Oral Texts Research Articles

La traduction dans L’amour, la fantasia d’Assia Djebar: une tunique de Nessus.

One of the interesting features of L’amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar is that it tries to combine historiography and autobiography by confronting both genres with the stories of Algerian women. More concretely, the author joins different textual sources in one multilingual palimpsest: the written text is based on oral texts and the French is based on Arabic, but also on English, Spanish, Turkish and German. The interrelations between the different components constitute as many translational stages, in a literal and in a figurative sense, at the heart of Djebar’s historiographical and autobiographical project. However, the explicit references the narrator makes to the communication problems between the French and the Algerians, draw our attention to the difficulty and pain involved in such an enterprise. L’amour, la fantasia is a novel based on the intertwining of sources of a different nature and from different languages, but all attempts at communication between the different cultures break down, and all the interpreters’ or translators’ efforts are doomed to fail.

Сегментация речи при создании корпуса устных текстов

The issue of oral speech segmentation is currently the focus of attention for linguists and is being considered from various perspectives; however, when working with specific material, it is still difficult to divide a spoken text into separate components. The paper aims to propose ways to solve the issue of live oral speech segmentation. The author analyses the foundations and potential of phonetic (prosodic) and discursive approaches to text segmentation. Scientific novelty of the study lies in the formulation of the speech segmentation principles that are optimal for transcribing oral monological texts as a part of creating a linguistic corpus including dialect materials and in-depth interviews. As a result of the study, a method of segmenting an oral text based on the use of several heterogeneous criteria (a mixed approach) has been developed.

Prospects of Digital Dostoevsky

There were several epochs in history that have altered the life of mankind. The first epoch was when the oral text was written down. The second was when the German scribe Guttenberg invented the printing press, and the handwritten text became printed. Now text is becoming digital, and there is a natural digitalization of all spheres of human activity, including the legacy of Dostoevsky. Modern information technologies create a new type of text that not only preserves the advantages of oral, handwritten and printed text, but also acquires new capabilities. The digital text expands the range of sources, the volume of information, and stimulates new methods of studying the writer's creative work. Despite the fact that electronic libraries, which currently dominate the Internet, present digital copies of Dostoevsky's printed publications, new types of electronic publications and new tools for analyzing not only handwritten and printed, but also digital text, are emerging. The idea of Digital Dostoevsky is being implemented in Petrozavodsk University projects (since 1995), the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2016), and the University of Toronto (since 2019). Lexicographic work on Dostoevsky's vocabulary is being carried out in digital format at the Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article provides an overview and outlines the prospects for the development of Digital Dostoevsky. An important task of the global Digital Dostoevsky is the creation of national bibliographies and electronic libraries and publication of new sources related to the writer's life and work. It is necessary to create the conditions for optimizing and integrating the existing resources. The digital format allows to actively use new text analysis tools and information technology capabilities for research and educational purposes.

Communicative-pragmatic paradigm: the importance and opportunities for the formation of speech culture

The introduction outlines the communicative-pragmatic paradigm, which is a new, relevant direction, these ideas are based on the work of the intellectuals of the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century. The opinion of thinkers of different periods is argued that the improvement шт the culture of the younger generation personality, the culture of the word in the educational process allows to form its civic appearance, national consciousness and mentality. The goal of the article is to consider the issues of the formation the culture of a person's pronunciation, the components of speech activity are comprehensively differentiated - the peculiarities of pronunciation. In this regard, the effectiveness of the use of the communicative-pragmatic method in mastering the skills of oral text formation has been scientifically substantiated. The authors of the article are participants in the project "Paradigms of language communication: literary pronunciation and Latin American writing." Therefore, the article also contains the findings of the research within the framework of this project. During the experiment, students are offered to work with a structural diagram of the  oral speech development for the analysis of a specific article. It is proved that students, acquiring such a specific orientation, acquire speech skills characteristic of the communicative quality of oral speech culture in accordance with the communicative-pragmatic paradigm, the achieved results are listed. It is differentiated that the right compilation, indication of the structural and content parts of monologue texts and the correct use of the paragraph in the transmission of the main idea when teaching the speaker the culture of pronunciation is one of the main conditions for achieving a communicative goal. It is assumed that the indicator of the communicative quality of a word is not limited only to the text, but also one of the main non-linguistic conditions of the participle is the addressee factor. Keywords: communicative-pragmatic paradigm, pronunciation, literary speaking, speech culture, norms of literary language, language communication, text, conversational activity

