Short Story In English Research Articles

The Effect of Teaching CoRT Program No. (4) Entitled "Creativity" on the Gifted Learners' Writings in Ein El-Basha Center for Gifted Students

This study attempts to investigate the effect of teaching CoRT Program 4 entitled Creativity” on the gifted learners' creative abilities in writing. The sample consisted of 36 gifted students in Ein El-Basha Center for Gifted Students. The first group (N= 18) was the control group (male and female students). The second group (N= 18) was the experimental group (male and female students).A pretest measuring fluency, flexibility and originality was administered for both groups. While CoRT program was demonstrated through 20 sessions taught for a period of three months for the experimental group, the control group continued studying in the traditional way. The test was validated and its interscorer reliability was ensured. The results of the study showed that the mean score of the experimental group was significantly higher than the mean score of the control group on fluency, flexibility and originality which indicates that the CoRT Program No. 4 entitled Creativity developed the gifted learners' creative abilities in writing English short stories. In light of the results of the study, the researcher recommends providing the gifted students with CoRT No. 4 entitled Creativity that could stimulate their fluency, flexibility and originality to write short stories creatively.

Stylistic creativity in Thai English fiction

‘Thai English literature’ has not been widely recognized because of the controversial notion of ‘Thai English’. This paper thus investigates features of stylistic creativity in English short stories and novels written by Thai authors in order to identify indicators for a Thai variety of English. The features are interpreted using the approaches of World Englishes by Kachru and Strevens. It was found that the selected Thai writers highlight their English fiction with strategies of stylistic and textual innovations similar to those used by writers of other New Englishes but with uniquely indicative features for a developing non-native variety of English in the Expanding Circle: contextual and rhetorical nativization, thought patterns in Thai writing styles, Thai identity construction, multilingual code repertoire, transcultural creativity, localization of English literary forms, and Thai cultural loading of the English language. These characteristics can be found in a canon of Thai English literary discourse.

The fox and the cabra: An ERP analysis of reading code switched nouns and verbs in bilingual short stories

Comprehending a language (or code) switch within a sentence context triggers 2 electrophysiological signatures: an early left anterior negativity post code switch onset – a LAN – followed by a Late Positive Component (LPC). Word class and word position modulate lexico-semantic processes in the monolingual brain, e.g., larger N400 amplitude for nouns than verbs and for earlier than later words in the sentence. Here we test whether the bilingual brain is affected by word class and word position when code switching, or if the cost of switching overrides these lexico-semantic and sentence context factors. Adult bilinguals read short stories in English containing 8 target words. Targets were nouns or verbs, occurred early or late in a story and were presented alternately in English (non-switch) or Spanish (switch) across different story versions. Overall, switched words elicited larger LAN and LPC amplitude than non-switched words. The N400 amplitude was larger for nouns than verbs, more focal for switches than non-switches, and for early than late nouns but not for early than late verbs. Moreover, an early LPC effect was observed only for switched nouns, but not verbs. Together, this indicates that referential elements (nouns) may be harder to process and integrate than relational elements (verbs) in discourse, and when switched, nouns incur higher integration cost. Word position did not modulate the code switching effects, implying that switching between languages may invoke discourse independent processes.

Teaching the Ecological Awareness on the use of John Steinbeck's Novel in English Language Learning for University Student in Thailand

For many centuries ago, critics have considered John Steinbeck literary works in a variety of many aspects, which it was found in various genres; collections of essays, articles in journal, research papers in university, or books -- into 4 main standpoints. Firstly, some critics employ a historical approach and interpret his novels in the context of American which relevance to the global history. Secondly, make a use of Marxist’s approach to considered Steinbeck’s works and let him to be a proletarian writer of the grassroots people. Furthermore, some critics are involved in investigate the use of myth whereas others give increasing attention to feminism and minorities’ studies in Steinbeck novel. Finally, the ecological vision of Steinbeck had become more influence in the eyes of the young generation reader in the 21 century. In Thailand, the English novels and short stories are also maintained in every University, especially, the student who are taking English as their major subject. They also study many works of famous author as John Steinbeck in many aspects, not only for entertainment but for education improvement and recreational of their vision too. This paper will look at some of John Steinbeck’s novels from an ecological awareness standpoint and bring the significance of relationship between human and nature as Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) urges in the Eco-criticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, the institution of literary studies should respond to global environmental crises. This paper is based on my certainty that an eco-critical approach can help restore the inequality caused by anthropocentric literary criticism and illustrate our awareness to significance of ecological problems by re – observe and explore Steinbeck’s visualization and his suggestions to counter ecological utilization.

