FLT Journal

It is important to study language as a tool used by politicians to persuade the public with their assertion of power.  In fact language is ideological as speakers can speak in a way that supports their interests. What are the mechanisms of power inherent in language? Language is a powerful instrument employed by political leaders. They use  linguistic strategies including linguistic manipulation as an influential instrument of political rhetoric to persuade audiences for a specific political action. To argue in favour of their political ideologies and goals, political leaders deploy a broad range of manipulative and rhetorical devices at the phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic and textual levels in their political discourse.  In this paper examples will be taken from a number of world leaders, past and present, dead or alive, who have used such strategies to persuade their audience of the correctness of their stance in order to provide the reader with information about the most widely used political rhetoric devices.

This paper firstly discusses the role of information technology in teaching English language. The problem of learning languages is very important today. Georgia is integrating into the world community and the problem of learning English for the purpose of communication is especially urgent today. To know English is absolutely necessary for every educated person, for every good specialist. Learning an English language is not an easy thing. Towards the end of the late 1800s, a revolution in language teaching philosophy took place that is seen by many as the dawn of modern foreign language teaching. Different methods appeared. e.g. Grammar Translation Method, The direct method, Audio-Lingual Method and others.

Methodology in language teaching has been characterized in a variety of ways. Within methodology we have methods and approaches, in which methods are the fixed teaching systems with prescribed techniques and practices, and approaches are language teaching philosophies that can be interpreted and applied in a variety of different ways in the classroom. Where classrooms in 1950s were dominated by traditional methods of rote learning of grammar rules, the CLT approach, based on the principle of 'learning a language by using it', made an entry into the language classrooms in the 1980s. However, in the Indian scenario CLT is still not the preferred approach for language teaching (as indicated by the practitioners of language teaching).Though it is being followed to a certain extent as a modern teaching technique and is being implemented in the classrooms according to the learning needs and background of the learners, yet the findings indicate reluctance on the part of teachers in using it as a language teaching methodology. Consequently a study is required to find out and explore the challenges being entailed by CLT resulting in hesitant attitude of teachers in using it in the classroom. Simultaneously, the paper seeks to compare and contrast it with the traditional Teaching methods so that the strengths and limitations of the two could be brought forth and a blended methodology could be suggested for effective language learning.

Teachers of this digital era have plenty of scope for updating their knowledge of various subjects of their interests and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer learning opportunities to teachers across the globe. Teachers receive lot of inputs on varied topics, participate in webinars, share views with other participants and more importantly get motivated to play the role of an online tutor. Furthermore, the flexibility of these courses paves the way for collaborating with the online teaching community. With the experience of having attended a MOOC, the author highlights the way that the course has widened her knowledge of digital learning and discusses the relevance of the online courses to teacher development, in her article.

Non-verbal communication is the study of communication without words. Our actions are the means of communication, subject to interpretation by others. Even the failure to act is a way of communicating. Today when we interact with others, we continuously give and receive wordless signals. All of our nonverbal behaviors—the gestures we make, the way we sit, how fast or how loud we talk, how close we stand, how much eye contact we make—send strong messages. These messages don't stop when you stop speaking either. Even when you're silent, you're still communicating nonverbally. Facial expressions, body movements, eye contact, vocal qualities all help us to communicate without words. These silent messages communicate our feelings during any form of interpersonal communication that we have with our friends, teachers, seniors, subordinates or colleagues. The present paper deals with what is non-verbal communication, its various forms and types, how to interpret them, and also some tips of how to enhance these non-verbal communication.

Along with development of information technology and its important applications in educational, the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has developed significantly during the past decades and an increasing number of research studies have been conducted in this area. In an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of CALL in EFL/ESL learning, the current study surveys a number of EFL/ESL International learners in Malaysia. The findings of this research reveal that majority of learners find CALL system helpful in improving their language skills, specifically in grammar component.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an approach to discourse analysis that goes beyond the textual analysis of language, to include analysis of what is between the lines. More specifically CDA deals with the analysis of linguistic features in relation to the broader social, cultural, political, ideological contexts in which language is used. The present paper is an attempt to show how CDA can be useful to the area of EFL teaching /learning. EFL learners usually face the big task of learning not only new vocabulary, syntactic patterns and phonology, but also discourse and socio-cultural dimensions of the target language. Within CDA, there are many frameworks and analytic tools that can be exploited by EFL teachers, but in this paper focus will be on Fairclough’s (2001) framework. An analysis of news reports using that framework will be presented to illustrate how CDA can be conducted and implemented in the EFL classroom. The research aims to demonstrate that using a CDA of authentic texts such as news reports or any other discourse type will make learners more motivated and thus successful, and will improve the learning process in general.

This study is an analysis of the spelling errors made by EFL students of English language in one of the Jordanian universities, Tafila Technical University (TTU). It aims at identifying the types of errors students at TTU make in spelling when answering essay questions. It also seeks the spelling difficulties the students have when writing English. The study was conducted based on the information observed and gathered by the researcher within 2 years from students’ answer sheets. Because of the irregularities of spelling rules and the confusion or misspelling English pronunciation sometimes brings about, the present study is primarily conducted to suggest solutions to spelling mistakes and to find out why most students make such mistakes in spelling. In addition, the study reported that the students have the same problems and that they make identical errors in English spelling.