Oral Literature and Transculturality: A Study of Contemporary Cameroonian Songs

Globalization led by Europe has spread so-called 'universal' values across the globe, which seems to have cultural intermingling as its backdrop. All human endeavors are based on a culture that has become multidimensional. All the time, in their diversity, cultures try to complement and absorb each other. However, in this meeting of cultural giving and receiving, it takes on a new face, the culture shock. This encounter causes major changes in our modern societies, giving way to a loss of cultural identity and internal imbalance. This article aims to analyze the way in which contemporary Cameroonian musicians use cultural and linguistic facts for communication purposes and other arguments. The aim of our work is to show how the various songwriters have found, through song, a new mode of resistance so that African traditions escape sedimentation. In this way, they reconcile the elements of oral tradition and the contributions of modernity to create a hybrid product. To illustrate our point, we have chosen oral texts from different regions of Cameroon. In order to better understand the transcultural reality in the texts, we will highlight the marks of traditional and modern aesthetics, then show that the transcultural is seen as a space of symbiosis between the traditional and the modern.

Word- and Text-Level Reading Difficulties in Students With Dyslexia

The purpose of this study was to examine whether group-based differences exist in word- and text-level reading in a clinical sample of students with dyslexia, and to shed light on the cognitive processes supporting these essential skills. Second- through seventh-grade students were administered a battery of standardized measures of cognitive processing skills (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming [RAN], and verbal short-term memory), word reading skills (decoding and word identification), oral text reading (fluency and comprehension), and silent text reading (fluency and comprehension). Word- and text-level reading skills were used to place students into the following groups: text fluency deficit, globally impaired, and partially remediated. Results replicated the existence of a text fluency deficit group. Reader group differences in terms of cognitive processing skills were less pronounced than expected, with only phonological awareness differentiating among them. Phonological awareness and RAN emerged as the important contributors to reading skill, though their relative contributions varied across word- and text-level measures. Together, these results point to importance of considering text-level reading processes across modality in both research and clinical contexts.

The Belief Stories in the Texts of Oral History of the People in Late Adulthood Period

In my article, I analyze selected belief stories from the oral history texts. The research material contains the three biographical accounts of the people in late adulthood (over 65). The belief stories (belief tales) are one of the genres of speech typical for the accounts rooted in a folk view of the world. The demonic characters appear in them, e. g. the devil, the striga or the południca. The belief stories contain a detailed description of the world. They have an explanatory function. They are to explain how the world works. Belief stories do not appear often in the oral history texts created by the people in late adulthood who were not related to the countryside or were related to it in a limited extent. This way of shaping the narrative may be related to changes in the rationality of the narrators. The common and the scientific view of the world intersect in their narratives. The narrators add the numerous comments to their belief stories, in which they distance themselves from the folk view of the world or try to scientifically rationalize the fantastic events. Nevertheless, the fragments in which other genres of speech are realized, especially in anecdotes, reveal a clear relationship between the narrative of oral history and the common sense and belief vision of the world. The narrators often explain their own experiences by introducing elements of belief tales into other genres. Such fragments reveal the schemes of punishment and reward, non-worldly divine intervention, anthropomorphization of inanimate objects and assigning them the rank of demonic beings. Despite the intersection of different types of rationality in the narratives, a belief-based vision of the world still plays an important role in shaping of the oral narratives about the past.

