Synergy

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Authors: Laura-Mihaela Muresan

This issue of Synergy Journal (1/2016) reflects the scholars’ and language experts’ growing interest in emerging trends in language education and research in the field of languages for professional and academic purposes. It takes further the conversations begun at the 14th international conference of AELFE – Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos – organised in Bucharest in the summer of 2015, in co-operation with the Romanian Association for Quality Language Services QUEST and The Bucharest University of Economic Studies.

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Authors: Mariana NICOLAE

The present book, edited by Karen Bennett, is important from several points of view. It is important for the international community of researchers of English for international scholarly publishing, it is important for each of the 10 national contexts presented in the book, and it is important for its individual contributors as well. It is also important from the point of view of the larger Romanian academic context, which is featured in the volume with a study by Bardi and Muresan. As Swales pointed out (Swales, 2015) the book is surprising and important in that it makes a significant effort to contribute to the understanding of today’s academic world, a contribution put forward probably for the first time by a majority of nonnative speakers of English, with the exception of Bennett herself and of Burgess. Equally important, it is put forward by a majority of female researchers, a dimension that is particularly relevant for the semiperiphery context.

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Authors: Boryana Kostova,Galina Shamonina

Internationalization of higher education and the impact of English in academic communication have resulted in opening a niche in language education. First, this involves a growing interest in studying academic discourse and rhetorical practices in order to support not only foreign and exchange students but mainly those academics who wish to publish in English and are apprehensive due to the widely acknowledged inequality in academic publishing in relation to discursive norms of languages different from English. Second, studying academic discourse involves studying language in action, looking at texts in relation to the social contexts in which they are used and the social relations they construct. Third, to meet the demand for formal language instruction targeting academics in non-English speaking countries, a handbook of academic communication in three languages was devised. Using the genre based approach it leads learners through academic genre moves and lexical bundles to strategies for academic communication.

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Authors: Anisoara POP

Exploration of technology-enhanced (TE) language learning has potential benefits pertaining to raising motivation levels and increased dynamics, cooperation, collaboration but at the same time student autonomy, authentic materials, flexibility of access to content and substantial extension of students’ contribution time. However, technology-enhanced language learning can be perceived as time consuming and difficult by some of the students. Therefore, feedback from course participants (Feedback on teaching, FoT) is crucial in language learning as it is in any quality optimization endeavour. The current paper will present the empirical results of ESP writing with second year students (N=36) in Dental Medicine of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Tirgu Mures (Hungarian line) who contributed for one semester to an asynchronous English writing project (Blog writing – BR). Students’ FoT perceptions based on variables such as convenience of delivery, strengths, challenges and preference of e-learning versus traditional activities have brought important insights for the design of TE writing practice and communication in the future as well as adjustments necessary for quality language learning.

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Authors: Maria ȘTEFĂNESCU

The aim of this article is to present and discuss some preliminary theoretical aspects related to designing and compiling a bilingual ESP dictionary, more specifically a Romanian-English dictionary of religious terms that will cover religious vocabulary associated with Catholic, Orthodox and Reformed Christianity. The main prospective beneficiaries of this work will be students attending Faculties of Theology, although I hope the dictionary may also benefit scholars with a background in theology, translators of religious texts from Romanian into English and other interested parties. The wordbook I envisage will be a work of specialized lexicography with an underlying pedagogical focus. The main aspects I intend to discuss in this article are: (1) identification of ESP students’ lexicographically significant needs and skills; (2) organization of each dictionary entry so that the users’ needs are successfully met; (3) discussion of some specific difficulties associated with the project of compiling such a dictionary.

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Authors: Gloria BOSCH-ROIG

The situation of the German language on Mallorca is a largely unexplored field, and there still is a lot of room for the unfolding of its potential as economic factor for the local and regional development. Based on objective data we try to demonstrate this and advocate the promotion of a more differentiated, regionalized and vocational multilingualism.

