Problematic Language Research Articles

The language of assessment: identifying challenging terminology for students and exploring implications for practice

Many interventions have been developed by staff to support students in understanding assessment task requirements and summative and formative feedback. However, to various extents, these approaches assume a shared understanding of the, often indeterminate, language used in assessment. This article reports on a project, which aimed to explore students’ confidence in interpreting frequently used language in assessment and feedback documentation and explore ways in which staff can work with students to address misunderstanding and misinterpretation. To do this, we undertook a corpus-based linguistic analysis of assessment documentation to identify frequently used and potentially problematic language. We then used a survey and focus groups to explore with students their confidence in interpreting these terms. In doing so, we identify commonly used assessment and feedback terminology, which students find challenging to interpret, potentially resulting in frustration and demotivation. We conclude by exploring different approaches reported by students in the focus groups which help them interpret challenging terminology, notably different forms of dialogic-based intervention, but note, however, that time and space are needed within the curriculum for a shared (or ideally co-created) understanding of language to be developed between students and staff.

An Analysis on the Typicality of Language Landscape in North China Electric Power University

This paper takes the typical language landscape of the campus of North China Electric Power University as the research object. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and explore the emergence of the problematic language landscape of the university campus found in the field investigation and investigation of the team. The top-down language landscape of the campus is investigated, summarized and analyzed from the aspects of the combination form, arrangement mode, naming mode and function of the code.

Language ideologies among Spanish-speaking migrants in Germany: insights from language conflict narratives

When migrants move to a new country, they often encounter challenges in understanding and being understood. Narratives serve as a way for individuals to make sense of these experiences, reflecting on their own and other people’s actions, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions while weaving them into coherent stories. This study examines narratives of problematic language incidents among Latin American migrants living in Germany within a language ideologies framework, using narrative analysis and positioning theory. Special emphasis is placed on how the narrators position themselves and other characters relative to widely shared language ideologies. Within the narratives, three pivotal language ideologies emerge: 1. The one-nation-one-language ideology, 2. The native standard ideology, and 3. The ideology of global English. Through their positioning acts, the narrators make moral claims and either affirm or challenge prevailing language ideologies, along with the embedded moral values. While the participants resist marginalization based on exclusionary ideologies of linguistic nationalism and native speakerism, they nevertheless uphold the ideals of a linguistically homogeneous nation-state and the native speaker model. Moreover, they support the use of English as a global language to bridge linguistic inequalities, but tend to overlook its exclusionary potential.

Measuring Systemic Oppression: Possibilities and (Re)Imaginings for Measuring Cisheterosexism in Education Research

Several disciplines have developed quantitative measures for systemic oppression against queer and trans people, including psychology, criminal justice, and gender and sexuality studies. These instruments can have wide-ranging influence on other fields, including higher education research. To explore how these studies operationalize queer and trans oppression, we conducted a systematic review of 33 survey instruments across seven disciplines, coding them within an ecological framework. Results revealed lingering challenges for accurate measurement of queer and trans oppression and have significant implications on the use of inflationary and problematic language in quantitative instruments. We offer implications for those in education who may adapt similar instruments, in the hopes that scholars and practitioners are mindful to the scope of queer and trans oppression.

The affordances of extreme speech

New media studies invested in online political conflict, radical and antagonistic subcultures have taken an interest in the affordances that shape memes, vernaculars and online political communication. One often overlooked affordance is the ensemble of social, communication, platform and legal frameworks stipulating what users can and cannot say, which I call “speech affordances.” To explore this concept, I look at the strategic communication of 4chan, Twitter and YouTube subcultures tied to a historical meme, “Kekistan,” often perceived as a key example of the ideological cacophony of the 2015–2017 online “culture wars.” I focus on how 4chan's policy of user anonymity, YouTube's unmoderated comment sections and Twitter's more proactive moderation practices brought some influencers to alter the original connotations of the meme into “overt” messages tolerable to Twitter and YouTube out-groups and platform moderation policies. Speech affordances bear methodological implications for historical studies of speech moderation and the overall mechanisms in which problematic language adapts to spaces with distinct speech norms.

