The image of the German in current literature and media

The aim of this article was to analyse the reflection of the image of the German in the examples from the current literature and the media present in the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language of the Vytautas Magnus University. The focus of the study went beyond the collocations with this word and the disclosure of the characteristic traits of Germans all the way to the meaning bestowed upon this word by the broader context – the sentence or a group of them. Examples containing all forms of the lexeme German were examined. A total of six different contexts in which Germans are mentioned were identified: these were the contexts of history, cooperation, sports, culture, characteristic traits, and science. In the context of history, Germans are usually referred to as a belligerent nation, assailants, savage conquerors, invaders. The attitude towards them is negative as often as not. Things are different in the context of cooperation, where the attitude is positive and Germans are seen as friendly partners. In the contexts of sports, culture, and science, the story is more or less the same, with Germans regarded with respect as meritorious and high-ranking representatives of their field.The context of the characteristic traits of Germans has the highest degree of controversy and stereotype. Some data show that Germans, according to the popular belief, are neat, rational, organised, punctual, disciplined, hard-working, cultured, law-abiding; they are rather cold and reserved. Other examples, albeit much smaller in number, bear witness to quite the opposite: that Germans are neither punctual nor overly neat or cultured; some sources even say that they are friendly, merry, and approachable. Besides, this nature loves to travel.

Identity Development of Foreign Language Teachers in Lithuania

Teacher identity is an evolving, multi-dimensional concept of a teacher’s understanding of self, best understood as a dynamic narrative of self-growth. The present study is focused on hypothesized stages of teacher identity development (Pride, Survival, Experimentation, Disenchantment, Rebellion and Progressive Proficiency) and their occurrence in Lithuanian foreign language teachers. A series of semi-structured interviews were carried out with eight Lithuanian foreign language teachers to discover their personal narratives of teacher identity development.The findings of the qualitative case study research revealed that key features of the six possible identity stages were present across the unique experiences of theforeign language teachers interviewed. However, each research participant displayed only certain key features of each identity development stage rather than a combination of all the possible features. In general, less experienced teachers displayed fewer key features at certain identity stages, implying that they had not experienced particular phases of identity development to completion. The results suggest certain features of identity development stages can be omitted and then experienced later in a teacher’s career. Teacher satisfaction with compensation, job security, professional prestige and the education system in general were additional factors that contributed uniquely to the identity development of teachers working in Lithuania.

Expressionist Narrative of War (Vasyl Stefanyk’s Novellas in the Western European Context)

This article shows how the influence of Western European expressionism on Ukrainian art contributed to the formation of its national version in the works of Vasyl Stefanyk. The research applied comparative, biographical methods and method of close reading. The outcome of this detailed analysis demonstrates that the common features of Stefanyk’s antimilitary novels and Western European Expressionists are similar and feature such themes as the crisis of cultural values, anti-military issues, condemnation of murder, states of existential anxiety, tragedy of human existence and eschatological feeling. Furthermore, Expressionists and Stefanyk focus on the psychophysical states of characters ‒ death, madness, injury, numbness, screaming, fear, panic, despair, agony, anxiety, prayer.

Individual Multilingualism of Students and Their Commitment to Learning German: A Pilot Study of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University

The importance of promoting individual multilingualism is repeatedly emphasised worldwide in didactic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies. The prior knowledge of the learners and the networking of languages is pointed out in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. For this reason, the principles and methods of multilingual didactics play an important role in foreign language teaching due to their positive effects. Therefore, the question is increasingly being addressed how individual differences and progress of the learners regarding their linguistic backgrounds can be taken into account in language teaching.This article examines the question of whether and how Lithuanian university students see their multilingual repertoire as a resource for learning German. For this purpose, a survey was carried out among the Philology students of Vilnius University who study German as an optional course. The aim of this pilot study was to find out whether the students' previous knowledge of other languages helps them to learn German, or whether they see the influences of their mother tongue and other foreign languages as an obstacle that affects them negatively. The data obtained from the questionnaire presents the students' attitudes towards multilingualism, their multilingual skills and language awareness, as well as their language-related experience in acquiring German as a foreign language. The respondents' answers were processed using the method of the qualitative content analysis with a deductive-inductive approach. The results of the survey show that the majority of the students encountered the methods of multilingual didactics and see the multilingual competence as an important advantage for learning other foreign languages. Despite the language interference, the benefits of language skills outweigh the learning process. The students give examples based on their experience of how they use other languages for learning German and show well-developed metalinguistic awareness (e.g. language comparisons) and metacognitive skills (e.g. learning strategies).It is planned to continue this study by interviewing students from other faculties of Vilnius University (Medicine, Law, etc.) comparing their multilingual skills and metalinguistic awareness with the Philology students.