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Authors: Diana-Eugenia IONCICĂ,Tom BURNS , Antonia ENACHE , Marina MILITARU , Sandra SINFIELD

The current paper deals with studying the level of student satisfaction in the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. As for the method used – the paper commences with an outline of the main factors contributing to student satisfaction. Then, we introduce and analyze research which was undertaken by the authors in the academic year 2014-2015 in the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The main objective of the research is to reveal if our academy meets students’ needs. We do that by trying to see if factors influencing the satisfaction level find appropriate responses from the teaching staff and, also if, from a student’s perspective, the university curriculum contributes to their professional development. The results of the research do not focus strictly on language learning in higher education. They are more general, including various aspects of student satisfaction. However, the conclusions of our study do not omit the role played by language learning opportunities in student satisfaction and emphasize its major importance, especially for students in International Business. The limitations of the research follow from the method used – they are due to the fact that the conclusions are based solely on students’ replies and are not, for the time being,correlated with other student satisfaction surveys or academic performance indicators. Thus, the connection established between student satisfaction and academic performance could be a direction for further research.

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Authors: Yolanda-Mirela CATELLY

This study presents research in embedding language learning strategies and language using strategies in an ESP course designed for engineering tertiary education, whose focus is on the transferability and generalizability of the approach. An enlarged sample of students was created by including a second teacher in the experimental research, who was thoroughly instructed on how to teach the experimental module, as one hypothesis was to check to what extent transfer of the proposed instructional construct was feasible. The findings analysis shows there are good chances of transferring the approach, with necessary amendments, towards other teachers and/or educational contexts.

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Authors: Antonia ENACHE

Without any political bias whatsoever, the present article analyses a recent Romanian election debate, that between the incumbent President, Klaus Iohannis, and his opponent at the time, Victor Ponta, with a view to winning the 2014 presidential elections. The analysis looks into a strategy that frequently appears in political communication, the indirect attack, which has the advantage of conveying a strong message without putting the speaker at risk. Out of the multiple facets that the indirect attack may present, the paper focuses on irony, questions, as well as the apparently neutral assumptions that both speakers make about themselves and the opponent, in order either to assert themselves and gain legitimacy, or to undermine the interlocutor's position. These strategies are used repeatedly by both participants in an attempt to make the antagonist appear unprepared, opportunistic,unreliable and corrupt in the eyes of potential electors.

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Authors: Anda-Elena Cretiu

The present paper focuses on how English is used in the Romanian art context, by whom, in what circumstances, to what purposes, and to what avail.The working thesis maintains that the use of Art English is a most valuable tool for increasing visibility and market value in the contemporary art world. Results so far encourage us to believe that the use of English played an important role in the growing international public of our former art students,helping them boost their visibility world-wide, encouraging meanwhile the efforts of the teacher to provide the students with this wonderful tool they may benefit from in the future.

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Authors: Maurizio Gotti

The paper will investigate the present globalising trends in the academic world, focusing in particular on their main implications for language education and research. The first part of the paper will explore the globalising effects of the use of English in the world of academia and the complex nature of its linguistic realisations, highlighting both its homogenizing and localising trends. Indeed, in spite of the greater similarity deriving from the process of globalisation, academic discourse is not at all uniform but varies according to a host of factors, such as language competence, disciplinary field, community membership, professional expertise and generic conventions, as well as other factors which clearly reflect aspects of local traditions and cultures. The data presented in this part originate from recent research projects on identity and culture in academic discourse, which show that the (native or non-native) Anglophone textual realisations are clearly influenced by their authors’ cultural allegiance to their linguistic, professional, social, or national reference groups. The second part of the paper will be devoted to the analysis of another issue which is highly topical in the academic context at a global level, i.e. the use of English as a medium of instruction in higher education. As part of the internationalisation programmes adopted by many Universities in non-English-speaking countries, the implementation of these ‘international’ courses have opened up new opportunities for learning the English discourses relating to the specialized disciplines taught, but have also aroused problems connected with language proficiency and the level of content competence acquired. These issues will be investigated with reference to experiences and research projects carried out in various European countries in the last few years.

