Current approaches and methods in teaching business English. Potential perspectives

The aim of this paper is to analyse different approaches to business English teaching in order to find solutions to an existing situation: a course in specialised language for second year students at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration which has to be finalised with the evaluation of the students’ linguistic competence according to CEFR. The question arising is how to combine different language teaching approaches such as CLT or TBLT and CLIL with CBI and CEFR? How to correlate the assessment of content with the assessment of linguistic competence? How to correlate linguistic levels with grades? We are trying to provide a few answers to these questions through a comprehensive literature review and personal assumptions based on teaching experience.

Marina Orsini-Jones and Fiona Lee. Intercultural Communicative Competence for Global Citizenship. Identifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in telecollaboration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. i-xix, 1-135. ISBN 978-1-137-58102-0 ISBN 978-1-137-58103-7 (eBook)

The book titled Intercultural Communicative Competence for Global Citizenship. Identifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in telecollaboration brings novel approaches to Computer Mediated Communication, based on practical outcomes from a small-scale online international learning (OIL) project, i.e., CoCo, carried out during the academic year 2015–2016, between UK and France. It provides useful insights into the contribution of OIL projects to the internationalisation of the Higher Education (HE) curriculum as well as to the development of global citizenship competences, with a focus on intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the digital era. The authors structured the book into seven chapters, concentrating on essential pragmatics concepts revisited within the cyberspace and describing the project methodology and findings. Chapter 1, Introduction provides an overview of the topics presented in the volume, with clear definitions and eloquent examples, i.e., Online International Learning (OIL), Intercultural communicative competence (ICC), Telecollaboration, Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC), Threshold concept (TC), Global citizenship, and Cyberpragmatics. Chapter 2, Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) Revisited brings forth an account of the historical evolution of the concepts of Communicative Competence (CC) and Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), while at the same time examining the impact of the World Wide Web, coupled with the extensive use of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) on the re-conceptualisation of ICC and its reassessed characteristics. It emphasises the value of integrating telecollaboration into the Higher Education curriculum with a view to creating global citizenship competences for the digital age in Higher Education. Chapter 3, Cyberpragmatics advances a comprehensive definition of cyberpragmatics seen as a professional as well as an academic genre-specific online ‘savoir-être’. It explores the theoretical foundations of the term, coined by Yus (2011), and brings forth examples of cyberpragmatic findings from similar research. Moreover, it gives an overview of the politeness theory (Brown, & Levinson 1987) and politeness principle (Leech 1983, 2014). The authors explain the blurring line between oral and written language that may occur in the case of online communication and how this affects students. The chapter also provides a clear-cut definition of the threshold concept (TC) pedagogy, upholding that Intercultural Cyberpragmatic Communicative Competence (ICCC) may be subsumed to TC. The authors advocate curricular scaffolding in HE in order to assist students with reflecting on and practising ICCC. Last but not least, the chapter presents the research question that this study aims to address. Chapter 4, The ‘CoCo’ Telecollaborative Project: Internationalisation at Home to Foster Global Citizenship Competences presents the CoCo (Coventry Colmar) telecollaborative course, along with the tasks devised and/or adopted for it, e.g., the Cultura Quizzes. It demonstrates the successful integration of CoCo into the curriculum and assessment of the two participating institutions and how students managed to apply critical digital literacies for global citizenship through active learning. The authors make an overview of research instruments and materials, including the frameworks of analysis and their application. Useful figures and tables illustrating the telecollaborative project structure, the politeness frameworks and strategies applied are also included. The fifth chapter, ‘CoCo’ Research Questions and Answers, delves further into the research questions of this study, at the same time offering a rationale for the analysis decisions taken as part of the asynchronous discussion forums with reference to tasks devised for the CoCo telecollaborative project. It tackles the impact of linguistic politeness theory frameworks on how project participants manage to negotiate politeness online. As for the asynchronous interactions in the CoCo forum, politeness strategies and facework employed by the CoCo interactants are interpreted from a cyberpragmatic standpoint through the application of Brown and Levinson’s and Leech’s politeness frameworks of analysis. Chapter 6, Emerging Online Politeness Patterns, brings forth a thorough account of the results obtained from the analysis of interactants’ exchanges carried out on the asynchronous discussion forums, with respect to the tasks devised for the telecollaborative CoCo project. In particular, three online exchanges were used in order to highlight patterns of linguistic behaviour, i.e., type and frequency of politeness strategies or maxims. The final chapter, Conclusion, presents the summary of findings, limitations and further research suggestions as well as pedagogical implications for teachers and students alike. The politeness frameworks of analysis provided by Brown and Levinson (1978) and Leech (1983), applied to cybercommunication are outlined and explained. The results revealed particular problematical areas in the field of cyberpragmatics, underpinning the challenges that students may face in telecollaboration, leading to the conclusion that detailed and structured task scaffolding is necessary in such collaborative activities. All in all, the book is an extremely useful tool for all stakeholders in the tertiary education landscape. It is a must read for language teachers, teacher trainers, trainees and educators from all educational systems across the globe.

