English Print Research Articles

Media portrayal of sexual violence in Pakistan: A critical discourse analysis of the Lahore-Sialkot motorway incident

Sexual violence against women is one of the serious social concerns that still persist across the world in its various forms and manifestations. This study talks about the portrayal of the gang-rape of a woman in Pakistani English Print media who was travelling on the Lahore-Sialkot Motorway when her car ran out of petrol where two armed men came along and raped her. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Transitivity analysis from Halliday's systemic functional linguistics is utilized to explore the language used by leading Pakistani English newspapers to report the incident. Moreover, the study examines how print media affects the opinion of the people towards the incidents of sexual violence against women in Pakistan. These discursive features of a language enable us to see deep into the thought-processes of the people of a society. The paper concludes that reporting on violence against women shapes and is shaped by the approach of the people towards women and the forms of violence against them.

The Impact of English Printed Books on Improving Students’ English Reading Skills in Twelve Years of Basic Education in Remote Areas: A Case Study of Muhanga District, Rwanda

The Impact of English Printed Books on Improving Students’ English Reading Skills in Twelve Years of Basic Education in Remote Areas: A Case Study of Muhanga District, Rwanda

A macroscope of English print culture, 1530–1700, applied to the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions

Abstract We combine unsupervised machine learning and econometric methods to study England’s print culture in the pivotal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machine learning synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. Topics include the expected, such as Natural Philosophy, and the unexpected, such as Baconian Theology. Timelines suggest that religious and political discourse gradually became less antagonistic and economic topics more prominent. The epistemology associated with Bacon was present in theological debates already before Bacon’s epistemological contributions. Vector autoregression estimates provide insight into the coevolution of ideas on religion, science, and institutions. Innovations in religious ideas stimulated focus on science, especially at times when Puritanism was prominent in religious discourse. Neither science nor institutional thought evidence secularization. The Glorious Revolution and the Civil War did not spur debates on institutions nor did the founding of the Royal Society markedly elevate attention to science.

Print Media Coverage of Climate Change Crisis in Pakistan: A Comparative Study of Two Newspapers Dawn and Daily Times

The coverage of the climate change crisis in two elite Pakistani English print media outlets, Dawn and Daily Times, is examined in this study. Considering the importance of climate change as a worldwide concern, understanding how it is depicted in the media is critical for raising awareness and affecting public opinion. The study looks at the frequency, themes, and framing of climate change-related articles in these newspapers using content analysis. The study compares the two newspapers to shed light on the variations and similarities in their reporting as well as to analyse the degree of coverage of this critical issue. Political and economic stories received prominent coverage, signifying the media’s acknowledgement of the role played by policymaking, politics, and the economic implications associated with climate change. Moreover, in terms of geographical focus, both newspapers demonstrated a prioritization of reporting on national climate change issues. The implementation of the NDCs long-term plan has exerted a discernible influence on the coverage of climate change-related stories in both newspapers. Notably, after the adoption of the NDCs plan, both Dawn and Daily Times have increased their coverage of climate change issues, thereby indicating the plan’s substantial impact on media attention and reporting.

Gender Equality in the “Next Stage” of the “New Age?” Content and Fan Perceptions of English Media Coverage of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup

This article offers an original contribution by examining both the quantity and quality of English print media coverage of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup and how fans perceive and respond to this coverage. It is the first longitudinal analysis of media coverage of women’s football in the United Kingdom and compares print media coverage between the 2015 and 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cups. We draw on a content analysis of five English national newspapers and 49 semistructured interviews with fans. We develop new theoretical insights through the development of our framework of the “next stage” of the “new age.” Our findings show media coverage of women’s football has substantially increased, with respectful coverage sustained. The new theme of gender equality made visible several types of inequality, but the media industry failed to acknowledge its own role in reinforcing gender inequalities. Interviewees were critical of the time-limited “revolution” whereby coverage was limited to the duration of the World Cup. To advance gender equality, future media coverage must be sustained, meaningful, and prominent.

Isabella Whitney and George Turberville: Mid-Tudor Heroidean Poetry and Questions of Precedence

ABSTRACT Scholarship on Isabella Whitney often positions her in relation to George Turberville. Her Copy of a Letter is habitually juxtaposed with—and oftentimes assumed to derive from—Turberville’s Heroycall Epistles (i.e. the earliest full translation of Ovid’s ancient Latin Heroides to appear in English print). Further similarities have been observed between Whitney’s Copy of a Letter and the Heroidean missives attributed to the fictive “Pyndara” in Turberville’s roughly contemporaneous auto-miscellany Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets. While there are a number of provocative parallels between Whitney’s and Turberville’s early works, the extent of the former’s reliance upon the latter may well be overstated in existing criticism. Reinvestigating various Whitney-Turberville connections, this essay calls renewed attention to the fact that the sequence in which The Copy of a Letter, The Heroycall Epistles, and Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets first reached print in the mid-1560s is hardly conclusive: it is therefore just as plausible that Whitney helped to shape Turberville’s Ovidian aesthetics as it is that Turberville provided the pattern for Whitney’s.