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Authors: Preeti SHIRODKAR

In a world that is getting increasingly multicultural, bilingualism is not an option. So too effectiveness in communication is a necessity, not an option. English being the second language, for most in India, there is an innate tendency to translate from the mother tongue, creating faux pas that can be disastrous. However, if one is aware of these pitfalls their effect can be reduced, if not totally averted. My paper points out such errors in grammar, vocabulary, accent, spellings and punctuation, in the Indian context, so that they can serve as guideposts to teachers and students in diverse locations.

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Authors: Laura GRŰNBERG

The list of European problems is long: the Greek debt crisis, refugees in the Mediterranean, a war in Ukraine, another war in Siria, excessive bureaucracy of the European institutions, or the rise of nationalist parties from Paris to Budapest. On the other hand, relatively speaking, Europe is doing fine in regard to gender equality. What does then gender equality have to do with Europe’s overall problems of today or tommorow? A whole lot – this will be the answer this article will give. Europe’s success in the area of gender equality is haunted by various potential failures. I will bring foreward some arguments that prove that addressing gender equality better is still important for overcoming a myriad of other issues in Europe, that still exist explicitly, but also implicitly. New forms of gender inequalities may in fact be a problem in Europe, holding societies back from unfolding their fullest and truest potential, and gender mainstreaming future agendas of Europe should be seriously taken into account.

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Authors: Preeti SHIRODKAR

An important strand in 20th century writing is diasporic writing from the intersectional space. Though fairly restricted in the actual body of work writing by diasporic women embodies power, through themes, characters, style, plots or approach. An important voice from this space is that of Shauna Singh Baldwin, whose writing is interesting, due to the concerns it raises, its craftsmanship, the space from which it emerges and the nuances in character or theme. Engaging with her short stories, this paper views her writing as representative of the intersectional diasporic space, to understand the dilemmas faced, despite seeming multiculturalism.

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Authors: Ruxandra CONSTANTINESCU-ȘTEFĂNEL

This article aims at illustrating the concepts defined by Ruth Amossy in her book « L’argumentation dans le discours » as they appear in two types of professional discourse, business negotiation and advertising in French magazines. The author will examine the argumentative orientation of these two discourses, their format, the audience, the speaker, the logos and the pathos and will draw conclusions on the similitudes and the differences between them.

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Authors: Ana KARLSTEDT

Establishing the connection between language and culture during the language teaching process is a main goal of intercultural learning. An important question is how a language teacher can raise awareness for foreign cultural situations. One method to achieve this awareness is to train the perception of the learners. Because perception is subjective, it is difficult to make learners aware of their own way of perceiving the world. Getting past this obstacle is the main focus of this article. The stages of perception are separated so as for the perception process to be reconstructed.

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Authors: Nina IVANCIU

The paper starts by setting the theoretical framework through a chain of notions, such as cross-cultural communication, enunciative postures, cultural mediation, cross-cultural skills, etc., which help explain the role of reformulations in connection with the new social references, « live and work together », and with the process of teaching and learning the professional languages-cultures. Secondly, and in extension, the paper shows how, in multicultural contexts, the different categories of reformulations contribute to the crystallization of varied points of view which, according to the French professor-researcher A. Rabatel, are associated with many enunciative postures: « the concordant concordance », « the discordant concordance », « the concordant discordance », « the discordant discordance ». Finally, the paper suggests that there is a bridge between the reformulation theory and the process of acquiring cross-cultural communication skills for professional purposes. This acquisition is also assumed as an academic objective in the language-culture courses delivered to the students in economics.