Individual Multilingualism of Students and Their Commitment to Learning German: A Pilot Study of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University

The importance of promoting individual multilingualism is repeatedly emphasised worldwide in didactic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies. The prior knowledge of the learners and the networking of languages is pointed out in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. For this reason, the principles and methods of multilingual didactics play an important role in foreign language teaching due to their positive effects. Therefore, the question is increasingly being addressed how individual differences and progress of the learners regarding their linguistic backgrounds can be taken into account in language teaching.This article examines the question of whether and how Lithuanian university students see their multilingual repertoire as a resource for learning German. For this purpose, a survey was carried out among the Philology students of Vilnius University who study German as an optional course. The aim of this pilot study was to find out whether the students' previous knowledge of other languages helps them to learn German, or whether they see the influences of their mother tongue and other foreign languages as an obstacle that affects them negatively. The data obtained from the questionnaire presents the students' attitudes towards multilingualism, their multilingual skills and language awareness, as well as their language-related experience in acquiring German as a foreign language. The respondents' answers were processed using the method of the qualitative content analysis with a deductive-inductive approach. The results of the survey show that the majority of the students encountered the methods of multilingual didactics and see the multilingual competence as an important advantage for learning other foreign languages. Despite the language interference, the benefits of language skills outweigh the learning process. The students give examples based on their experience of how they use other languages for learning German and show well-developed metalinguistic awareness (e.g. language comparisons) and metacognitive skills (e.g. learning strategies).It is planned to continue this study by interviewing students from other faculties of Vilnius University (Medicine, Law, etc.) comparing their multilingual skills and metalinguistic awareness with the Philology students.

Tatars in the Worldview of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language

The year 2021 was declared the year of the Tatar language and culture in Lithuania. This fact has inspired the authors to take a closer look and examine lexicographic material related to this nation. The image of the Lithuanian Tatars in the eyes of local Lithuanians has been scrutinized by ethnologists, folklorists, historians, linguists. However, their studies in that regard have so far omitted the largest linguistic tract, the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language, which can be approached as some kind of a chronicle covering different material from our first writings dated 1547 until 2001. This article firstly aims to take a closer look at the image and relationship between those two ethnic groups, living in the close neighborhood for around 700 years, on the basis of available material recorded in the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language. Illustrations provided in the dictionary cover written texts of different scope and types, various dialects across the country, and a broad variety of historical periods.A semantic analysis of roughly 120 illustrative examples associated with the Tatar has revealed an image of how Lithuanians have looked at Tatars – basically the warriors and mostly enemies. Even in peaceful times with no major battles around the Tartars were looked upon as strangers. People different in appearance, clothing, using the language strange to the locals, practicing different traditions, and religious confession. Sometimes local girls, though not too willingly, would get married to Tartars, fearing life could get worse and family links with their relatives will be lost.It is worth mentioning that a considerable number of plants and two animals are etymologically related to Tartars.

Saussure, miraculeusement retrouvé / Saussure, miraculously rediscovered

Loïc DEPECKER, Saussure tel qu'en lui-même. D'après les manuscrits, Paris, Éditions Champion, 2020, 264 p.

The Narrative Form in Leonid Yuzefovich's Novel “Cranes and Dwarfs”

Исследование показало, что свободный косвенный дискурс использовался в романе Леонида Юзефовича «Журавли и карлики»для передачи точки зрения речи и повествования от лица всех трех главных героев романа (Жохова, Шубина и Анкудинова), доминировала при этом точка зрения Жохова. В статье обсуждаются обнаруженные нами в тексте романа «Журавли и карлики» виды конструирования свободного косвенного дискурса. А именно:несовпадение субъекта речи и субъекта сознания в указании пространственной или временной локализации персонажа; вплетение в голос субъекта речи голоса персонажа посредством указания на восприятие (физическое или интеллектуальное) ситуации, или объекта, или природных явлений персонажем; передача в рамках речевого акта повествователя мыслей и субъективного восприятия действительности персонажем; передача в рамках речевого акта повествователя внутреннего состояния и эмоциональных переживаний персонажа; соединение голосов повествователя и персонажа способом называния родственных связей и частей тела персонажа.В статье также приводится список речевых маркеров, свидетельствующих о совмещении точек зрения автора и персонажа в рамках одного речевого акта.

Syntactic Complexity of Learning Content in Italian for COVID-19 Frontline Responders: A Study on WHO’s Emergency Learning Platform

The goal of this paper is to offer a model to quantify the level of complexity of the linguistic content of a corpus in Italian extracted from OpenWHO, WHO’s health emergency learning platform (Rohloff et al. 2018; Zhao et al. 2019). The nature of the computational ranking costs of a typology of relativization strategies is investigated. To reach this goal, the results of the corpus are compared with other three syntactic annotated corpora from Italian belonging to different genres (news, social media, encyclopedic entries, legal). The results show that online learning contents in public health reduce complex structures in syntactic terms. The case study presented here provides a methodology to quantify syntactic and computational complexity in corpus studies.

Diary as a Means for a Student to Discover a Country

This paper aims to present a diary as a multifaceted means for incoming international students to become familiar with the host country (in this case, Lithuania), discover it through the ways of immersion and exploration, and reflect upon it on the diary pages. Every year the course of ‘Intercultural Communication’ taught at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, welcomes a large number of incoming students from different parts of the world. Further to the subject syllabus, these students are given a special research task: to delve into the context of the host country, focus on a number of socio-cultural aspects, compare and contrast them to the similar ones in their native countries and reflect upon them in their diaries. The paper provides an overview of the accumulated empirical evidence on the attitudinal discoveries of 84 students representing 21 countries. The employed Interpretive content analysis proved to be a flexible and helpful research method to reveal the informants' existing cultural capital (Bourdieu 1994), to follow the flow of their interpretations consequently leading to the shifts in their attitudes, and thus, contribute to the development of the students' intercultural communicative competence. This paper sheds light on the informants’ attitudes towards Lithuania as the destination country for their Erasmus+ exchange, as well as their impressions of the academic environment of Vilnius University.