English Style Research Articles

English language learning and teaching styles in two Turkish primary schools

Foreign language learning styles are aimed at facilitating students' learning and therefore the teaching style used is important in terms of matching learners' styles to their educational needs. The present study was aimed at investigating several dimensions of primary school students' language learning styles and the ways in which certain styles are shaped and favored by teachers' teaching styles. The primary aim was to find out whether or not the measures taken by the Turkish Ministry of Education regarding rectifying the shortage of teachers of English as a foreign language have had an effect on the learning styles of primary school students. The secondary aim was to examine the varying learning styles of EFL students in two primary schools and to establish whether or not there has been a change in these learning styles. Finally, the researcher examined whether or not the economic conditions of the schools had an influence on the students' learning styles.

Book Reviews: Together with Technology: Writing Review, Enculturation and Technological Mediation, Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication, the Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market, Outsourcing Technical Communication: Issues, Policies and Practices

Book Reviews: Together with Technology: Writing Review, Enculturation and Technological Mediation, Motives for Metaphor in Scientific and Technical Communication, the Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market, Outsourcing Technical Communication: Issues, Policies and Practices

The structures of provincialism: Britain's many voices in the colonies

Britain's eighteenth-century North American colonies were certainly provinces of the empire, but it remains unclear how these provincial societies developed amidst the influence of English fashions, customs, and styles. Traditional views that the American colonies had cultures simply derivative of Britain are inadequate, because they presume a single, monolithic imperial culture, which Americans either absorbed or rejected. In practice, Americans chose from different and even contradictory cultural sources, not passively mimicking styles, but consciously selecting elements of English culture to suit their provincial purposes. Two wealthy Protestant congregations in eighteenth-century New England exemplify this process, adapting different English architectural styles in a competition for local prestige. In 1726 Boston's minority Anglican community completed the London inspired Christ Church, then the largest and tallest structure in the capital of New England Puritanism. One might have expected the costly building to rankle the Congregationalist majority, who held to Reformed Protestant tradition by refusing crosses, wedding rings, and even the title of “church” for their houses of worship. However, by the decade's close Boston's prestigious third Congregational society built the Old South Meetinghouse, nearly identical to Christ Church in its impressive brick exterior, but larger and taller. More than just a pursuit of London finery, both sects selectively incorporated elements of English architecture, hoping to project a sophisticated identity that would attract new members without offending Boston's Puritan aesthetic tradition. Sects used the height and stately form of the church exteriors to symbolize their prominence, while avoiding idolatrous or immodest flourishes. Inside, the designs reinforced each sect's distinct values, creating a unique churchgoing experience for attendees. The complex process of adapting English styles also produced unexpected results. As the provincial congregations financed their expensive constructions, they created tensions and social changes within their membership, altering the practice and image of their faiths.