Making sense the teacher evaluation with the value of local culture (The voice of school principals in Indonesia)

PurposeThe voice of school principals represents the principals' thoughts and experiences because of their as teachers' evaluator. It provides principals' perception on making sense the teacher evaluation. In qualitative research, voice can provide the truth and meaning of principals' experience in teachers evaluation. Their voices in the qualitative interviews are recorded and transcribed into words (Jackson and Mazzei, 2009 and Charteris and Smardon, 2018). By listening to the voices of principals in five provinces in Indonesia, this study, a qualitative research, intends to explore the principals' sensemaking in teacher evaluation.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted a qualitative approach, as it was principally concerned with capturing participants' direct experiences in their natural setting as both the teachers' evaluator and school leader (Patton, 2002). The qualitative interview and content analysis were used in this study. The qualitative interview is a type of conversation used to explore informants' experiences and interpretations; in this study, the headmaster (Mishler, 1986; Spradley, 1979 in Hatch, 2002). Researchers used the interviews to uncover the structure of meaning used by principals in making sense the policies that determine teacher evaluations and that are used to carry out evaluations within principal's local authority. The implicit structure can be discovered from direct observation, and the qualitative interviews can bring this meaning to the surface (Hatch, 2002). Therefore, by applying the qualitative interviews, it is expected that information or “unique” interpretations from the principal can be obtained (Stake, 2010). Content analysis is a research technique for making valid conclusions from oral texts into a research context. This analysis can provide new insights, improve researchers' understanding of certain phenomena, or inform other practical actions through the use of verbal data collected in the form of answers to open interview questions (Krippendorff, 2004).FindingsThere are three important findings relating to principals' sensemaking of teachers' evaluation; they are teachers' length of service, principals' perceptions of teacher evaluations and consistency in teacher performance improvement. The principals' perception greatly influences their beliefs and sensemaking of teacher evaluation. In essence, teacher evaluation has not been used to identify high-quality teachers. Principals focus more on the improvement of teachers' welfare than teacher actual performance.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should explore principals' attitude toward the stakeholders when student achievement is not in line with the consistent increase in teachers' performance ratings. And, it is also necessary to investigate the policy makers response to see the consistent improvement in teacher's evaluation is not in line with student achievement. Finally, how to eliminate the culture of joint responsibility without causing frictions in the school environment.Originality/valueThe authors hereby declare that this submission is their own work, and to the best of their knowledge, it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material that have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma any other publishers.

Developing Speaking with 21st Century Digital Tools in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom:

In a changing, dynamic world increasingly dependent on technologies, it is necessary to educate children so that they can participate fully in today’s and future society. Literacy thus needs much more than the traditional approaches to reading and writing in students’ first language. After analyzing the concept and implications of new literacies in foreign language learning, a quantitative study was carried out to explore Spanish primary education students’ perceptions (n = 82) on the development of new literacies in the English as a foreign language (EFL) lesson after using the online video discussion platform Flipgrid to practice their oral expression and create meanings in EFL during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis also aims to analyze whether there are differences based on gender, age and educational stage. The results show that the participants in this study were motivated to use this digital tool that enables them to make comments to their partners’ videos, send messages about the oral texts, and include additional media, among many other options, going then beyond reading texts on a computer screen. This study concludes with a series of considerations for possible future implementations.

“Vocal Form” as a Music-Phonetic Speech Genre: Aspects of Study

Vocal music is a form of existence and realization of a language. Primarily, it is oral speech of a specific type. Prosodic features of vocal music, as well as its rhythm and intonation, are formed as a result of direct music-language interaction. Therefore, intonational language-music correlation provides possibility of linguistic description of national vocal music and confirms the necessity to develop theoretical foundation for studying this issue. We consider vocal speech of any genre (song, aria or choral singing) in view of its prosodic features. Correspondingly, we consider intonational realization of a vocal text as related to distinctive features of intonation within phonetic system of a given language. In the present article, the authors term vocal-music speech phenomenon as a vocal form of a language, and specify the rationale that it could be related to elements of various levels of oral text. Several aspects of the vocal form are defined, namely phonatory, phonetic, rhythmic and intonational, and considered in the following branches of linguistics: phonostylistics, intonology and speech studies. The paper presents the concept of vocal form of a language within the research prospect. According to structure-based phonological approach, the vocal form as a music-language object is interpreted as a system component, its elements being defined as language units.

