Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

5

Authors: Saodat Muhamedova & Ekaterina Shirinova

The following article is dedicated to the question of thematic grouping of banking/financial terms, which take a considerable place in the lexical structure of the Uzbek language. The paper presents the criteria for the distribution of terms according to their lexical structure, their original properties, and it provides examples for the substantiation of the hypothesis.

8

Authors: Evgenia Koika

The multinational nature of the English speaking community as well as the increasing use of English by non –native speakers, as it has become the lingua franca of our era, may lead to the assumption that the English language is not tied to any particular culture. This paper however suggests that teachers should choose a pluralistic approach with the ultimate goal of raising their students’ intercultural communicative competence. Thus, it examines both theoretically and practically, through extensive Needs Analyses, and a posteriori students’ evaluations, the appeal of a cultural awareness approach and the success of its implementation by means of a series of organized events. The Needs Analyses prove that the students are eager to learn more about the countries which they overwhelmingly consider a possible destination for studies and/or job (mainly US, UK, Australia, Canada and to a lesser extent Ireland). Celebrations, sports, local cuisines, as well as music and the film industry are absolutely cherished. Their participation in events including British Tea Parties, Irish Saint Patrick’s Day presentations and distinctive American Thanksgiving and Halloween celebrations prove the merit of the cultural awareness approach in EFL. Thus Clarks’s objective “to learn by doing rather than by being taught” can be applied in conjunction with a modern intercultural communicative approach and a strategy of an English language contextualization. Hence, students embark voluntarily on a learning process, improving not only their language but also their research, organizational and communication skills, while achieving cultural familiarization with all English-speaking people. In order to achieve the aforementioned, the use of computer-based technology is a sine qua non since it offers flexibility and redefines the roles of the teacher and the learners as the teacher assumes the role of the facilitator/guide on the side, leading students to autonomy.

9

Authors: Hyreme Gurra

This research paper is going to elaborate Middlemarch, one of the greatest works of George Elliot (her real name was Marie Ann Evans). It is one of the major pieces of the thesaurus of British Victorian period. The novel is subtitled as ‘A study of Provincial Life’ which is set in the imaginary town of Middlemarch which is thought to be at the territory of today’s city of Coventry, a little town not far from Oxford. The story takes place between the periods of 1930-1932.Elliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Representation of the People Act Bill. This Reform Bill endorsed major changes in the parliament where the number of commoners increased. Middlemarch is her seventh novel, started to be written in 1869.The interruption of her writing was caused by the illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her partner George Henry Lewes. Elliot’s resumed works; fusing together several stories into coherent whole during 1871-1872, appeared in serial form. The Volume I Edition was published in 1874 and attracted a large publicity. The novel is composed of eight books; it contains also a prelude and a postscript or a finale describing the post-novel fates of the main characters. The narrator is an omniscient third-person singular that narrates the life of ordinary people isn’t granting the echelon of heroic princes and kings. As a realistic novel Middlemarch contains multiple and different characteristics of realism such as; a slow-moving plot, emphasis on morality, casualty, foreshadowing of everyday events, emphasis on psychological optimistic tone, too much details, events are usually plausible. The research methods that have been helpful while conducting this research paper are; narrative and descriptive methods.

10

Authors: A.V. Peeters-Podgaevskaja & Alicja Verhagen

From previous research, perceptual saliency and morphophonological and morphosyntactic regularity significantly contribute to a successful acquisition of morphemes (Goldschneider & DeKeyser 2001). This pilot study investigates if and to what extent these features are predictors in the acquisition of reflexive verbs in adult L2 Polish and Russian. Despite these languages being closely related, their reflexive verbs differ dramatically. Polish uses a particle siẹ that has a high sonority value and can be freely placed in a sentence. Russian uses a reflexive affix which is placed directly after the finite verb ending and has two phonetically reduced variants -sja and -s’ that depend on the phonological context. In this pilot study, we hypothesized that i) perceptual saliency (understood as higher sonority and a prominent position in a sentence) facilitated perception and sentence repetition; ii) morphosyntactic regularity and predictability positively affected written production. Two groups of Dutch first-year students learning Russian and Polish respectively as L2 at the University of Amsterdam were recruited. Russian and Polish native speakers served as controls. In order to test perception/comprehension and (re)production of reflexive verbs in L2, a sentence repetition task (SRT) was used. The task consisted of 15 target sentences and 10 distractors for each language (syllable length: 17–22), and was administered in e-prime. The sentence position of the target structure and semantic categories of reflexive verbs were controlled. In order to test written production, a sentence translation task (STT) was developed that contained 15 Dutch items. For the controls, accuracy in both tasks was at ceiling. The Dutch-L2 groups performed significantly worse. The accuracy scores on target structures in SRT were better in Polish (61% vs. 40%). In the STT, the Russian L2 students outperformed the Polish L2 participants (84% vs. 58%). The results of this study support the idea that perceptual saliency and morphophonological uniformity affect perception and(re)production, while morphosyntactic regularity and predictability (boundness) is relevant for written production.

10

Authors: Iva Čupić & Martina Klanjčić

Why are students of English so reluctant to use the passive voice? The answer to this question may lie in the fact that students find it artificial, even pretentious, partly because it really does tend to be overtly wordy and cumbersome. Moreover, a point often overlooked is that the Croatian language “favours” the active structure as more natural both in informal and formal discourse, which is why students often find it difficult to adopt the passive voice as characteristic of the English language. Also, both for learners of English and native speakers of the language, the passive structure may be felt as contrary to the more common subjectverb-object (or S-O-V) order of syntactic constituents in the transitive sentence, employed profusely in the majority of Indo-European languages. Nonetheless, not only is it expected of the students to appreciate the passive, but also to use it competently. A great deal of academic English courses focus on formal communication; which makes the passive of key importance to understanding the type of language prevalent in EAP. This type of discourse is essential to studying English at university level, in the authors’ case ESP in the field of international relations and diplomacy, where study materials abound with passive structures. The aim of the paper is to show that the passive is fairly simple and easy both to understand and apply in independent production since it follows a set of formulaic instructions with little or no exceptions to the rule. It will look into examples of texts such as newspaper articles, legislation, professional literature, etc., and provide various activities used as a springboard for the acquisition of passive structures.

