in the work of executive commissions that dealt with issues of care, public education and sanitation at local authorities, and the legislative prerequisites for this are indicated. It was determined that during the creation of the German model of local self-government in the 19th century. English local self-government was taken as a model. The article examines the implementation of bureaucratic decentralization and integration of local self-government into the system of state authorities. It was stated that the corresponding period in Germany was spent in search of a suitable model of implementation of local government, the choice of English or French in particular.

‘Oh, Hello Word!’ Boundary Crossing Between Swedish and English

ABSTRACT This essay reports on the findings of a study of Swedish teenagers who have a free-time interest of creative writing in English. The essay includes extracts from interviews in which the participants explain their motivations to start their writing activity and continue with it over a longer period. Having been inspired initially by a desire to imitate and adapt stories they had read, the teenagers’ interest in writing became a vehicle to help them understand experiences and deal with emotions. The essay includes some consideration of these findings in the light of Vygotskian ideas about art and literature. I also discuss the young people’s choice of English as a language for their creativity. As well as highlighting the teenagers’ insights, I reflect over my own move from England to Sweden and what it has taught me about learning languages and teaching English.

Sociopolitical Dimensions of English in Nepal

Nepal is an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) country where teaching and learning of English was disallowed under the Ranas for political reason while English took root in the rest of South Asia under the British colonial dispensation for over two centuries. English was adopted as a useful tool to enhance Nepal’s standing and to strengthen its relations with the outside world after the Ranas were removed from ower in 1951. This research paper dwells on how choosing English for use in a nation for education, business and foreign relations constitutes a political act and how Nepal’s political history guided the resistance to use English in the nation and how the changed political scenario pushed the country to adopt teaching and learning of English in a big way. Political thinking even determines how the choice of English is described at the official level to camouflage it as a purely nationalistic invention dubbing it as one of the U.N. languages which Nepal as a member must master to play its role in the world body. This research paper seeks to highlight the context of EFL in Nepal in the past fifty years, describes the modes of teaching and learning of English in the country and tries to demonstrate that English in Nepal does not fall under the nstitutionalized variety of English such as Indian or South Asian English.

Complex motivations of Japanese medical students to an online medical English course during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background: In response to globalism, many East-Asian countries now include a Medical English course in their undergraduate medical education syllabus. Traditional didactic educational culture is a potential barrier for teaching and learning medical English in East-Asian countries. Online technology-based learning has been recognized as an effective instructional strategy for teaching medical English in the East. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the related attribute factors of students' motivation to learn medical English through an online modality. Methods: Of 134 eligible fourth-year medical students who participated in an online medical English course at a Japanese medical school, 105 were enrolled in this single cohort study. The participants completed pre- and post-course surveys regarding their motivation during the course, including perceived academic control and task value, and their assignment scores. A structural equation model was used to examine the hypothesized relationship of constructs, based on control-value theory. Results: The model showed a good fit for the data (χ 2[df=7] = 1.821, p=0.969, CFI = 1.000, RMSEA < 0.001, SRMR < 0.05, GFI = 0.993, AGFI = 0.980). The latent variables of the perceived course achievement related to the observed variables of academic control and task value scale scores, and negatively predicted willingness for self-study after course completion. In addition, the preference of English as the course language negatively predicted willingness for self-study of medical English. Conclusion: Choice of English as the language of instruction and perceived high course achievement negatively predicted students’ motivation for further English self-study after the class. The importance of incorporating the perspective of lifelong learning into the teaching of medical English was recognized.

Het 'verengelsende' hoger onderwijs in de praktijk: een casestudy aan de UHasselt

The choice for Dutch as the language of instruction and communication in higher education is under increasing pressure in Dutch-speaking regions. Quantitative data on the choice of English as the language of instruction form the starting point for the debate on advantages and disadvantages of this development. In view of this discussion, it is interesting to gain more insight into how English is used in higher education in practice. This paper is devoted to a case study at Hasselt University. We focus on aspects of English as the medium of instruction in relation to the quality of education and phenomena that occur in the practice of teaching. The results are based on questionnaires into the appreciation of students about English-taught courses and interviews with professors who report on their experiences with English-medium instruction

