Synergy

6

Authors: Radadiana CALCIU

As universities are facing a tough competition all over the world, the PR activity has become crucial in order to create an image, a personality to the organisation. Thus, they can inform the public about their outstanding achievements or their wide range of courses and as a result they would attract the best students and professors and would also raise funds to sustain their activities. This article describes the PR activity in German universities and gives some hints on how to improve the quality of materials used to enhance the image of the university, both in written or digital form.

7

Authors: Maria Liana LĂCĂTUŞ

Public choice economics is a new domain of knowledge developed in order to understand the complex mechanism of governmental intervention in economy and, especially, the lack of efficiency of governmental decisions and actions. Its founder is James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986. Public choice economics is focused on the effects of individual personal interest, voters and politicians alike, on public decisions. Public choice economics became a valuable teaching method which helps students understand and apply an economic way of thinking in the classroom or in real life situations.

8

Authors: Adriana CHIRIACESCU

Skilled business persons know that creating goodwill is the main objective of any business, whatever the specific objective may be: buying, selling or solving problems. How could we define good will? The Oxford Dictionary considers it as a “kindly feeling to persons”. Trying to define it, we may say that goodwill is the degree to which the receiver of the message perceives the communicator of the respective message as a likable, trustworthy and consistent person. Of course, this image shall be determined by the attitude of the communicator. Can goodwill be taught and learned? Our hope is that it can become a constant value of human behaviour by gradual, trained accumulation of knowledge and successful practice.

8

Authors: AESTHETS AND AESTHETICISM

This article does not intend to be a dogmatic critical approach. The two novelists that I focus on, Vladimir Nabokov and Mateiu L. Caragiale are observed from the perspective of their similarities and of their differences. Each author has a different cultural background and created his work in an environment that was in most respects different from the cultural milieu of the other. However, the artistic views of the two authors are more similar than one would imagine.

9

Authors: Doru ENACHE

The present article analyzes Emil Cioran’s well-known essay collection, On the Heights of Despair, explaining and illustrating the philosopher’s understanding of the absurd. The main ideas focus around the author’s approach to the meaning of life (or better said, to the meaninglessness of life), and around the efforts one makes in order to try to lend some noble purpose to one’s own existence. However, one’s only escape from the self-induced world of illusions seems to be the “passion for the absurd”.

10

Authors: Laura Mureşan

As language professionals, we are all familiar with the added value the European Language Portfolio (ELP) can bring to the language class and its potential for continuous language learning outside class. So which are the new vistas for the ELP? Which are its new roles and target audiences? Which is the transversal dimension of Portfolio-based self-assessment? These are some of the questions this article aims to address. The focus will not be on language teaching and learning per se, but rather on the relevance of language learning and the importance of communication and cooperation in a wider context of European values, integration and transferability of multiple competencies. To illustrate the role European projects can play in bridging the gap between the field of language education and the world of work, reference will be made to the Lingua 1 project “EuroIntegrELP – Equal Chances to European Integration through the use of the European Language Portfolio”, which has recently been awarded the European Label for Innovation in Language Education.

12

Authors: Monica CONDRUZ-BĂCESCU

This article explores the struggles of identity and the multiple processes associated with increasing globalisation in the modern age. The contradictory process of globalisation has led to wideranging changes in the processes of identity formation. Globalisation causes a loss of marks, of individual identity, far away from our own ego. In this context, the term “identity” makes reference to one’s feeling of belonging that allows an individual to identify him/herself with a social group through a sort of shared memory that has a single cultural ground. Identity is reflected in people's lifestyles, language and religion. It has two key aspects: similarity with others and difference. This fear of the loss of cultural diversity and hence identities stems from the fact that globalisation is viewed as cultural homogenisation or westernisation or Americanisation.