It is beneficial and indispensable to know a foreign or a second language for people living in any country. In one sense, language is the proof of their existence. When people from different parts of the world come together to communicate, the language turns to be a foreign language for the others, and so need to learn a foreign language comes out. But as it is known learning a foreign language does not mean that only knowing the rules of any language, it also requires the use of language for communicative purposes. The purpose of this study is to determine the communication problems and anxiety of some Turkish EFL learners. This study was conducted at Samsun 19 Mayıs University, ELT Department. The study was set out to determine their oral communication problems. Participants were the 4th grade students of English language teaching department. For data collection a questionnaire was given to the students (25 were female and 7 were male). During the preparation of the questionnaire, view of 8 instructors from ELT department was taken. Randomly selected 8 students wereinterviewed.DataanalysiswasdonebySPPSandCronbach'salpha.Resultswere discussed and some solutions and suggestions were given.

This paper aims to investigate the well-established notion of contrastive rhetoric which highlights a connection between culture and writing conventions across languages within the context of a factual text type, the least expected to reflect a cultural influence. The paper provides comparative evidence from culturally neutral informative newspaper reports written in English and Arabic. A textual analysis approach is used to determine the linguistic and rhetorical choices made by English and Arab writers on the basis of cultural preferences in English and Arabic writing styles. The analysis reveals that factual texts in English and Arabic display cross-cultural variations. The results provide a strong support for the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. There is an evidential effect of culture across different writing genres including factual text types. The paper discusses the pedagogical implications which these results have for the current practices of teaching L2 writing.

Today's educational demand no longer focuses on academic merit alone as one needs to have skills and competencies required in the current competitive world. This also leads to the need for different ways of assessing the learning process. In line with this, Malaysia has implemented the School-Based Assessment (SBA) since 17 December 2010.However, there has been a hue and cry over this assessment because of several challenges in implementing it. This article reports and discusses the findings of a small scale study on teachers' perceptions towards the SBA in an attempt to understand the uproar. Seventeen teachers from three established public schools in Seremban district were purposively chosen as participants. A semi-structured interview method was used to collect the data. Findings revealed that although the motives of the SBA are positively perceived by the teachers, its implementation in schools is still unfavourable because of the numerous challenges in implementing the SBA.

In this paper, I propose an innovative paradigm for teaching English phonetics to nonnative speakers of English. In teaching segmental sounds, subsegmental features, suprasegmental effects, and fine phonetic detail, the paradigm adopts the constructivist approach. It promotes experiential learning through guided and interactive cognitive, auditory, visual, and psychomotor tasks. Unifying these tasks is the theme of learning phonetics by doing phonetics. The paradigm requires students to do visual and auditory inspections of in-class live recordings, using the appropriate speech-analysis package. Students also monitor speech unfolds in real time via x-ray movies and interactive articulatory diagrams. Moreover, students watch themselves articulate speech sounds in slow motion. To better understand and learn about the contribution of fine phonetic detail to the pronunciation of words, students engage in constructing and analysing lists of inter-language homophones. The paradigm also raises students' awareness of interlanguage phonemic contrasts through the construction and analysis of lists of nativized loanwords from English into their L1 and vice versa. Finally, the paradigm requires students to make predictions about the likely English pronunciation of nonsense words.

This paper examines Athol Fugard’s creative exploitation of the means of drama in garnished protest against South Africa’s apartheid. The focus is on his three plays: “Sizwe Banzi is Dead," "The Island," and "Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act,” in the collection entitled Statements: Three Plays. The paper explores Fugard’s unique introspection into human emotions, his themes on the depersonalising system, and his furtive techniques arising from his social context of creative censor.

In ‘An Argument for Holism Part 1’ (Nunn, 2013), I focused on the meaning of holism within applied language studies considering in detail the relationship between focused atomistic studies and holistic views of epistemological diversity (Moser’s, 2002). In addition, I compared Moser’s view of holism with ecological views. While fully accepting the importance of context, I suggested that context-independence is also a legitimate focus. As such, my characterization of ‘holism’ is more closely associated with complexity theory (Pappamihiel and Walser, 2009 and Cvetek, 2008), emphasizing the need to take the unpredictable and unstable nature of complexity into account.
In part 2, I explore the implications of views of holistic diversity in relation to just a few important areas in our field: language and discourse use, motivation, assessment, task-based curriculum and materials planning. I provide evidence and specialist support for my view that all of these areas are essentially holistic and that recent scholarship in these areas seems to require us to situate focused atomistic studies within a broader framework.

Learning English in the context of English as second language (ESL) is unarguably complex. It involves various ways of human processing that very much concerns several factors such as learning styles as well as learning setting itself. In Malaysia for instance, understanding English has been considered as the second language and being taught for years in both primary and secondary schools, there is always a huge question mark pertaining to the proficiency of Malaysian ESL learners. Some studies have discovered that numbers of Malaysian ESL learners still demonstrate low proficiency in English besides struggling in learning such intended language due to some reasons. Hence, this research mainly aims to identify the effective language learning strategies being implied by some successful Malaysian ESL learners in mastering the four macro skills in English – listening, speaking, reading and writing. This research also intends to discover the individual purpose of learning English in Malaysian context.

