Language Media Research Articles

Development and Validation of Contextualized Kindergarten Module for Children with Hearing Impairment

This study aimed to develop and validate a sign language-based and contextualized kindergarten module for children with hearing impairment. There is a need to develop and contextualize a module in order to cater the unmet needs of students with hearing impairment. The developed module includes a teaching guide for parents, for them to become more effective co-facilitators of learning. The distinctive feature of this module is that, the sign language interpretations are with pictures and texts. The pictures vividly show the step-by-step procedure on how to sign the specific word. The pictures are supported by the comprehensive explanation on how to sign the words. This study utilized the Research and Development (R & D) research method to systematically design, develop and evaluate the instructional material. The participants of this study are eleven (11) students with hearing impairment and eleven (11) parents of students with hearing impairment. The respondents and served as expert-validators are master teacher, kindergarten teacher, and SPED teacher. It employed a purposive sampling technique; it purposely selected a population related to children with hearing impairment. To analyze the qualitative data, it was imported to MAXQDA software with the use of Horizontalization method by Moustakas. For statistical treatment of the descriptive data, researchers used the PSPP software. The study found that the parents’ ideal module for children with hearing impairment has five emerging themes, such as 1) sign language medium of instruction, 2) disability consideration, 3) media consideration, 4) level of difficulty, and 5) technical design. Expert-validators assessed that the validity of contextualized kindergarten module is highly acceptable among the dimensions of: content, format and language, presentation, and usefulness. Effectiveness of the contextualized module as perceived by the parents yielded a total of 96.36% positive responses.

The Misrepresentation of American Sign Language and Deaf Culture in Mainstream Film Media: A Call for Inclusive Representation

The Misrepresentation of American Sign Language and Deaf Culture in Mainstream Film Media: A Call for Inclusive Representation

Typology of abbreviations in the language of Russian mass media

Typology of abbreviations in the language of Russian mass media

Google Sites Based on Guided Inquiry to Improve Social Studies Critical Thinking in Elementary Schools

The increase in Indonesian internet users will reach 215 million people in 2023, increasing from 77.02% to 78.18%. Apart from that, students' critical thinking, evaluation, inference, explanation and self-regulation skills still need to be improved. This research aims to develop Google sites based on guided inquiry. This type of research is development research using the Borg and Gall model procedure. The research subjects are learning media experts, material experts and language experts. The test subjects were 30 students and 2 teachers. Data collection methods use observation, interviews, questionnaires and tests. Data collection instruments use questionnaires and test questions. Data analysis techniques use descriptive statistical analysis and inferential statistical analysis. The results of the research were that media expert validation produced an average of 4.64, material experts produced an average of 4.67 and language expert validation results were 4.7. Based on teacher and student trials, it shows that the media is in the very good category, declared suitable for use in learning. The effectiveness test results obtained an N-gain of 56.2 in the "quite effective" category. Student response activities obtained an N-gain of 77.99 in the "effective" category. It was concluded that Google Sites-based media integrated with guided inquiry can improve the critical thinking of fifth-grade elementary school students compared to conventional learning. This research implies that the guided inquiry-based Google Sites developed can be used in learning.

Indonesian Twitter Users’ Language Attitude Towards English-Indonesian Code-mixing

Social media users need language as a tool to communicate, both in verbal and written form. Over time, the language used in social media also shows some significant growth. Talking about language in social media, there is an interesting phenomenon recently on social media that can be reached within the internet, namely the code-mixing of Indonesian and English (which in Indonesian are also popularly known as Jaksel language, Keminggris, Kemlondo, Indoglish, Englonesian, or Bahasa Gado-gado). This study is aimed to find out the attitudes of 500 Indonesian Twitter users towards English-Indonesian code-mixing with a questionnaire. This study uses a descriptive-quantitative approach. For the result of each aspect, it shows a quite positive indication: Cognitive aspect 2.92, Affective aspect 2.75, and Conative 2.79. If the three aspects being summed up, also indicated a quite positive attitude towards the code-mixing with point or score 2.82. The attitudes come from many reasons and factors, such as the need for understandability in communication, language prestige, prepossessing or attracting attention, confidence, and language aptitude.