Extensive long-term verbal memory training is associated with brain plasticity

The human brain has a remarkable capacity to store a lifetime of information through visual or auditory routes. It excels and exceeds any artificial memory system in mixing and integrating multiple pieces of information encoded. In this study, a group of verbal memory experts was evaluated by multiple structural brain analysis methods to record the changes in the brain structure. The participants were professional Hindu pandits (priests/scholars) trained in reciting Vedas and other forms of Hindu scriptures. These professional Vedic priests are experts in memorization and recitation of oral texts with precise diction. Vedas are a collection of hymns. It is estimated that there are more than 20,000 mantras and shlokas in the four Vedas. The analysis included the measurement of the grey and white matter density, gyrification, and cortical thickness in a group of Vedic pandits and comparing these measures with a matched control group. The results revealed an increased grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) in the midbrain, pons, thalamus, parahippocampus, and orbitofrontal regions in pandits. The whole-brain corelation analysis using length of post-training teaching duration showed significant correlation with the left angular gyrus. We also found increased gyrification in the insula, supplementary motor area, medial frontal areas, and increased cortical thickness (CT) in the right temporal pole and caudate regions of the brain. These findings, collectively, provide unique information regarding the association between crucial memory regions in the brain and long-term practice of oral recitation of scriptures from memory with the proper diction that also involved controlled breathing.

Teacher’s Language Input for Recognizing the Cognitive Abilities of Autistic Student in Classroom Interaction

<p style="text-align:justify">Cognitive is an essential developmental aspect for children. The cognitive barrier is one of the learning barriers experienced by children with autism. From educational perspective, teacher language input can appropriately develop cognitive abilities of autistic students. This study aims to describe (1) teacher’s language input for recognizing the cognitive abilities of autistic students in classroom interactions and (2) cognitive abilities of autistic students based on teacher language input in classroom interactions. The approach of the study was conducted qualitatively with case study, while source of data was oral texts from the teacher language input toward autistic students in classroom. The results shows that the cognitive abilities of autistic students can be recognized through teacher's language input in classroom learning by engaging interrogative speech acts, such as representative, directive, expressive, and commissive. The cognitive level is used to see the variants of the teacher's language input. Meanwhile, the acquisition of students' cognitive abilities based on teacher language’s input is developed through memorizing, understanding, applying, and analyzing skills with criteria student A and B in the medium category, and G in low category.</p>

Curious Conversations: Henry Mayhew and the Street-Sellers in the Media Ecology of London Labour and the London Poor

Abstract Henry Mayhew is renowned as the chronicler and historian of London street-sellers and poor labourers. However, Mayhew’s relationships with his subjects, and their influence on the development of London Labour and the London Poor, is less often discussed. This article examines Mayhew’s productive and disruptive friendships, collaborations, and disagreements with the London poor, and situates these exchanges within the layered print and oral texts that comprise the extensive media ecology of London Labour. I argue that through their disruptive collaborations with Mayhew, some street-sellers, including Charles Alloway, memorialized as ‘The Crippled Street-Seller of Nut-Meg Graters’, strategically harnessed the media forms of London Labour for profitable self-representation. In contrast, a group of street-sellers known as the Street Traders’ Protection Association mobilized against Mayhew and critiqued his representations of their class. These disruptive collaborations reveal underlying kinships and conflicts between Mayhew and the street-folk, thus destabilizing his reputation as a neutral and authoritative observer in the history of poverty.

Prosodic Interactions in Anishinaabemowin Verbs

This research aims to better understand the link between prosody and verbs in Anishinaabemowin by investigating pitch placement in relation to verb placement in Anishinaabemowin utterances. The data is from a story by Ogimaawigwaebiik archived in Dibaajimowinaan; Anishinaabe Stories of Culture and Respect. 
 Anishinaabemowin, also known as Ojibwe, is a member of the Algonquin language family and is spoken throughout Southern Ontario and the Northern United States (Fairbanks, 2017). It is a polysynthetic language meaning it primarily uses affixes to convey meaning, particularly on the verbs. Prosody is the organization of various linguistics units (words, pitch, tone) into an utterance in the process of speech production. It conveys not only linguistics information but also contextual cues, intentions and attitudes (Fujisaki, 1997). 
 This research utilized two audio softwares, Audacity and Praat, to clean and segment the audio into utterances and then token sentences were selected based on verb placement (verb initial, verb second and verb final). These token sentences will be analyzed for pitch placement and then compared to see if verb placement affects prosody, further expanding on the current literature which states that pitch defaults to the verb (Frazier, accepted). This research is particularly important because there is a gap in existing literature on prosody in Anishinaabemowin and there are no experimental studies such as this. 
 

