English Studies at NBU

14

Authors: Blagovesta Troeva

The paper discusses how literacy teachers approach the differences in the reading profiles of their students with dyslexia, and the value of an available diagnosis of dyslexia in their choosing the most appropriate teaching methods. The research was carried out in the Greater London area in 2014. It involved interviews with six practitioners directly involved in teaching reading skills to pupils with dyslexia in various capacities. All of the participants demonstrated awareness of the wide range of difficulties on the dyslexia spectrum. This underlay their commitment to personalized teaching based on a detailed assessment of the pupils' weaknesses and strengths. Provided that such an assessment and special educational expert's recommendations for teaching were available to inform their approach, five out of the six interviewees, who were working only at a school level, did not find the availability of a diagnosis of dyslexia necessary. However, the participant with the most extensive expertise, occupying a leadership role in a borough's literacy support centre, strongly defended and insisted on the existence and the instructional necessity of the dyslexia category. The overall conclusion is that applying the most appropriate teaching strategies would depend on the availability of a detailed assessment, which poses the question how teachers who have no access to such information will be able to adjust their instruction to the needs of the particular student.

14

Authors: Mariya Chankova

This contribution analyzes Cappelen’s No-Assertion view arguing that, although appealing, the No-Assertion view is based on a questionable premise, namely, that assertions are sayings. Austin’s notions of locution and saying are examined, in order to show that illocutionary acts concern aspects not covered by either of the previous two terms. Following a reconstructed definition of illocutionary act from Austin’s writings, I suggest that assertion is an illocutionary act, in that it takes effect after it is taken up by a hearer. I further suggest that in this respect the game analogy fails with regard to assertion, since no rules of the constitutive kind or norms can intrinsically define this act. This proposal is based on the idea that illocutionary act analysis should dispose of any preoccupations with propositions. It argues that expressing propositions was not originally and should not be at the core of speech act theoretic problematic.

16

Authors: Tadd Graham Fernée

This article compares two major 20th century magical realist novels - Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl – as critiques of modern nation-making practices, in Nehruvian post-independence India and Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi. The analysis centers the interplay of accidents and systems, in political constructions and contestations of modern self, history and knowledge. The works are assessed in terms of two aesthetic paradigms of modernity: Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as traumatic deracination involving new creative possibilities and freedom, and Cocteau’s vision of modernity as an Infernal Machine where a pre-recorded universe annihilates creative freedom. The political significance of these aesthetics are evaluated against the two distinctive nationalist narratives which the authors set out to contest in their respective novels. Both novels offer important critiques of violence. Yet both reveal a Proustian aesthetic of nostalgia, rejecting organized political action in the public sphere to celebrate imaginative introversion.

18

Authors: Maria Stambolieva

The paper presents ongoing research in contrastive corpus linguistics with envisaged applications in machine translation (MT) and with focus on Google Translate (GT) performance in English-Bulgarian translation. Structural patterns, forms or expressions where automatic translation fails are identified and analysed in view of creating a GT-editing tool providing improved target language output. The paper presents the corpus and the corpus analysis method applied, including the identification of inacceptable string types, their structural analysis and categorization. For each failure type, pre- or post-GT editing transformations are proposed. A first outline is proposed of a GT-editing tool consisting of a pre-GT editor performing string identification, substitution or deletion operations, a post-GT editor with a set of more complex string transformation rules and an additional module transferring structural information.

8

Authors: Andrea Gencheva

One of the questions perpetually plaguing the critics of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is whether the ghosts are real or the governess had lost her mind. This paper offers an interpretation of James’ novella from the viewpoint of the Gothic novel, and the author draws parallels between the actions and behavior of the young and impressionable governess and those of a heroine from the Gothic genre, taking into account the governess’ narrative style, her repressed self, the evil she faces and finally, the overall position of governesses in Victorian society. The result is an aligning of James’ protagonist with the generally accepted image of a Gothic heroine, thus working towards the conclusion that, seen from the perspective of the Gothic novel, the ghosts are real and the governess is caught in a battle between good and evil, fighting for the children’s souls.

11

Authors: Marina Fomina

The paper focuses on the category of semantic subject and its syntactical representation. The concept of subject is shaped by extra-linguistic knowledge and personal experiences as well as by people’s linguistic knowledge. The concept of subject, among other components, includes accumulated knowledge of the semantic roles which the grammatical subject may have in a sentence. The variety of roles accounts for the radially structured category of subject, with some members more central than others. The prototypical grammatical subject – an agent subject − is expressed by the nominative case of a noun which precedes the verb and is typically represented by an animate initiator or do-er of an action. Other types of subject are scattered within the syntactical category of subject being more central or peripheral. Translation-wise, the most “treacherous” types are the peripheral ones.

14

Authors: Maria Kunilovskaya

The article aims to describe the inter-rater reliability of translation quality assessment (TQA) in translator training, calculated as a measure of raters’ agreement either on the number of points awarded to each translation under a holistic rating scale or the types and number of translation mistakes marked by raters in the same translations. We analyze three different samples of student translations assessed by several different panels of raters who used different methods of assessment and draw conclusions about statistical reliability of real-life TQA results in general and objective trends in this essentially subjective activity in particular. We also try to define the more objective data as regards error-analysis based TQA and suggest an approach to rank error-marked translations which can be used for subsequent relative grading in translator training.

17

Authors: Milka Hadjikoteva

Academic presentations are hard to teach and students frequently have difficulties in their preparation and delivery. This article aims to present some of the findings of researchers in this area related to communication apprehension encountered both by native and non-native speakers of English. It also discusses the notion of high- and low-context cultures as well as various types of organization of presentations and overviews presentations as a process rather than a product developed with New Bulgarian University (NBU) students of EFL courses at level B1-B2 according to CEFR.

19

Authors: Olga Suleimanova, Daria Holodova

The paper discusses directions in the Latinization of Moscow street signs as an approach to facilitating urban navigation in a multicultural environment. Existing transliteration standards are critically reviewed and compared in the aims of identifying the most suitable Latinization approaches to meet the requirements of the modern city.