The Effectiveness of English in Supporting Communication with Customers to Provide the Best Service in the World of Work

This research aims to determine the description of workers' ability to speak English, English is needed to communicate via online media/internet both with fellow actors and with consumers consisting of domestic consumers and tourists. The total sample technique used in this research was 70 people. The description of the characteristics of MSME actors consists of age, education, length of business, and media ownership, while the characteristics of MSMEs are presented based on micro, small and medium business scale. English language skills are measured based on the ability to read, understand and interpret messages on social media. Based on the formulation of research objectives and the results of data analysis tests, it can be concluded that the description of the characteristics of MSME actors mostly includes those of productive age (80%), most of the respondents are male (40%), the education of MSME actors is dominated by undergraduate graduates (60%), and has Most have more than 5 years of experience and most have more than 1(77.14%) media experience. The characteristics of business scale include small scale (50%), only 1.43% of medium scale ones were in the research sample. The description of the English language skills of MSME players is quite good with an average score of 3.32, while the ability to use media has a better average score than English language skills, namely 3.42. The results of the correlational analysis show that there is a very real positive relationship between English language ability and media use ability, which is expressed by an r value of 0.993, meaning that the higher the English language ability, the higher the media use ability.

Changes in Russian Media Language in Turbulent Times

Changes in Russian Media Language in Turbulent Times

Spanish Vs. English Language Media Consumption and Latino Political Trust and Efficacy

ABSTRACT Do Latinos who consume more Spanish language media relative to English language media express greater political trust and efficacy? While research produces increasing evidence that variations in English language media content shape core democratic attitudes like political trust, and that Spanish language media shapes acculturation and issue attitudes among Latinos, research has not explored whether broader linguistic media environments shape attitudes fundamental to democracy. Given revolutionary changes the English language media environment, and stark contrasts between English and Spanish language media environments in terms of fragmentation, ideological and partisan news reporting, narratives portraying Latinos as a “threat,” and Latino-oriented and affirming content, relative consumption of Spanish or English language news may come with important implications. Bilingual Latinos who consume varying mixtures of media from these environments offer a unique population for exploring these relationships. Building off studies relating patterns of Latino acculturation and Spanish language media to a variety of attitudinal effects, we explore the relationship between linguistic media consumption and political trust and efficacy using three unique datasets: the 2008 CMPS, 2016 CMPS, and our own survey conducted in 2021. We then leverage unique variables in the 2016 CMPS to explore whether Latino trust and efficacy relate directly to relative consumption of Spanish language media or indirectly to Spanish language media through recall of Latino-oriented content and induced emotional reactions.

Linguistic Means of Speech Manipulation in the Discourse of Modern German-Language Media

This article touches upon the problem of identifying and analysing speech manipulation in the texts of the German-speaking media. The media determines linguistic and cultural pictures of the world, so the analysis of media language will help to establish trends of influence on the cognitive consciousness of society. In today’s geopolitical environment, the basic functions of the media transform, as it uses specific techniques of speech manipulation to achieve informational and emotive effectiveness, allowing for the distortion of the cognitive perception of information by the audience. The material for this study was German-language media texts, selected by means of a total sampling and semantic-syntactic analysis. The relevance of the study lies in its linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The author states that in the conditions of information pollution all the participants of communication should be able to identify speech manipulation in a text, qualify information in terms of its significance or reliability, and to the risks of exposure to manipulative actions. Taking the peculiarities of speech manipulation methods used in the modern German-language media texts into account, the recipient must have sufficient interpretational competence to allow him or her to overcome the barriers that prevent the identification and mental comprehension of the means of speech manipulation in the texts of foreign-language publications. The main purpose of this study is to remove some difficulties in the perception of information in German-language media text by presenting signs of indirect pressure and speech manipulation in them. To this end, the article classifies the basic techniques of speech manipulation in terms of linguistic analysis, and also justifies the expediency of forming interpretative competence in the sphere of epistemic vigilance. We argue that this competence is effective when it comes to levelling the negative impact of the discourse of German-language media on the cognitive consciousness of the audience.

