Practical Challenges to Teachers and Students in Asynchronous Cross-cultural Communication Projects

Teachers are expected to prepare their students for life in a world that changes daily, fueled by technological progress and globalisation (Howells, 2018). In this internationalized world, English has become the lingua franca for business, science and education (Tatsioka et al., 2018). Young professionals are expected to be proficient in English and able to easily communicate with colleagues from other countries. Achieving these objectives presents challenges for teachers and students. Practical approaches to incorporating authentic communication across cultures in the English language classroom are discussed in this paper. Over three years we authors implemented several projects using different didactic methods to bring students from Japan and Germany together to improve their proficiency in language as well as their cross-cultural communication skills. Students worked in small teams on joint tasks, in which the use of ICT (information and communication technologies) was crucial to successful outcome. Naturally, any careful advance planning was quickly met by the emergence of unforeseen problems that needed immediate attention from teachers and students. In this paper, we focus on challenges teachers and students may encounter when developing new strategies to include meaningful cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in the tertiary ELF classroom, based on teacher and student experiences.

Needs analysis of English for mechanical engineers in the Vietnamese context

<p>This study examines the English language needs of mechanical engineers in Vietnam. A high demand for proficiency in English is increasing in ASEAN countries, including Vietnam. Vietnam in general and the important field of mechanical engineering, in particular, attracts many foreign investors and multinational organisations and this creates plurilingual and pluricultural workplaces where English is used as a lingua franca. Drawing on sociolinguistic theory, this pragmatic mixed method needs analysis study examines the English language communication needs of Vietnamese mechanical engineers at four workplaces in Vietnam. It investigates the kinds of real-world English skills required by Vietnamese mechanical engineers to function effectively in the workplace, the social factors that affect the use of English and the effects of breakdowns or other issues in communication in English. It draws on needs analysis models which have evolved from English for Specific Purposes, including those devised by Munby (1978) and more recently by The Common European Framework (CEF) Professional Profiles to establish key communicative events. To answer the study’s pragmatic questions about language use for practical purposes in the lingua franca, plurilingual and pluricultural workplace it also borrows from the theoretically eclectic model of the Wellington Workplace Project, a model grounded in the first language context (L1), and other more sociological studies of the relationship of language and power in international workplaces. The study employed questionnaire, semi-structured interview and observation for data collection. Questionnaires were completed by 22 managers of mechanical engineers and 71 professional mechanical engineers. Based on the initial questionnaire analysis, 12 participants from the two groups took part in the follow-up semi-structured interviews. Observations in four worksites provided rich data about the real-world use of English. The findings indicated a high frequency of English language use and the range of real-world English required by Vietnamese mechanical engineers for a range of communicative events including ordering spare parts, interpreting technical drawing and bidding for contracts. Mechanical engineers needed plurilingual and pluricultural competence to negotiate a range of accent, intonation and idiom in the lingua franca and plurilingual context. Minimal use of functional occupational language was sometimes sufficient for communication for the purpose of ‘getting things done’, but not always. Communication issues had financial consequences for the company, sometimes disastrous ones. Looking at the findings through the lens of arising communication issues helped to reveal some of the underlying power relationships in the workplace and some negative impacts on workplace solidarity. These findings demonstrate the urgency of the need for increased English language skills for mechanical engineers in Vietnam and for the wider economy of Vietnam. English was found to function as a source of ‘expert power’ and in a wider implication this revealed a hidden or ‘shadow’ power structure within the workplace affected by English language proficiency. People were empowered when they possessed a good level of English, which could help them save not only their own face but also the face of the company. More positively adaptive communicative strategies helped both mechanical engineers and their managers avoid communication issues. Adapting language for the purpose of ‘getting things done’ in turn interacted with low and high solidarity relationships. There was arguably an acceptance of a level of rudeness or abruptness in these workplace contexts. A high tolerance for the need to negotiate meaning in what could be described as not only a lingua franca but also a ‘poor English’ workplace context was sometimes observed. This tolerance sometimes but not always extended to the mobility of plurilingual repertoires such as code-switching, and some code-switching into Vietnamese was also observed on the part of long-term foreign managers. Humour also emerged as a dimension of high solidarity longer-term workplace relationships between Vietnamese mechanical engineers and foreign managers, even when all parties had limited English. The study argues that understanding why mechanical engineers needed specific types of English and the effect of the social dimensions of this language could help lessen issues in communication. The consequences of miscommunication should be addressed in the English-language training process. Students should be strategically prepared to meet the the high communication demands of the lingua franca and plurilingual workplace which requires both English for technical communication and English for social communication.</p>

