Virtual Education in English Literature Courses during Pandemic COVID-19: Merits and Demerits, and Needs

Distance education and e-learning became widespread and necessary with the miracle of the internet and its increasing influence among the individuals much within the days of a pandemic outbreak of COVID-19. Many universities, institutions, and learners encourage using e-learning and begin growing in this field. This paper examines the merits and demerits of distance and online education teaching for English literature educators and students. Technology and increasing demand for education, traditional strategies do not meet the growing requirements of academic communities and virtual education and e-learning with all their benefits and drawbacks attempt to meet these needs. This paper investigates e-teaching and e-learning infrastructure, needs, benefits, and limitations, in addition to opportunities and challenges of online education within the days of the coronavirus occurrence. The research method of the current study was conducted through a library study along with empirical study and descriptive analysis. New challenges of English literature educators and students in pandemic COVID-19 were identified and new approaches to remove the constraints are suggested. The results confirm online education is a constant educational need not limited to pandemic period and have to be compelled to develop productivity and creativity in learning with the appearance of recent technologies such as computers, the web, and social networks. These skills development can assist educators to find solutions for these difficulties in various areas of educational, cultural, and social issues. Blended learning can contribute to post-pandemic English literature classes and sustainable higher education.

A Realist Interpretation of Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street

This paper is a realist interpretation of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. The text is considered for study here because it dwells on the popular, the modern and social issues that define realist works. The paper involves realism of subject-matter and social realism as its theoretical tools for the evaluation of the research subject. Realism of subject-matter deals with themes that are common to society while social realism looks at the poor social conditions of the middle and lower classes. The paper is a qualitative research and it is based on a content analysis of the select text for study. The paper probes the ugly life of four young girls in Nigeria who are trafficked into Antwerp, Belgium, to work as prostitutes and earn income for their traffickers. The girls suffer from sexual abuse and deceit from their parents and older men. They undergo hardship as a result of lack of proper parental care, unemployment, insecurity and poor social services which make them frustrated. All of these make their lives vulnerable. Therefore, the study concludes that, well placed individuals, parents, civil society organizations and the government should make efforts to improve and secure the lives of vulnerable young women in Nigeria in order to help them escape from their vulnerabilities. Also, the novel’s authentic representation of life and society and its focus on character more than plot, including its attention to the lower class, the social and the contemporary issues fits it into the realist agenda.

The Impact of Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue On College ESL Learners: Zhejiang Yuexiu University as a Case Study

Negative transfer of mother tongue is a major difficulty that every second language learner has to overcome, especially for those students whose target language is quite different from their mother tongue. With the in-depth development of pluralism in the world, people pay more and more attention to the learning of various languages, especially English. In this situation, the concerns of language researchers on the negative transfer of mother tongue are inevitably boosting. Given this, based on the pertinent theories of the negative language transfer, this study aims to explore the impact of negative language transfer on Chinese college students’ English learning through a questionnaire poll with some students of Zhejiang Yuexiu University as the research objects. The results of the study are mainly shown in two aspects: the impact of the negative transfer of mother tongue on college students’ oral learning and college students’ writing learning. At the end of the article, the author puts forward the cultural differences between China and the Western countries that lead to the negative transfer of mother tongue, and some effective methods to help Chinese college English learners reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue in their process of English learning.

A Corpora-Based Analysis of Rely on and Depend on

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of rely on and depend on in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. The COCA clearly shows that the expression rely on government is the most preferred by Americans, followed by rely on people, and rely on data. The COCA further indicates that the expression depend on slate is the most preferred by Americans, followed by depend on government, and depend on people. The BNC shows, on the other hand, that the expression rely on others is the most preferred by the British, followed by rely on people, and rely on friends. The BNC further indicates that depend on factors and depend on others are the most preferred by the British, followed by depend on age, and depend on food. Finally, in the COCA, the nouns government, luck, welfare, people, information, state, fossil, water, family, oil, food, and things are linked to both rely on and depend on, but many nouns are not still linked to both of them. On the other hand, in the BNC, only the nouns state, chance, government, and others are linked to both rely on and depend on, but many nouns are not still linked to both rely on and depend on. It can thus be inferred from this that rely on is slightly different from depend on in its use.

An SFL Approach to Biden’s Inauguration Speech after Winning the Presidential Election: Compensation

The US election is an influential event, not just in the USA itself but in the world. The present study aims to analyze Joe Biden’s inauguration speech after winning the presidential election in January 2021 and becoming the 46th president of the United States. Moreover, this paper attempts to investigate the USA’s possible policies toward their own nation and, of course, the other countries. This analysis goes through predicting probable upcoming policies of Biden’s administration comparing to the previous president of the USA, Donald Trump, who breached several international agreements. To this end, Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1978; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) has been employed in Biden’s first speech after winning the election and beginning of the democratic administration to observe his political intentions by means of a critical approach and using appraisal resources of Martin and White (2007) to clarify the attitude, graduation, and engagement of his speech. Overall, designating the number of vocabularies related to any of the mentioned appraisal resources, it is concluded that Biden’s tendency, based on his inauguration speech and the lexical and grammatical (‘lexicogrammar) choices, is to compensate Trump’s actions, such as breaching 2015 JCPOA agreement and breaking 2015 Paris Climate Accord, and make peace with whom Trump had fueled conflicts.