Об исламских религионимах и специфике их функционирования в СМИ и социальных сетях

The article examines some Islamic religious names that are actively used in the lan-guage of mass media and social networks. The problem is that most lexical units naming Islamic concepts are not recorded In Russian dictionaries with a complete and correct interpretation of their meaning, which leads to the situation when people professing other religions in Russia get certain ideas about Islam from the press and social networks where Islamic vocabulary is often used in contexts that distort the meaning of these words, which leads to incorrect understanding of Islam. The research methods applied in this study allow to establish that Islamic religious names are used in the Russian language both in their sacred and figurative meanings and perform various functions in the investigated texts.

Overview of the 8th Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks at the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium.

The aim of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks is to take a community-driven approach to address the natural language processing and machine learning challenges inherent to utilizing social media data for health informatics. In this paper, we present the annotated corpora, a technical summary of participants' systems, and the performance results. The eighth iteration of the #SMM4H shared tasks was hosted at the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium and consisted of 5 tasks that represented various social media platforms (Twitter and Reddit), languages (English and Spanish), methods (binary classification, multi-class classification, extraction, and normalization), and topics (COVID-19, therapies, social anxiety disorder, and adverse drug events). In total, 29 teams registered, representing 17 countries.In general, the top-performing systems used deep neural network architectures based on pre-trained transformer models. In particular, the top-performing systems for the classification tasks were based on single models that were pre-trained on social media corpora. To facilitate future work, the datasets-a total of 61353 posts-will remain available by request, and the CodaLab sites will remain active for a post-evaluation phase.

A topic‐controllable keywords‐to‐text generator with knowledge base network

AbstractWith the introduction of more recent deep learning models such as encoder‐decoder, text generation frameworks have gained a lot of popularity. In Natural Language Generation (NLG), controlling the information and style of the output produced is a crucial and challenging task. The purpose of this paper is to develop informative and controllable text using social media language by incorporating topic knowledge into a keyword‐to‐text framework. A novel Topic‐Controllable Key‐to‐Text (TC‐K2T) generator that focuses on the issues of ignoring unordered keywords and utilising subject‐controlled information from previous research is presented. TC‐K2T is built on the framework of conditional language encoders. In order to guide the model to produce an informative and controllable language, the generator first inputs unordered keywords and uses subjects to simulate prior human knowledge. Using an additional probability term, the model increases the likelihood of topic words appearing in the generated text to bias the overall distribution. The proposed TC‐K2T can produce more informative and controllable senescence, outperforming state‐of‐the‐art models, according to empirical research on automatic evaluation metrics and human annotations.

Language as an Agent of Change: Promoting Gender Fairness

This research explores the complex dynamics of gendered language usage in an effort to provide guidance for language-based initiatives that advance gender equality. The study includes a number of goals, such as determining how frequently gendered words are used, analyzing inclusive language policies' effectiveness and presence, learning about respondents' opinions about gendered language, and finding barriers to the adoption of gender-inclusive terminology. The researcher used a Likert scale to analyze the findings after conducting a quantitative survey with 118 students from the City College of Calamba's Arts and Sciences Department. The results show that respondents were mostly in agreement with the negative effects of gendered language in media and advertising, as well as the difficulties in promoting gender-neutral language, especially in media sources. , the study proposes an advocacy project, "Language for Equality: Promoting Gender Fairness," aiming to raise awareness and encourage the use of gender-fair language to combat discrimination and foster gender equality within the college community. This research contributes valuable insights to the ongoing discourse on language as a catalyst for transformative societal change. Limitations, however, include the possible influence of social desirability bias and the distinctive characteristics of the sample. Comprehensive qualitative inquiries, cross-cultural and longitudinal studies, mixed-methods approaches, and evaluations of suggested solutions are among the study directions for the future. It is recommended that media professionals compare educational resources and inclusive language training programs to improve their understanding of gendered language hurdles and practical solutions.

