District–Learning: An Architectural Approach to Bridge the Academic Gap in the UAE Educational System

The United Arab Emirates Vision 2071 expects the country to become one of the best in the world in several sectors, including education and infrastructure. Highlighting today’s global tendency towards a knowledge-based economy, it drives the need to bridge the academic gap in UAE’s educational system to enhance the nation’s innovation. This gap is best addressed from three different levels, policy level, pedagogical level, and socio-urban level. The UAE is working on developing its educational system by emphasizing its importance through the UAE future strategies and policies, that will upgrade it with its new pedagogical facilities. This study proposes the “District-Learning”, a novel approach to upgrading the UAE educational system/sector by providing the necessary new pedagogical functions in a building located in the barycenter of a school district and serving all its existing facilities. The concept focuses on boosting the communication between schools in the same district and enables sharing resources between them. This non-physical connectivity will be translated into physical connectivity which bridge each existing school to the new building. The construction process fosters modularity and flexibility, allowing the project to fit the demand of different districts. The study present the results of a test of this new approach to the case study of Al Jurf 2 zone in Ajman.

Pragmatic Hedges in Editorials: A Focus on Vanguard, Guardian and Sun Newspaper Editorials in 2017

Many studies have been carried out on the operations of hedges in different language discourse especially in scientific reports and academic writing. Amongst these studies, none has focused on the operations, functions and layout of hedges in Nigerian newspapers. It is on this basis therefor that the current study pays attention to the nature and pragmatic functions which hedges are deployed in Nigerian newspaper editorials. It is the academic gap which the present study unravels. The study used the categorisation of hedges provided by Salager Meyer (1994) as the theoretical framework. The study sampled six editorials each from the 2017 editorials of the Vanguard, Guardian and Sun newspapers, making a total of 18 editorials for analysis. At the end, the study present amongst other findings that the shield hedges are the more frequently used hedges in the newspaper editorials as all the newspapers used it. On the other hand, the study found out that no newspaper editorial used the compound hedge as there was none found in the sampled data.