Complex motivations of Japanese medical students to an online medical English course during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: In response to globalism, many East-Asian countries now include a Medical English course in their undergraduate medical education syllabus. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the related attribute factors of students' motivation to learn medical English through an online modality. Methods: Of 134 eligible fourth-year medical students who participated in an Online Medical English course at a Japanese medical school, 105 were enrolled in this single cohort study. The participants completed pre- and post-course surveys regarding their motivation during the course, including perceived academic control and task value, and their assignment scores. A structural equation model was used to examine the hypothesized relationship of constructs, based on control-value theory. Results: The model showed a good fit for the data (χ 2[df=7] = 1.821, p=0.969, CFI = 1.000, RMSEA < 0.001, SRMR < 0.05, GFI = 0.993, AGFI = 0.980). The latent variables of the perceived course achievement related to the observed variables of academic control and task value scale scores, and negatively predicted willingness for self-study after course completion. In addition, the preference of English as the course language negatively predicted willingness for self-study of medical English. Conclusion: Choice of English as the language of instruction and perceived high course achievement negatively predicted students' motivation for further English self-study after the class. The importance of incorporating the perspective of lifelong learning into the teaching of medical English was recognized.

It is all about TOEIC: discovering topics and trends in employee perceptions of corporate language policy

ABSTRACT Globalisation poses a challenge for businesses with linguistically diverse staff, prompting the choice of English as the default corporate language. Although many studies extensively explored the role of corporate language policy in large corporations, employees' perceptions of such policy has not been explored adequately. Fewer studies investigate the trends in such perceptions in social media texts. This study fills this gap; it examines the barriers in multinational companies that have adopted a foreign language and analyses employees' attitudes. The study uses computer-assisted text analysis to investigate changes in employees' perceptions of an English-only policy in Rakuten, a Japanese company. It analyses a corpus of 704 social media posts on OpenWork from 2010 to 2018. The study finds some trends in employees' attitudes such as the inconsistency between expectation and reality in terms of ‘Englishnization’ and the popularity of the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The findings suggest that Rakuten is not global in the true sense; the value of the TOEIC score is overestimated and the neoliberal employment system affects employees in complex ways. This study contributes to international business language with a bottom-up, employee-centred, and diachronic perspective on language management.

На гребні економічної освітньої, наукової та виховної роботи

The article is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the south-eastern Ukraine – Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University. The achievements and contribution of LNU in the fields of pedagogy, history, geography, philology and linguistics, physics and mathematics, and Olympic sports are widely known in Ukraine and abroad. At the level of the best achievements there are also achievements of Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University in the field of economic science, which is shown by the example of the modern department of economics, marketing and entrepreneurship. The author makes an attempt to establish historical justice in the history of world economics: to prove the unsurpassed importance of the developments of the former head of the department Vasily Antonovich Bader. In the late 1960 s, in parallel with the world-famous Ota Šik, in the context of the theory of "market socialism" he substantiated the doom and disintegration of the socialist economic system and its transformation into a market economy (much later, under other economic and socio-political conditions, Deng Xiaoping, the father of the "Opening of China", came to similar views). At the beginning of the 2000s, for the first time in Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe, the department introduced a process of organizational and economic combination of research and educational activities – the establishment of a branch of the Institute of Industrial Economics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine at the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University. With the beginning of the war in Donbass, the department became the first and only in Ukraine, on the basis of which was established a communication and consulting support center for leading international charitable organizations in Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The department has developed one of the first in Ukraine concepts of "Marshall Plan" for the Revival of the Donbas". The academic mobility experience of the department gained via the Visiting Professor program in teaching professional disciplines in Poland to students from the European Union, Asia and Africa under the ERASMUS+ Program is unique. Innovative are the practices of participation in the most prestigious European scientific and practical research projects, encouragement on a regular basis to the domestic educational process of leading entrepreneurs, teaching disciplines of free choice in English and cooperation with public authorities.

