The Miraculous Victory War and Ideology in The Life of Henry The Fifth

In William Shakespeare’s play The Life of Henry The Fifth, King Henry V is described as an excellent speaker whose speech becomes the key element of the Britain’s miraculous victory in the Battle of Agincourt, and he attributes the victory to God. It is then worth to explore the reasons why Shakespeare highlights the power of the king’s speech and why the king hands the victory to God. This essay argues that Shakespeare’s emphasis on the power of Henry V’s speech in the Battle of Agincourt exaggerates Britain’s power and stirs the British’s sense of glory, and Henry V’s handing over the victory to God makes his colonial war seemingly rationalized, which strengthens the colonial dream and unites the Britons in the age of Elizabeth I.

The Bilingual Competence of Local Council Staffers in the Centre and Littoral Regions of Cameroon

This work sets out to appraise the state of individual bilingualism in francophone local councils in Cameroon. The work checks the use of English by francophone local council workers and of French by their anglophone mates with the focus on the four communicative language skills, i.e., speaking, reading, writing and listening. The ethnographic approach to data collection was adopted, and self-rating through a questionnaire was the major tool used. The eight-item questionnaire was administered to 192 local council staffers. They were 177 (91.14% of 192) francophone workers selected out of a pool of over 500 workers in six local councils situated in two big francophone towns i.e., Douala and Yaounde on the one hand, and 15 (8.85% of 192) out of a total of 16 anglophone workers in these same localities. The analysis of the data collected revealed that very low percentages of francophone workers could perform the following tasks using English: discuss office issues with their bosses (10.16% of 177 subjects), read out a speech (8.47%), write a letter to their collaborators (4.51%), and listen to someone with understanding (20.33%). Conversely, a high proportion of anglophone workers were able to perform these same tasks using French i.e., discuss office issues with their bosses (73.33% of 15 subjects), read out a speech (20%), write a letter to a collaborator (33.33%), and listen to someone with understanding (80%). In short, 63.28% of 177 francophone workers reported having a low performance in receptive skills in English as opposed to 20% of 15 anglophone workers who said the same for French; similarly, 7.34% of 177 francophones claimed to have a good command of productive skills in English as opposed to 53.33% of 15 anglophones who claimed to have a command of French. The implications for the study are that official French-English bilingualism in Cameroon is a mere political wish which is not a reality on the field.

On the Relationship between Iranian EFL students’

The study aimed at investigating the relationship between writing strategies, and writing ability of Iranian EFL students. The participants were 120 students learning English in the Iranian EFL context. Data were gathered by means of a writing strategies questionnaire and an IELTS writing task. The results of Pearson correlation test revealed that there was a statistically significant relationship between the variables. The results have some implications for teaching writing in the EFL context.

Teaching Hong Kong English before Teaching Academic English: The Gateway to Effective Learning of College Writing

Owing to the negative view of Hong Kong English (HKE) in popular discourse, few English lecturers in Hong Kong universities directly acknowledge or discuss the variety in a non-linguistic course. This paper illustrates an action research study of how HKE may play a role in an academic writing course of a sub-degree program in Hong Kong. Focusing on 8 representatives from an academic writing course with 100 students, it employed the qualitative experiment method to examine whether students who had possessed basic linguistic knowledge of HKE from an additional tutorial would perceive HKE and academic writing differently from those who had not. Student representatives from each group were invited to a focus group to explore ideas about the two subjects discussed in class. Their conversations suggested that prior knowledge of the syntactic features of HKE might raise students’ awareness of the grammatical differences between the variety and the standard. The analysis also suggested that introducing the linguistic view of HKE to students might render them optimistic about their variety, helping them identify the situations where the variety would be tolerant of and settings where Standard English would be expected. The study suggested that such an intervention might facilitate students’ learning of Standard English for academic purposes and practices of English in actual professional communication. Upon the improvement or advancement, they will position themselves more powerfully in the dichotomy between the standard and non-standard. More formal research on a similar or relevant topic is required to validate the impact of understanding HKE on learning academic writing.

