Blame the Message Senders Not the Messenger: The Defence Case of the English “Native Speaker” Teacher

This article investigates how “native speaker” teachers define who a “native speaker” is and how they view themselves in relation to the concept. It further explores how they feel about discriminatory practices in employability and the pay gap that are systemically carried out against their “nonnative speaker” counterparts by recruiters. Data were gathered from 10 English language teachers: five males and five females from the UK, Canada, Ireland, and South Africa, who were hired by a state university in Saudi Arabia on the basis that they are “native speakers.” The findings show that although the place of birth and the official status of English in a given country were the main defining criteria for hiring a “native speaker,” the interviewees did not view the concept of the “native speaker” in the same ways as their recruiters did, who they believed used those criteria in an overly simplistic and reductive way rooted in native-speakerism. The findings also show that the participants did not enjoy the unjustified privileges given to them by their recruiters at the expense of their “non-native speaker” colleagues. Instead, in some cases, they attempted to confront their recruiters over such discriminatory practices, and in some others, they attempted to bridge the gap and ease the tension between themselves and their “nonnative speaker” counterparts, although these efforts were hindered by the system’s unfair and unjust practices.

Crucial Strategies to Solve Communicative Breakdown

English has increasingly become international language for business and commerce, science and technology, international relations and diplomacy. Due to this fact, the purpose of learning a foreign language is communication. Through communication, people send and receive messages and negotiate meaning. Communication has different forms and takes place in different situations. People communicate to satisfy their needs. Heterogeneous interaction is carried out by a native speaker and a non-native one in the purpose of exchanging of ideas, information between two or more individuals. There is usually, at least one speaker or sender, a message which transmitted, and an individual or individuals for whom this message is intended. Communication breakdowns may happen to anybody communicating in a language other than their dominating language. This problem, surely, can be solved but how? The primary aim of this article is to investigate the heterogeneous communication process in the terms of possible breakdown which happens to all people while communicating, so that they are unable to get their messages across express what they mean and what they understand. The author highlights crucial strategies toward solving these disruptions.

Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

The Ideology of English-as-the-global-language in Taiwan’s Private English Language Schools

English is regarded as a key to globalization or internationalization and future success for Taiwan and its people. One of the most extraordinary results of English-as-the-global-language of English teaching and learning in Taiwan is private English language schools are ubiquitous. Research into how private English language schools weld together English-as-the-global-language and English teaching and learning has yet received much attention. This study aims to investigate how Taiwan’s private English language schools’ television commercials market English-as-the-global-language and what the underlying ideologies of English-as-the-global-language are. Exploring the ideology of English-as-the-global-language, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed herein to analyze 106 private English language school television commercials produced from 2000 to 2020 in Taiwan. The results indicate that English as the key to internationalization and future success is an ideology. Moreover, the ideological concept of English-as-the-global-language is central to English teaching and learning ideologies in Taiwan, such as an early start in English learning, English-only as the ideal English teaching method, and native-speaker norms in English teaching and learning.

“Viejas pisadas”: Activating Postvernacular Ladino in the Works of Myriam Moscona

In both her hybrid-language novel Tela de Sevoya (2012) and in her Ladino poetry collec­tion Ansina (2015), Mexican author Myriam Moscona (1955) embraces Ladino as a post­vernacular language without any illusions of recuperating it for daily speech. Although her grandparents spoke Ladino, she herself is not a native speaker. While she recognizes that Ladino is a dying tongue, Moscona makes explicit the power of literary works to infiltrate and function within the liminal spaces that exist between languages, identities, or layers of history. Moscona’s dynamic and future-oriented creative work-composed in a language whose vernacularity exists only in the past-utilizes the tool of postvernacularity and en­ters into the discourse of feminist mobilization. Her works show how the active use of postvernacularity can open opportunities for her Spanish-speaking audiences to collective­ly engage in Ladino’s afterlife through acts of creative play.