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Authors: Sharaf REHMAN

This paper offers a comparative textual analysis of three European films and three films from Hollywood. All six of these belong to a film genre - Films about Filmmaking. The three European films included in the analysis are: 8 ½ (1963) by Fellini, Day for Night (1973) by Truffaut, and Cinema Paradiso by Tornatore (1988); three American films included are: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) by Minnelli, The Last Tycoon (1976) by Kazan, and The Player (1992) by Altman. Analysis of plots, themes, characters, and motivations reveals that European directors view their work differently than their American counterparts. While European films deal with inner or interpersonal conflicts of the characters, American films about filmmaking are concerned with producing films as a commercial commodity. In so doing, the paper builds a case about the basic approaches to filmmaking in Europe and the United States. The paper suggests that Hollywood treats movie making as a business while the Europeans filmmakers have focused on the artistry and the artists involved in making films.

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Authors: Mihaela ARSENE

“Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty” by Acemoglu and Robinson was published in 2012 and took the world by storm as the two U.S. professors launched a new theory on the origin of economic disparities, past and present. The 500 page volume builds on 15 years of comprehensive research that explores the rise and fall of states and empires, from the Neolithic Revolution to the current developments in China, with due attention to all the outburst of economic and institutional creativity, be it manifested in the Maya civilization or the Industrial Revolution.

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Authors: Mihaela ARSENE

The article revisits, refines, expands, and updates some of the issues first explored in Synergy volume 6, number 1 of 2010 and further on in volume 7, number 1 of 2011. The core issue is teacher training and development: does this occur through imitation of the teaching patterns one has been exposed to throughout the schooling process or can self awareness, by integrating reflection and introspection, liberate teachers and turn the blueprint of the past teaching practices into just one of the many teaching options they can choose from?

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Authors: Lora CONSTANTINESCU

Beyond the theoretical framework within which the topical issues of environmentalism and sustainability have developed (as ethical values of the society as well as of the company corporate culture), the question remains: what do ecology and sustainable behaviour look like in everyday life? In the present paper the focus lies on developing and raising the ecological awareness: starting with a brief look at the complex economy-ecology in the modern business world and then discussing some (teaching book-based and project-oriented) FLT-approaches, the paper points out at ways and means to make the topic a rewarding issue when teaching LSP/ German to advanced and L2-learners.

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Authors: Adrian SOLOMON

Post-tourism has undergone a few mutations in recent decades. The ironically-disposed post-tourist has come to accept and eventually seek destinations where space and time, and sometimes people themselves, have been commodified for touristic purposes. Various degrees of authenticity of a few popular tourist destinations are analyzed in the light of Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra. The conclusion briefly lays out the modern tourists’ dual attitude towards commodification and (in)authenticity.

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Authors: Sridhar RAJESWARAN

India is an ancient land, a land that has been home to many. It is steeped in myth and has no “trace” of “attestable history” before the 13th century. It is also a many times colonized land that has experienced/suffered hegemonising social intrusions due to expropriations of the land and territory of its indigenous peoples. It is a country that has had its map drawn many times over with the imperial British Modern European Coloniser finally partitioning it. This land is known for its diversity. Its peoples speak many languages, practice different cultures, cultures that are exuded due to inhabiting differential terrains that makes it also a traveller’s paradise. A reading of the history of this ancient land in the times we indwelled- in and are indwelling-in reads no different from the lines that begin Dickens’s opus, “A Tale of Two Cities”, containing within it India’s success story as well as India’s strife, voices that sang and continue to sing in euphoria as well as voices screaming silent shrieks of disgruntled masses of a time past, a time present, discordant. The questions that need to be answered are as to “how may one privilege the future when the past is unavailable, erased, or available only as nostalgia, myth, and mere memory? When the present impinges on the past in particular ideological ways? When destinies are tied irresistibly to a colonial centre, Europe in general and Britain in particular? The paper will be an exploration of some of these questions.

