Lexicogrammatical aspects in English for dentistry acquisition materials

In the 21st century, globalization and massive migration have increased the global demand for effective transnational communication skills in English in the health care workplace and academic contexts, including dentistry. English for Dentistry falls under the umbrella of English for Specific Purposes (ESP): this refers to teaching and learning English as a foreign language in a particular domain. While the role of grammar acquisition in ESP courses is often understated in the key theoretical literature on ESP, this article highlights the importance of lexicogrammatical knowledge. Dentistry students and practitioners in Latvia highly value the accuracy in communication since the knowledge of various syntactic and morphological rules of grammar and their use in the dentistry-related context contribute to the accuracy required in the performance of different communicative tasks, for instance, asking for, explaining, and providing information, giving instructions. Besides, if dentists are unable, for example, to explain a diagnosis, agree on treatment options with the patient in a meaningfully accurate way, the dentist’s authority may be undermined, resulting in unsuccessful communication. The case study reports on the tasks employing lexicogrammatical strategies in the material “Dentistry and Language Integrated Learning”, which has been developed by the authors of this article working in close collaboration with individual academic staff at the the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Latvia. The material piloted amongst both dentistry practitioners and students suggests that the applied strategies of morphological derivation, for instance, recognizing and building new words by gaining control of affixation devices, can be considered as useful tools in the new lexeme meaning-making process in dentistry. As a result, this study has attempted to support the assumption that ESP and content and language integrated learning (or CLIL) are compatible and can be efficiently mastered in the professional discourse development process.

Polymedia and family multilingualism

This paper investigates family multilingualism in a polymedia perspective, presenting results from a study of transnational communication among four families with Senegalese background, living in Norway. Ethnographic interview data collected in 2017 and 2018, including mediagrams, are analysed to get insight into the families’ uses of media and language. Furthermore, the moment-by-moment language practices through which family relationships are managed and sustained are examined through fine-grained analysis of interpersonal interaction. The paper thus both draws on and goes beyond polymedia to investigate how linguistic repertoires are developed in digital communication. The aim is to explore ways in which this theory may help us rethink family multilingualism as digital language practices become increasingly significant.

MECHANISMS OF TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN THE FIELD OF MIGRATION IN THE MODERN ERA

В статье исследуются проблемы взаимодействия и сотрудничества государств в миграционной и других сферах на современном этапе. Проводится научный анализ развития интеграционных процессов на постсоветском пространстве в рамках СНГ, Союзного государства Россия-Беларусь и ЕАЭС, а также программ сотрудничества Евросоюза с республиками Центральной Азии. Делается вывод о необходимости переосмысления механизмов межгосударственного взаимодействия и сотрудничества в рамках международных объединений. Поднимается вопрос о соотношении международного права и активно развивающегося интеграционного (транснационального) права. Сформулированы рекомендации российской дипломатии в отношениях с коллективным Западом.

Living Religion

The chapter explores the everyday contributions of ordinary Christians to the running of Graham’s crusades. In forming prayer groups and organizing bus rides, ordinary Christians blurred the boundaries between private religiosity and public mass evangelism, as well as between the religious and the secular. They filled the organizational structures implemented by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association with life and by doing so turned the crusades into a powerful force of renewal for local churches and everyday religious life in London, Berlin, and New York. Women played a crucial role in this everyday running of the crusade machine. Religious practices such as prayer and pilgrimages traveled with Billy Graham and crossed the national boundaries between the different organizing committees. Organized prayer turned into a dynamic form of transnational communication that tied different crusade audiences together and became the cornerstone of Graham’s international ministry.

Transcultural Communication for a Polycentric World

In the era of digitized and globalized 24/7 communication, the one-way vertical flow of media and mediated culture from the West to the East has given way to multiple and horizontal flows, in which Asian countries are playing an increasingly significant role. This is having a profound impact on transcultural communication in a polycentric world. Although the United States and some other western countries still maintain their leading position in the field of global media and communication hardware and software. This article suggests that new actors, harnessing the potential of digital globalization, have emerged in the past decade and provide new avenues for transnational communication. Such changes, it argues, warrant a re-evaluation of how we define the global in terms of media and communication. Focusing on the growing global influence and digital presence of China and other Asian countries, the article suggests that the ascent of Asia contributes to further internationalizing of media and its study.