Explicitation, simplification and neutralisation in the translation of reference

Recurrent features of translation, sometimes labelled as ‘translation universals’, have been intensively investigated within Descriptive Corpus-based Translation Studies. Numerous language pairs have been set under researchers’ lens with a view to observing languages from a contrastive viewpoint, but also individually, in their translational manifestations. This has enabled the identification of characteristic features of the translational facets of languages, which have generated more and more nuanced scholarly theories. This paper examines the occurrence of some of the most frequent features of translation, namely: explicitation, simplification and neutralisation in the translation of reference as a cohesive device. Methodologically speaking, the investigation combines the theoretical and applied areas of Translation Studies, with an interdisciplinary dimension provided by the fusion of methodological input borrowed from Descriptive Translation Studies, Discourse Analysis and Contrastive Studies. The theoretical component of the research refers to issues of contrastiveness between English and Romanian viewed from a translational angle, in terms of equivalence and the occurrence of the three features of translation. The applied area of Translation Studies comprises the empirical approach to the translation of reference, while addressing not only the researchers’ community, but also the practitioners in translation and the translator training environment. The research applies both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the data selected from John Fowles’ novel Mantissa (1982) and its translation into Romanian by Angela Jianu (Fowles 1995). The findings provide insights into the nature and functions of referring expressions as formal links, but also as stylistic devices, and shed light into issues related to contrastiveness of reference between English and Romanian, to aspects of equivalence and translatability, as well as to the occurrence of translation universals.

The status of but in documentaries and their Romanian subtitles

The aim of this article is to describe the status of but functioning as a connector of contrast in documentaries and their subtitles, with English as the source language and Romanian as the target language. But is a complex word, serving as a connectivity evince, comprehension facilitator and argumentative indicator, acquiring therefore a host of roles, both within and beyond the sentence. As theoretical support, I will employ the idea put forward by Fraser (2009) that but conveys one core meaning, that of contrast and that pragmatically it has a wide range of interpretations which are to be inferred from the context, but I will also draw on the Relevance Theoretic approach to discourse connectives elaborated by Diane Blakemore (1987, 2002, 2004) who referred to these functional items as encoding procedures rather than concepts, their meaning being interpreted based on what they indicate, not on what they describe. As for its role in argumentation, but will be analysed within the pragma-dialectical framework. Using my own research, but also that carried out by Halliday and Hasan (1976), Quirk et al. (1985), Biber et al. (1999) and Fraser (1999, 2009), I have made a list of connectors of contrast and the conclusion I have reached so far is that there are roughly 66 such items in English. However, in documentaries, there is a tendency to use only a few of them, approximately 15 (but, yet, still, however, though, although, even though, despite, rather, in reality, better, while, whereas). But is at the top of the list, having by far the largest number of occurrences and therefore being of outmost importance in constructing the idea of contrast. However, there is a certain inconsistency with respect to the rendition but in Romanian. When it functions at the level of the sentence, it is very rarely omitted as it displays a strong syntactic dependence. Conversely, when it functions at the discourse level, its translation does not always have the same degree of salience, in certain cases the subtitler resorting to its omission as part of his/her strategy of text condensation. I will identify and analyse the types of situations in which but is omitted in Romanian and those in which it is not, focusing on its role according to the various patterns typical of documentaries that include this connector.

New narration in practicing western integrative medicine: Linguistic, ecolinguistic, and biosemiotic aspects

Western science and academia have entered the new millennium with the growing realisation that their theoretical and utilitarian limits have been reached. A particular threshold is experienced across traditional academic disciplines, which is visible in the fact that, on the one hand, the intensity of social, environmental, psychological, health-related and communicational problems people deal with in their everyday lives is increasing; on the other hand, theoretical models and intervention programs that scholarly work provides do not meet the growing necessity. Our paper presents a research project whose starting-point aims are to explore the doctor-patient communication dyad, its functions in the healing process, and to propose a theoretical as well as applicative way forward. In the plans for our research, we aim to study the integrative medical approach and the ways in which language and communication processes allow healing to happen and optimal health to be preserved.