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Authors: Roxana Marinescu

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Authors: Avtar BRAH

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Authors: Nina IVANCIU

This article aims to examine some requirements – foundations of a team’s synergy created for the realization of a professional project. To support the principle ”the will-to acttogether” declaratively is, surely, a promising start in order to make possible the team’s cohesion and coherence, but it is not sufficient. It is necessary, in addition, to think together about the conditions to fulfil with the purpose of applying this principle. The debate is proved to be essential, first of all because nowadays the interlocutors are not, generally, inheritors of the same beliefs, convictions, norms, procedures, etc.The paper will be especially interested in the references which nourish some values such as trust, empathy, discursive and practical solidarity, or individual involvement in the achievement of common targets. To share these objectives supposes that each partner works on himself so that he improves his skills and his personal faculties, as well as with all the team’s members for identifying and/or correcting the dysfunctions which may sabotage the progress of the project assumed.

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Authors: Iulia RĂŞCANU

(Im)migrants need to go through a complicated process of adaptation which presupposes levels of alienation and/or connectedness towards the ‘host’/’home’ country influenced by external or personal factors. The generation factor divides levels of connectedness and of alienation as younger diasporics may be more connected to the ‘host’ country and view their country of origin as simply a point of reference. Another influential factor is the transnational families’ fear of ghettoization (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002). The paper analyses diasporics’ levels of connectedness and alienation towards the ‘home’ culture and the factors that influence these levels and are sometimes reflected by pieces of writing or films of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. The second part of the paper addresses the thorny topic of European identity in connection with diasporic communities/groups living in UK with a view to how ‘connected’ or ‘alienated’ these may feel towards this new type of identity.

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Authors: Doris SAVA

The easiest way to convey set phrases is by approaching them from their cross-cultural commonalities. The international project IPHRAS edits stereotype collocations with interlingual similarities for the languages German, English, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Romani linguistic-didactically and provides appropriate e-learning products. The learning materials are geared to the needs of self-learners who learn one (or more) of the presented languages as a foreign language and are at the same time native speakers of one of the represented languages. Within the project, routine phrases and stereotype phrases of the thematic area curriculum vitae and letter of application are collected and compared in different languages and made available on the platform free of charge.

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Authors: Luminiţa ANDREI COCÂRŢĂ

In the 21st century, languages in general, but English in particular, have known a lot of change and English has been integrated in a multitude of cultural settings, and taught intensively all over the world, as it has become lingua franca. Current linguistic and cultural approaches are being re-examined and new varieties of English are being discussed in the specialized literature, since the diversity in users and uses of English in multicultural settings is growing nowadays. English is no longer the property of native speakers. It is also the language of non-native speakers who use it for communication in their own economic and socio-cultural contexts. The main issues brought into discussion in our paper include aspects of the research concerning the institutionalized non-native varieties of English used in international communication, among which the level of innovation occurring in these varieties, the debate concerning non-native and native norms, the degree of codification and the issue of a pedagogical model within this context.

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Authors: Roxana MARINESCU

This paper focuses on the gendered identities resulting from some English-language novels by women writers of South-Asian origin, namely Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Life Isn’t All Haa Haa Hee Hee by Meera Syal and Looking for Maya and Transmission by Atima Srivastava. The discussion takes place in the postcolonial and postmodern contexts and addresses this topic in connection to other markers of identity: class, ‘race’, socioeconomic group, caste, sexual orientation, generation. Gender is regarded as a process, in movement and development, from a balanced perspective, by equally taking into consideration feminist and masculinity theories. The question of culture today must be raised in the realm of the ‘beyond’, which expresses a transit period and is defined by a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction (according to Homi Bhabbha in Introduction to The Location of Culture). Thus, gender identity is explored in the above mentioned novels as a cultural construct and on the migratory axis centre-periphery, metropolis-former empire, with some of the characters seeking to accede to what they view as the centre and others to go back to the periphery they or their parents had left. However,‘finding the centre’ seems to pose controversial identity issues in the global contemporary world, where this is a personal construct rather than a generally acknowledged one.