The double-blind peer-reviewed international research journal for language and cultural education professionals promoting international scholarly exchange among researchers, academics, and professionals. The journal is published 3-times a year both in print and online. The online version is free for access and download (www.jolace.com).

Referencing is a fundamental and critical aspect of scholarship. It is a way in which members of the scholarly community acknowledge the contributions of others to knowledge creation and dissemination, and signal the extent of their use of such prior knowledge in relation to their own original input. Graduate students, as burgeoning members of the academe, need to understand the value of such textual practices and commit to them. While studies in this area have tended to focus on international students in Western universities, less attention has been paid to students in universities in West Africa. This study therefore seeks to investigate Ghanaian graduate students' background preparation in and knowledge of referencing styles in academic writing. Using a questionnaire-based approach, the paper explores the views of 125 graduate students of the University of Ghana. Even though most of the students declared they had had substantial levels of training in referencing styles, their responses to types of assigned writing tasks and use of source materials revealed gaps in their practical knowledge of referencing formats. The study considers the implications of the findings for plagiarism, and proposes strategies for strengthening students' preparation in citation protocols.

The present study aimed to explore the reading strategies use of Yemeni university learners and to find whether females and males significantly varied in their utilization of reading strategies. For the collection of data, 100 Yemen university students (female=70; male=30) completed the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002). The data collected were statistically processed by using SPSS. The results obtained showed that: (a) the majority of both male and female students are active strategy users; they use all the three types of reading strategies, though,  problem-solving strategies were more slightly used than global and support strategies, (b) no significant differences has been found between females and males’ use of reading strategies, and (c) the learners’ use of problem-solving and global strategies significantly (r=.280, p < .01 and r=.219, p < .05)  correlated with their marks in reading skills.

This study investigated the effects of the 'Student Teams-Achievement Divisions' (STAD) and 'Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition' (CIRC) cooperative learning models on reading achievement and vocabulary learning of Iranian learners of English. 132 female Language learners of EFL participated in the study at National Iran English Language (NIEL) institute in Takestan. The four experimental groups were taught in cooperative learning for one semester with methods of the 'Student Teams-Achievement Divisions' (STAD) and 'Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition' (CIRC), the control groups were taught in a non-cooperative method. Data collected through reading comprehension and vocabulary post-tests were analyzed using four one-way ANOVA procedures. The results indicated that the cooperative learning model CIRC had statistically significant effects on reading comprehension and vocabulary learning, particularly for elementary EFL learners.

This study examines the speech acts of apologizing among Kurdish-Persian bilinguals in Iran, based on discourse completion task data. In particular, it looks at the type of apology term used, in different situations. The findings with the highest amount of frequencies in using IFIDs and explanations showed that people of Ilam have a frequent tendency towards using these strategies in their acts of apology. However, they did not have much inclination towards showing concern for the hearer, but at the same time they did not incline to deny their responsibility towards the hearer. On the other hand, the results were different for women and men, and also for monolingual and bilingual people of Ilam. Monolinguals and men used fewer amounts of apology strategies in comparison to women and bilinguals. The only act of apology in which men provided the hearer with more apologetic expressions was the case of repairing. Men tended to compensate for the damage they caused more than women. In the cases of denial of responsibility and concern for the hearer, the means for each of the four groups were so similar that they could not be regarded as differences.

This paper reports on the role of contextual support and cognitive challenge in second language (L2) tasks. Studies have investigated task complexity by focusing on the cognitive demands of tasks, but little has explored the role of context in L2 learning tasks. The main aim of the study is to explore the effect of different contextual and cognitive support in tasks. Two communicative decision-making tasks were designed, based on Cummins' (1984) model of designing communicative tasks. Fourteen learners completed these tasks and their voices about views of the tasks were gathered in interviews. Transcribed interviews were analyzed thematically, and compared to the model. The data revealed various associations to context that link to prior knowledge, experience and interpersonal support; and cognitive demands that link to abstract concepts and higher-order thinking. The findings also show that learners regard tasks as easy when there is high-contextual support, and difficult when there is high-cognitive demand, which contributes to different L2 task performance. This study shows that Cummins' (1984) framework provides a substantial platform for task design as it considers learners' background knowledge and cognitive ability for L2 learning experience to take place comfortably.

The paper is concern with teaching literature in English. It is described as literary work in real life situation or imaginary situation expressed in the four genres: prose, poetry and drama. Since literature is language in action, teachers of English at the secondary school are expected to expose students to various literary components such as the theme, setting, plot, characters, dialogues and monologues. A well-coordinated integrative language teaching of literature in English at the secondary school should clearly bring out the vital roles of literature as a laboratory where students go to practice their ideas of English language. That is literature should be used to facilitate the learning of English language. Therefore, it is against this backdrop that this paper aims at discussing simplified teaching methodologies, strategies and techniques for effective and productive teaching and learning literature in particular and by extension English language generally in secondary schools.

