BECOMING A BUSINESS WRITER: OMANI ESP STUDENTS’ SELF-PERCEIVED WRITING CHALLENGES, NEEDS AND WANTS

Today, effective English writing is one of the most valuable professional skills for growth and development in the world of entrepreneurship. In spite of the prominence of English as the leading language of business and business education, writing is still one of the biggest challenges that business students face. The purpose of this paper is to report on a study that explored Omani business student-perceived challenges, needs and wants in writing. The study used an online survey involving seventy students from Sultan Qaboos University who were asked to share their perceptions in regard to these three dimensions specifically related to the skill of business writing. Analysis of the data was conducted using frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations. Findings reveal that business students place effective writing skills high in terms of their perceived necessity. They also indicate that in spite of interesting and engaging writing activities contextualized in Oman’s world of business, students’ overall enjoyment level of writing is moderate on average due to perceived challenges throughout learning, and lacks in perspectives pertaining to how the writing tasks and assignments could be developed and implemented, including providing more guiding writing practice, more feedback, more interesting topics and more real-world topics and tasks. These student challenges, needs and wants analysis’ findings can direct further developments, leading to a successful English business writing syllabus and teaching practice.

Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation

This article develops a complex orientation to linguistic domination and resistance to demonstrate how academic communication can be diversified to facilitate anti-racist scholarship. While it draws from social sciences which provide complex theories of social structuration, it demonstrates how linguists can offer fine-grained analytical tools to track these processes across diverse scales of space, time, and institutions. The objective of this article is to introduce an orientation to language which goes beyond traditional reductive and overdetermined perspectives to accommodate its generative and resistant potential. It introduces translingual practice as accommodating the theoretical developments discussed, and demonstrates how methods of indexical analyses can help scholars study texts and communication across various spatiotemporal scales in achieving structuration. This approach is applied to the writing practice of African American scholar, Geneva Smitherman, to demonstrate how her anti-racist scholarship renegotiates established structures of academic communication and generates change. While this article will help applied linguists to develop an appreciation of writers and writing in constructing diversified academic communication, it can provide linguistic tools to social scientists for tracing the workings of structuration and change at diverse spatiotemporal and social scales of consideration.

Investigating the relationship between linguistic changes in L2 writers’ paraphrasing, paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency

While the typology of paraphrasing revolves around linguistic changes of paraphrasing, little is known about the importance of different types of linguistic changes and their relationship between paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Empirical enquiry has focused on L2 writers’ inappropriate paraphrasing performance against the norm of L1 writer, which is problematic in that L2 and L1 writers displayed considerable variation in paraphrasing. The present study drew upon 202 Chinese EFL writers’ written responses in a paraphrasing test to look into the discrete linguistic transformations in paraphrasing and examine how the frequency of different linguistic changes in paraphrasing relates to their paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency. Correlation analysis was run to analyze the relationship between the frequency of linguistic changes and paraphrasing performance. Multivariate analysis of variance analysis was conducted to examine how the frequency of linguistic changes relates to L2 proficiency. The findings revealed that Conceptual Transformation had the highest significant correlation with paraphrasing scores, followed by Lexical Transformation and then Syntactic Transformation. The frequency of Synonym Substitution, Morphology, Multiple Word Units, Phrase/Clause Shift, Active/Passive Shift and Conceptual Transformation increased as L2 writers’ proficiency levels increased. Implications are drawn from the findings for paraphrasing instruction and assessment, research in paraphrasing and L2 writers’ academic writing practice.

More-than-human economies of writing

In this article, and based on the theme of economies of writing, I explore writing as a more-than-human or posthuman practice. In particular, I consider the way in which academics curate writing places and spaces and the role of matter (things, natures and technologies) in these assemblages of writing by drawing on a Baradian take on posthumanism. The article utilises empirical data from a qualitative, photovoice study with doctoral students. The aim of the article is to encourage reflection on the way we, as academics, experience and teach writing practice in a more-than-human world, and how these experiences relate to productivity and wellbeing.

Zur Diachronie der satzinternen Großschreibung im Niederländischen

On the history of sentence-internal capitalisation in Dutch – a corpus-based study on genre influence on the capitalisation practice Though sentence-internal capitalisation of nouns is – unlike in German – no hallmark of Modern Dutch orthography at all, initial studies on Early Modern Dutch writing practice have affirmed Maas’ (1995, 2007) claim that Dutch once exhibited at least a moderate tendency to uppercase nouns in sentence-internal position (cf. & 2020a): Since both studies were restricted on a corpus of bible prints, it remains an open question whether the capitalisation practice was restricted to this text type only. Therefore, the present paper aims at analysing the use of majuscules in other texts types to gain a more conclusive picture on the overall phenomenon. The contrastive analysis of bible prints with printed travel reports and sailing letters (1500-1800) confirms – on the one hand – previous findings, mainly the fact that the use of majuscules within common nouns was increasingly motivated by cognitive factors, mainly animacy and concreteness of the referent; on the other hand, however, the present study shows that sentence-internal capitalisation of common nouns was much more pronounced in non-biblical texts than expected by previous studies (cf. & 2020a). In contrast to bible prints, non-biblical texts did not abolish sentence-internal uppercase letters by the end of the 17th century, suggesting that this spelling convention was not abandoned due to religious reasons as suggested by & 2007).