Needs analysis of English for mechanical engineers in the Vietnamese context

<p>This study examines the English language needs of mechanical engineers in Vietnam. A high demand for proficiency in English is increasing in ASEAN countries, including Vietnam. Vietnam in general and the important field of mechanical engineering, in particular, attracts many foreign investors and multinational organisations and this creates plurilingual and pluricultural workplaces where English is used as a lingua franca. Drawing on sociolinguistic theory, this pragmatic mixed method needs analysis study examines the English language communication needs of Vietnamese mechanical engineers at four workplaces in Vietnam. It investigates the kinds of real-world English skills required by Vietnamese mechanical engineers to function effectively in the workplace, the social factors that affect the use of English and the effects of breakdowns or other issues in communication in English. It draws on needs analysis models which have evolved from English for Specific Purposes, including those devised by Munby (1978) and more recently by The Common European Framework (CEF) Professional Profiles to establish key communicative events. To answer the study’s pragmatic questions about language use for practical purposes in the lingua franca, plurilingual and pluricultural workplace it also borrows from the theoretically eclectic model of the Wellington Workplace Project, a model grounded in the first language context (L1), and other more sociological studies of the relationship of language and power in international workplaces. The study employed questionnaire, semi-structured interview and observation for data collection. Questionnaires were completed by 22 managers of mechanical engineers and 71 professional mechanical engineers. Based on the initial questionnaire analysis, 12 participants from the two groups took part in the follow-up semi-structured interviews. Observations in four worksites provided rich data about the real-world use of English. The findings indicated a high frequency of English language use and the range of real-world English required by Vietnamese mechanical engineers for a range of communicative events including ordering spare parts, interpreting technical drawing and bidding for contracts. Mechanical engineers needed plurilingual and pluricultural competence to negotiate a range of accent, intonation and idiom in the lingua franca and plurilingual context. Minimal use of functional occupational language was sometimes sufficient for communication for the purpose of ‘getting things done’, but not always. Communication issues had financial consequences for the company, sometimes disastrous ones. Looking at the findings through the lens of arising communication issues helped to reveal some of the underlying power relationships in the workplace and some negative impacts on workplace solidarity. These findings demonstrate the urgency of the need for increased English language skills for mechanical engineers in Vietnam and for the wider economy of Vietnam. English was found to function as a source of ‘expert power’ and in a wider implication this revealed a hidden or ‘shadow’ power structure within the workplace affected by English language proficiency. People were empowered when they possessed a good level of English, which could help them save not only their own face but also the face of the company. More positively adaptive communicative strategies helped both mechanical engineers and their managers avoid communication issues. Adapting language for the purpose of ‘getting things done’ in turn interacted with low and high solidarity relationships. There was arguably an acceptance of a level of rudeness or abruptness in these workplace contexts. A high tolerance for the need to negotiate meaning in what could be described as not only a lingua franca but also a ‘poor English’ workplace context was sometimes observed. This tolerance sometimes but not always extended to the mobility of plurilingual repertoires such as code-switching, and some code-switching into Vietnamese was also observed on the part of long-term foreign managers. Humour also emerged as a dimension of high solidarity longer-term workplace relationships between Vietnamese mechanical engineers and foreign managers, even when all parties had limited English. The study argues that understanding why mechanical engineers needed specific types of English and the effect of the social dimensions of this language could help lessen issues in communication. The consequences of miscommunication should be addressed in the English-language training process. Students should be strategically prepared to meet the the high communication demands of the lingua franca and plurilingual workplace which requires both English for technical communication and English for social communication.</p>