Outlier speakers and apparent effects: The case of variable subject placement in Spanish

Aims and objectives: The current paper utilizes corpus data to examine variation and potential language contact effects regarding pronominal subject placement among first-generation immigrants in Atlanta, with particular attention paid to the individual speaker. The research questions that guide the study are the following: What linguistic and social predictors govern subject placement in Mexican Spanish spoken in Roswell, GA? What role, if any, does English contact play in the overall preverbal rates and/or constraints that govern subject placement? Do the data show any substantial individual differences with regard to rates of subject placement? If so, how might the inclusion versus exclusion of these speakers influence the overall interpretation of the results? Design and data: This study employs a variationist sociolinguistic framework, and the speakers comprise 20 first-generation Mexican immigrants living in Georgia. Analysis: Descriptive statistics are employed for purposes of overall as well as individual usage rates of postverbal subjects. In addition, linguistic (e.g., person/number, priming) and social predictors (e.g., sex, English proficiency, preferred media language) were incorporated into logistic regression analyses using Rbrul. Findings: Pronominal subject placement is most strongly influenced by person/number. Third-person singular pronouns favor postverbals while other pronouns favor preverbal position. Regarding social predictors, both sex and preferred media language appeared to play significant roles in the initial analysis; however, upon considering outlier speaker effects, the apparent effect of sex disappeared. The media language effect shows that those with a preference for English media favor preverbal subjects, suggesting a potential language contact effect. Originality and implications: The current study is the first to analyze this phenomenon in southeastern U.S. Spanish. The findings have implications for the study of language contact and change, demonstrating the importance of considering how individual speakers could misrepresent the overall data, interpretations of results, and conclusions in sociolinguistic studies of bilingualism.

Arabic Audio-Visual Translation Censorship: A Corpus Study of Subtitles of Three Films

Audio-visual translation is one of the most dynamic types of translation. As this form of translation deals with culture as well as language media is often altered to remove sensitive elements. This is common in the Arab world where censor boards filter media before its rerelease. The strategies employed in censorship have been influenced by advancements in technology and mass media narratives. This paper therefore examines the subtitling strategies employed in film censorship by examining three American films, namely, The Hangover, Bridesmaids, and What Women Want. The research adopts Pederson’s taxonomy (2017) as a theoretical framework in addition to the three strategies proposed in this study ‘tone down,’ ‘upgrading,’ and ‘normalizing’. The results indicated that censorship is common in the Arab world in the forms of omission and euphemism. Moreover, it was found that subtitles employ high register language when rendering the low register language of the source text despite the availability of low register language choices. The study recommends that dialectical and non-standard Arabic be used for the rendering of sensitive elements. Future studies may build on these findings to improve the understanding of censorship trends and unconventional movements.

«Американские лекции» И. Кальвино как комментарий к романам «Невидимые города» и «Если однажды зимней ночью путник»