This state of the art paper revisits foreign language teacher beliefs. The first part of the paper reviews some factors that have an impact on foreign/second language (L2) teachers' beliefs. The second part outlines some characteristics of teacher beliefs by providing examples from a range of research studies conducted in the field. In the final part, the paper attempts to illuminate the complex nature of L2 teacher beliefs and belief formation processes by addressing Moscovici's social representations theory. The author argues that Moscovici's social representations theory, and Abric's central kernel theory developed as a sub-theory of social representations theory offer the theoretical foundation to explain differing aspects of L2 teacher beliefs. The author claims that central kernels theory provides a clear distinction between peripheral and core beliefs. The author concludes by suggesting future research focusing on L2 teachers' peripheral and core beliefs.

Reflective teaching goes through an analytical process of self-observation and self-evaluation. Self-reflection can be one of the effective means of finding out one's strengths and drawbacks in respect of teachers' professional development. Teacher education has directly or indirectly been connected to the reflective teaching practice. Capturing the actual picture of language teaching directly or indirectly leads to look at what the teacher does in the classroom. A teacher can collect information and then bring necessary changes to teaching by reflecting upon his/her own teaching practices. But the fact is, the process of reflection should be systematic and carried out by some carefully designed steps. There are some important ways or methods of conducting the process of reflection like peer observation, recording lessons, student feedback. A teacher can invite a colleague to come into the class to collect information about the lesson and to have students' opinions and perceptions as well. The respective teacher may also record the lessons regularly to have the actual picture of the class. After collecting authentic information the teacher can Think, Talk, Read and Ask while going through some structured steps. Thus this paper will focus on a cyclical process of reflective teaching that once starts and keeps going by implementing changes. Reflections might go on continuously by posing different rhetoric questions like, What I am doing? Why I am doing? Is the teaching method effective? What are the problems? and What could be the solutions?. This is how the teacher's professional development is related to the evaluative cycle of reflective teaching. This paper, therefore, attempts to discuss the findings of a study that investigated the role that reflective teaching can play in effective English language teaching contexts and in the field of teachers' professional development. Most importantly this paper offers recommendations by suggesting a well-designed procedure for reflective teaching in ESL/EFL classroom.

Test anxiety involves a combination of physiological worry and fear about test performance, and generally interferes with normal learning. People experience extreme stress, anxiety, and discomfort during and/or before taking a test. The aim of this study is to unearth prospective English language teachers' test anxiety level and to search if there is a relationship between gender, age, grade and high school graduated and testing anxiety. A test anxiety scale, consisting of 20 items and 4 open-ended questions, was given to 267 prospective ELT teachers at 19 Mayıs University and the data were analyzed statistically. The results indicate that female students are more anxious than male partners. Secondly, fourth graders dread testing more. Third, there is no significant difference between the high school graduated and testing anxiety. The only difference seems to be within the groups of Anatolian High School and Anatolian Teacher Training High School graduates. Age and anxiety relationship is found to be significant. The results show that young adults seem to be more apprehensive. In open-ended question section, prospective teachers were asked to list anxiety provoking factors; state negative effects that tests can bring on them; mention ways to reduce or overcome test anxiety. Answers varied.

The main aim of the following article is to provide the analysis of the masculine and feminine words used in both spoken and written Chinese language. At first, the author will focus on describing the specificity of the Chinese characters from the perspective of their construction and some historical background which has a significant influence on their meaning. Following, a set of words introducing both types of gender will be thoughtfully examined, implementing a rule on how to differentiate the two types of gender and what kind of attributes the elements in question obtain in terms of Chinese written system. Moreover, the author will analyze the personal pronouns and occupation words in terms of gender distinction, which is problematic in terms of telling apart the masculine and feminine form of such words as opposed to English and Polish equivalents.

Teaching languages requires specific linguistic and methodological knowledge and experience. However, the teachers should not forget about introducing culture-oriented elements during the classes, especially as far as oriental languages are concerned. The aim of this contribution is to provide important pieces of information concerning Chinese language acquisition and learning process. I would also like to answer a question: how the knowledge and cultural awareness of the L2 influences the understanding of another language by foreign learners. At first a comparative outline of Polish and Chinese will be made. Next, the specificity of the Chinese language and difficulties in learning it will be explained. As a main research source the textbook 'Contemporary Chinese' will be used. In the second part, the methodology of teaching Chinese will be explained concerning introducing linguistic and culture-oriented items. Later, the ways of coping with difficulties in learning and teaching Chinese will be described followed by a set of tips on how to teach Polish students oriental languages such as Chinese. My conclusions were based on experience I have obtained during a few years of teaching including working at the Silesian University at the Institute of English among 1 st and 2 nd year students of Chinese program.

This paper takes a brief look at external and internal demotivating factors among EFL young learners at Pozantı Regional Primary Boarding School (YİBO). In the search of the reasons of demotivation, a questionnaire consisting of 5-point Likert Scale, openended questions, observations and interviews were administered. Following the evaluation of data tools, interviews were conducted with randomly chosen students, and a new lesson plan was designed and applied for 8 hours of English lesson independent from the state English book. Regretfully, this study is not exhaustive to provide solutions for demotivation due its limited application period. However, it might show that teachers could change the negative attitudes into positive ones even with little effort, though it does not occur miraculously.