Reading prosody unpacked: A longitudinal investigation of its dimensionality and relation with word reading and listening comprehension for children in primary grades.

We investigated the dimensionality of various indicators of reading prosody, and the relations of word reading and listening comprehension to the identified dimension(s) of reading prosody, using longitudinal data from Grades 1 to 3. A total of 371 English-speaking children were assessed on oral text reading, word reading, and listening comprehension in the fall and spring of each year (i.e., 6 waves of data). From oral text reading, reading prosody was evaluated on pause structures (pause duration, pause frequency) and pitch (intonation contour, F₀ change) using spectrographic analysis, and on expressiveness, smoothness, phrasing, and pacing using the Multi-Dimensional Fluency Scale (MFS). A bifactor structure described the data best across the 6 waves, composed of (a) a ratings and pause general factor, which captured common variance among MFS, pause frequency, and pause duration; (b) ratings (MFS) and pause specific factors, which captured variance over and above the ratings and pause general factor; and (c) a separate pitch factor, which captured variance in intonation contour and F0 change. Word reading and listening comprehension were related to the identified dimensions of reading prosody, but when they were in a model together, word reading, not listening comprehension, was uniquely related to reading prosody across the six waves. These results indicate that reading prosody is multidimensional and that a pitch factor is a dissociable skill from the general ratings and pause prosody. Furthermore, word reading is the primary driver for the development of various dimensions of reading prosody, at least for children in primary grades. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Reverse Subtitling in the ESP Class to Improve Written Skills in English

The improvement of foreign language (L2) skills is of paramount importance in the university context, and a considerable number of students lack linguistic proficiency in their oral and written communication skills. This lack of proficiency needs to be properly addressed and methodologies employed in order to help students improve such skills. There are many cases in which international students, whose cultural background is either European or Asian, need to improve their oral and written production in English as an L2. This paper presents a study conducted at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid throughout the 2017–2018 academic year, in which a number of undergraduate students enrolled in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) used reverse subtitling, from Spanish or Chinese into English, as a learning tool. The main focus of this case study was to enable students to improve their written skills in English through the combined use of Business English and reverse subtitling in accordance with the course content and expectations. A mixed method was used in order to gather and evaluate quantitative and qualitative data. This study therefore aims to bring to the fore the potential of using reverse subtitling in the ESP class. Lay summary Improvement in written and oral skills is a universal task for all university students studying a foreign language. Their goal is to work toward improving their skills in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) by completing the tasks proposed by their lecturers in the subject in which they are enrolled. One of these skills is writing, which is a production skill that requires the lecturer’s supervision. The aim of this paper is to present a study centred on the improvement of written skills in the class of ESP with a majority of students from Spain and a minority from China. The study took place in the 2017–2018 academic year at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Participants submitted compositions in English relating to business and commerce. In addition, they used subtitling as a pedagogical tool to improve their written production in ESP. This practice consisted of transferring the original oral text of a video into subtitles, from Spanish to English (in the case of Spanish speakers) and from Chinese into English (for Chinese speakers). By doing so, we compared quantitative data obtained from the tasks submitted by students, and qualitative data in the form of participant questionnaires in order to observe improvement in their skills. We aim to highlight the pedagogical potential of subtitling for the improvement of written skills in ESP.