Writing as a Path to the Alphabetic Principle: How Preschoolers Learn that their Own Writing Represents Speech

ABSTRACTThis study explores how preschoolers develop understandings of the symbolic nature of print in the context of their own writing. Using qualitative methods and a cross‐sectional design, this study documents the learning trajectory that begins with children's earliest experiences linking speech and print in writing events and continues as they learn that English print is glottographic and alphabetic. Children's changing approaches to speech‐print linking provide evidence of their developing understanding of how print functions as a representational system. Participants were 134 English‐speaking 2‐ to 5‐year‐olds attending childcare classrooms where preschoolers' writing was frequent and valued. Children completed an open‐ended writing task where they wrote a photo caption and read it to an adult. Open and axial coding identified six core approaches to speech‐print linking during writing: marks not read, conversational speech without pointing, conversational speech with pointing to the graphic array, segmented speech with pointing to the graphic array, segmented speech matched to specific marks, and phoneme‐grapheme matching. A growth curve model provided statistical support for this ordering of the core approaches. Findings show that early writing experiences can be an important context for building foundational literacy skills such as the alphabetic principle. Adult practices that physically materialize speech‐print relations in writing may be especially supportive of this learning. We conclude that young children should be offered frequent opportunities to compose their own texts, and to interact with adults around their writing.

Developing a classification model for graphic devices in early printed books

This article examines visual modes of information transmission in early modern English books. Images, tables, diagrams, and other graphic devices may be used to support or illustrate the text and to communicate information difficult or even impossible to convey via words alone. Previously established models of graphic representation generally focus either on individual devices or device types, or aim to construct taxonomies of present-day materials; little has been done to combine these approaches to create historical taxonomies of visual communication. This article presents a model for classifying graphic devices in early English print, 1473-1700, based on a cross-disciplinary review of previous scholarly work on graphic and visual devices, and discusses the methodology of constructing a taxonomy of devices suitable for historical, diachronic research.

Reading Braille by Touch Recruits Posterior Parietal Cortex.

Blind readers use a tactile reading system consisting of raised dot arrays: braille/⠃⠗⠇. How do human brains implement reading by touch? The current study looked for signatures of reading-specific orthographic processes in braille, separate from low-level somatosensory responses and semantic processes. Of specific interest were responses in posterior parietal cortices (PPCs), because of their role in high-level tactile perception. Congenitally blind, proficient braille readers read real words and pseudowords by touch while undergoing fMRI. We leveraged the system of contractions in English braille, where one braille cell can represent multiple English print letters (e.g., "ing" ⠬, "one" ⠐⠕), making it possible to separate physical and orthographic word length. All words in the study consisted of four braille cells, but their corresponding Roman letter spellings varied from four to seven letters (e.g., "con-c-er-t" ⠒⠉⠻⠞. contracted: four cells; uncontracted: seven letters). We found that the bilateral supramarginal gyrus in the PPC increased its activity as the uncontracted word length increased. By contrast, in the hand region of primary somatosensory cortex (S1), activity increased as a function of a low-level somatosensory feature: dot-number per word. The PPC also showed greater response to pseudowords than real words and distinguished between real and pseudowords in multivariate-pattern analysis. Parieto-occipital, early visual and ventral occipito-temporal, as well as prefrontal cortices also showed sensitivity to the real-versus-pseudoword distinction. We conclude that PPC is involved in orthographic processing for braille, that is, braille character and word recognition, possibly because of braille's tactile modality.

Pierre Jurieu and the Creation of a Protestant Imagined Community in England, 1680–1705

This article discusses how Pierre Jurieu's (1637–1713) political journalism advanced the cause of pan-Protestantism in the later seventeenth century. It examines how Jurieu portrayed his Huguenot subjects as worthy of sympathy, as well as spelling out how that sympathy could manifest itself politically, by reinterpreting the Glorious Revolution as an event that enabled England to carry out a pan-Protestant foreign policy. This discussion demonstrates how Jurieu was characteristic of three trends that have attracted historiographical attention. Firstly, Jurieu's works were part of the later seventeenth century speeding up of time and closing in of space: he informed his readers of events in faraway regions in unprecedentedly quick time spans. Secondly, the reconstruction of Jurieu's patronage networks in the English print market casts aspersions on the idea of a pristine public sphere. Thirdly, his blending of religious and political ideas problematizes the divide between the two: his apocalyptic writings complemented his works on political economy, and vice versa. With these themes in mind, Jurieu is presented as a provider of one of the richest defences of pan-Protestantism, as well as a representative actor of the broader forces that were shaping English discourse in the later seventeenth century.