Content teachers’ and lecturers’ corrective feedback in EMI classes in high school and university settings

To date, very limited research interest has been given to the strategies English-medium instruction (EMI) teachers or lecturers deploy to provide corrective feedback (CF) on the language use to their students during class interaction. In other words, when EMI teachers incidentally focus on students’ problematic language use, how do they correct it – providing explicit correction or using recast or elicitation? This article reports on a study that examined CF types EMI teachers and lecturers used during classroom discourse, drawing on data collected from classroom observations and recordings of six different EMI classes in high school and university settings in Korea. The frequency and types of CF used in reactive language-related episodes (LREs) were identified in the EMI classes and compared between the two settings and across disciplines (social science, mathematics, and computer science). Findings showed that all the EMI teachers and lecturers offered CF to their students but with different frequency; the schoolteachers offered CF more frequently than the university lecturers. Also, the schoolteachers used more various types of CF than the lecturers. In both settings, CF occurred most frequently in mathematics compared to the other two disciplines. This article ends with suggestions for ways the findings of this study can be used to raise EMI teachers’ awareness of various options for providing CF on students’ linguistic errors during their incidental teaching practices.

Dynamic, Customizable, and Free: Increasing Inclusion in Human Sexuality Courses Using OER

Traditional commercial textbooks at the college level are slow to update, often have problematic language or content related to queer and trans identities, and are likely to be prohibitively expensive. As an alternative, I explore the benefits of using open educational resources (OER) and free-to-access resources for a human sexuality course. I argue that using OER gives instructors the ability to customize content that is relevant to their students and location while spotlighting experiences that are frequently left out of commercial textbooks. Further, using OER provides opportunities for instructors and students to depathologize queer identities and challenge systems of oppression. Using my own experience, I present a case study of redesigning a human sexuality course with OER, including the process of evaluating and selecting sources. Finally, I offer suggestions for instructors who want to utilize OER and related free-to-access resources in their own classes.

Implementation of FAST in Two Digital Repositories: Breaking Silos, Unifying Subject Practices

This study traces evolving approaches to the use of the FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) in digital repositories at Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where changes in staffing, the launch of an institutional repository, and efforts to address problematic language in metadata have necessitated a shift from an in-depth indexing approach to FAST to a lightweight “tagging” model more suited to present-day metadata needs. Despite the subject schema’s apparent simplicity, Atkins’ experience with FAST has shown that it still requires significant time, effort, and experimentation in order to deploy it to best effect.

Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Covering tangata whenua in Aotearoa: a big data exploration of print media and Māori

ABSTRACT A large body of academic research documents harmful media coverage of indigenous populations across the globe. New Zealand is no exception. Aotearoa’s indigenous people, Māori, share similar damaging experiences, leading one major NZ media company to publish an apology for their historically poor depiction of tangata whenua. This paper adds to that wealth of evidence using the automated methods of machine learning to examine coverage of Māori in NZ print media. Across roughly 800,000 sentences – spanning over two decades of coverage – this research investigates print media discourses involving Māori at a mass scale while demonstrating the applicability of such tools for further research. The results replicate a collection of existing findings at large-N scale, further documenting problematic discussions of violence, political representation, and culture, among several other concerns. The novel approach also hints at complex, obscure relationships embedded within problematic language in Aotearoa’s print media, identifying notions of division - both implied and otherwise - along with notable instances of resistance.