11

Authors: Luiza Zeqiri

Research has shown that learner-centered classrooms are very effective. Engaging students in various classroom activities leads towards better learning outcomes. Moreover, project-based activities can have a positive influence on the students’ engagement and dedication towards a language class. Accordingly, this study will investigate the influence of project-based language learning on students’ achievements and attitudes towards the ESP course. The participants in this study were sixty students from the Faculty of Languages Cultures and Communication at South East European University (SEEU), in Tetove, attending ESP for Communication Sciences (1) and (2) courses. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used for the data collection. The administered instruments were: group projects, student questionnaires, unstructured interviews with the students and process observation. The results confirmed that the students showed more positive attitudes towards ESP classes, after they participated in group projects. They became more motivated and more enthusiastic during their classes. The students improved their critical and creative thinking skills; they productively participated in teamwork and they were able to give constructive criticism. It can be hypothesized that engaging the students in group projects helps in lowering the affective filter, by which the students’ input increases and they show greater academic achievements.

12

Authors: Alla Nedashkivska

The study analyzes the pedagogical model of the blended-learning delivery format that may be incorporated in an L2 classroom. The study begins with the introduction of current developments in the area of blended-learning in higher education and in second-language acquisition research in particular. The focus is on scholarship that empirically informs the instruction and acquisition of language competence in an L2 classroom with an added computer-assisted language-learning component, blended-learning in particular. The model studied is a combination of face-to-face instruction as the basis of learning experience and an online teaching and learning tools. The focus is on specific tasks to be incorporated into the design of activities for both methods of learning and instruction. Five types of tasks, interactive, adaptive, communicative, productive and instructional, are studied as the main building blocks of an L2 learning environment. The discussion focuses on ways the blended-learning model allows reconfiguration of specific tasks in the two, face-to-face and online, components, leading to changes in the dynamics of an L2 classroom, shifting also the role of student and instructor in the studied blend. The analysis shows that the incorporation of the studied model may contribute to the increase of students’ engagement in the learning process at both learning spaces, face-to-face and online, fosteringa learner-centered L2 environment. The study concludes with a discussion of benefits the blendedlearning approach offers in an L2 classroom and suggests directions for further empirical investigations.

13

Authors: Milena Ivanović

This work, proceeding from Ivanovic (2015), focuses on the linguistic manifestations of argumentation and politeness in expressing different points of view and how they can be applied in teaching Spanish as a FL to advanced level students according to the CEFR (2001) which suggests the critical interpretation of texts in levels B2/C. For proving this proposal, columns published in two Spanish newspapers with different political orientation: progressive, El País (Carlos Boyero and Maruja Torres), and conservative, ABC (Antonio Burgos and Ignacio Camacho) were analyzed. Both the content and the strategies used by columnists have a persuasive goal and are considered materials that encourage students to think about social issues and trigger meaningful discussions. Previous studies have shown that, on the one hand, argumentation is a way of being polite because it justifies communicative goals and is a way of collaborating with the speaker, and, on the other hand, politeness can be considered as a tool for argumentation (Fuentes, 2009: 117, 125). It is supposed that (im)politeness is an argumentative technique that can add value and convince the speaker of something (Alcoba and Poch: 2006, 2010). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to approach Critical Literacy studies and develop critical literacy competence in C1/C2 students of Spanish as a FL focusing on argumentation and politeness strategies. In order to achieve that, as proposed in Goethals (2011), it is essential to enable students to identify different components of each text (text organization), to interpret its functional exponents and functions of certain strategies. In that sense, to adopt critical approach towards media discourse and to be able to interpret the underlying messages it is necessary to emphasize the importance of the following aspects to the B2/C students of Spanish as a FL: argumentation and politeness strategies used in columns and its significant exponents because it can allow us to show whether these manifestations of argumentation and politeness depend on ideology or rather on the personal style of each author.

14

Authors: Huiru Duan & Jun Deng & Zheng Zhang

This paper presents an empirical study on Chinese university students’ intercultural communication competence. The results show that learners should promote their cultural knowledge, intercultural sensitivity, communication strategies and intercultural awareness, etc. Suggestions for the curriculum and pedagogy of intercultural communication and the methods in developing Chinese university students’ intercultural communication competence in net environment are provided based on the research results.

15

Authors: Jeta Rushidi

Contrastive analysis or contrastive linguistics is related to the field of applied contrastive studies which predicts and clarifies the difficulties in the process of second language acquisition. It is also claimed that a comparison of different levels between the mother tongue and the target language (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, culture) would identify points of difference or difficulty and provide results that would be important in language teaching. This paper aims at describing and analyzing the similarities, dissimilarities, and identities between the English and Albanian compounds by form and meaning. Considering the fact that the dissimilarities are the main cause of difficulty in the learning of the second language or a foreign language, the paper will look at the most common errors Albanian university students make whilst translating compounds from Albanian to English and vice versa. The research presents a combined methodological design, both quantitative and qualitative approach. Correspondingly, English and Albanian grammar books were used as the primary sources in this contrastive study. The research also included the conducting of a test run questionnaire and the subsequent analysis of its results. Consequently, the results gave some insightful ideas or indications regarding implications in teaching and learning compounds in an ELT context.