The debatable identity in Isaiah 62:5

In Isaiah 62:5, there are three major translations of who will marry ‘you’ or ‘Zion’ based on the immediate context (Is 62:1). Firstly, the most common reading is ‘your sons’ (Amplified Bible [AB], American Standard Version [ASV], Berean Study Bible [BSB], Catholic Public Domain Version [CPDV], Douay-Rheims Bible [DRB], English Standard Version [ESV], King James Version [KJV], New International Version [NIV], New American Standard Bible [NASB], Smith’s Literal Translation [SLT], World English Bible [WEB]). Secondly, the scholars reading preference is ‘your builder’, which refers to ‘God’ based on Psalms 147:2. This reading is adopted by Coverdale Bible of 1535, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and Good New Bible (GNT). Lastly, although the translation ‘builders’ is the least favourable reading, LSV and YLT use this reading. This research, therefore, attempts to argue for ‘your sons’ translation as the original reading through textual criticism as the methodology.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is a combination of textual criticism studies with translations.

A Corpus-Based Study on Construction of “Anger Adjectives + Prepositions” in World Englishes

Anger as one of the basic emotions has attracted much attention. In the construction of &ldquo;Anger adjectives + prepositions&rdquo;, the temporal duration of the Anger adjectives is closely related to their prepositional collocates. Differences in the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates might be captured in the world English varieties. The corpora used in this study cover eight varieties of English. The five varieties of English used in Canada, Philippines, Singapore, India and Nigeria are from the International Corpus of English (ICE). The China English corpus (ChiE) consists of news texts crawled from six Chinese English media. American English is taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British English is taken from British National Corpus (BNC). By investigating the use of the Anger adjectives and their prepositional collocates in the eight varieties of English, this paper finds that, on the continuums of the temporal duration of Anger adjectives, most varieties of English are closer to American English, whereas only Singapore English is close to British English. The distribution of Anger adjectives in the English varieties is largely in accordance with the Concentric Circles of world Englishes whereas the continuums of the temporal duration of emotions present a new insight into their relations.

A Novel Sequence-to-Subgraph Framework for Diagnosis Classification

Text-based diagnosis classification is a critical problem in AI-enabled healthcare studies, which assists clinicians in making correct decision and lowering the rate of diagnostic errors. Previous studies follow the routine of sequence based deep learning models in NLP literature to deal with clinical notes. However, recent studies find that structural information is important in clinical contents that greatly impacts the predictions. In this paper, a novel sequence-to-subgraph framework is introduced to process clinical texts for classification, which changes the paradigm of managing texts. Moreover, a new classification model under the framework is proposed that incorporates subgraph convolutional network and hierarchical diagnostic attentive network to extract the layered structural features of clinical texts. The evaluation conducted on both the real-world English and Chinese datasets shows that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning based diagnosis classification models.

The Need for Translation in the Globalized World English Arabic Contact in the Algerian Academic Context

The neck-breaking changes imposed by the process of globalization demand a reconsideration of the mundane scholarly dealings. The constant need for communication in a scientific area to keep pace with the continuing advancements and the newly published research works, mainly in the Speech-language Pathology branch, pushes the researcher to look for the appropriate tools which bridge the gap and ease the task. The researcher tries to find out how translation can bridge the gap between the technological improvements, anglicized data, and the actual context in which the Algerian students and teachers work? This research paper aims, thus, at researching the significance of translation from English to Arabic in an Algerian academic context (at the University of Oran 2). To reach the predetermined objective, the researcher uses of descriptive case study research in which a students’ questionnaire, a teachers’ interview, and program analysis are used. The findings show that a total absence of both the English language and translation in such a scientific discipline widens the gap between the requirements of the age and the actual practice enormously. A set of recommendations, including insertion of a specialized translation module, are suggested to help both the teachers and the students in this department.