Difficulty For Readers Research Articles

A Speech Acts Analysis of English COVID-19 News Headlines

News headlines are key elements in spreading news. They are unique texts written in a special language which enables readers understand the overall nature and importance of the topic. However, this special language causes difficulty for readers in understanding the headline. To illuminate this difficulty, it is argued that a pragmatic analysis from a speech act theory perspective is a plausible tool for a headline analysis. The main objective of the study is to pragmatically analyze the most frequently employed types of speech acts in the news headlines covering COVID-19 in Aljazeera English website. To this end, Bach and Harnish's (1979) Taxonomy of Speech Acts has been adopted to analyze the data. Thirty headlines have been collected from Aljazeera English news website. The findings have shown that constatives and directives occur more frequently than commissives. Other types, like acknowledgments, effectives and verdictives are not employed. The study has concluded that to pay a special emphasis on COVID-19 as an issue that preoccupied and endangered the world, headline writers of Aljazeera website uses specific speech acts, constatives and directives, more frequently than others. This makes it clear that using specific speech acts in writing headlines is an effective way for inspiring readers to easily understand the intended message.

한국어 성경의 ‘요람’과 ‘여호람’ 번역에 관한 소고

In the Old Testament, the son of Ahab king of Israel appears as Joram and Jehoram. Also, the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah appears as Jehoram and also as Joram. In this paper, we look at how these two names are used in the Bible, and how the patterns of use and translation of the two names can cause difficulties for readers. The texts of KJV, CEV, NIV, ESV, ZB and Hebrew BHS were examined to clarify this problem and to find a solution. Among Korean Bible translations, New Korean Revised Version (NKRV), Revised New Korean Standard Version (RNKSV), and Common Translation of the Holy Bible (CTHB) were examined to see how each translation translated these names. And we looked at how the two people using the two names could cause confusion for the reader, and how to adjust or revise the translation in order to make it less confusing.<BR> In the Hebrew text, the son of Ahab king of Israel is marked as Joram, but it is translated in 2 Kings 1:17b; 3:1a and 6 as Jehoram in the NKRV. It was therefore suggested to adjust them to Joram.<BR> Among the places in the Hebrew text where the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah is marked as Joram, i.e., 2 Kings 11:2 and 1 Chronicles 3:11 in the NKRV, the translation into Joram was proposed to be adjusted to Jehoram.<BR> In the New Testament where Joram appears twice in Matthew 1:8, it was proposed to adjust the Joram the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah to Jehoram.<BR> Jehoram in 1 Chronicles 12:8 of the CTHB is an error of Jeroha(ירתם). Joram in 1 Kings 22:51 of the CTHB is also the translation of the Hebrew word Jehoram (יחורם), and its actual content is Jehoram (son of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah in the southern kingdom, father of Azariah). It was suggested to correct the translation of these two places.

Smart bookcase based on image recognition

With the improvement of people’s living standards, the demand for books and the efficiency and accuracy of accessing books are also increasing. Because the information displayed to readers on the library management system is the position of the book when it is neatly arranged, sometimes the position of the book is inconsistent with the actual position of the book, which increases the difficulty for readers to find the target book. The traditional bookcase has a simple structure, and it takes a certain amount of time to search for books on weekdays. In view of the time-consuming situation of borrowing books, and in order to make it convenient for borrowers to find books, it is extremely important to develop a new type of networkable smart bookcase for libraries.

The End of the Line? Alliterative Meter, Macaronic Style, and Piers Plowman

Surviving in three distinct authorial versions (A, B, and C) and over sixty manuscripts, including complete texts of each version, spliced texts of two or more versions, fragments, and excerpts, William Langland's Piers Plowman presents exceptional difficulties for readers, bibliographers, and textual critics. Sporadically throughout the text, both the medieval scribes who copied the poem and the modern scholars who propose to edit its three versions have disagreed about where one poetic line ends and the next begins. Uncertainty about the end of the line throws into doubt all other textual and literary discriminations, so the two case studies in mislineation of multilingual lines considered in this essay (B.13.19 / C.15.21–22 and B.15.69 / C.16.229–30) illustrate a larger swath of interpretive problems in this recalcitrant medieval text.

Move Analysis of the English Bachelor Thesis Abstracts Written by Indonesians

Due to the global era, bachelor thesis abstracts written by non-native English speakers (Indonesians) from non-English departments in Indonesia are usually written in two languages, i.e. Indonesian and English. The English bachelor thesis abstracts are mostly the translated ones from Indonesian and do not always follow the features of abstract genre. This study aims at examining the rhetorical moves of English bachelor thesis abstracts written by students from non-English departments. The data consisted of twenty abstracts selected randomly from hard and social science departments of Universitas Muria Kudus. The analysis employed Hyland’s five rhetorical move model. The study reveals that most English bachelor thesis abstracts did not follow the five rhetorical moves. The absence of some rhetorical moves in the English bachelor thesis abstracts may lead to the communicative purposes not achieved and thus might cause difficulty for readers to understand the study.Keywords: move, English bachelor thesis abstract, Indonesians

EFL Students’ Difficulties in Metaphor Comprehension: A Case from Korean College Students