Photographic Reportage of War on Terror: A Perspective of Mainstream Print Media in Pakistan

The current study focuses on the depiction of ‘war on terror’ in Pakistan's mainstream print media in 2014-15. After the APS (Army Public School, Peshawar) assault in December 2014, there was a large number of sensitive contents shared on media. This research examines visual content published in leading newspapers of Pakistan, namely, Dawn, Daily Jang, and Nawa-i-Waqt from December 2014 to November 2015. The researchers examined the front and back pages of the chosen newspapers for specific photojournalistic evidence during a set period of time. For this research, quantitative content analysis and simple random sampling method was used. According to the findings of the study, the frequency of negative pictures related to the ‘war on terror’ is higher in Pakistan's print media. In addition, when compared to English print media, the Urdu press has a higher frequency of graphic content connected to the war on terror. It's also been noted that the mainstream print media (Dawn, Jang, and Nawa-e-Waqt) aren't doing a good photojournalism related to war on terror. When compared to the English press in Pakistan, the Urdu press provides greater sensationalism and dramatization in terms of pictorial coverage of the incident.

Neural specialization to English words in Chinese children: Joint contribution of age and English reading abilities

N1 tuning to words, a neural marker of visual word recognition, develops by an interaction between age and ability. The development of N1 tuning to a second learnt print is unclear. The present study examined the joint contribution of age and English reading abilities to N1 amplitude and tuning to English print in Chinese children in Hong Kong. EEG signals were recorded from 179 children (six to nine years old) while they were performing a repetition detection task comprised of different print stimuli measuring three types of tuning, i.e., coarse tuning (real word versus false font), fine tuning (real versus nonword), and lexicality effect (real versus pseudo word). Children were assessed in English word reading accuracy (EWR) and English sub-lexical orthographic knowledge (EOK). Results indicated that coarse tuning decreased with age but increased with EWR and EOK. Fine tuning uniquely increased with EOK, and the lexicality effect increased with EWR. At last, higher EWR was linked to less right-lateralized coarse tuning in younger children. Taken together, the findings support the visual perceptual expertise account in the L2 context, in that N1 coarse tuning, fine tuning, and lexicality effect are driven by skill improvement.

Digital poetry for adult English learners with limited education: Possibilities in language learning, literacy development and interculturality

Studies on the role of digital technology in teaching and learning English tend to focus on secondary or higher education contexts and/or with literate or educated students. The recent global pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to advance digital equity and inclusion for adult learners with limited education and literacy. Despite their basic digital, language and literacy skills, classroom observations and studies have challenged stereotypes of this cohort of students’ limited capacity for online learning (Pobega, 2020; Tour et al, 2021). This paper will discuss a digital literacy project which involved poetry writing using an online book creator app with adult learners with limited English print literacy skills. Moving beyond merely mastering the mechanics of digital technologies (Kern, 2015), this project was an exploration of how language classrooms can be set up as supportive spaces where adult English learners perform “social acts of meaning mediated by the creation of texts” (Bhatt, 2012). Drawing on their personal histories, the learners made connections with the people, events, and spaces, from their past and present, emphasising the need to focus on human connections in language learning and the development of digital literacy skills (Guillén et al, 2020). Through poetry as a familiar literary form, the project serves to expand and strengthen the epistemic contribution capability (Fricker, 2015) of English learners with limited education and print literacy skills.

Science Journalism in Pakistani Print Media: A Content Analysis of Daily Dawn and The News International

Science journalism is a special form of journalism that primarily covers topics such as science, engineering, technology etc. This study has been conducted to find out the coverage of Science Journalism in Pakistani English Print Media. The researcher applied both Qualitative and Quantitative content analysis methods for the collection of the data. Through this method the researcher collected data from the Pakistani English newspaper; Daily Dawn and The Daily News International. The researcher collected data from five pages including pages 1, 2, 3 4 and 12. The researcher collected data from three days including Monday, Wednesday and Friday through a systematic sampling procedure from 6 months of Newspapers (N=72+72=144). It is found that both newspapers covered science journalism whereas; a total of 211 news stories were published in 6 months from January 1, 2022, to June 30, 2022. Daily The News published 46.9% while 53.1% were published by Daily Dawn. The results revealed that The Daily Dawn has given more coverage as compared to The News International in the last six months of 2022 science journalism.