On the one hand, English is a foreign language for Iranian learners, on the other hand, speaking in English is one of the main purposes of Iranian learners, parents, and private institutions. But there is a deliberative factor that hinders achieving this goal. This factor is termed foreign language learning anxiety. So, this article describes a research project concerning the link between collaborative learning and the level of anxiety in speaking among EFL learners in Kerman. The participants were two groups of intermediate English learners in one of the private institutions (N=50).The first group consisted of 25 learners in a teacher fronted class, and the second one 25 learners in a collaborative learning class. The foreign language classroom anxiety scale (FLCAS –Horwitz et al.’s 1986) which was translated into Persian was used to measure the level of anxiety after treatment. The results indicated that according to the answers to the questions, the level of anxiety for speaking was lower and consequently the frequency of class participation in order to speak was higher for the second group.

Although our society is dominated by images, the common practices in education ignore images and persist in an one-dimensional concept of literacy, due to an ideological (and subsequently naturalized) preference for print literacy. Literacy equates to the continuous and creative processing of a "text" and its goal is to produce something with meaning, taking into account the conventions of the context in which the literacy skills are activated. In the age of visual turn, when the very meaning of "text" has changed towards a broader and more inclusive definition, students are denied a balanced literacy repertoire and the possibility of learning to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from images. In this essay we challenge common practices and we assert that comics is a medium through which both print (linguistic-literary) and cultural literacy can be taught and even more creativity can be released. We are going to propose ways to integrate comics in the classroom in order to engage students in a creative process and enhance not only their cultural and critical literacy, but also their literary competence and linguistic performance.

The present paper investigated a number of grammatical errors committed by young learners around the age of six to thirteen and adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty five. They were at the same proficiency level (elementary level). Adults were studying the "Intro" book from the Interchange series and young learners, "family and friends 2". The grammatical points were taught deductively so that they could become more familiar with them and their errors could be removed. The classes were held three sessions per week, lasting six weeks. At first, Pre-test was administered and 40 students out of 60, whose scores were somewhat identical, were chosen. Their errors were categorized into morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic ones. Towards the end of the course, a Post-test was administered. The errors were classified into the same two groups. Afterwards, the errors were analyzed. The grammatical errors made by these two age groups could not be remedied during the whole term in the classroom. Errors of 20 young learners and 20 adults in four classes (each class consisting of 10 students) in the academic year of 2012 were examined. Findings showed that most of adults' errors were interlanguage errors, indicating the influence of the mother language, while most of young learners' errors were due to overgeneralization.

Although it is unquestionably important to be proficient in English, studies have shown that the English proficiency of many Malaysian young learners are at an average level. Keeping this into account, researchers found that a certain mixture of teaching strategies could allow teachers to adjust their teaching methods to suit different types of learners. However, there appear to be few studies on the impacts of different teaching strategies on the English proficiency of young Malaysian learners. Hence, this study aims to determine these impacts, with an emphasis on the perspectives of senior English teachers at a language centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The study involved both qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 10 surveys were collected back and 2 senior teachers were interviewed. The results showed that the elicitation strategy was the most commonly used teaching strategy. Be that as it may, the efficacy of every teaching strategy may depend on the level of English proficiency that each young learner possesses, the topics discussed in the class and the teacher's flexibility in adjusting his/her teaching style to the learning capabilities of the young learners.

Governments try to keep the citizens in accordance with approval of their decisions by utilizing persuasive language. This essay investigates the persuasive side of language in a speech delivered by Barack Obama on March 27 2009.It studies how Obama employs language to convince the congress and Americans to rectitude of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is done from an Aristotelian point of view, meaning that it focuses on how Obama utilizes Aristotle's three means of persuasion, ethos, pathos and logos. The analysis is basically performed through personal observations guided by previous studies within the frame of Aristotelian rhetoric. The results indicate that Obama tries to move the audience in his favour mostly by: 1) arousing the emotion of people by fear mongering, evoking anger, patriotism and using repetitions and metaphor 2) showing himself a credible person by appealing to authority and 3) bringing logical reasoning. In short, repetition has a great role in collaborating ethos, pathos and logos in his remarks. out those emotions such as anger, pity and fear, and their oppositions, powerfully influence our rational judgments. Due to this fact, much of our political discourse and much of advertising we experience is directed toward moving our emotions. Anger is a very powerful motivating force. Obama purposely puts the audience in a defensive frame of mind in order to persuade them in his favor. He knows that if they are shocked and angered at this moment the audience will be more likely to accept his new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Therefore, he initiates his speech with "The situation is increasingly perilous. It's been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed from power, yet war rages on, and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Attacks against our troops, our NATO allies, and the Afghan government have risen steadily. And most painfully, 2008 was the deadliest year of the war for American forces" and puts the audience in a angry and scared state of mind. He increases this defensive manner and stirs the emotions by recalling 11 September 5 times in different parts of his speeches the following quote : " So let me be clear: Al Qaeda and its allies --the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks --are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan. And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban --or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged --that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can". By recalling terrorist attacks in London, Bali, North Africa and the Middle East, in Islamabad and in Kabul, Obama arouses emotions of people around the world, stimulates anger and puts them in defensive manner. He stimulates feeling pity for Afghanistan people, by telling "For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -especially women and girls". Obama mentions women and girls' right 2 times and implicitly reminds the audience the miserable situation of them during Taliban. Moreover, Obama explains that the only obstacle for Pakistani people to end terror, access to basic services, the opportunity to live their dreams, and the security that can only come with the rule of law, comes from al Qaeda and their extremists' allies. By recalling 11 September again, and connecting it with al Qaeda's attacks in Pakistan and killing Pakistan soldiers, police and especially Benazir Bhutto, Obama mentions al Qaeda's terrorist actions and their consequences, Obama tries to stimulate anger toward al Qaeda and arousing sympathy among American and Pakistani people. Additionally, Obama appeals to pathos, to the audience's perceptions of acting as heroes and celebrates the American and coalition forces that have fought together in Afghanistan and their families' patriotism and self-sacrifice. He arouses their emotions and makes them feel pity, anger and grieve, when he says:" That is true, above all, for the coalition that has fought together in Afghanistan, side by side with Afghans. The sacrifices have been enormous. Nearly 700 Americans have lost their lives. Troops from over 20 countries have also paid the ultimate price. All Americans honor the service and cherish the friendship of those who have fought, and worked, and bled by our side. And all Americans are awed by the service of our own men and women in uniform, who've borne a burden as great as any other generation's. They and their families embody the example of selfless sacrifice. Emotionally, the highest point of the speech is his statements that "I remind everybody, the United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan. Nearly 3,000 of our people were killed on September 11, 2001, for doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. Al Qaeda and its allies have since killed thousands of people in many countries.