Intermediary languages at the stage of pre-university training

The article considers the intermediary function of languages used at the stage of preparation of foreign applicants for admission to Russian universities. In a situation when the majority of foreigners’ proficiency of the Russian language is not satisfactory, the process of studying special disciplines is significantly slowed down, and the lack of subject knowledge does not allow foreign students to successfully master their chosen specialty. In order to overcome these difficulties and solve the problem of providing students with initial subject knowledge, various forms of presentation of the material are used, but often they can be effective only if an intermediary language is used in the classroom – a common language that is more or less familiar to all the participants in the educational process. For this purpose, English is more often used in modern education. The choice of English as an intermediary language is explained by the role it plays in international communication and its wide representation in the educational process. Since there are different views in linguodidactics on the ways, methods, and “order” of introducing foreign language knowledge, special attention is paid to the expediency –inexpediency of using an intermediary language at different stages of teaching Russian in groups with heterogeneous ethnic composition. The conclusion is made about the importance of the designated problem and the need for its further development within the framework of ethnolinguistics and linguodidactics.

ІННОВАЦІЙНИЙ ЗМІСТ НАВЧАННЯ ТА КУЛЬТУРА ВИВЧЕННЯ ІНОЗЕМНОЇ МОВИ

The article shows the ways how to make the combination of lexical aspect, grammar, style with the art, authentic literature, the discussion of facts in the free, friendly atmosphere, which have a big impact on public and individual opinions, developing a more nature-like vocabulary. The problem is that a lot of teachers use only the classroom for their work and manuals they have got for it. It does not make the educational process interesting and it does not push the students to raise their level of knowledge. The task is that it needs to seek for another ways of education. The aims of this article are to consider the importance roleplaying practice for analysis of authentic text after visiting theatre, to create the images of characters, use facts of the history and make closer them to the reality, applicate the original text, analyze the language together with the teacher, define the role of the teacher in innovation process of the education. Learners need to develop a critical eye for analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing new information, the differences in styles of native language and English, reading the authentic literature of the authors the language of whom they study. The material analysis namely the best methods which are used for more intensive meaning of English, stimulation of students and achievement of positive results offer the teacher a wide range of actions and methods in such processing. The conversations which are widely accepted in the methodology must be compounded not only with lexical material, grammar, phonetics but also with the art for general outlook, theatrical creation in the roleplays, abilities to show their activities in the confidence manner on the imaginary scene with the audience in friendly atmosphere, with free usage of language on the base of theatrical imagination, learning the authentic material [1-7]. Such work helps students to research idiom origin, slang, synonyms and discuss word choice in English to enlarge their vocabulary. This article confirms that the best way is to develop discussion skills through roleplay after attending theatre. Students share ideas with their partners and with the other group in the form of pyramid. The role of the teacher is to attend theatre with the group of students, to facilitate the choice of the ideas for discussion, provide language skills and encourage confidence. The urgency of this article lays in the fact that the present educational process uses not only traditional methods of teaching English but enough innovational ones which carry out linguistic, psychological, general educational, country research, culturally educational aspects.

Should I stay or should I go? Predictors and effects of studying abroad during high school

In an increasingly globalized and culturally diverse world, extended stays abroad during high school are considered important opportunities for acquiring and improving a variety of skills, most importantly, language achievement. This study examines both predictors and effects of studying abroad in an English-speaking country during high school, using population data from the second largest city in Germany (N = 5361; 13% went abroad). In order to determine the most central predictors of studying abroad, we employed logistic regression models in which students’ socioeconomic background emerged as the strongest predictor of studying abroad. To test the effects of studying abroad, we applied propensity score matching. Studying abroad had positive effects on standardized achievement, grades, and course choice in English, whereas it had hardly any effects on outcomes in math. Implications for studying abroad during high school and future research directions are discussed.

Translanguaging and multimodality in workplace texts and writing

ABSTRACT Professionals working in international companies in Sweden are expected to speak, read, and write in Swedish and English in their daily work. This article discusses professional writing in different languages. Through the use of methods from linguistic ethnography, we aim to enrich the understanding of workplace literacy by studying writing and texts in multilingual business contexts. Our results show that professionals are expected to navigate between a translanguaging mode and a more monolingual mode in everyday communication. Also, when they opt for producing monolingual texts, literacy practices that surround those texts are often multilingual. Moreover, they imagine a future, secondary audience for their texts, often resulting in the choice of English for reaching out, or in the choice of Swedish as a way of keeping matters local. Knowing when to choose a translanguaging mode or a more monolingual mode is a necessary skill or competence in this type of workplace. Our results also show that the use of multimodal resources includes the material placement of texts, and that old materialities such as pen and paper are still essential. Different linguistic and semiotic resources are used, including resources from academic, business and personal discourse.