English Style and Decoration: A Sourcebook of Original Design

English Style and Decoration: A Sourcebook of Original Design

Style and the Mole: Domestic Aesthetics in <i>The Wind in the Willows</i>

Style and the Mole: Domestic Aesthetics in The Wind in the Willows Seth Lerer (bio) Writing to her husband’s first illustrator, Graham Robertson, in 1931, Elspeth Grahame thanked him for the gift of his recently published memoirs. She called them “entrancing” and goes on to note: “The touch is so light yet so sure that whatever the subject the reading of it would be full of pleasure to any lover of English style.”1 Lovers of English style would have been long familiar with Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, originally published in 1908 and, by 1931, available in four different editions (a new one, illustrated by Ernest Shepard would soon appear in that year).2 A. A. Milne’s stage adaptation, Toad of Toad Hall, played to welcoming audiences in 1929, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, perhaps that era’s greatest arbiter of English style, had ensconced Grahame with two selections in his Oxford Book of English Prose, published in 1925.3 While The Wind in the Willows is about many things—the nature of friendship, the loss of English pastoral security, the temptations of fashion and fad—it is, first and foremost, an essay in aesthetics. Style governs each and every creature of its woods and mansions, from Mole’s quiet, gentlemanly domesticity to Toad’s manic, aristocratic shows. Style governs, too, the progress of its narrative, and throughout this book, Grahame explores techniques of pictorial description and devices of characterization that would come to epitomize what Elspeth could evoke as “English style.”4 Though voiced decades after her husband’s major work had been completed, Elspeth’s judgment chimes with the ideals of the Edwardian aesthetic codified in Quiller-Couch’s anthology.5 Central to that aesthetic was a kind of effortless esprit, as well as an essential “Englishness” that rooted that esprit in local landscape and personal reminiscence. There remains something sweetly nostalgic about the Edwardian idiom, and Quiller-Couch makes clear that, even though his book may brim with “purple patches,” there is nonetheless a “subdued and hallowed emotion” to its selections: “a sense of wonderful history written silently in books and buildings, all [End Page 51] persuading that we are heirs of more spiritual wealth than, may be, we have surmised or hitherto begun to divine.”6 Some of those selections, he claims, hold “the core of true English gentility.” Others are, he reflects, full of “out-of-door matter.”7 He goes on to note that, when Wolfe crossed the St. Lawrence, he is reputed to have “murmured a stanza or two from Gray’s Elegy,” and Quiller-Couch himself has drawn on writers who, he claims, evoked “this imperishable land of ours revived.”8 Such sentiments could not have been far from the mind of Elspeth Grahame, who invites Graham Robertson to their home in the country in her letter of thanks: Do you ever go caring—or if by train we are within an hour of Paddington, and 5 minutes walk from the station here—in an old cottage next the church with a round village lock-up in the garden—so if you would ever propose yourself to come down & see us we should be so glad—and used as you are in Surrey to beauty-spots the river & trees are beautiful in summer-time, that is of course when there is any summer about which has not been the case this year.9 The Grahames lived by what Quiller-Couch calls that “green and English country churchyard,” and in his anthology he calls attention to a selection from Charles Reade, “The English Skylark in Australia.” There, in an amazing, paragraph-long sentence, Reade epitomizes the ideals of local pastoralism, and his style—though readers today may find it overwrought—would provide a model for the criticism of Elspeth as well as the writing of her husband: Every time he checked his song to think of its theme, the green meadows, the quiet stealing streams, the clover he first soared from and the Spring he sang so well, a loud sigh from many a rough bosom, many a wild and wicked heart, told how tight the listeners had...

The Syntax Features of the African American English In Georgia Doyle Johnson's Frederick Douglas And Loraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

Syntax reflects features of a language. One of the American African English features in syntax can be seen in Georgia Doyle Johnson's Frederick Douglas and Loraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. As it is considered non-standard dialect, the American African English syntax is assumed to have its own characteristic different from the standard American English. This paper is descriptive linguistics rather than a stylistic study as it does not focus on literary style. The data taken was classified into linguistic elements and was" tested to the theories of informal English in general; African American English in particular and Standard American English rules of pronunciation. The research findings were summarized and discussed to conclude the research. The result of the research demonstrates that African American English, a variant of informal English, is different from the rules of Standard American English. In terms of syntax, the African American English style if it is seen from viewpoint of grammar function contradicts with features-6f Standard English: clarity^ brevity and fluency. The rules of clarity are broken by the presence of ellipses, clippings, copulas and tenses; brevity by the presence of unnecessary repetition and additions; and fluency by the presence of combinations of assimilation and clipping. African American English speakers employ polite expressions. The research revealed that polite expressions when greeting people, using please when asking for permission and using titles to show respect is done, particularly with elders. Furthermore, when the speaker is angry, she/he uses a complete name for emphasis.

Myths and realities of English learning strategies and styles.

Myths and realities of English learning strategies and styles.