Resultative constructions in cooking recipes in English and elsewhere: Similarities and differences across languages and cultures

The present article deals with selected property resultative constructions. They are first compared in a variety of languages in general and then in the specialised genre of cooking recipes. Unlike in English, resultatives realised as adjective phrases are either not available or very rare in some languages studied in this article (Croatian, Russian, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian), where they are most frequently replaced by prepositional phrases or some clausal structures. However, it turns out on closer inspection that adjective phrases are not only used infrequently in the specialised genre of cooking recipes in those languages that do not favour this type of resultative phrases in general, but also in English, which is surprising. We claim that the unexpected asymmetry in the formal realisation of selected property resultatives (i.e., the absence of AP resultatives in cooking recipes in English) can be motivated if we consider this phenomenon against the background of the embodiment of human language in the broadest sense of the concept.

La francophonie en contexte FLE : Littérature et éducation interculturelle

Despite institutional recommendations, particularly those of the Council of Europe, advocating the development of plurilingual and pluricultural skills in language teaching, the contemporary context is characterised by the increasing development of identity-related tensions and by the enclosure in representations of languages and cultures. In this context, the learning of FFL (French as a Foreign Language) by the French-speaking world is a means of valuing cultural and linguistic variation and thus challenging a purely French vision of French, in order to overcome the stereotypes transmitted both by teaching materials and by teachers and reproduced by learners. It is therefore a question of restoring to the concepts of otherness and intercultural education their full meaning, which is today diluted, even betrayed, by a global approach that reduces the complexity of the encounter with the other. In this context, French-language literature appears to be a privileged tool for intercultural mediation because it presents an experience of linguistic and cultural plurality and allows the learner to live this experience himself, provided that the teacher implements a genuine didactic approach to involvement. Three examples are presented, from level A2 to C2, from works by contemporary French-speaking authors - including migrant literature. We attempt to show how a didactic approach to French-language literature at the service of intercultural education can mobilise the subjectivity of the learner and enable him/her to meet the subjectivity of the author on the one hand, and that of other learners on the other. The FFL class thus becomes the place where a community of readers develops, with universal and singular paths, and where intersubjectivity is experimented. The proposed examples show how the literary approach can reveal subjectivity, linguistic and cultural plurality, and also present universal and shared figures and principles. In this way, it fights against the enclosure and essentialisation of identity, and closes the gap between us and others. It enables the implementation of a dialogue between individuals and cultures, but also within each individual, who thus discovers that he or she is plural.

A semantic approach to ‘Friends’ TV series

The aim of this article is to revisit Leech’s meaning typology as applied to the widely popular TV series ‘Friends’. The seven types of meaning postulated by Geoffrey Leech (1981): conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflected, collocative and thematic will be exemplified with dialogues from the sitcom. The analysis will be made mainly from a semantic perspective, and less focus will be attached to the pragmatic side of conversations under scrutiny, as Leech himself considers that meaning is impartial between ‘speaker’s meaning’ and ‘hearer’s meaning’. The analysed corpus consisted of approximately 880,000 words, resulting from the script of all 232 episodes, through 10 seasons. In particular, the social and affective meaning are the one most closely related to pragmatic speech acts. The dialogues, as was stated by other researchers (Qualio 2009), are less prone to deploying strategic vagueness, being more context-based than concentrating on the narration of imaginary or past events, with actually a minimal plot.

Raising students’ awareness of the importance of terminology in translation. A case study

The paper draws on the practical applications of terminological research and it relies on an experiment conducted by the author at 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia. The experiment involved students enrolled in the Translation and Interpreting undergraduate programme and with a view to preparing future translation professionals to carry out terminological research. The participants were assigned the task of compiling corpora and their choices were sundry: legal, business, technical, medical. Based on their findings, they had to elaborate terminological entries i.e., compile glossaries of specialised terms. The experiment combines both terminological and terminographical work, during it students had to extract terminology and to elaborate specialised glossaries. The interdisciplinary character of the experiment lies in the fact that it brings together the methods of terminology and the tools of corpus linguistics.

Exploring BA students’ intercultural awareness and their expectations of translation courses

The aim of the research in this paper is to investigate how the third- and fourth-year BA students of English as a foreign language perceive what they should be provided with in new translation courses that Pale Faculty of Philosophy (Department of English) is introducing, and to explore their perception about the difficulties in the process of gaining the translational competence. The premise is that the students are not sufficiently aware of the translation as a part of intercultural communication, and the cross-cultural elements that it should be focusing on. The survey also relates to on the teaching methods and styles most commonly used in translation courses, the results they are providing, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. The results of the research may serve as a reliable basis for enhancement of the teaching process and the translation competence acquisition process, first and foremost through methodological eclecticism, then raising the awareness of intercultural components in translation and encouraging the communicative approach to teaching, through a positive classroom atmosphere creation. In the end, several points are made on how to raise the awareness of the students in the process of intercultural competence development.