15

Authors: Anca PECICAN

The present research article is a cross-linguistic approach to economics discourse lexis, more exactly to the expression of business trends in Romanian and English. The analysis focuses on the use of conceptual metaphors in expressing increase and decrease of economic indicators such as price, GDP, unemployment, etc. and uses as corpus the Romanian and English Central Bank reports. Starting from Lakoff and Johnson’s definition and Deignan, Gabrys and Solska’s classification of conceptual metaphors, several types of such linguistic expressions are identified and compared. The findings of the research indicate that the metaphors used to express economic trends are largely the same between the two languages but differ in terms of frequency and lexical realisation. The study is intended to prove helpful to Romanian speaking economists reading and writing in English, as well as to translators and ESP students.

6

Authors: Mihaela DUMITRESCU

The present article, which is meant as a brief introduction to the “antimetaphysical” deconstructionist project, is a paradoxical attempt to make sense of a peculiar type of critical discourse that obstinately resists intelligibility. As such, to deconstructionists themselves it would necessarily appear as one more illustration of the illegitimate, totalising, yet unavoidable gesture condemned by both Derrida and his Yale followers – a gesture ironically performed by its own critics, at times. Given the deconstructionist inconsistency that we have just mentioned, we prefer to look at it as one more example of logocentric “blindness” understood in the highly ambivalent, demannean sense of the word, as both a hindrance to, and a condition for valuable critical “insights”.

7

Authors: Roxana CIOLĂNEANU

Teaching a foreign language goes beyond teaching the language itself. Language is rooted in culture; it reflects customs and sets of values that people display when they speak. So, in the context of globalisation, teaching a foreign language involves the intercultural communicative competence as a key component, essential for communicating effectively with people belonging to various cultures, which helps one better understand one’s own culture. Teaching intercultural communicative competence to our students of Business English is all the more important today, with business going more and more international as an immediate consequence of the recent European integration and as a general consequence of the broader phenomenon of globalisation.

7

Authors: Anastasia ROMANOVA

When students take the exam in English, they are asked to answer various questions concerning a text they have heard once or twice. So we should ask ourselves a few questions concerning the problem of listening comprehension assessment.

8

Authors: Bob IVES, Kathryn M. OBENCHAIN

Expectations for Romanian scholars to publish their work in Western journals have risen in recent years. Meeting these expectations can be a challenging process because of language differences and differences in publication traditions. In this article, we describe the typical publication process for Western journals, including the peer review process and how articles and journals are evaluated for quality. We also indicate some of the challenges to being successful with this process, and offer a few suggestions that may help all scholars, including Romanian scholars, publish their work in these journals

10

Authors: Iulia RĂŞCANU

Commercials – entertainment, business or something more? “A means of moulding social stereotypes” seems a formula a little too pretentious. This paper appeared because at one point I was struck by the commercials’ power to intrude in people’s choices and to strengthen their preconceived ideas or social stereotypes. The recurrent theme that I noticed is related mainly to household products and the idea of marriage where advertisers felt like it was necessary to focus on the woman’s wedding ring (it is always the woman), especially when there are some kids involved. The point I want to make here is that it is not the advertisers’ role to mould or strengthen social or religious morale: they need to promote a product, not social behaviour or personal choice.

11

Authors: Diana IONCICĂ

The present study discusses the consequences free speech may have in today’s society, making reference to the case of one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, namely the book Salman Rushdie published in 1988: “The Satanic Verses”. By presenting the different aspects of the controversy surrounding the novel, we hope to reveal significant points related to the intricate and at times potentially dangerous connections established between religion and fiction and to show how a multitude of elements – including religious, political and social factors – combine in shaping the effect a piece of writing has on its audience.

16

Authors: Juan José VARELA TEMBRA, Eduardo ENCABO FERNÁNDEZ

The use of dictionaries in the teaching of English as a foreign language was not considered as an indispensable tool in the learning process for many years. The emphasis was laid on different strategies pursuing the acquisition of meaning. It is our sincere opinion that it is highly important to promote their use, both in and out of the classroom, and from a very early stage. The benefits of dictionaries over other techniques for learning vocabulary could be summarized in two basic points; they provide autonomy to the student to continue learning outside the classroom and they give the student complete information about the world. Therefore, teachers, have to dedicate special attention to the presentation of good dictionaries, and also their proper use in the classroom.