The Choice of English Forms and Pragmatic Motivation----Taking Propose as an Example

The Choice of English Forms and Pragmatic Motivation----Taking Propose as an Example

Diachronic Reevaluation of Translation Procedures

Abstract Today’s world has necessitated changes in almost every aspect of our lives. Technological advancements have fundamentally challenged the routines that many of us took for granted and did not observe as transmutable. Was translation an exception? A principal idea behind writing this paper is to take a step back and soar above the every dynamics in order to get an adequate vista over translation theorizing/theories and the actual decision making in translation activity. The objective is not to offer solutions but rather to involve in theory-based translation argumentation through the analysis and discussion of commonly authentic translational files. Language has many functions and takes varying forms depending on the situation in which it is used. Any attempt to offer an in-depth analysis of the theory-practice boundary imposes the choice of a language pair where the different aspects of translation can be explored with ease and insight. The choice of English and Serbian as the relevant pair hardly needs any justification with English being an international lingua franca and Serbian being used in large swaths of the Balkan peninsula. Another main motivation for writing this paper is to accommodate for the renewed and booming interest in translation in the Balkan peninsula both at the practical and academic levels.

The choice of English as a home language in urban Ghana

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we investigate the choice of English as a home language in Ghana, a multilingual nation where 81 languages are spoken by a population of about 27 million people. In the past, while English was reserved as the de facto language of official domains, e.g., government business and education, Ghanaian languages were used in informal domains such as homes, markets and churches. Recent research and observations show a gradual shift from the use of indigenous languages in some informal domains to the use of the English language, especially in urban centres. This study uses audio-recordings, questionnaires and observations to gather data from 20 homes from 2 geographically and socio-economically distinct urban communities in Accra. The findings of the study show that economic status, age, inter-ethnic marriages and educational background are the main factors influencing the choice of English as a home language in urban Ghana. Other factors, such as the media, the language in education policies and the use of the internet, also play a role in the use of English in Ghanaian homes.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF ENGLISH ABILITY AND CAREER MOBILITY

The aims of this study are to find out how the individual‘s own language competences affect career mobility and to find out how the common language acts as a facilitator for career mobility. The qualitative research method is used in this study. Interviews with personnel from the case organization, provide the opportunity to observe the views and experiences of the interviewees and to find out how they fit in to the prior research done on this subject. The empirical research on the common corporate language strategy as facilitator or barrier for career mobility implicated that the choice of English as common corporate language was generally seen as a facilitator for career mobility and as the facilitators‘ positive effect on career mobility also influenced the employee‘s subjective as well the objective measures of career success

Attitudes and identities in learning English and Chinese as a lingua franca: a bilingual learners’ perspective

ABSTRACTWith increasing global demand for English and Chinese language education, the existence of linguistic variation in (and varieties of) both languages has focused scholarly attention on the choice of language standards, norms and models. Using in-depth focus group interviews, this study compared bilingual learners’ choice of English and Putonghua learning targets and examined their language attitudes and identities in relation to these two ‘big’ languages, both of which have played important roles in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong. The findings revealed that the participants held a hierarchical attitude (i.e. native speaker ideology) towards English but not Putonghua, and identified four key factors affecting their choice of language learning targets, namely (1) the language’s status and instrumental value, (2) the perceived attainability of the target, (3) practical communication needs and (4) the learner’s cultural identity. These results shed light on the local and global status of the two languages and subsequently on the identity construction of Hong Kong people. By comparing the attitudinal patterns of learners towards the world’s two ‘big’ languages, this paper argues for the possibility of applying a World Englishes-oriented framework to the study of Chinese, given its increasing global visibility, linguistic variation and extensive use around the world.

