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.