Hybrid loans: a study of English loanwords transmitted to Korean via Japanese

In this paper we present the results of a study of Japanese-influenced English loanwords in Korean. We identify some 10 phonological indexes that identify the loan’s Japanese provenance and examine their relative rate of retention in 287 loan forms that show a mixture of Japanese-style and direct-English-style phonological characteristics. Our chief finding is that certain traits of Japanese-style loanwords are more resistant to change to the direct English style of adaptation that is applied to contemporary loans. We consider two possible explanations for such a hierarchy. First, the resistance hierarchy reflects the relative perceptual saliency of the relevant features (cf. Steriade, 2001). Second, the resistance hierarchy reflects the degree of confidence Korean speakers have about the “correct” direct-English borrowing pattern.

Introduction: Developmental co-construction of cognition

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I would like to thank Denis Hilton for comments on English style.

Let them write English

This article discusses the current requirement for scientific research to be published in the English language and the problems arising from this requirement not only for authors whose first language is not English but also for society and for the world's scientific community. The assistance which is and should be available to authors is considered as well as a future looking towards multilingual publication.

Review: Telling New Stories

Gerry Hassan and his colleagues have put together an enticing mixture of fiction and commentary in the model of a 'European' cultural production. The cast of characters is distinguished: among others, Scotland's top civil servant John Elvidge, academics David Bell, Tom Devine, Christopher Harvie and Iain McLean, and treasurable public intellectuals Carol Craig, George Kerevan and Tom Nairn. By using interviews and correspondence they have generated a more rapid and accessible intervention into the public record than most academic collections (sadly not matched by the speed of this reviewer, for which apologies to the authors and journal editors). The introduction by former Presiding Officer George Reid locates this material in the Futures Forum work of the Parliament that is able to engage a wider range of interests (especially opposition parties) than is possible with government initiatives. Reid's approach to his position was to cultivate a more European, less English style of public discourse, intriguingly distinct from older styles of political nationalism.

Discourse styles in spoken British English : a corpus-based study

This paper is concerned with discourse styles in spoken British English. The investigation is based on the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) and the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC), two corpora which mirror the state of the language at the beginning of the 1990s. The study focuses on differences in the distribution of the discourse markers oh, well, you know and I mean across gender, age and register. It is shown that female speakers in COLT and the BNC use discourse markers more frequently than male speakers whenever there are obvious dissimilarities. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the investigated discourse markers tend to be more common among adults than adolescents and that differences between spontaneous and formal communication seem to be larger among adults than teenagers.

Écritures de l'exil chez Elias et Veza Canetti

The exiled Viennese Sepharad writers, Elias and Veza Canetti, were confronted with the problem of their relation with the host country, England, and with the land of their origins, Vienna. The situation of exile reinforced their belonging to Spanish culture and to the Mediterranean and more generally the “Oriental” world. The present article deals with their trajectory looking at three different elements in order to explain why Veza failed where her husband finally succeeded. Veza died in 1963 and didn’t manage to publish any of her works, and for that reason there are but few examples of the work of this socialist and feminist author to enable us to understand her. Her last known work, a spirited comedy in English style, shows her desire to integrate and her ability to intertwine lightness and earnestness in weaving the thematic threads of exile into an entertaining play.

Nações e estilos de economia política

Nations and styles of political economy. This paper investigates the existence of national styles of political economy. The characteristics and determinants of the German, the Austrian, the French, and the English styles are suggested. Some methodological implications for the historical economic thought are outlined.