Outobiografie en herinnering as verset in Adam Small se The Orange Earth

The Orange Earth is discussed here as a fictionalised autobiographical account in which the Afrikaans poet and playwright, Adam Small, reflects on the impact of apartheid, creating a counternarrative of a marginalised life during that political system. In the play, presented essentially as a play of ideas, the Coloured main character Johnny Adams, the fictionalised alter ego of the author, plants a bomb that kills a white child and much of the action involves his rationalization of his deed of terror. The play references the cultural and linguistic relationship between Coloured and white Afrikaans-speaking people, and the former’s humiliation and exclusion under the apartheid policy. It is argued inter alia that Small’s choice of English as a language of literary expression could be interpreted as part of a counterdiscourse on cultural disaffection and political disillusion just as his option of urban violence as a solution to apartheid, his “cry for citizenship”, amounts to a desperate act rather than one of revolutionary violence. The article concludes with a discussion on the multiple meanings associated with the title that serves as a metaphor for the countermemory of Small’s narrative.

Paris Berlin New York: The Color of the City by Mark Miscovich

Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories. Trans. Srinivas Rayaprol. Goa, India. Under the Peepal Tree. 2016. 192 pages. Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories is a collection of nineteen short stories by as many authors (sixteen men and three women), selected and translated from the Telugu by Srinivas Rayaprol (1925–98), arguably one of postcolonial India’s most interesting and least-appreciated anglophone poets. Telugu, a Dravidian language spoken by some seventy-five million people in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, was Rayaprol’s father tongue as well as his father’s literary medium. This may explain his choice of English, and American English, over British models. His father, the distinguished poet, scholar, and academic Rayaprolu Subbarao, was a great admirer and translator of English Romantic poetry. Back in India, he founded and edited a short-lived but important literary magazine , East and West, and published three collections of poetry in three decades, eventually turning his creative attention and skills to the translation of modern and contemporary Telugu poetry and short fiction . At the time of his premature death, he had contributed to various anthologies and prepared at least one selection of his own. The present volume was “nearly finished ” when Rayaprol’s daughter, and manager of the Rayaprol Literary Trust, asked the editors to prepare the manuscript for publication. In their prefatory note, they explain how the translator’s method was “so radically different” from their own that they “decided not to tamper ” with it, simply ensuring consistency across the entire volume. They further point out how the selection “seems to be purely personal” and its arrangement “unique, for it defies chronology.” In reality, Rayaprol’s choices are fairly representative of what scholars and critics tend to see as the single most significant subject in modern Telugu fiction, namely the condition of women in India’s rapidly developing society. Most and some of the best stories are about women (although not always written by women), whether they have female protagonists or subjects or address various (and variously disguised) representations of femininity and its discontents. More relevant—and revealing—than the selection of the stories, though, is their arrangement, which is indeed “unique” although in a different and deeper sense than what is indicated by the editors. By juxtaposing stories with obvious affinities and stories linked by more intimate, subtle , and subterranean meanings, Rayaprol effectively invites readings that are both complementary and alternative to those suggested by previous anthologies of the same kind. This makes the present volume an important addition to both Telugu fiction in English translation and to Rayaprol ’s body of published work. Graziano Krätli North Haven, Connecticut Wolfgang Hermann. Paris Berlin New York: The Color of the City. Trans. Mark Miscovich. Greenville, South Carolina. KBR. 2016. 217 pages. Western literature is full of accounts of vagrancy and tales of the flâneur. So why would we need yet another? Wolfgang Hermann’s Paris Berlin New York, collected here in one translated volume with a critical essay by Mark Miscovich, is a work that exceeds expectations and proves that the theme is anything but exhausted. In fact, Hermann’s book situates him in the same orbit as Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as the postmodern master W. G. Sebald. In terms of writing style, Hermann’s is closer to Baudelaire’s than the others, despite carrying the feeling of being absolutely contemporary. Paris Berlin New York reads more like prose poems than a series of short stories. What the reader gets is a series of snapshots of place, often eerily uncanny places like those that arrive in dreams. Reading Hermann is like grasping at the residue of a dream that stays with us just long enough to either make a suggestion or leave an ephemeral imprint on our consciousness. The book is divided into four sections . “Paris,” “Berlin,” and “New York,” which make up the first three sections, are told in the first person, and the narrator wanders those cities like a ghost moving through the walls of some ancient ancestral home. There is a sadness, an errancy, to these pieces...