Metaphors, usually regarded as “culturally-loaded,” are likely to cause more difficulties for readers, especially those from different cultural backgrounds, as shared knowledge is required to fully understand them (Littlemore, 2003). Based on this assumption, this study aims to examine specifically what clues readers use to interpret L2 metaphors and how Korean college students struggle with L2 reading. Through qualitative analysis, this study seeks to identify exactly what makes metaphor-reading easy or difficult for its participants. After completing a questionnaire and a reading task, participants were asked how they responded to the reading task, followed by a semi-structured interview. The findings reveal that in order to infer metaphorical meanings, Korean college students looked at syntactic structure, images of the metaphors, literal translation, and grammatical structure. In addition, culture and context appeared as factors affecting the relative ease or difficulty with which participants understood the metaphors in the reading task. Word knowledge also appeared as another important factor affecting understanding, functioning both as a cue and a hindrance as participants interpreted metaphors. In terms of the pedagogical implications, instructors’ primary focus on easily imaginable metaphors is highly recommended. Then, materials or teaching methods assisting the memorization of them can be also complementarily used.

Nursing documentation: How meaning is obscured by fragmentary language

This article looks at the effect of using fragmentary language in nursing documentation. Fragmentary language is defined as phrases and abbreviations found in records of nursing care that are understood at the local ward level but would make it difficult for anyone reading the documentation beyond this local level to construct meaning. Sixty-seven entries of nursing documentation were investigated using textual analysis. Each entry was examined to determine how grammatical and linguistic features of the text could impede meaning. Three entries are discussed in detail to demonstrate possible difficulty for readers in understanding the patient’s condition and care. Education programs that encourage nurses to view their documentation as a crucial aspect of care are recommended. Writing nursing documentation in a manner that allows readers from both within and outside the profession to understand the patient’s condition and care required is supported. If readers cannot understand what is written in nursing documentation, there is a danger that misinterpretations could lead to clinical errors and adverse events.

INTRODUCTION: TIMING OF LITERACY INSTRUCTION CAN SPELL SUCCESS

Perhaps the best way to overcome learning difficulties for readers and writers is to provide solid teaching in the classroom from the very beginning. While we may not turn back the clock to elimina...

Nuruddin Farah's Maps: Deterritorialization and "The Postmodern"

By CHARLES SUGNET Nuruddin Farah's Maps has been widely appreciated for its brilliant exploration of the connections between national partition, gender identity, and narrative form. And the book has been fortunate enough to receive criticism worthy of its complexity, such as Rhonda Cobham's of the Nation, Boundaries of the Self: African Nationalist Fictions and Nuruddin Farah's There remains, however, certain critical unease and uncertainty about Maps, about the novel's difficulty for readers, about why Farah chose to alternate among first-, second-, and third-person narration, and about what it means for an African novelist to be what Derek Wright calls a thoroughgoing postmodernist (1997, 194). Operating on Borges's principle that each writer chooses his own predecessors, I want to examine certain affinities that Farah has expressed for specific writers, rather than addressing him as generic case of the postmodern. Such tracing will reveal that the European postmodernists to whom Farah alludes are often those writing from situations of exile, deterritorialization, and national partition, and that the postmodern in Farah's work is not case of metropolitan insight flowing from the center to the less-developed peripheries, but rather case of affinity between writers confronting analogous situations. Understanding Farah's work may help us better appreciate what is at stake in Beckett's trilogy, as well as the other way around. Such tracing may also offer some insight about the logic behind Farah's shifting pronouns in Maps. (For the last word on relations between postmodern and postcolonial, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's essay Is the Tost-' in TostcoloniaP the Tost-' in 'Postmodern'?)

Linguistic Complexity and Text Comprehension: Readability Issues Reconsidered

Standard readability formulas are widely accepted as reliable means of determining text difficulty for readers. This book examines the shortcomings of these formulas, both for professionals who try to use these formulas to match texts with readers and for others who study how language is understood. Language comprehension experts in cognitive psychology, education, and linguistics present alternative viewpoints concerning the issue of effective readability predictors. The long-term result: new questions raised by the research in this book should help to make texts more comprehensible and to provide a theoretically sound model of language processing and interpretation.

Problems of LiberalismNOMOS XXV: Liberal Democracy. J. Roland Pennock , John W. Chapman

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssaysProblems of Liberalism NOMOS XXV: Liberal Democracy. J. Roland Pennock , John W. Chapman Carole PatemanCarole Pateman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 96, Number 2Jan., 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/292754 Views: 32Total views on this site Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Dubos-Dubois Dichotomy

ABSTRACT To the Editor.— The letter to the editor by Roger W. Pease, Jr, PhD (242:413, 1979), continues a laudable tradition of examining the historical and current usage of words. Unfortunately, in this case, it also has propagated further fumbles that might cause difficulties for readers wishing to investigate the sources.Pease cites R. Dubois—who never did and never will have an i in his last name—as having written Mankind Evolving (New Haven, Conn, Yale University Press, 1962). It was written by Theodosious Dobzhansky and published by the same press as Man Adapting, by Rene Dubos, in 1965.Whether credit for the new sense of multifactorial is due to Dubos or to Dobzhansky I leave to Dr Pease to discover. I have to go back to work now.