Is Libyan Arabic a corrupted language: A study of Libyans’ attitudes towards the use of Libyan Arabic (ҁa:mmijjah, dariʒah)

This paper aims to explore the Libyans people’s attitudes towards the linguistic status and use of Libyan Arabic dialect (ҁa:mmijjah, dariʒah) as it is employed on a daily basis. Libyan Arabic is often denigrated and described as a corrupted, not codified and problematic language when assessed against fusˤћa:, the language of governmental affairs, religion, medium of instruction in schools and the official language of Libya. However, recent studies revealed that Libyan Arabic has crept into high domains exclusively reserved for Standard Arabic such as the mosque and the schools (1). In fact, some characters that are affiliated with and reserved for Modern Standard Arabic have been lent to Libyan Arabic via the process of “ideological elision” (14 p24). Accordingly, the current study examines the Libyans’ assessment of Libyan Arabic, its codification, its use in public domains, media, advertisements and whether this dialect is considered as a corrupted language in a diglossic setting. Sallabank (32 pp61-62) correlates language attitudes and ideologies with the way individuals perceive language vitality and practices and accordingly, with language policy.
 This paper also investigates how Libyan people perceive Libyan Arabic as an in-group marker and of identity.
 The results in the current study revealed that the Libyan people evaluated Libyan Arabic positively at not only the functional level but also at the symbolic level. Age group as a social factor turned to be descriptively significant since the younger age group showed more inclinations towards dariʒah.

A Deweyan Ethic for Human/Nonhuman Animal Relationships

Abstract In this article, I propose that the ethical work of John Dewey can better evaluate, enhance, and nurture human/nonhuman animal relationships. While Peter Singer’s utilitarianism and Tom Regan’s deontology are considered the dominant ethical theories in the field of animal ethics and have provided indispensable scholarship to the field, I argue that they cannot fully attend to the complexities of human/nonhuman animal relationships. Some of the shortcomings of Singer’s and Regan’s theories are the absence of context, the dichotomization of reason/emotion and human/animal, the calculative sterility of moral deliberation, and the problematic language of ‘rights.’ A supplemented Deweyan ethic—enhanced by care ethics and ecofeminism—can better attend to the ethical messiness of human/nonhuman animal relationships. I offer five characteristics of Dewey’s ethical work—naturalism, ethical pluralism, experimentalism, fallibilism, and meliorism—as an alternative way to evaluate and nurture these relationships.

Recommended Terminology for Substance Use Disorders in the Care of Children, Adolescents, Young Adults, and Families

Pediatricians across the United States encounter infants, children, adolescents, young adults, and families affected by substance use disorders in their daily practice. For much of history, substance use has been viewed as a moral failing for which individuals themselves are to blame; however, as addiction became understood as a medical disorder, clinical terminology has shifted along with a growing awareness of harm of stigmatizing language in medicine. In issuing this policy statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) joins other large organizations in providing recommendations regarding medically accurate, person-first, and nonstigmatizing terminology. As the first pediatric society to offer guidance on preferred language regarding substance use to be used among pediatricians, media, policymakers, and government agencies and in its own peer-reviewed publications, the AAP aims to promote child health by highlighting the specific context of infants, children, adolescents, young adults, and families. In this policy statement, the AAP provides 3 specific recommendations, accompanied by a table that presents a summary of problematic language to be avoided, paired with the recommended more appropriate language and explanations for each. Pediatricians have an important role in advocating for the health of children and adolescents in the context of families affected by substance use and are optimally empowered to do so by avoiding the use of stigmatizing language in favor of medically accurate terminology that respects the dignity and personhood of individuals with substance use disorders and the children and adolescents raised in families affected by substance use.

Improving a framework for evaluating participatory science

This article proposes improvements to an open framework for evaluating participatory science, including projects framed as citizen science. An original proposed framework, while valuable in its comprehensiveness, used problematic language that makes it unworkable in many international contexts. In countries like Australia where Indigenous data sovereignty matters profoundly, language about ‘target groups’ and ‘easing access’ to knowledge can harmfully perpetuate colonial discourses. The original proposed framework is sufficiently useful that it is worth constructively revising, so critique in this article is aimed towards collaborative progression of an open framework more suitable for international use. As well as replacing ‘target groups’ with partnership approaches, we argue that ‘easing access’ to knowledge for exploitation is a frame perpetuating the colonial doctrine of discovery, proposing recovery as an alternative aligned with several international movements for social justice and sustainability.

Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism

“If only one could say, and dismiss it with that, ‘These people are savages.’ They are—but they are a new and terrifying kind of savage. The twentieth century and the white civilized world produced this savage.”1 –Dorothy Thompson, “The Lessons of Dachau,” Ladies Home Journal, September 1945 When the readers of the Ladies Home Journal turned to Thompson’s article, after paging through columns offering housekeeping and beauty advice, they faced a somber shift in tone in the journalist’s descriptions of the Dachau concentration camp. Thompson’s problematic language about civilization, race, and savagery echoed the themes of a novel by one of her favorite authors, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which described another genocidal atrocity at the hands of white Belgians in the Congo. In 1941 she had lamented the shortcomings of journalism to fully represent the war and expressed hope that it would produce “a Victor Hugo,...

Подходы к обучению студентов аграрного вуза иностранному языку для профессиональной коммуникации

Currently, there are three methodical approaches in the methods of teaching a professional foreign language: 1) a foreign language for specific purposes, 2) teaching specialized disciplines in a foreign language, and 3) an integrated approach. Each of them is focused on achieving specific learning objectives. Content and language integrated learning has a significant professional and linguodidactic potential. Its distinguishing feature lies in the fact that within the framework of one integrated course, students simultaneously develop a professional foreign language com-municative competence and professional competencies. The purpose of the research is to compare these three methodical approaches to learning and determine which of them are used in teaching students of agricultural universities. The study showed that at the moment the subject-thematic content of integrated courses has been developed for students of such areas of study as “Agrochemistry and Agrosoil Science”, “Gardening”, “Agroengineering” and “Technology of Production and Processing of Livestock Products”. The methodical dominant in the context of the implementation of integrated learning is the system of problematic foreign language professional tasks. Typologies of such tasks and professional cases were developed for students of the areas of study “Agroengineering” and “Technology of Production and Processing of Livestock Products”. As for students of other areas of training of an agricult

Language Matters: How Baker Library is Working Towards Conscious and Inclusive Description

Inclusive and conscious archival description can support consistency in researching and describing marginalized groups and can serve to provide context and a counter-narrative reflecting the perspective of the documented community. It can also help to address the power imbalances between creators and subjects of records. In this article, the authors describe efforts to prepare best practice guidelines for inclusive description and for revising descriptions to remediate outdated, problematic, or offensive language and meet modern standards. They also share how the project team is working together to create meaningful and enduring changes that both provide a better experience for staff and users and support Harvard Business School’s Action Plan for Racial Equality.

Magical thinking and moral injury: exclusion culture in psychiatry.

This is an article about exclusion. We might not like to admit it - even fail to realise it - but National Health Service (NHS) mental health service structures have become increasingly focused on how to deny people care instead of help them to access it. Clinicians learn the art of self-delusion, convincing ourselves we are not letting patients down but, instead, doing the clinically appropriate thing. Well-meant initiatives become misappropriated to justify neglect. Are we trying to protect ourselves against the knowledge that we're failing our patients, or is collusion simply the easiest option? Problematic language endemic in psychiatry reveals a deeper issue: a culture of fear and falsehood, leading to iatrogenic harm. An excessively risk-averse and under-resourced system may drain its clinicians of compassion, losing sight of the human being behind each 'protected' bed and rejected referral.

Using Context Clues in Sentences by Cambridge IGCSE Students to Understand the Nonliteral Meanings of Words

Purpose: The main objective of the study is to help Cambridge IGCSE students to develop their acquisition abilities as well as linguistic knowledge of figurative language to figure out the context-dependent meaning.
 Approach/Methodology/Design: This is a type of qualitative study on how Cambridge IGCSE students can develop their analytical thinking skills to understand figurative language through using context clues theory in order to figure out the meanings of idioms and expressions used by authors.
 Findings: A lot of progress in the use of figurative language was noticed. At the end of the course, students’ megacognitive skills highly improved and turned the students optimistic, after being frustrated at the beginning, to achieve the IGCSE Exams confidently. The study points out the necessity of teaching this type of language since students may encounter it in the Cambridge IGCSE Exams. It also focuses remarkably on the difference between literal and nonliteral language, and since these two are related to semantics and pragmatics, the scope of the study extended to cover the difference between the two.
 Practical Implications: Through TBD, periodicals help college students develop their listening and writing skills, raise awareness on problematic language areas, and avoid biases in analyzing texts. 
 Originality/value: Through designing some sample lessons, the study tries to assist teachers to get immensely engaged in teaching different aspects of figurative language and how to approach teaching it.