‘We Are a Global Community’: Communicating Knowledge through Moocs and Teacher Training Platforms

A socio-rhetorical discourse community consists of a group of people who come together to pursue objectives that predate those of socialization and solidarity, and who aim to develop and maintain their own discoursal characteristics. We have examined MOOCs (Massive Open Online courses) and teacher training educational platforms in order to ascertain whether and to what extent they may be identified as networked learning tools and discourse communities characterized by a commonality of goals, mechanisms and procedures of intercommunication, exchange of knowledge, information, as well as specialized genres and their terminology. MOOCs and learning platforms have dramatically changed the way people learn. Starting from ongoing research, we analyze the metadiscoursal features of an ad hoc corpus of online filmed lectures drawn from two MOOC providers (FutureLearn and Coursera). We look at both interactive and interactional resources (to guide the listener through the texts and to involve the listener in the subject), in order to discover how these features are used to control, evaluate and negotiate the communicative goals and impact of the ongoing exchanges. The quantitative and qualitative analysis shows a significant use of metadiscourse markers in the video lectures with a higher frequency of interactional features such as self-mentions, engagement markers, hedges and boosters, rather than interactive ones. These commentaries in the lectures signal the instructors’ attitudes towards the texts and their listeners. Additionally, they were found to perform a rhetorical function since they persuasively reinforce the instructors’ attitude and stance. Thus, their use engages the participants as members of a digital community, where commitment, dedication, and common goals seem to be fundamental features.

Book Review: Bula, A. (2020). Poetry as Throne for Sentimental Reticulation: A Review of Andrew Bula's Turns of Thoughts. Abuja: Old Press

This review article is a critical inspection of Andrew Bula's collection of poems, Turns of Thoughts (2020). As such, critical searchlights are thrown on poems as “Turns of Thoughts”, “Who Knows”, “Keeping Vigil”, “Love to Love”, “Wall Gecko”, “Far Out to the Woods”, “King on Fours in the Wilds”, “Trekking Home on a Windy Night”, ‘Presence and Space”, “Neighbour, Let’s Hate Hatred”, "Much Minuses & Little Pluses", "To Illumine our Rich, Fine World". In investigating these pieces, the aim really is to uncover the message and artistry of Bula's poetry. There are, of course, other pieces in the anthology that are simply mentioned in this review, without depth analyses. In such circumstances, the tendency is to liken them to other piece(s) or, quite simply, to take a cursory view of them. And then there is a showcasing of dominant literary devices as found in the poems as Rhetorical Questions, Paradox, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allusion, and Code Mixing. In the end, it is made out that Bula’s poetry is one of emotional elation and it reveals high moral awareness of, and gratitude to, important members of the public who have positively impacted society. Likewise, it is discovered that the poems also explore nature, love, and philosophical themes, while employing literary devices such as have already been mentioned.

Arab American Feminism: The Political and the Literary Strategies of Re-writing between Borders in Contemporary Post-9/11 Fiction by Women Writers

Undeniably, Arab American women occupy a debatable position in mainstream culture and politics. Because of their former invisibility, they started to claim their presence and to fight for their rights in post-9/11 America. They ardently become aware of their submission to both Arab patriarchy and sexism and the necessity to fight against this denigrating position. Likewise, they realise that they were silenced in discourses against Arab and Muslim discrimination in the United States. This paper focuses on the ways they have been challenging these discriminatory and invisibilizing discourses against Arab women through shedding light on their Transnational Feminist concerns in their writings, in which they have created a site to communicate anti-discrimination discourses, and to oppose the stereotypical monolithic portrayals of Arab men that are mainly due to the hypervisibility and the demonization of Arabs in post- 9/11 America. Additionally, it highlights how the Shehrazadian narrative strategy in contemporary Arab American women’s writing engulfs several features and illustrations of confrontation and resistance to the stereotypical representations of Arab women, mainly in the American popular culture. Indeed, Shehrazade and her narrative strategies become in this context a collective means for re-writing, reviving and redefining grandmother figures from the past. Shehrazed’s storytelling, as a life-serving strategy, becomes a metaphor for the urgency of exploring why and how figures like Shehrazade are translated across cultures and how Orientalism shapes such translation.

The Concept of Parenthood in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns are two heart-wrenching novels that glorify the power of indestructible love and affection. The protagonists of both of the novels Amir and Mariam undergo several psychological, familial, and political plights in their life. They show their undefeatable and unconditional spirits in their quests to overcome their predicaments–to achieve their desired identities. In this way, they slowly walk on the path to parenthood. In their pursuits of life, they struggle to protect Sohrab and Laila and to ensure a bright future for them. Their indomitable effort to decorate the life of Sohrab and Laila gradually eradicates all their discontentment of life and turns them into contented parents. The study aims to focus on the concept of parenthood portrayed in the novels. It analyses how parenthood offers a new meaning of life to Amir and Mariam releasing them from the havocs that they have experienced in their life.

“No One Leaves Home Unless Home Is the Mouth of a Shark”: Dwelling and the Complexities of Return in Warsan Shire’s Poetry

Africa’s bitter historical experience of slavery and racial discrimination influences diasporic literary writers in their representation of home and its exigencies. This is due to the sordid effect of racial conflicts culminating in disillusionment of writers, who engage in the nostalgic longing for their country of origin, notwithstanding the influences of the host country on African migrants. By exploring Warsan Shire’s poetry, this study, through the lens of modernity and globalization, examines the concept of home while x-raying locations of the African immigrant in diaspora. The research utilised the Postcolonial theory and the qualitative method of analysis to examine how diasporic immigrants, particularly female subalterns struggle to grapple with the intricacies of dwelling in a hostile clime which situates the “Us” and “Them” binary opposition on their lived conditions. It analysed Shire’s poems as a product of the transcultural identity formation of the poet, illustrating her migratory experiences through the notion of “unhomely” (in her home country) and “Homeliness” (in her host country) as dilemmas that bisect her quest for return home because of war. The study, thus, submits that globalization alternates the idea of situating home as a place of origin.