DEAN BALDWIN. Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880-1950.

DEAN BALDWIN. Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880-1950.

Strategies of Repair in EFL Learners’ Oral Discourse

This study examines how EFL learners in the non-English speaking communities (Jordan and Germany) handle communication in story-retelling, and uncovers the repair strategies, which they deploy in order to overcome communication breakdowns and pass comprehensible messages to their interlocutors. The study also analyzes factors governing the EFL learners' preferences for employing repair strategies. It examines two repair strategies used by Jordanian and German EFL learners; self-initiated repair and repetition. The participants of this study were volunteer third-year students enrolled in the Linguistics Department at Chemnitz Technical University (Germany) and the University of Jordan (Jordan). Two short stories, selected from 100 free English short stories for ESL learners, were used to elicit data. The results of the analysis revealed that both German and Jordanian non-native speakers of English resort to strategies of repair in order to compensate for their lack of linguistic items or to gain time to retrieve linguistic item(s) and maintain conversation. Moreover, the results indicate that the Jordanian Arabic speaking subjects used strategies of repair more frequently, which was attributed to the fact that they produced more story events, which doubled the number of words in their oral production. Another finding was that repetition was used more frequently than self-initiated repair by both groups. The results of this study may provide some useful insights into syllabus design and English language teaching (ELT).

Representations of the land reform programme in selected Zimbabwean short stories and Mutasas Sekai, Minda Tave Nayo (Sekai, We Now Have the Land): A fait accompli?

The issue of the Land Redistribution Programme in the Zimbabwean literary geography is vexed and moot. This is because, like the politics which energised it, it is embedded in different ideological, social, economic, racial, gender and ethnic standpoints. It is this that makes some writers see it as a grand act of final decolonisation whose intention was to empower landless black natives. On the other hand, others see its bloody and violent nature and the attendant survival imperatives as something that will have to be addressed in future because it created other imbalances. There are yet others who try to straddle the two extreme positions by looking at the programme’s negatives and positives. The research interrogates how this momentous period in Zimbabwe’s life is represented in literature and why the different writers take the positions they take. In doing this, the researchers use selected English short stories produced after 2000 and a Shona novel on the same issue. The stories are written by both white and black writers. Key Words: Zimbabwe Jambanja, Chimurenga, Fast Track Land Reform, Xenophobic dispossession, land Imbalances.

The British and Irish short story handbook

The British and Irish short story handbook

Discovering a Hidden Facet of the Impact of Deletion Order on the Comprehension of C-tests

Cloze test is widely known as an effective technique in testing reading comprehension. However, since the validity of cloze test was questioned by some language experts, a modification of cloze procedure, called C-test, was then proposed. The present study was meant to explore the effects of the position of letters deleted in a C-test on the comprehension of the test; namely, the restoration of the deleted letters. In a standard C-test, the first half of every second word is deleted but in this study an adapted version of a C-test was employed in which the second half of every other word was deleted. A group of high intermediate students (N = 50) learning English at the Iran Language Institute (ILI) participated in this study. The two different versions of the test (the adapted version and the standard version) were randomly administered to the participants of the study so that some students received the standard version and the others the adapted version. Independent samples t-tests were run to analyze the data and the analysis of the data revealed that students taking the standard version of the test had significantly performed better on the test than those taking the adapted version. This indicated that the order of the deletion of the letters in a C-test would affect the comprehension of the text based on which the C-test was prepared. Further analysis of the data revealed that, interestingly enough, five of the highest scores obtained on the two versions of the test belonged to five students who had taken the adapted version of the test. The results of an interview with these students showed that they were used to reading extra material, especially English newspapers and English short stories a lot and that this had helped them increase their reading proficiency to a great extent compared to the other students, especially those who had taken the standard version of the test.