Evolution of the Associative-Verbal Network of the Concept “Old Age” in the Language Consciousness of the Native Russian-Language Speakers of the 20s of the XXI Century

The development of information technologies, change of political system and other socio-political changes in the life of any state, leave an imprint on the linguistic consciousness of a typical native speaker. Notwithstanding, the national conceptual sphere or nave linguistic picture of the world has undergone significant changes, for all the changes in the world around us are fragmentally recorded in the collective linguistic consciousness of Russian language native speakers. The concepts of old age that were relevant to the residents of our state three decades ago, have undergone significant changes. Negative attitude to the old age, pessimism, and a sense of the inevitable end of life, have been replaced by the hope of a prosperous, happy, financially stable old age. The younger generation does not hesitate to draw a parallel between such concepts as old age and retirement - this fact was recorded for the first time as previously, the scientific studies based on data from associative experiments, hadnt noted similar approach. The above conclusions were obtained as a result of a chain associative experiment with the word-stimulus old age, which involves obtaining 3 reactions of students to this stimulus (on the basis of the Faculty of Philology of the RUDN). 99 students (aged 17-25), native speakers of the Russian language, were selected to participate in the experiment (these parameters are reflected in the questionnaire of the subjects). Due to the unfavorable epidemiological situation and the conditions of distance learning, the experiment was conducted in an online format using the MS Forms application. The obtained resulting associative-verbal network of the concept old age was compared with the characteristics of the above-mentioned concept, recorded in the Associative Dictionary of the Russian Language edited by Yuri Nikolaevich Karaulov.

THE PHONOLOGICAL PROCESS OF SEMIVOWEL INSERTION IN BAHASA INDONESIA

The phonological process shows the changing of sounds and the rules that govern the work. These sound changes can occur in vowels, consonants, and even semivowels. This study focuses on the sound changes that occur in semivowels [y] and [w], especially in Indonesian vocabularies. This study aimed to investigate the quantity of diphthong diversity in Bahasa Indonesia, as the basis for examining the role and patterns of [y] and [w] insertion, as well as when [y] and [w] cannot be inserted into some words in Bahasa Indonesia. This study also emphasizes the location where [y] and [w] are inserted by using a spectrogram. The data collection used the observation method. The list of data was taken from Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) and pronounced by an Indonesian native speaker. The spoken data are transcribed into the phonetic form using the note-taking technique. The analysis was done through the syllabic structural process based on Schane. The results present that [y] is inserted between the diphthongs ia, iu, ie, io, ea, and eo. Then, [w] is inserted between the diphthongs ua, ui, ue, uo, and oa, and the insertion of [y] and [w] does not appear when they meet with the diphthongs ai, au, ae, ao, ei, eu, oi, ou oe. The spectrograms in this study are used to see and present the insertion of [y] and [w].

Ways of improving language literacy of law enforcement officers

The article is devoted to considering the ways of improving language literacy of law enforcement officers. The experience of the existing researches concerning this issue is analyzed and summarized. The ways of improving language literacy of law enforcement officers are formulated. Some recommendations both on teaching the Russian language within the professional training of law enforcement officers and organizing their self-training are provided. Such concepts as professional speech culture, literacy, functional literacy, language literacy are considered in the article. It is noted that modern society makes higher demands on the professional developing level of specialists in various fields: a competent specialist must have both a set of professionally significant knowledge and skills and high level of professional speech culture, which implies a high level of literacy. It is indicated that the level of developing the professional speech culture is regarded as one of the main indicators of the law enforcement officers’ professionalism. Literacy implies the ability of a person to read and write according to the standards of his native language. The concept of functional literacy is interpreted as the level of knowledge, skills and abilities that ensure the normal individual’s functioning in the system of social relations. Language literacy, being a component of functional literacy, implies the ability of a native speaker to comply with the norms of the literary language in the process of oral and written communication. Some recommendations on teaching the Russian language to law enforcement officers are provided. Various ways of improving the language literacy of this category of specialists are described. It is concluded that the main ways of improving the language literacy of law enforcement officers are the following: teaching the Russian language to law enforcement officers; organizing the research activities of trainees; organizing the self-training of the officers during off-duty hours (using the educational Internet-resources and mobile applications). The urgency of the problem of improving the literacy level of native speakers at the present stage of the society development is emphasized.