What is Freedom?

This work is a collection of interviews on the topic of freedom from many of the world’s leading academic thinkers on the subject, as well as highly influential activists. The book contains twelve interviews and an introduction. The interviews are presented in a simple readable format intended for a general audience, each with a short introduction and suggested reading. The interviews are split into three sections; history, philosophy, and activism, covering what freedom has meant, how it can be defined, and what work it does in real-world political contestation respectively. One central theme of the work is how freedom’s meaning has changed and evolved over time and been contested both between and within political traditions. The book also explores contemporary alternatives to individual negative liberty, and considers freedom as a possible ideal to which activists can appeal. A final issue many of the interviews touch on is how different conceptions of freedom relate to different ideas about human nature and our relationship with history.

Lexical density and variation in Indonesian folklores in English student textbooks: an SFL study

This study aims to study the lexical density and lexical variation in Indonesian folklore narrative texts in English textbooks for grade X which were published by the Ministry of Education and Culture of The Republic of Indonesia. This study uses qualitative method since this study focuses on lexical density and lexical variation in the texts from the textbooks. This study applies the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics based on lexical density theory of Ure (1971) which was refined by Halliday (1985) and the theory of lexical variation of Castello (2008). In addition, Gunning Fog Index and Estimated Reading Grades by Heydari (2012) are also applied to help measure suggested reading grades of the texts. The data are three narrative texts about Indonesian folklore from Bahasa Inggris: third edition (2017) and Interlanguage (2008) textbooks. This study revealed that the texts vary in terms of their lexical density and lexical variation. Moreover, in some of the texts, their lexical variation does not go in line with their lexical density and affect the difficulty level of the texts to be comprehended. This study also revealed that the texts vary in terms of Gunning Fog Index and many of the texts are suggested for lower graders.

The problem of using English reading strategies perceived by Thai EFL students

It is recognized that reading ability is essential for Thai EFL students and English reading is perceived as a difficult task among them. To understand the difficulty experienced by the students while reading English text, this study hence aimed at investigating problems of using English reading strategies perceived by Thai EFL students as well as providing suggested reading instructions for Thai lecturers to cope with the emerging problems. This study employed a mixed-method design. The participants of the study were 412 Thai EFL students who, in this study, were also considered as Gen Z students at a large-size university in Bangkok, Thailand. The participants were asked to complete an online questionnaire on 4-point Likert’s scale, which was adapted from Aebersold and Field (1997). Moreover, 10 students were recruited for two focus group interviews. The results revealed that Thai EFL students experience difficulties in using English reading strategies when they have to skip unknown words during the first reading (mean = 2.67, SD = 1.01) followed by varying reading speed rates according to the type of the reading passage (mean = 2.66, SD = 0.97), and guessing the meanings of unknown words by using the context clues (mean = 2.59, SD = 0.92) respectively. Based on both quantitative and qualitative results and personality traits of Thai Gen Z, suggested reading instructions including guided reading, improving student’s vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, technology-blended classroom and critical reading were purposed.

Journal Scan

Cardiology is an everchanging science, and to provide the best of care we need to be updated with the latest in the field. With our busy schedules and with the stress of dealing with a pandemic, we might be hard pressed to review the latest journals and stay up to date. It is with the aim of fulfilling this gap that we present to you this section on journal scan. In this issue, I have focused on articles published from January 2021 to April 2021. The articles I have chosen range from structural heart disease intervention, to heart failure therapeutics, an article on the fast-rising field of cardio-diabetes and of course the quintessential article on COVID-19 cardiology. In my limited capacity, I have made a few comments regarding the utility and impact of these articles on our daily practice. There are a few more articles that I could not incorporate as it fell beyond the scope of this review, and I have mentioned them as suggested reading at the end of the article.