Stability of temporal contrasts across speaking styles in English and Croatian

In this paper, we investigate the effect of clear speech, a distinct, listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production, on vowel and stop consonant contrasts along the temporal dimension in English and Croatian. Our previous work has shown that, in addition to enhancing the overall acoustic salience of the speech signal through a decrease in speaking rate and expansion of pitch range, clear speech modifications increased the spectral distances between vowel categories in both languages despite the different sizes of their vowel inventories (+10 in English, five in Croatian). Here, we examine how clear speech affects the duration of English tense (long) vs. lax (short) vowels, English vowels preceding voiced (long) vs. voiceless (short) coda stops, Croatian long vs. short vowels and Croatian and English voice onset time (VOT) duration for voiced and voiceless stops. Overall, the results showed that the proportional distance between the ‘short’ and ‘long’ vowel categories and between the voiced and voiceless stop categories was remarkably stable across the two speaking styles in both languages. These results suggest that, in combination with the spectral enhancement of vowel contrasts, language-specific pronunciation norms along the temporal dimension are maintained in clear and conversational speech.

File work, legal care, and professional habitus—an ethnographic reflection on different styles of advocacy

This article contrasts two English solicitors' styles of file work and aims to spell out some of the styles' respective practical and ethical implications. What I call ‘elaborate style’ relates to the file as the primary means of casework, while the ‘minimalist style’ relates to the file in terms of a compulsory exercise. The contrasts in style are further explored by attempting a set of explanations for them. The paper seeks explanation by relating the styles to the respective cases filed, to gender differences in the legal profession, and to the professional habitus of either solicitor. In conclusion, the inquiry suggests an explanation involving the legal discourse served. There are good reasons for either style under certain pre-trial and trial procedures. To stick habitually to one style while moving towards another procedure may cause unwanted consequences.

Folk Music from Wisconsin (review)

Reviewed by: Folk Music from Wisconsin James P. Leary Folk Music from Wisconsin. [1960] 2001. Compiled and annotated by Helene Stratman-Thomas; reissue produced by Bob Carlin. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, in cooperation with Rounder Records, CD (1), Rounder 1521. Folk Music from Wisconsin, once available only as an LP in a plain but durable record jacket stuffed with a stapled typescript, is now in a far more attractive package, thanks to the American Folklife Center's joint venture with Rounder Records to reissue titles from the old Folk Music of the United States series of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress. The twenty-one tracks, remastered for excellent sound, are culled from the 1940s field recordings of Helene Stratman-Thomas, a faculty member in the School of Music at the University of Wisconsin. With the exception of two pages devoted to credits and a historical sketch of the Archive of Folk Culture, the text of the thirty-eight-page booklet faithfully reproduces Stratman-Thomas's fine original notes, including the places and dates of recordings, performers' biographies, comparative discussions of songs and tunes, song lyrics, references, and a bibliography. The new booklet adds eleven photographs, most of them portraits of performers made during Stratman-Thomas's 1941 and 1946 forays around Wisconsin. In keeping with the high degree of cultural pluralism that has characterized Wisconsin since the early nineteenth century, Stratman-Thomas did fieldwork with nearly thirty ethnic groups, recording Ho-Chunk morning songs, Luxembourger immigrant ballads, Walloon dance tunes, Swiss yodels, French singing games, Polish highlander fiddling, and much more—over seven hundred performances altogether. This production, however, includes "only ballads and songs in the English tongue" (p. 1), an indication of both the antiforeign, assimilationist ideology dominating American public culture and the prevailing Anglophile orientation of American folksong scholarship at the time of its initial release. Regrettable limitations aside, we hear fine versions of nine ballads concerning tarrying nobles ("Lord Lovel," Child 75), Irish robbers ("Brennan on the Moor," Laws L7), suffering sweethearts ("Charming Beauty Bright," Laws M6, and "The Drowsy Sleeper," Laws M4), faithful lovers ("The Lake of Ponchartrain," Laws H9), valiant cowboys ("Billy Vanero," Laws B6), snake-bit farmhands ("Springfield Mountain," Laws G16), disaster victims ("Milwaukee Fire," Laws G15), and contesting lumberjacks ("Little Brown Bulls," Laws C16). The last two, as well as Eben Rexford's composition, "The Ride of Paul Venarez" (the source of "Billy Vanero"), originated in Wisconsin. Lyric folksongs include a children's singing game ("Pompey is Dead") and a fox hunter's ditty ("How Happy is the Sportsman"); the Irish "Shule Aroon"; two celebrations of lumber camps and woods workers ("Shantyman's Life," "The Bold McIntyres"); a harvesters' anthem ("The Cranberry Song"); and a cante-fable spread by traveling shills for Hamlin's Wizard Oil ("Reuben Wright and Phoebe Brown"). The foregoing sixteen performances, seven by women and nine by men, are all unaccompanied, with the exception of Luther Royce's guitar-backed rendition of "Billy Vanero." Royce's twangy, rather than crooning, emulation of singing cowboys like Jules Verne Allen is paralleled in its vernacular culture orientation by Hamilton Lobdell's Wizard Oil campiness. The other singers rely variously on the folk styles of Cornish, English, Irish, and Welsh immigrants; Yankees and Yorkers; and the "Kentucks" who settled in northern Wisconsin in [End Page 76] the 1890s. The haunting lilt of Antigo's Pearl Jacobs Borusky, a "Kentuck" from a singing family, and the Irish-derived woods singing of Rhinelander's Emery DeNoyer are particularly stellar. They may also be heard singing "The Rich Old Farmer" and "The Little Brown Bulls," respectively, on Anglo American Ballads (Rounder 1511). Pearl Jacobs Borusky's marriage into an extended Polish family and the acquisition of Irish American performance mannerisms by the French Canadian DeNoyer hint at the broader linguistic and cultural diversity of vocal styles and songs prevailing in Wisconsin in the 1940s. Although we hear none of that diversity on Folk Music from Wisconsin, we are treated to five highly creolized "lumber camp" tunes performed by Iva and Otto Rindlisbacher of Rice Lake. The children of Swiss German immigrants, the Rindlisbachers were adept players of Swiss...