Cartoons that Make A Difference: A Linguistic Analysis of Peppa Pig

The present paper examines the vocabulary contained in the British animated programme Peppa Pig and investigates whether the vocabulary included is frequent but also appropriate for beginner learners of English. It also examines if there is any formulaic language in it. Comparison with the BNC wordlist and with the CYLET and EVP wordlists for beginners suggests that one fifth of the English vocabulary contained in the show is frequent and that a small amount of it overlaps with the proposed vocabulary lists of CYLET and EVP for A1 level. Therefore, the majority of the vocabulary contained in the show is mainly infrequent but still appropriate while the in-depth analysis of selective episodes showed amplitude of formulaic language in the show and plenty repetition of it.

Request Realisations in Cameroon Pidgin English

Pragmatic investigations into Cameroon Pidgin English are rare and works on requests are non-existent. This study sets out to outline the rules that underlie requests in this language and the lexical and structural features that realise them. The informants were 30 fluent Pidgin English speakers who were found communicating in Pidgin in public settings like bars and who were willing to join in a writing exercise. The instrument used was a collection of ten request fragments that had occurred in natural Pidgin conversation. These informants were asked to compose a possible conversation between two familiar equals in which one of these fragments like “Put the potatoes in the bucket” could fit squarely. The frame adopted for data analysis was Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s 1984 research on requests and apologies, whose aim was to specify the particular pragmatic rules of use for a number of languages including English and German. The analysis revealed that the constituents of a request utterance were the same as previous researchers had identified. Besides the most frequent request strategy type used was “reference to preparatory conditions” (31.57% of 38 utterances) followed by “hedged performatives” (26.31%).

On the Inconspicuousness of Indigenous African Languages: The Case of IsiZulu Linguistic Integration in KwaZulu-Natal’s Basic Education Sector

This paper investigates the challenges associated with the inconspicuousness of indigenous African languages in the South African education system, as established during empirical research conducted by the author for his PhD thesis. According to the findings of the research, integrating indigenous African languages in the basic education sector is a key strategic shift that should be considered for it could fast-track efforts to elevate and promote indigenous African languages as media of educational instruction. These languages have been discriminated against for decades, since the era of colonisation and Apartheid South Africa. Despite attempts by the democratic government, through transformative legislative frameworks, African languages are inconspicuous within the education sector. Institutions of learning have developed multilingual language policies yet their implementation remains a problem. Based on the critical review of the literature on indigenous African languages, and with a focus on information and communication technology (ICT), the paper investigates policy opportunities and challenges. The paper concludes by assessing the low profile of indigenous languages in education, and its likely impact on the high failure rate in South African schools.

Development of EFL Students’ Writing in Secondary Education

The aim of this paper is to explore and measure language learners’ performance in L2 writing production using the complexity, accuracy, and fluency constructs. A total of 123 secondary education students took part in the study. Results are manifold. In the first place, they show that the measures of fluency, accuracy, grammatical and lexical complexity progress in a significant way: fourth grade students outperform first graders in the aforementioned measures. Secondly, fewer correlations between the writing measures used and the general quality of the compositions are found among the older students than among the younger ones, indicating that the correlations change depending on learners’ age. Thirdly, 1st year students exhibit a higher ratio of errors, both in general and also by error category, although only two types decrease significantly in 4th year students: syntactic and spelling errors. Lastly, we find that errors tend to develop in a non-linear way.

Manipulating De/Legitimation in Translation of Political Discourse

This study seeks to gain an insight into political speech subtitle, focusing on de/legitimation as a macro-linguistic discursive strategy reflecting micro-linguistic discursive strategies so as to exemplify as to how such a discursive representation could be mediated through translation as a socio-communicative action and translation studies as a growing interdisciplinary field of inquiry. To this end, a twofold theoretical framework at both macro-linguistic and micro-linguistic levels is employed – consisting of a quadruple categorization of legitimation developed by Leeuwen (2008) on political discourse (PD) and Fairclough’s (2003) critical discourse analysis (CDA) model on linguistic modality – to analyze one of the political speeches delivered by the Iranian former president Mahmood Ahmadinejad and subtitled into English by MEMRITV (Middle East Media Research Institute TV). The results, confirming political discourse and its translation as a means of de/legitimation, indicate that although there are no overt manipulations regarding the discourse of de/legitimation in the target text (TT), the manipulation of micro-linguistic device of modality constitutes a degree of covert manipulation of de-legitimizing discourse, altering the author's (the source text enunciator’s) commitment to truth. It is concluded that viewing translation of political discourse as a means of de/legitimization in the context of micro-linguistic aspects such as modality could probably open a fruitful avenue to discourse studies in general and translation studies in particular.