The strange history of the British short story and its reviewers

Before the 1890s, reviewers of short stories treated short fiction as they treated the novel, judging it by the same or similar criteria. As the short story became popular and the number of magazines printing short stories increased dramatically, reviewers’ attitudes towards the short story began to change. Partly under the influence of Brander Matthews’ insistence that the short story must have ‘form’ (interpreted by most reviewers and editors as ‘plot’) and partly because of the growing rift between traditional and Modernist aesthetics – embodied for many reviewers in the Yellow Book – editors and reviewers began treating the short story as different from the novel, often elevating it to the realm of ‘art’. As a consequence, reviewers frequently denigrated popular stories as ‘machine made’ and Modernist stories as ‘gloomy’ or as ‘mere’ sketches. Reviewers thus contributed to the impression among readers that the short story was in theory superior to the novel but in practice inferior to it. This attitude was often reflected by authors themselves, many of whom tended to regard their own short stories as of lesser importance than their novels.

<i>Event representation in language and cognition</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Event representation in language and cognition Engin Arik Jürgen Bohnemeyer and Eric Pederson, eds. 2011. Event representation in language and cognition. In the series Language, culture and cognition 11. CambridgeCambridge University Press. Pp. xiii + 282. US $95.00 (hardcover). Since, perhaps, the publication of Pederson et al. (1998) and Levinson (2003), there has been growing interest in studying the language of spatial representations. The [End Page 461] present book, the eleventh in the series Language, culture and cognition, is another invaluable addition to this field. Focusing on event representations in language and cognition, this book consists of eleven chapters written by leading experts in the field. In the first chapter, “On representing events — an introduction” (pp. 1–12), Pederson and Bohnemeyer discuss the concept of event and review previous analyses of event representation in the linguistics and psychology literature. The authors underline that the book aims to bring together the linguistic and psychological research on linguistic and cognitive event representations. Then, they provide a brief summary of the articles in the book. In the following article, “Event representation in serial verb constructions” (pp. 13–42), Pawley starts by reminding readers about the discussion between him and Givón in their earlier publications on the nature of event representations in serial verb constructions of some languages of New Guinea. The author here focuses on Kalam and English to further elaborate this discussion. In doing so, he gives a basic outline of word classes, verbal clauses, and clause-chaining constructions in Kalam, presents the findings of Givon’s studies, shows logical problems in those studies, and finally proposes a new study to compare compact and narrative serial verb constructions. According to the author, these conventionally used narrative serial verb constructions cannot be translated as a single verb but are comparable to narrations or short stories in English. It is this difference that may make speakers of Kalam and English differ from one another in their segmentation of events. In the third article, “The macro-event property: The segmentation of causal chains” (pp. 43–67), Bohnemeyer et al. examine how languages encode causal chains of events. The authors present results from their studies which were collected from four languages (Ewe, Japanese, Lao, and Yukatek) using a questionnaire and 74 video clips to elicit event descriptions. In doing so, they propose that languages differ from one another in the way that they segment events with respect to the macro-event property (MEP), defined as follows: “an event-denoting construction has the MEP iff it combines only with those time-propositional or durational operators that have scope over all sub-events it entails” (p. 48). The studies reported here show that Japanese is different from the other three languages in that Japanese, but not the others, uses multiple MEP expressions to encode causal chains of events. In “Event representation, time event relations, and clause structure: A cross-linguistic study of English and German” (pp. 68–83), Carroll and von Stutterheim investigate to what extent English and German speakers differ from each other in macro-event properties and sub-events in their event descriptions. For this, the authors collect data from 30 English and 30 German speakers by using 40 video clips, each depicting a different event. They show that English descriptions include new referents in an existential predication then categorize the event in a subordinate clause whereas German descriptions include new referents and the event in the same clause (e.g., There is a girl shopping in a supermarket vs. A girl shops in a supermarket). Unlike the other articles, which focus on event representations in spoken languages, Özyürek and Perniss’s chapter (pp. 84–107) examines event representations in sign languages, focusing on Turkish Sign Language and German Sign Language. [End Page 462] Investigating how sign languages represent events can provide new insights because sign languages use the space in front of the signers and the body to represent spatial relations. The authors focus on perspective taking in narratives and using a set of predicates in events that depict transitivity to show to what extent these two sign languages are similar to and different from each other. In “Linguistic and...