Science Fiction by Sherryl Vint

604 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) dimensional alien” (63). Moving beyond the work of Lovecraft, Steadman persists in using problematic language when describing “mentally-challenged person[s]” (124, 209) in Asimov’s “… That Thou Art Mindful of Him” (1974) and Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive respectively. He goes on to describe Asimov’s Late Solarians as hermaphrodites and “alien monstrosities” who have taken “their obsessive fears of human contact and sexuality to extreme levels” (153). And finally, in a most perplexing instance, Steadman dedicates an entire paragraph to what he frames as a prescient parallel between the Solarian civilization and “the situation of our millenials in the twenty-first century” (153). Connecting the extreme isolation and technological dependency of these advanced Spacers to the modern-day use of smart phones and other electronic devices, he writes, “Although the millenials have not yet reached the levels of isolation and solipsistic self-absorption that the Solarians have obtained, nevertheless, they seem to be well on their way towards achieving this end” (153). While warning, as Steadman does, against a future with “no room in it for alien love” (245), the lack of critical and self-reflective analysis in this book ultimately falls short of what our current moment most requires. These recurring instances of alienation diminish the value of a text otherwise worthy of praise.—E. Mariah Spencer, University of Iowa Thinking with Science Fiction. Sherryl Vint. Science Fiction. MIT, 2021. 207 pp. $15.95 pbk. Sherryl Vint’s well-conceived, informative, and concise new introduction to science fiction is one of a dozen 2021 entries in MIT Press’s ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE series, dedicated, as the series statement says, to offering accessible, expert overviews of “topics of current interest.” This is especially worth noting because Science Fiction is the only volume in the entire series (not just among the 2021 entries) dedicated to a narrative genre. The most closely related topics are volumes on Critical Thinking, Deconstruction, and Hate Speech; otherwise the topics skew toward technical matters such as Algorithms, Biofabrication, Ketamine, and AI Assistants or to social issues such as Gender(s) or Death and Dying. The inclusion of science fiction as a topic in the series is striking evidence in support of Vint’s main thesis, that science fiction is an increasingly important cultural vernacular “for thinking about and intervening in the world” (1-2). Therefore, she explains, “This book is about what science fiction can do, not a catalogue of important authors and titles” (2). This is not in the least a promise to unveil science fiction’s formal essence, something Vint does not think it has. She stresses instead the diversification and globalization of science fiction in recent decades, emphasizing that the genre is “embraced by many communities of practice, often to significantly divergent ends and with correspondingly different aesthetic and formal strategies” (14). The genre’s internal discord, the “tension between scientific extrapolation and social change [that] lies at [its] heart,” is the keynote of Vint’s exposition of its history and contemporary shape (10). She sets out as her main goal to explain how science fiction complements conversations about 605 BOOKS IN REVIEW “visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (17, quoting science studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff) by doing something “more urgently needed—namely, it critically interrogates who is part of the collective creating those ‘shared understandings.’ Social as well as technological change is at stake in sf, which helps us think through whether ‘advances in science and technology’ are also always advances in civic and social life” (17). She concludes her introductory chapter with a claim that the book fully lives up to: “If we are living in a science-fictional world, this book aims to help us articulate more precisely what that means and to prompt us to think about actively managing—rather than passively awaiting—this future” (18). Vint fleshes out her exposition of what science fiction can do in seven thematically organized chapters. Some of the chapters tackle familiar, wellestablished contexts and motifs of sf: the utopian tradition; the colonial imagination; robots...