How Do EFL Students Perceive Brainstorming in L2 Writing Classes?

Brainstorming is a valuable pre-writing activity in enabling learners to get started in writing classes. The present qualitative study explored the participants’ perceptions regarding the use of the method after experiencing it in online writing classes. The participants were selected based on convenience sampling, and their age range was 19 to 23. They had participated in private writing classes and volunteered to take part in interviews performed after the course. The interviews were also done virtually via WhatsApp, during which the respondents answered six questions. The analysis of the interviews led the researchers to extract eight significant themes, which were then divided into advantages and disadvantages. The interviewees mentioned idea generation, encouraging new ideas, becoming open-minded, enhancing motivation to write, and creating stronger rapport with classmates as the positive features of brainstorming. The disadvantages consisted of being distracted by too many ideas, being influenced by others’ ideas, and accepting ideas expressed by the majority. The study has implications for language teachers, educators, and ELT specialists.

Agents and Agency

The CPC traveling agent was a woman who traveled for several months a year, stopping in small towns on her route to recruit women to sell in their neighborhoods. The traveling agent kept in daily contact with the company in New York, evaluating individual sales reports and earnings, handing out catalogs and sample cases to new recruits, and training women for making sales calls, submitting and receiving orders, and distributing products to customers. A demographic profile of these agents shows that most women were either single or widowed and between the ages of twenty and seventy. An analysis of their work gleaned from company literature, private writing, and the national census shows that most of these women welcomed the independence and opportunity for substantial income beyond what ordinary work offered. This group of women would become the first generation of women managers in the company, overseeing the transition from district to city sales offices in the late 1930s.

L’autobiografia di Liberale Medici Aspetti linguistici, espressioni idiomatiche e metafore

This paper aims at providing a first research on the autobiography of the Venetian farmer Liberale Medici (1922-2016). The Medici’s work crossed the boundaries of private writing by winning the Premio Pieve in 1988, and, consequently, with its first publication, entitled Schola cantorum (Rome: Edizioni Live, 1989). Recently, it has been also comprehended in the anthology La vita è sogno (Milan: il Saggiatore, 2016). After highlighting the main linguistic features of this autobiography, the analysis focuses on its metaphorical devices, in order to survey its figurative language.

Letters of Ivan IV the Terrible (Architectonics and Suggestion Techniques)

The epistolary traditions of medieval Russia had the most varied sources. In this article, we address the problem of the Genesis of the formative models that formed the basis of the architectonics of the most famous Epistles of medieval Russia. The polemical Epistles of Ivan the Terrible, which have long been included in the circle of classical texts of medieval Russia, should be considered in the context of the development of the Epistle genre as such. But its General theory, as well as a complete history over the course of seven centuries of the development of East Slavic literature has not yet been created. This is due to the objective difficulties associated with the nature of this genre. In medieval Russia, the message is changeable. It not only stands between everyday life and high book tradition, but is also prone to frequent transformations. It is sometimes rhetorical, sometimes ordinary, but at the same time both rhetoric and uncomplicated style do not exclude publicism and public sound. Nevertheless, within the boundaries of the creativity of individual authors, the epistle has completely separated itself as a very peculiar type of source, endowed with such formal and meaningful features that allow it to be distinguished from works of other genres. Comparing the polemical letters of Ivan the Terrible with each other and some other texts of the same author, which are adjacent to them, allows us to talk about a single architectonics and General methods of suggestion — persuasion of the addressee for such letters. The main compositional units of Ivan IV’s letters echo the structure of late Byzantine epistolography. But this coincidence is only external. The basic set of motifs and formulas of Byzantine writing was strikingly different from the epistolary manner that Ivan IV developed. His polemical texts go back to the polemical treatise, diplomatic letters, and private writing.

Now is the “We-Time.” Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ read as self-critical reflection of Nazi involvement

The article analyzes Heidegger?s relation to National Socialism based on his private writing in the ?Black Notebooks,? published in their entirety (nine volumes) this year. Although it is indisputable that Heidegger was an enthusiastic adherent of the National Socialist program between 1930 and 1934, his private writings show his avowed philosophical delusion that the National Socialist ?revolution? in Germany was going to bring about a new beginning of philosophy beyond the metaphysical tradition. The article shows how Heidegger criticized National Socialism after 1934, and the circumstances of his resignation from the post of Rector of Freiburg University in that year.

«Ho sempre desiderato di avere un grande album»

The posthumous work Album di vestiti, although not a real diary, constitutes an example of private writing capable of retracing the salient passages of the personal and literary story of Paola Masino, author and journalist of the 20th century. These are autobiographical pages where Masino reflects on the themes of motherhood, marriage, her concept of literature and the interest in the chromatic sphere expressed in her volumes. A work of memory, therefore, a ‘biography of clothes’ capable of revealing the dynamics that led to the drafting of some of the most famous passages of Paola Masino’s writings, as well as episodes related to the dear figures of the father Enrico Alfredo and Massimo Bontempelli.

“Sacred Heart” and the Appropriation of Catholic Faith in Nineteenth-Century China

This chapter analyzes several rarely seen letters written in 1871 by three Catholic women from a village in Northeast China. The letters were addressed to a member of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris who had been the priest of their church. In these letters, the author detects the underlying sense of feminine piety mingled with the Du women’s purposeful borrowing of religious vocabularies to articulate personal feelings and emotional requests. The displacement between the spiritual devotion to Jesus and the sensible attachment to an absent Western priest signifies the new boundary of Christian religiosity being shaped by these village women. Private writing became an alternative means of self-empowerment for them to redefine faith, passion, and collective identity in late Qing society.

Introduction

In 1935, Nishida Kitarō, modern Japan’s most important philosopher and, at the time, also a well-known public intellectual, was invited to a government committee for the reform of education. Nishida was not too enthusiastic about it. After economic crises, attempted coup d’états, and political assassinations, Japanese society had been in turmoil for some years. Tensions with the West were rising and, under pressure within from military and right-wing movements, the country was steering away from democracy. Marxism enthralled many students and intellectuals, while government- and right-wing ideologues, alarmed as much by the rampant consumerism in the cities as by international communism, were calling for a spiritual mobilization and unity under the emperor, who was considered a descendant of the Shintō gods. At this committee, Kihira Tadayoshi, who is now forgotten but at the time was a well-known philosopher and professor working for the Ministry of Education, circulated a proposal. Nishida was aghast at its contents, but did not dare to protest openly. These were dangerous times. But Nishida did complain in private, writing to his friend, the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō:...