Language choice and use, which refers to the selection of language(s) for diverse purposes in diverse contexts with different individuals or groups, are common but rather vital sociolinguistic phenomena in a multilingual setting. This study integrates Fishman’s (1972) domain analysis to determine the dominant language choice of Tamil Christian youths in Malaysia based on their patterns of language choice and use in the domains of family, friendship, and religion; and to examine the underlying factors that govern their language choice patterns in the selected domains. The data were collected through a questionnaire administered to 60 Tamil Christian youths at a church in Kuala Lumpur; together with 4 face-to-face interviews. SPSS was used to get percentage values and frequencies through descriptive statistics of data from the questionnaire. The findings of the study indicate that the respondents chose and used English, Tamil, and Bahasa Malaysia in the selected domains. The English language was found to be used predominantly in all three domains as a result of the influence of these particular domains; the speakers’ verbal repertoires and those of their addressees; their attitude towards a language and its speakers; motivation; and also their sense of solidarity and social identity.

Keywords: Language Choice, Language Use, Tamil Christians, Youths, Domains, Dominant Language

Due to the recent paradigm shift in ELT, the focus of the attention of both instructors and researchers has also shifted to the learner and all the forces that drive them to function, including the classroom activities which learners use to grasp the new concepts. Similarly, the present research was formed to study one aspect of classroom activities; namely the type of thinking that activities promote - as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) - in Iranian EFL context. To get a general picture of the kind of thinking Iranian EFL teachers preferred their classroom activities to invoke, Bloom’s taxonomy questionnaire was mailed to 250 language instructors from twenty-five Universities. Furthermore, to cross validate the data and to examine the congruence between the teachers’ responses to the items on the questionnaire and their actual practice in real classrooms,  two cases of EFL reading comprehension classes were directly observed  for  fifteen sessions during the second semester of 2010. The results of the data analysis uncovered a discrepancy between teachers’ preferred options and their actual actions in their classrooms. Moreover, it was also discovered that factors such as gender, experience, and level of education had a direct influence on the results. The findings of this study can inform educational planners and language instructors in designing and exercising new activities because as the findings indicated classroom activities are good regulators to develop the right type of thinking.

Languages in the Philippines, though almost all belonging to the Austronesian language family, have unique ways on how sounds and sound patterns are realized. The number of phonemic sounds varies in each language. The Pangasinan language, according to Richard Benton (1971), has five significant vowel phonemes namely /a/, /ɛ/, /ǝ/, /i/ and /ᴐ/ or /ʊ/, and 13 consonant phonemes. The quality of these phonemes changes depending on the phonetic environment. This study used a scientific approach in describing the vowels of Pangasinan according to their acoustic properties and depending on the environments they are found. These environments include stressed and unstressed positions. A software program was utilized to analyze the individual characteristics of these vowels. In general, this study contributes to the production and development of educational materials in teaching the Pangasinan language to its native speakers, and even to interested second language learners.

Writing is a field of study which involves the ability to comprehend the meaning and the use of the rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalization correctly, and it requires the skills of planning and organisation, and structuring the elements of unity and coherence. However, it is a widely known fact that teaching all those above mentioned elements is much more difficult whilst students struggle to learn English or any other language as a second language. It is of course a great challenge for such students who cannot find any opportunity to use that second language in daily life and cannot gain a good command of English. At universities whose medium of education is English, students are to transform their ideas into carefully-planned compositions or essays in writing courses since the second language education does not solely mean to learn the rules of that language but to contextualise and put into practice all the theoretical data correctly and in a rational manner. Within this frame, the language instructors in the departments of English Language and Literature in Turkey, who put their efforts to teach all the above-mentiond tasks to the students, almost always find themselves inefficient and hopeless in that they have difficulties helping the students to avoid faulty and illogical sentence construction; disorganized and incomplete paragraphs. One of the methods to teach shy and reluctant students writing is to use such non-literary formats as guides to a TV or radio serial, newspaper articles, reports, and pictures, in particular, to motivate writing. These authentic means enable the students to develop their power of observation and encourage thinking and writing freely. The aim of this paper is to dwell on the fact that the use of such non-literary formats as pictures or drawings may provide the students with a more independent and an enjoyable atmosphere in writing which is an indispensable unit in second language acquisition, by referring to some sample writing courses held through authentic formats and methods in language teaching.

