Synergy

6

Authors: Anca COLIBABA, Monica VLAD and Cezar VRÎNCEANU

The aim of this article is to offer language teachers a series of tools and practical guidelines for improving their usage of the online environment. We will cover mainly two coordinates. Firstly, we will study the concept of Personal Learning Network (PLN). In this respect, we will present an example of how to create such a network, both from the perspective of the teachers (for their own learning) and also from the perspective of the learners (how a teacher can help the learner build a PLN). Secondly, we will focus on one of the greatest challenges for teachers and learners today: how to make the most of the online language resources available. If in the past the challenge was to find any resources on the internet, the challenge of our day is to select quality resources and to ensure that the learners have access to learning material that is relevant to their needs.

6

Authors: Virginia Mihaela DUMITRESCU

The present article looks at a type of reading which Paul de Man calls “theretical” to distinguish it from the traditional, “aesthetic” approach. The “theoretical” close reading, characterised by increased analytical rigour and focused on a clear-cut distinction between the linguistic and the phenomenal, aims to identify the “literariness” of literary language (a term used by the American critic with reference to “the autonomous potential of language”, to all the non-intuitive linguistic “factors” and “functions” that are not accessible to perceptive knowledge and constitute the incontrollable, “inhuman”,mechanism of language). The “linguistics of literariness” underlying it is used as an instrument for denouncing “ideological aberrations”, or the confusion between the materiality of the signifier and the materiality of the object designated by it. Unlike the traditional, totalising, “aesthetic reading” which starts from the premise of the possibility of knowledge, and the intelligibility of the text, the non-cognitive “theoretical” reading is an extreme example of linguistic and epistemological scepticism. Ironically, the critic himself cannot escape the error he criticises, as shown in the initial stage of his reading of a fragment of Rousseau’s Confessions: he tends to resort to the totalising, defensive strategy he later denounces as pure mystification, in an effort to elude the “blind force” of the linguistic mechanism by attributing meaning to structures created mechanically through the “positing power” of language.

7

Authors: Monica CONDRUZ-BĂCESCU

Business communication is how you communicate in your line of work. It is also a matter of human relationships. Good business communication is a must to meet the demands of the business environment. Most of us spend a lot of time communicating our knowledge, thoughts, and ideas to others. Your communication at the workplace can make all the difference between success and failure. Communication is described by many as the single most important factor in choosing managerial level staff, yet despite this fact many people are unable to convey their thoughts and they are struggling to communicate effectively.

8

Authors: Mădălina ALAMĂ

The following article focuses on virtual space and on identification processes and stages in order to show why the virtual space is endlessly resourceful for the user who finds this particular space to be the ultimate identity enhancer. The article begins by defining some key terms and by putting forth that the mirror stage (as cited in Lacan, 2006) is instrumental in understanding identification processes that the subject is to undergo throughout his/her life. Other identity theories are brought into discussion in order to broaden the theoretical understanding of identification in virtual space.

9

Authors: Lora CONSTANTINESCU

Advertising is commonly viewed upon as a multi-layered process of stimulating attention, acceptance and desire. Disappointingly enough, it is a means to ”reach the consumers’pockets”. Let us look again at this system of interwoven semiotic analysis, mercantile profit planning, psychological implications and ideological considerations. Since advertising still offers post modern society an exhaustively debated topic and interdisciplinary research area, this article discusses advertising as text genre and its use in FLT (here German) as a) a means of building genre awareness as well as of developing communicative competence (the intercultural included), and b) a device of shaping ways of thinking and inducing ways of acting.

14

Authors: Alexandra Anca CODREANU

At borderline of language philosophy, rhetoric and pragmatics topoi as understood by Aristotle, Perelman or Ducrot underlie legal reasoning. This article looks into the use of topoi in non argumentative, normative texts. The claim is that the knowledge representation function performed by topoi validates their use in laws and contracts. Legal provisions on quality assurance in higher education in the British and Romanian systems of law will be used as corpus. A clear identification of the way topics operate and are dealt with in professional communication using such normative texts will contribute to more efficiently teaching English for Legal Purposes.

22

Authors: Raluca ŞERBAN

This article deals with John Barth’s most autobiographic book, Once Upon a Time. A Floating Opera. The genre is subverted, as autobiographic parts are carefully balanced by imagined situations or characters. What results, despite its author’s firm refusal to admit to inserting any autobiographic elements in it, is a “postmodern”, or a “fictional autobiography”, one that could be approached, at least partly, via psychoanalytic criticism, again despite the author’s irony vis-à-vis such possibility.