When entrepreneurship becomes a tool for political hegemony

Orientation: From a critical entrepreneurship perspective, this article examines the potential hegemonic nature of the mainstream entrepreneurship discourse.Research objectives: (1) To determine what mainstream entrepreneurship assumptions and resulting discourses are being reproduced in the South African media discourse. (2) To determine if and how this current discourse is naturalising knowledge claims about ‘entrepreneurship’. (3) To highlight the hegemonic possibilities of producing and reproducing this discourse in a South African context. (4) To provide recommendations that could mitigate the potential hegemonic entrepreneurship discourse in South Africa.Motivation for the study: Everything labelled ‘entrepreneurship’ is not contributing to job creation and economic development equally. From a critical standpoint it is becoming evident that the assumptions underlying mainstream entrepreneurship discourse – especially when entrepreneurship is used as a development tool – have to be challenged.Research design, approach and method: Random purposive sampling is employed by searching English print media articles containing relevant key words that were published in South African English newspapers between 01 January 2018 and 31 December 2018. The sampling frame was obtained from Sabinet through the University of Pretoria Library SA Media database. A critical discourse analysis is conducted on the final sample of 63 articles.Main findings: The South African media discourse replicates the mainstream entrepreneurship knowledge claims that any and all type of entrepreneurial activity is essentially the same and that anything labelled ‘entrepreneurship’ will lead to economic development and job creation. These knowledge claims have become normalised in the South African discourse. The dominance of this mainstream discourse on entrepreneurship is opening the way for political hegemony in a South African context.Practical/managerial implications: The South African scholarly community has to take up its responsibility as actors of social change and challenge the reigning public discourse in the field of entrepreneurship that is resulting in political hegemony.Contribution/value-add: This article shows that the failure to distinguish between different types of entrepreneurship is providing a fertile ground for political hegemony.

In Covers Green and Gold: Fin-de-siècle Evelina

The first novel by Frances Burney, Evelina, Or, a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, published in 1778, has enjoyed long-standing popularity, having never gone out of print in English. A distinct cluster of its editions appeared at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. This period in book history was marked by the creative work of private-press book designers, printers, binders, and illustrators inspired by the Aestheticism, Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau movements. Even though their pioneering work was destined for narrow circles of collectors and connoisseurs, it profoundly influenced the development of both industrial and artists’ book design, heightening the awareness of books’ aesthetic appeal. The fin de siècle was a time of nostalgia for idealized pre-industrial society, symptomatic of Victorian and Edwardian escapism, which found its expression in lavish book ornaments and illustrations executed in the Directoire and Louis XVI styles. Late 19th - early 20th-century Evelinas, illustrated and decorated by Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, and Hugh Thomson, produced by Dent, Newnes, and Macmillan, reflect a profound influence that innovative private presses had on general publishing practices and the quality of industrially produced books. These Evelinas, beautifully illustrated, bound in decorative covers, and well-printed, exemplify both the newly awakened interest in the book’s physical make-up and aesthetical aspects and the late-Victorian and Edwardian escapist nostalgia characteristic of fin de siècle publishing.

A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Advertisements from the Perspective of Visual Grammar Illustrated by the Cases of Cosmetics Advertising

Relying on multimedia networks, commercial advertisements using multi-modal discourse such as sound, image, and text can be seen everywhere, which has also become one of the important means to promote and expand the market of many cosmetics products. With the booming development of the "beauty economy" cosmetics market and the general trend of cross-border e-commerce, it is of great significance to study Chinese and English print advertisements of cosmetics. This paper uses the reproductive meaning and interactive meaning of Visual Grammar proposed by Krees & Van Leeuwen to compare the Chinese and English print advertisements of cosmetics derived randomly from official propaganda channels, which are more representative and have wider coverage and higher acceptability. Through the literature and content analysis method, some reasons for the similarities and differences of Chinese and English print ads are proposed, which provide a new guidance for the analysis and design for both Chinese and English print ads to promote communication and cooperation between different cultures.

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

Semantic features in English print advertisements: a Xitsonga translation perspective

Authors’ writing styles and diction applied in advertisements give the language a specialised aspect in translation. The translation of advertisements from English into Xitsonga is still undervalued, based on the observation that Xitsonga newspapers prefer to advertise in English. This article explores a corpus of two print advertisements and employs a descriptive qualitative design by document analysis to provide an in-depth analysis of the translation of both metaphoric statements and subtle words from English into Xitsonga. The study is underpinned by the functionalist approach of translation theory to illustrate the dynamic nature of the selected advertisements. The article exposes the confusion, threats, prejudice and linguistic motives of domination by and hegemony of English as the often-hidden attempts to discredit Xitsonga. The question is: How can Xitsonga advertisements be appropriately couched in English semantic features and still make sense to the target reader? The article observes that the translation of advertisements from English into Xitsonga is at the cusp of being declared ‘adaptation’ or ‘transcreation’. However, it posits that since advertising is characterised by persuasive meaning, it requires the translator’s skilful manipulation of the functionalist approach in translation.

A Macroscope of English Print Culture, 1530-1700, Applied to the Coevolution of Ideas on Religion, Science, and Institutions

A Macroscope of English Print Culture, 1530-1700, Applied to the Coevolution of Ideas on Religion, Science, and Institutions