Tertiary ELT majoring students have various elective courses through which they intend to improve their knowledge about the target language, English. One of these courses offered to the learners is " Cultural Specific Expressions and Lexical Competence " which aims to provide foreign language learners with the most frequently used cultural elements in English. The written and oral tests administered to the learners in order to check the efficacy of the activities implemented during the four weeks of the semester revealed that learners were not able to grasp and produce the related terms appropriately. The problem was that teaching such sort of expressions using only the lecturing and translating techniques would not lead the learners to the required solution and motivation. Student and colleague interviews were made, and a questionnaire was carried out so as to find out the reasons for the problem. The results obtained from this research contributed to solving the problem. Cross-cultural research study and drama activities conducted by the learners in groups carried out during the following ten weeks of the semester. Finally, classroom learning has been promoted and learners have become more motivated to learn and to take part in teaching process.

In this study some issues related to assessment are under study such as the amount of the feedback the teachers provide for the learners, the preferred reading assessment to the teachers, the efficiency of each assessment, the provided feedback to close the gap between the students’ current and standard level, the amount of useful and valuable information in each assessment for the teachers, using informal reading inventories in diagnostic assessment. Furthermore, this study is to find the most effective techniques to the teachers in improving reading comprehension of the students in English courses of universities. 40 English teachers participated in this study. A questionnaire survey was carried out for the purpose of the research in which there were 12 questions and the subjects were supposed to choose items among a five-point scale. The data were gathered and analyzed. The results show that the subjects consider the amount of the useful and valuable information in formative assessment very little, while it is completely different for summative and diagnostic assessment. Furthermore it showed that the teachers believe in oral form of the test more than the written one and in oral reading fluency in informal reading inventories as the best predictor of reading achievement.

Abstract:

This article, written for the Polygraph Journal, is a condensed compilation of a germinal study that provided current successful methods for obtaining confessions during interrogations. The foundation of the study derived from active-duty police detectives that illustrated methods they used to gain confessions from suspects in criminal cases. The study also provided a literature review of past practices of renowned interrogation techniques that collaborated with oral interviews with police investigators from selective east coast and west coast law enforcement agencies.

The rationale behind this research is to explore the key teaching and assessment methods that I could use to motivate students in an English Senior classroom. I have assumed and believed through recent research and practical experiences that students drop out rate at the high school level increases every year. Along with other factors, one of the major causes discovered is a lack of motivation. When students are not feeling motivated they lose their interest which causes failure and dropouts. Engaging students in a senior English classroom is challenging too. Engaging students to learn and implementing successful teaching strategies and methods in order to motivate them is a big challenge for teachers in U.S and Canada. During one of my findings about High school student's motivation, I have learned that the lack of academic motivation can lead to frustration and exasperation which results in dropouts or failure. Student diversity, differentiated instructions, and student engagement are the linking partners of student motivation and teachers need to be familiar with all these terms in order to create an effective learning environment. The purpose of this research is the same. My focus is to explore useful teaching strategies and assessment methods which I could use to motivate all students in my classroom and to improve their literacy competence.

The curriculum reform in Hong Kong resulted in a change in the direction of academic English enhancement courses in the University of Hong Kong. The change involved the replacement of generic English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses by English-in-the-discipline (ED) courses, one of which is ‘Writing Psychology: Text and Context’. It was offered in the 2013-14 academic year in hopes of helping students master various writing genres of psychology. A genre analysis approach (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990) was adopted in course design with an aim of enhancing students’ awareness of the language forms of disciplinary-specific writing through exploring the linguistic and rhetorical features of various texts in psychology. After its first launch it was felt by course developers that the pedagogical benefits of the course could be maximized by a scrutiny of students’ competence in genre-based writing. This study therefore sets out to investigate the perceptions of psychology students’ major difficulties in writing, and to analyze their actual writing problems.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief literature review and some preliminary insights on phonological awareness and its assessments. This paper helps improve the understanding of researchers, particularly in the assessments of a child's phonological system, which is the key to interpreting the phonological awareness of a child. Understanding the development of phonological awareness is important in establishing a basis to detect disordered phonological systems in children. It is hoped that this simple literature review on phonological awareness can be expanded henceforth in other studies as it is the first and main contributor to the development of literacy in children which will shape the other factors such as proficiency, understanding and performance.

The present study has tried to investigate the vocabulary content of the General English textbook of Payame Noor University one of the state universities in Iran. This study has used a computer program called vocabprofile (VP) which was invented by . The lexicon of the book was compared against three different word lists including: The first 1,000 most frequent words in General English (GE), the second 1,000 most frequent words in GE and the Academic Word List (AWL). The results showed that most of the vocabulary in this textbook was among the first 1,000 most frequent words in General English and the frequency and repetition of words were not sufficient for comprehensive learning of the vocabulary presented. It was concluded that the type and amount of vocabulary presented was not appropriate for the level of the students.