“American Lectures” (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) are well established in the minds of readers as a testament of Italo Calvino addressed to posterity. The course of lectures prepared by the writer for delivery at Harvard University in 1984 was the last work from his pen. In his last book, Calvino identifies several features of literature that are of particular value. Thanks to their mind-stimulating cognitive functions, these features, according to the writer, will help future generations cope with the dangers that are inherent in the language of media with its vague concepts and in visual promotional images that clog our imagination. “American Lectures” not only allow us to look at the history and theory of literature from an unexpected angle, but also shed light on Calvino’s own creative path. The reflections contained in the lectures are primarily related to the search for new mechanisms for creating a literary work, which occupied the writer in his last, “combinatorial”, period. In his lectures, Calvino reflects on speed, which is equivalent to agility, mobility, ease of storytelling, which above all are characteristic of oriental fairy tales. Calvino’s novels Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler are like The Thousand and One Nights thanks to a frame composition capable of accommodating a potentially infinite number of inserted short stories. As in The Thousand and One Nights, in the novel Invisible Cities the plot of the frame is built on the relationship between the narrator and the ruler. By contrast, in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler the engine of the plot is the art, borrowed from Scheherazade, of interrupting the story at the climax of the unfolding plot. In addition, according to the ideas contained in the lectures, a large form made up solely of beginnings actualizes the potential of the novel as a genre that concentrates its power precisely at the beginning of the narrative. Both novels considered here are in line with the writer’s experiments with the form of “map-novel” or “hyper-novel”, capable of accommodating a potentially unlimited number of images and plot combinations.

Perception of dialect origin in media language: Is the standard language in use a supradialectal idiom?

Perception of dialect origin in media language: Is the standard language in use a supradialectal idiom?

Corpus-based Translation Studies: Examining Media Language through a Linguistic Lens

This paper delves into the multifaceted world where translation studies converge with corpus linguistics, casting a spotlight on the dynamic domain of media language. By harnessing the power of a corpus-based methodology, our research meticulously dissects the intricate process of translating and adapting media texts within a panoply of linguistic landscapes and cultural contexts. The core objective of the study is to excavate and analyze the pantheon of linguistic attributes and the repertoire of tactics translators wield in the realm of media, unlocking a treasure trove of understanding pertaining to cultural subtleties and the nuanced art of translation practices. Our exploration traverses a broad spectrum of media genres, encompassing the rigor of news journalism, the creative complexity of television programming, and the viral nature of digital content, to construct a comprehensive understanding of the translation phenomena at play. The findings illuminate the myriad ways in which media narratives are reconfigured and presented to global audiences, ultimately enriching the discourse on how translation shapes and is shaped by the currents of worldwide communication. This study, therefore, serves as a crucial beacon for academics, professionals, and enthusiasts poised at the crossroads of linguistics and cultural exchange, guiding them through the labyrinth of media translation and its profound influence on international dialogues and perceptions.

Promoting Heritage Language: A Phenomenological Study on the Approaches Used by Cordilleran Students

Heritage languages are crucial to identity and community cohesion, but they face a threat from dominant global languages in education, media, and mobility. This threatens their transmission between generations and risks their survival and evolution. This phenomenological study aimed to investigate the approaches utilised by university students in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) in one of the universities in Northern Philippines to promote their heritage languages. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 purposively sampled participants who met specified inclusion criteria. Thematic analysis uncovered four main strategies students employ: intergenerational family transmission, interpersonal sharing and storytelling, informal peer teaching and exchange, and online dissemination. Findings reveal the vital role of families in developing heritage language proficiency through exclusive daily use and active transmission across generations. Students leverage interpersonal interactions and storytelling to affirm cultural identities and foster belonging. Peer teaching enables organic exchange and retention through translation, lessons, and collaborative projects. Interactive online platforms provide expanded reach for promoting heritage beyond local communities. Overall, promotion occurs through interconnected familial, social, educational, and virtual modes that empower students as change agents counteracting assimilation pressures. This contributes to identity formation, pluralism, and sustaining marginalised traditions often excluded from formal domains. Recommendations include an integrated approach reinforcing students' informal efforts through heritage programmes, intergenerational activities, media guidance, policy support, and community collaboration. Formal initiatives should strategically nurture familial foundations and amplify student-driven promotion spanning diverse spheres.

GHA: a Gated Hierarchical Attention Mechanism for the Detection of Abusive Language in Social Media

GHA: a Gated Hierarchical Attention Mechanism for the Detection of Abusive Language in Social Media