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Authors: Anca-Teodora ŞERBAN-OPRESCU

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Authors: Maria Ana OPRESCU

Without intending to be exhaustive, I have drafted here a brief presentation of the brand, of its features and evolution. We have to take into account the fact that today everything is bought and is appreciated according to the importance of its brand on the market. It is used to identify the product, it is a reason of its superiority and a guarantee of its authenticity and quality. Products have names, just like characters. A certain commercial heraldry is reached, given by brands whose names have become international. Nowadays the symbolic power of brands renders companies, the market and us dynamic. They can be neither ignored nor contested.

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Authors: Mihaela Luminiţa LEVARDA

My paper aims to analyse the consequences of an exclusively utilitarian education taught by Mr. Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times. At the same time this paper will bring forth Dickens’s solution to ameliorate the effects of utilitarian education: the attempt to unify the “wisdom of the head” with the “wisdom of the heart”, in order to attain a powerful bond between mind and feelings. Therefore, a better future of the education provided in Victorian schools lies in the hope of softening the hearts of the learned ones.

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Authors: Yolanda-Mirela CATELLY

The current economic context expects that engineering graduates should have a wide range of both technical/hard skills and soft ones. It is the role of higher education to equip students with soft skills to support them in successfully accessing jobs (inter)nationally. This study therefore aims to propose an approach focused on developing the learners’ language learning and language using strategic repertoire. A chronological cross section of recent evolutions in the approach to teaching foreign languages in a Romanian technical university is given and a research project is briefly discussed, which should be seen as a proposal open to optimization.

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Authors: Kenneth FRIEDMAN

Numerous arguments have been made in support of literature for language instruction of all types, including English for Academic Purposes (Hirvela, 1990). Extensive reading (Day& Bamford, 1998) is proposed to enhance reading fluency, vocabulary competence, and the enjoyment of reading. Both proposals seem promising for international scholars, increasingly required to communicate in English (Pérez-Llantada, 2012). In this preliminary study, an extensive reading approach involving literary texts was employed in English classes for EAL scholars. Results suggest that literature enhances classroom interactions, and extensive reading, after considerable orientation, did lead to an increase in reading outside of scholars’ specialized fields.

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Authors: Diana SOPON

This article presents the intricate relationship between university and society in the new context of social, cultural and economic changes. It highlights the roles and functions of the universities in the so-called knowledge society, taking into account the academic capitalism philosophy. The article also points out that the functions a university performs in our society are directly related to the adopted type of management and that universities should pay more attention in defining and implementing their mission.

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Authors: Monica CONDRUZ-BĂCESCU

The article deals with the challenges of managerial communication. The first part focuses on its characteristics. The evolution of management determined the occurrence of a specific form of managerial communication. This type of communication has become a real force, occupying a central place in the work of any manager. In the second part, I outlined the purpose and objectives of managerial communication. Also, managerial communication in any organization is subject to specific ethical rules, contained in the organizational culture, in the organizational policy and obviously in the ethics of employees from top management. Afterwards, I presented its functions and the communication inside the company between manager and employees and also inside a team. The last part focuses on strategies of communication at organisation level. The conclusion of the article is that managerial communication style is mostly influenced by the work style of the leaders with subordinates. The adoption of a particular style of communication depends on several factors such as: leadership skills and personality, competence and subordinates’ personality, leadership style practiced by top managers and organizational culture.

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Authors: Adrian SOLOMON

Both love and hate can be manipulated to the advantage of power, even when the citizens are subjected to poverty and famine. True or forced love is what dictators seek from their subjects, but situations differ a lot: although Ceauşescu’s authoritarianism was inspired by communist China and North Korea, specific details pertaining to Romanian reality and himself distinguish him from Asian dictators. Totalitarian states also need to foster hate against real or invented enemies, and are adept at selecting the types of enemies and hatred that serve their purposes.