One of the most important components of writing is spelling. Spelling is essentially a complex linguistic skill that requires the developing speller to reflect on the linguistic factors that contribute to the spelling a word (Treiman, 1998, Moats, 2000, Ehri, 2000). Recent research indicates that several linguistic knowledge sources provide the foundation for spelling abilities. These linguistic foundations include: knowledge of phonology, orthography and morphology (Bourassa & Treiman, 2001; Apel & Masterson, 2001). Since each of these areas contributes to spelling success, the present study aims to investigate the nature of Persian learners' spelling errors in learning EFL to identify their linguistic deficits in phonology, orthography and morphology that are interfering with Persian learners’ ability to spell EFL. Upon the analysis of spelling errors of Persian English language learners in the current study it can be concluded that students with poor phonological, orthographic, and morphological knowledge have problems with substitution of consonant, consonant cluster, vowel digraphs, double consonants, silent vowels, silent consonants, homophone and spelling rules.

Learner concordancing or direct corpus use by learners has been applauded as one of the promising areas which can revolutionize L2 writing and language pedagogy as a whole Hyland, 2003). Researchers have argued that it provides authentic contexts in which linguistic items are used, promotes data-driven learning (Johns, 1988), and serves as a reference tool that language learners can use to solve language problems. However, these potential benefits have been more talked about than investigated with empirical studies, and only until recently, researchers have started conducting studies in this area. Focusing on L2 writing, this presentation will show how this potential of concordancing has been realized in a study in a university in Saudi Arabia where the presenter introduced concordancing along with other freely available tools such as online dictionaries to his students to improve their L2 writing. The presenter will show the participants how he trained his students on corpus and dictionary search techniques. Then, he will lead the discussion towards the findings of the study shedding light on the new search strategies that the students came up with to solve their language problems, correct their errors and produce better texts. This session is intended for teachers and researchers who want to learn about the applications of corpora and online dictionaries in EFL/ESL writing classrooms. It is also intended for researchers who are interested in learning more about new tools for collecting digital data from participants working on computers.

This pilot study aimed at examining how vocabulary knowledge of the language of the text may affect one’s reading comprehension when reading in that language. In order to find out how vocabulary knowledge may affect reading comprehension, a foreign language learner’s reading comprehension performances when reading in a foreign language and in his native language were compared. The findings show that vocabulary knowledge plays a role in reading comprehension performance. Within the context of this study, the participant was lacking in vocabulary knowledge of the target foreign language which deficiency adversely affected his reading comprehension ability in the foreign language. The findings of the study were discussed in relation to the importance of enhancing foreign language vocabulary knowledge for better reading comprehension performance when reading in a foreign language.

The present study aimed at investigating the presumed effects of implementation of what is usually called "The Correction-for-Guessing Formula", on the assessment of the EFL student proficiency in the grammar of English, which ultimately, we believed, would impact the validity of any test score. The technique is allegedly used for the purpose of decreasing the effects of chance answers to items on the true score of testees on multiple-choice tests. The questions of all of the tests which were held in the process of this research were adopted from the advanced part of the book Graded Exercises of English . The research was carried out in two phases. In the first phase a community of 44 male high school students sat a pretest and finally 30 of them who had gained the minimum of 70% of the test score were selected for the next phase. The second phase consisted of three stages: At the stage 1, testees took a test with only an answer sheet, (without a question sheet) and they tried the alternatives merely using random guess. At each one of the stages 2 and 3, they were given both answer and question sheets, the difference being that at the stage 1 they were discouraged about choosing any alternatives when not being quite sure about the right choice, however on the stage 2 they were encouraged to do so and were reassured that no penalty score would be given to their wrong choices. After accomplishments of each one of the stages, the scores were calculated: for the stages 1 and 2, penalty scores with the scale of -1/3 for each wrong choice were calculated. However, for the stage 3 no penalty scores were considered. The final outcome of the corrections and calculations indicated that the testees gained considerably higher scores when they were free to utilize their guesswork power, which meant they were allowed to make best use of their relative knowledge i.e. the knowledge as to what choice is NOT correct, in addition to what they knew the right choice was.

The analysis of the EFL P.Æ.C.E. Corpus (Landolfi 2012a) shows that university students are fully aware of the multifaceted value of English in our contemporary world and feel unsatisfied when considering their failure in language learning particularly in the presence of a significant number of years of exposure to formalized language learning prior to university enrollment. Despite their past negative experiences, however, students’ desire to own the target language still pushes them to enroll in English courses and nurtures their expectations for future success. Though desires can be considered strong motivating factors, which supposedly lead to academic achievements, students’ expectations may hide problems particularly when factors that lead to failure are out of focus and expectations are too high to be fulfilled in one academic course.
The present article intends to address the above issues with the scope to show that students’ voiced/implied Self-representations illustrate despair in admitting incompetency in English but also lack of responsibility in the learning process or inappropriate blame transfer. Both issues poorly match their voiced desire to reach out toward a futuristic, language competent Self. The distance between the two Self-representations constitutes an intersection where language teachers may play a significant role guiding students toward a successful reframing of their expectations so as to overcome the issue and reduce/avoid future blocks in language learning, fear-entanglements, and/or detachment from the academic path.