Development: Opening Space for New Zealand Women's Participation in Scriptwriting for Feature Films?

<p>This thesis explores whether an analytical practice, combining creative writing with activism and based in academia, can help open space for more women scriptwriters within New Zealand feature filmmaking. It links autoethnography with activist and experience-based methodologies within a creative writing framework that includes a memoir, an essay, a report, diaries and emails, an essay screenplay and weblogging, to present multiple views of an investigation into state investment in women‘s feature filmmaking and the researcher‘s own experience as an activist researcher and apprentice scriptwriter. It concludes that, within an analytical creative writing practice, autoethnography‘s accommodation of a single researcher participant‘s shifting roles may help to open space for women scriptwriters to contribute to New Zealand feature films.</p>

Development: Opening Space for New Zealand Women's Participation in Scriptwriting for Feature Films?

<p>This thesis explores whether an analytical practice, combining creative writing with activism and based in academia, can help open space for more women scriptwriters within New Zealand feature filmmaking. It links autoethnography with activist and experience-based methodologies within a creative writing framework that includes a memoir, an essay, a report, diaries and emails, an essay screenplay and weblogging, to present multiple views of an investigation into state investment in women‘s feature filmmaking and the researcher‘s own experience as an activist researcher and apprentice scriptwriter. It concludes that, within an analytical creative writing practice, autoethnography‘s accommodation of a single researcher participant‘s shifting roles may help to open space for women scriptwriters to contribute to New Zealand feature films.</p>

On Shifting Ground: Self-narrative, Feminist Theory and Writing Practice

<p>This thesis centres on a problem that stands at the heart of feminist theory: how women may come to understand themselves as speaking subjects located within historically specific, discursive social structures, to question those structures aloud, and to seek to change them. It combines self-narrative, feminist theory and writing practice to make sense of a body of published work which I produced between 1984 and 1999, with a consistent focus on some form of gendered discourse, by setting it in its personal, historical, and theoretical contexts. Although the thesis is built around published work, it is not primarily about results or outcomes, but rather about a set of active historical processes. Taking the form of a spirally structured critical autobiography spanning five and a half decades, it traces how one voice of what I have termed feminist oppositional imagining has emerged and taken its own worded shape. First, it constructs a double story of coming to writing and coming to feminism, in order to explore the formation of a writing subject and show the critical importance of the connections between subjectivity and oppositional imagining, and to highlight the need to find ways of producing knowledge which do not rely on the notion of the detached observer. Secondly, in a deliberate shift of form and focus, it steps back to canvass the historical context for the work I produced in response to the discursive shift that has become known as the New Right. It argues that by usefully enforcing a focus on the necessity of a commitment to social justice and human interdependence, this shift spurred the development of a feminist discourse, centred on unpaid work, which is capable of understanding and countering New Right perspectives on what it means to be a human being and to live in human society.</p>

On Shifting Ground: Self-narrative, Feminist Theory and Writing Practice

<p>This thesis centres on a problem that stands at the heart of feminist theory: how women may come to understand themselves as speaking subjects located within historically specific, discursive social structures, to question those structures aloud, and to seek to change them. It combines self-narrative, feminist theory and writing practice to make sense of a body of published work which I produced between 1984 and 1999, with a consistent focus on some form of gendered discourse, by setting it in its personal, historical, and theoretical contexts. Although the thesis is built around published work, it is not primarily about results or outcomes, but rather about a set of active historical processes. Taking the form of a spirally structured critical autobiography spanning five and a half decades, it traces how one voice of what I have termed feminist oppositional imagining has emerged and taken its own worded shape. First, it constructs a double story of coming to writing and coming to feminism, in order to explore the formation of a writing subject and show the critical importance of the connections between subjectivity and oppositional imagining, and to highlight the need to find ways of producing knowledge which do not rely on the notion of the detached observer. Secondly, in a deliberate shift of form and focus, it steps back to canvass the historical context for the work I produced in response to the discursive shift that has become known as the New Right. It argues that by usefully enforcing a focus on the necessity of a commitment to social justice and human interdependence, this shift spurred the development of a feminist discourse, centred on unpaid work, which is capable of understanding and countering New Right perspectives on what it means to be a human being and to live in human society.</p>

Postcolonialism and translation: the dialectic between theory and practice

Postcolonial intercultural writing has been likened to translation both in terms of the writing practice and the nature of the postcolonial text, which often involves multiple linguistic and cultural systems. To highlight the significance of this view of translation as a metaphor for postcolonial writing and its impact on current translation theory, this paper attempts to lay the groundwork for defining the linguistic and cultural status of postcolonial discourse and to establish parallels between the translation process and some strategies for crafting the postcolonial text. The ontological relation between translation theory and practice is discussed in the light of post- colonial translation practices which have broadened the scope of research in translation studies to include issues of ideology, identity, power relations, and other ethnographic and sociologically based modes of investigation.