THE «ALTERNATIVE» MEANS OF USAGE OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS IN RUSSIA OF THE 18TH CENTURY

The 18th century was marked by the appearance of a great number of unusual objects in Russia. Besides military ships, wardrobes and beds, wigs and Holland-fashioned suites they were all kinds of scientific instruments – compasses, astrolabes, sundials, clocks, bisecting dividers, electrostatic machines etс. They were visible and tangible signs of western culture, processes of Russian modernization and westernization. And besides the obvious for us today means of usage they had some other ones. Many instruments were multi-faceted. As a rule they all were rear and expensive things, hand-made by individual order in just few or even the only exemplar. Not everyone could use them. So the instruments demonstrated the high level of education and the high social status of the possessor. The instruments were used for entertainment both at the court and for general public. This kind of court activities was an important tool of attracting attention and state investments to the scientific researches. Clocks, sundials and telescopes played diplomatic role as gifts both on the level of transnational communication and on the local one (the establishment of good relations between arriving expeditions and local authorities). At last local peasants preserved the strange objects possessed by alien-dressed men as a super-modern weapon of pillage.

Illusion vs. Disillusion: Chinese Viewers’ Articulation of “House of Cards”

This study explores how Chinese viewers articulate the meaning of the Netflix series “House of Cards” through analyzing viewer comments posted on Sohu Video, which streamed the show in China. A qualitative textual analysis of the comments reveals that the Sohu viewers turned the commenting of the show into articulations of democracy and China’s political conditions. In their articulation, some endorsed American democracy as a superb political system, while others resented it as being dark and corrupt, similar to the one in China. Still other viewers made a connection between “Cards” with China’s lack of freedom of speech. These connections were made under certain social conditions, including China’s internet providing a space for political discourse, tensions among different social forces and conflicting meaning systems existing in today’s China, and Chinese people’s increasing consumption of foreign media content and assumptions. Analyzing a particular case of transnational communication, this study demonstrates how the audience can make meaning of a foreign media product by connecting with their own social context, and how such articulations can be plural and multifaceted.

Communicative Practices of Migrants in the Transnational Space

Th article is devoted to the analysis of intercultural global interaction in the format of transnational communication networks that migrants form, moving from the country of origin to the country of reception. The purpose of the article is to describe and analyze the phenomenon of the reproduction of ethnic identity in transnational spaces, where migrants mainly from Central Asian countries form new multicultural models of behavior based on their own cultural patterns and identities. The article emphasizes that cultural systems involve diverging, but overlapping of migrant groups’ patterns of behavior. Thus, the problem situation is determined by ignorance of the features of everyday communication and behavioral patterns adopted in different groups of migrants. The author analyzes various adaptation strategies of migrants, emphasizing that the choice of a particular strategy depends on the motivation of the migrant. The problem of migrant groups’ integration is identified in the article as state policy aimed not only at working with migrants in order to successfully include them in the host community, but also at interacting with the host community itself and the local population. Organizational, integration and financial resources spent on working with migrants will not be effectively used if we do not take into account the differences between ethnic migrant groups, which are identified, including in the particularities of communication practices and the construction of communicative transnational spaces. The research methodology includes the main components of a transnational approach, in the framework of which it is noted that the concept of “international migration”, which involves crossing borders, is losing its relevance. migrants more and more differ in socio-cultural characteristics, are oriented towards life in two or more societies, the development of transnational communities and the corresponding consciousness. In transnational communications, a special role belongs to diaspora communities. The main conclusion of the article is that the concept of transnational and translocal migration sets a new globalist perspective. The locality is being replaced by the process of translocality, and transmigrants belong to several localities at the same time and are included in more than one community. Keywords: transnational migrations, adaptation strategies, communication practices, transnational space The publication has been prepared with the support of the «RUDN University Program 5-100»

Two Linguas Francas? Social Inclusion through English and Esperanto

New forms of mobility presuppose a technological factor that frames it as ‘topological proximity,’ regardless of the nature of the mobile agent (human being, robot ware, animal, virus, digital object). The appeal of the so-called linguas francas is especially evident in human beings showing high propensity to move, i.e., motility. They are usually associated with transnational communication in multilingual settings, linguistic justice, and globalization. Paradoxically, such global languages foster mobility, but, at the same time, they may hinder social inclusion in the hosting society, especially for people in mobility. The article compares English as a lingua franca and Esperanto in the European context, putting together the linguistic hierarchy of transnational communication (Gobbo, 2015) and the notion of linguistic unease, used to assess sociolinguistic justice (Iannàccaro, Gobbo, & Dell’Aquila, 2018). The analysis shows that the sense of belonging of their respective speakers influences social inclusion in different ways. More in general, the article frames the linguistic dimension of social inclusion in terms of linguistic ease, proposing a scale suitable for the analysis of European contexts.