Converging conventions? Macrosyntactic conjunction with English and and German und

A growing number of investigations into the historical development and status of academic prose have found that many national languages lose both prestige and distribution as a medium of expression in the sciences, while English progressively develops into the lingua franca of science. The investigation presented in this paper starts from the assumption that the status of English as a global lingua franca not only replaces the use of other languages but that the prestige associated with English styles of scientific writing can also influence text production in other languages in the sense that indigenous language- and culture-specific communicative conventions are superseded by the conventions operative in comparable English texts. Taking the example of macrosyntactic conjunction with and and und in English and German popular scientific texts, this article addresses the question of whether German communicative conventions are adapted to English communicative styles such that language-specific strategies of information organization in German change in the direction of English.

Looking at the overlooked: A corpora study of punctuation use in Russian and English1

This study was designed to analyze the comparative use of punctuation marks in Russian and English newspaper editorials. The study was conducted using corpora of English-language editorials, taken from the New York Times in 2005, and of Russian-language editorials, taken from Izvestiia in the same year. Results indicated that the comma, colon, and the em-dash were used more often in the Russian corpus. The difference was determined to be statistically significant. The author then compared these results to the results of punctuation use in corpora of Russian and English literary texts. Again these punctuation marks were used more frequently in the Russian literary corpus than in the English one. At the same time, in both the Russian and English literary corpora these marks were used much more frequently than in the corpora of Russian and English editorials. In the second part of the article, the author attempts to isolate the reasons for the discrepancy in use of the colon by examining rules for its use as elaborated in authoritative Russian and English style guides. On the basis of this, the author suggests guidelines for the translation of the colon into English.

Communicative styles in English and German

In this paper cultural differences in communicative styles preferred by speakers of German and English are presented, and their impact on intercultural misunderstandings and the ascription of politeness or impoliteness is discussed. Concretely, five dimensions along which these cultural differences (as outcomes of extensive contrastive-pragmatic work can be placed) are introduced and exemplified. Further, the value and the explanatory power these dimensions might have for culture clashes and for the perception of misunderstanding and (im)politeness are discussed.