Inclusive Host Language Teaching

This chapter presents research on the teaching-learning of Portuguese as a host language, based on the exploration of authentic informational and institutional texts targeting migrant and refugee people, and considering that successful host language teaching must correspond to the needs of its target audience. The chapter discusses methods of defining and identifying criteria and features to monitor official texts with regard to inclusiveness and bias. It provides insights on how to select real texts to be used in task-based language teaching approaches for inclusive host language teaching. Departing from a real corpus analysis, the potential and the limitations of existing guidelines to inclusiveness for the assessment of real texts are shown, as well as other still neglected issues. Furthermore, this chapter provides future research directions to an effective and reliable assessment of inclusive texts that can serve as inclusive host language teaching materials through NLP and machine learning approaches.

Migration terminology in the EU Institutions

‘Migration’ has recently become a single domain for specialized terminology in the European Union, linked to the crisis which has been rapidly unfolding in Europe since 2015. The migration crisis, with the dramatic increase in arrivals of migrants in Europe, has highlighted the uncertainty of institutional classifications used to describe and manage migration flows. What is a migrant in the EU Institutions and how is the term refugee or asylum seeker respectively classified? The present study delves into Migration from a terminological perspective and investigates how migrants have been mirrored through terminology in institutional texts from 1950 to 2016 by analyzing two sets of corpora: the European Migration Network glossaries (EMN) of the European Commission and the EU database of official legislative text, EUR-lex EN 2/16. This paper aims to show how migration phenomena can be narrated through the lens of terminology and how term choice plays a vital role in making an impact in the representation of migrants and refugees in political institutions and society.

How deep is the difference?

This paper follows the blurriness of the concept of difference as it relates to the Canadian idea of diversity, and its manifestation in governmental forms and official documents. It highlights the paradoxical (inconsistent) function of such documents in addressing diversity, individuation and change. This research was informed by the concept of difference, defined (interpreted) by Manuel DeLanda, and is expressed in a multimedia installation titled Illegal Entries, which reconfigures the Canadian Passport Application form (PPTC 153-154) as a three-dimensional space. This installation shows viewers that this official document, which operates to legitimize state power over citizens’ bodies, is designed to undermine the concept of difference, which is at the core of individuation and is the backbone of diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. This paper provides an account of how a document is transformed into a documentary. The installation creates a bilingual, audio-visual conundrum that consists of institutional texts, commands and warnings. This is juxtaposed with animated graphics, icons and shapes that appear in the document in addition to the image of the passport ID photograph.

How deep is the difference?

This paper follows the blurriness of the concept of difference as it relates to the Canadian idea of diversity, and its manifestation in governmental forms and official documents. It highlights the paradoxical (inconsistent) function of such documents in addressing diversity, individuation and change. This research was informed by the concept of difference, defined (interpreted) by Manuel DeLanda, and is expressed in a multimedia installation titled Illegal Entries, which reconfigures the Canadian Passport Application form (PPTC 153-154) as a three-dimensional space. This installation shows viewers that this official document, which operates to legitimize state power over citizens’ bodies, is designed to undermine the concept of difference, which is at the core of individuation and is the backbone of diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. This paper provides an account of how a document is transformed into a documentary. The installation creates a bilingual, audio-visual conundrum that consists of institutional texts, commands and warnings. This is juxtaposed with animated graphics, icons and shapes that appear in the document in addition to the image of the passport ID photograph.

Discursive stickiness: Affective institutional texts and activist resistance

Pushing the bounds of public relations theory and research, we explore how institutional texts have produced and reified stigmas around gender transgression and how these texts are bound up in moments of activism and resistance. We considered how different discursive and material functions get “stuck” together by way of texts and how this sticking depends on a history of association and institutionalization. Activism presents opportunities to challenge institutional and structural stickiness, and we argue that public relations can challenge the affective assemblages that comprise and perpetuate these systems, unsettling the historical discourses that have governed institutions by establishing new communicative possibilities.

Global Anglican Discourse and Women’s Ordination in Kenya: The Controversy in Kirinyaga, 1979–1992, and its Legacy

In the 1980s, the question of women’s ordination in the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) caused a controversy in Kirinyaga diocese, in which Archbishop David Gitari (1937–2013) played a critical role as an advocate for women. This controversy is just one example of how African Christian women have faced multiple material and theological obstacles to ordination, both in the Anglican Church and in other churches. Through an analysis of institutional texts we show how the issue of women’s ordination has been addressed in formal Anglican decision-making processes. We also outline the patriarchal attitudes that characterized the wider discourse of women’s ordination in Kenya and in the Anglican Communion, and discuss how this discourse informed Gitari’s intervention. Opposition to women’s ordination is only one facet of sexism in the ACK, as was implicitly recognized by Gitari in his wider project of ‘holistic development’.

Being a transnational researcher and a mother amid the COVID-19 crisis

The article focuses on the author’s experience as a transnational researcher during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak (January–April 2020), and discusses the possibilities and impossibilities of the COVID-19 pandemic for mothers who are transnational researchers.The sociological approach of institutional ethnography is utilised to analyse entries from the author’s diary, articles and videos from mass media, posts on social media, and institutional texts (for example, regulations, policies).The disjunctures between the different versions of reality (the author’s experiential perspective versus the ruling perspectives of the various institutions that framed the author’s experience at different stages) are discussed from the author’s standpoint as an international researcher, a woman and a single mother.

The model of Mary between Islam and Catholicism: The figurativization of normative principles in the intercultural exchange

In the Catholic tradition, saintly characters work as figurativizations or narrative representations of underlying values and normative principles and therefore represent strategic communication media to disseminate particular models of behavior among the faithful. This paper tests the efficacy of the representation of saintly figures in the case of the interreligious dialogue by focusing on the case study of the construction and communication of the figure of the Virgin Mary in the encounter between Catholics and Muslims. What emerges from an analysis of scholarly and institutional texts, as well as from some reflections on ecumenical practices in Marian shrines, is that the representation of Mary as the figurativization of abstract values and norms mostly concerns a cultivated elite and that the dialogue on the respective representations of Mary is quite limited and concerns especially Mary as the model of the perfect pious and devout person.

Master’s students’ post-editing perception and strategies

The present article aims at presenting the results of an exploratory post-editing process study carried out in a Belgian university, the University of Mons. For this experiment, 64 final-year translation students with no post-editing experience post-edited from English into French parts of five different institutional texts from the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission. They were additionally asked to fill in a prospective questionnaire and a retrospective one, related to their post-editing perception and strategies. Four students took part in the experiment on a separate computer equipped with an eye-tracking device, so that eye-tracking data could be collected and compared with these students’ questionnaires. We found that results related to eye-tracking data correlate well with previous research, and that students’ perceptions of post-editing depend on each university’s particular context.