Experiments in Genre: Baroja's Vidas sombrías and the Short Story in English

Encouraged by the author's identification of his literaryinfluences—Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoyevsky and Stendhal— little critical attention has been paid to transnational connections that go beyond PíoBaroja's interest in nineteenth-century English, French or Russian literature, but which instead coincide with his own novelistic apprenticeship. This article considers Baroja's anticipation of changing paradigms in European and North American prose fiction, by suggesting alternative, but compelling, comparisons with the theories and practice of contemporaneous international figures, such as Henry James and James Joyce, among others. The article analyses Baroja's first published work, the collection of short stories entitled Vidas sombrías (1900), in the context of the English, Irish and American short story at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses firstly on the central importance of individual consciousness rendered through experimental narrative techniques in line with the fragment or ‘sketch’ of contemporaneous Anglo-American writers; secondly, pictorial and spatial form; and thirdly, the emphasis on the Gothic, supernatural or ‘uncanny’. Baroja's fiction, from its earliest incarnations, intersects with both the English and American tradition, simultaneously revealing nineteenth-century influences through Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism, in the transition to Modernism in all its varied forms.

Cultural Translation and the Transnational Circulation of Books

Like other commodities, books have both a material and a sociosymbolic life, whose inherent integration has been too often ignored. Comparative literature and transla­tion studies do not grant sufficient importance to the physical life of the book. Analyses of translation often fail to acknowledge that the (historical) journey by which the book traveled forms an important part of the mental worlds and symbolic mutations that it provokes and undergoes once transported. Scholars of book history, paying much attention to the materiality of the book, usually track a book's existence only within its original language environment. While cultural anthropology and geography offer the best models for bringing a fuller and richer history of the book into world-historical focus, scholars of consumption and material culture have yet to add books to their lists of circulating commodities. By looking at books as both cultural products and physical objects, this article proposes new perspectives for a study of translation as part of world history. Two case studies from the transmission of Russian books to China, a German-language collection of stories by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev and a Modern Library anthology of Russian short stories in English, are offered as illustrations of the ways in which transnational translation practices mediate between the book as object, as cultural-symbolic artifact in motion, and as text.

Applying the Reader-response Approach in Teaching English Short Stories to EFL Students

This article argues about the practicality of introducing the reader-response approach to teaching English literature to Iranian EFL students. The conventionally used traditional method and the newly introduced reader-response approach to teaching English short stories were implemented in two different groups of college students. It was of the interest of the researcher to observe any differences in the reading comprehension, vocabulary acquisition and motivation for further reading of English literature amongst the students of the two groups. The findings revealed that students directed with the reader-response approach could give aesthetic responses to literature without impairing their comprehension of the literary text. However, there were no significant differences revealed in the level of vocabulary acquisition or degree of motivation of the students of the two groups to read English literature in the future, deliberately and on their own.

The English Short Story in Pakistan: A Survey

The English Short Story in Pakistan: A Survey

11th International Conference on the Short Story in English: The Border as Fiction

11th International Conference on the Short Story in English: The Border as Fiction

A Stylistic Analysis of “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield, remembered as one of the finest writers of English short stories, enjoys enduring fame and a somewhat awesome literary status with her short stories, Miss Brill as one of her representative pieces. The interest of our Chinese critics, in general, locates more in the modernist techniques and devices she employs to present the inner world of the characters in her stories, than in her unique artistry in using language—commonly known as style— as a women writer. This thesis, however, is concerned primarily with the style of “Miss Brill”, and aims to provide an integrative, systematic stylistic analysis of the short story, deriving its underlying theories from a method of prose text analysis, proposed by literary stylists Leech & Short. The analysis is done in three main steps corresponding to the four main

Short-Term Memories: The First World War in British Short Stories, 1914–39

This article looks at British short stories of and about the First World War, written and published between 1914 and 1939. Drawing on a corpus of over 400 stories, the authors discuss the short story's merit as a contribution to the cultural history of the Great War. Short stories document the war and its perception in small fragments, addressing everyday concerns, interests and anxieties of those who experienced the conflict at first hand, whether as civilians on the home front or combatants in one of the many theatres of war: land, air and sea, France, Belgium or the Middle East. While memoirs and novels established themselves as the main genres for the depiction of the war's long-term effects, and poetry as the major medium of its commemoration, the short story offers a glimpse into the immediate experience of the war, a snapshot of the moment.

A Companion to the British and Irish short story

A Companion to the British and Irish short story

A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story

A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story