Mimesi del parlato in “Sandokan, storia di camorra” di Nanni Balestrini Analisi stilistica

The goal of this paper is to examine the main features of spontaneous speech and colloquial language in Nanni Balestrini's novel, Sandokan, camorra story. The choice of the novel is due to the fact that this work is characterized by a style based on the imitation of the protagonist's oral narration; by the prevalence of the spoken aspects and of stylistic construction that corresponds to the oral texts. We are facing a linguistic work entrusted to flows without any punctuation marks. In order to delimit the language used in the corpus, a wide range of models will be examined through an analytical methodology. The analysis is carried out on linguistic and stylistic aspects. Linguistically, the focus will be on lexical and morph- syntactic tendency. The lexical choices belong to the colloquial register through the presence of dialectal voices; lexemes of medium and familiar use; verbal phrases with a generic sense such as the verb “fare” (to do); foul language; and lexemes related to the world of the mafia and drugs. As for morph- syntactic tendency, distinctive aspects of speech appear such as: the use of the indicative mode; “che polivalente” (that multipurpose); the dislocation and the split sentence “la frase scissa”; and finally, the discursive signals. On a stylistic level, not only the style is considered without punctuation, but also some mechanisms to which textual cohesion is assigned through the figurative language such as “sillessi”, “anaphora” and repetition, which are recurrent in speech and colloquial language.

Developing individualized feedback for listening assessment: Combining standard setting and cognitive diagnostic assessment approaches

In this study, we present the development of individualized feedback for a large-scale listening assessment by combining standard setting and cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) approaches. We used the performance data from 3,358 students’ item-level responses to a field test of a national EFL test primarily intended for tertiary-level EFL learners. The results showed that proficiency classifications and subskill mastery classifications were generally of acceptable reliability, and the two kinds of classifications were in alignment with each other at individual and group levels. The outcome of the study is a set of descriptors that describe each test taker’s ability to understand certain level of oral texts and his or her cognitive performance. The current study, by illustrating the feasibility of combining standard setting and CDA approaches to produce individualized feedback, contributes to the enhancement of score reporting and addresses the long-standing criticism that large-scale language assessments fail to provide individualized feedback to link assessment with instruction.

A First Description of Arabic on The South Coast of Iran: The Arabic Dialect of Bandar Moqām, Hormozgan

Abstract Arabic has been spoken as a mother tongue in Iran since pre-Islamic times, but a number of the Arabic dialect groups scattered across the country have not been documented. In this study, we provide a first account of Arabic on Iran's southern coast, with a description of the dialect of Bandar Moqām in western Hormozgan Province. Using the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) linguistic data questionnaire as well as supplementary elicitation and oral texts, we have documented salient elements of its lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax. Our analysis confirms that Bandar Moqām Arabic fits into the wider Gulf Arabic dialect area, yet is internally heterogenous. On the one hand, it shares many features with the regionally dominant ‘Bedouin’ type Gulf Arabic koine, but it also aligns with distinctive structures—both retentions and innovations—in the more ancient ‘Sedentary’ Gulf dialects that originated in southern Arabia. Further, it exhibits a series of structures in common with Mesopotamian Arabic and its descendants that reached as far as Central Asia during the Arab con-quest of greater Persia and are still spoken there today.

Evidentiality and Mirativity in Traditional Negev Arabic: Morphological, Lexical and Discourse-Syntactic Strategies

Abstract Evidentiality as a typological category pertains to the source of information from the speaker's point of view without specifying it. This information may be conveyed as non-witnessed, inferred or surprising (mirative), among other possibilities. Evidentiality strategies and mirativity strategies are usually secondary extensions of other primary functions, such as resultativity. These strategies may be grammatical, syntactic or discursive, and I also include here lexical items with no other function. In Traditional Negev Arabic, as spoken by elderly Bedouin in Southern Israel, grammatical evidentiality was noted in 1992. Since then, however, evidentiality in Arabic has only been recognized in some peripheral dialects in contact with evidential languages. This study analyses the interaction and pragmatic-rhetorical effects of three strategies for evidentiality and mirativity in oral narrative texts in Traditional Negev Arabic: a grammatical strategy via the evidential participle; a lexical strategy via evidential particles; and a discourse-syntactic strategy via presentatives, combining visual evidence with mirativity and often inference. These strategies tend to cluster together in narrative peaks, creating saturated environments of high dramatic tension. Their complex interaction is highly effective in focalizing and achieving pragmatic and rhetorical ends in this under-studied and rapidly disappearing oral narrative tradition.