With English turning out to be a needed international tool for communication, debate after debate has risen on what methodology best teaches the language. This review article covers a range of ELT methodologies and their evolution, from traditional approaches contrasted with modern methods to strengths, limitations, and the place of technology within them. Traditional approaches to teaching, like grammar-translation, audio-lingual, and direct instruction, focus on the precept of structured learning; they focus on grammar rules and vocabulary. These methods, however, very often result in the negligence of communicative competence and also fail to engage learners actively, which in turn limits their real-life applicability. In contrast, contemporary methods such as CLT, TBL and TELL focus on interaction, fluency and learner autonomy. These methods, while promoting practical use of the language and integrating technology to enhance learning, also have tools for personalized and adaptive learning. However, the challenges posed by these methods, such as the digital divide and resistance to change among educators, are a significant barrier. Also very important is the need for interaction between traditional and modern, leading to a balanced framework by context sensitivity, which tries to maximize both linguistic and communicative proficiency. These recommendations then conclude the paper with a review of ideas on how best to synthesize innovative methods with old practices, emphasizing continuous professional development, investment in technology, and research into the longitudinal effects of hybrid teaching. With these factors in mind, educators will be able to accommodate the ever-changing nature of ELT and make sure learning is effective for students of diverse backgrounds.
Mohammad Usama, Sohaib Alam, Shashikanta Tarai
et al.
The study aims to analyze 12th-grade students’ writing errors related to inflectional morphemes. In addition, the research measures efficacy of the Rotation Model (RM) and the Grammar Translation Method (GTM) in minimizing writing errors among learners of English. Comparative studies are rare to find the effectiveness of two teaching models in the context of error analysis. Eighty-two samples were taken into consideration for randomize sampling. The present research is divided into two groups; the experimental group, consisting of 41 participants, provided with instruction via RM, and the control group, also comprising 41 individuals, being taught through GTM. Pre and post-test treatment data were collected and analyzed with the help of SPSS 22. The results revealed common errors with inflectional morphemes among both groups. Additionally, the mean values for each type of error were significantly minimized due to the post-instruction of RM compared to the GTM. The study’s findings largely devoted to pedagogical improvement among ESL learners’ writing. The findings are reviewed concerning future research directions and instructional strategies.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated the transformation of educational institutions across the globe by implementing online and blended learning, which becomes an important aspect of the instruction and learning processes. The present study aimed to investigate the impact of both online and blended learning methods on grammatical knowledge and skill acquisition via an experimental approach. The study recruited 76 first-year medical learners to participate in an experiment for 7 weeks. Specifically, the experimental group studied the learning material face-to-face for 7 hours with 8 hours online, while the control group studied the same material online for 15 hours. The data were collected through pre-test and post-test. Although both approaches significantly improved learners’ grammar performance, the study results discovered significantly higher learners’ performance in a blended learning environment compared to solely online learning.
Gamification in the 21st century academic English grammar instruction is popular, but the lack of comparative studies on its effectiveness in online courses limits its scalability. This study aimed to address this problem by examining students’ experiences and outcomes in gamified grammar learning versus non-gamified learning in a fully synchronous online English course. The 12-week course involved 80 A1-A2 English learners, split into experimental (gamified) and control (non-gamified) groups. Data were collected through surveys, learning outcomes, and written reflections using a two-group design and the sequential explanatory research method. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, independent t-tests, and bivariate correlations, while qualitative data underwent thematic analysis. The results indicate that gamified grammar instruction improved students’ experiences, motivation, enjoyment, and engagement while reducing anxiety. Gamification also led to better learning outcomes compared to traditional methods. However, there was a gap between perceived experiences and actual outcomes, emphasizing the need for caution in interpreting emotions as achievement indicators. Some obstacles, including technical issues, comprehension difficulties, and time constraints, were observed. The study recommends policies to facilitate the integration of gamification into the curriculum.
The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated interest among researchers and industry professionals, particularly in their application to tasks concerning mobile user interfaces (UIs). This position paper investigates the use of LLMs for UI layout generation. Central to our exploration is the introduction of UI grammar -- a novel approach we proposed to represent the hierarchical structure inherent in UI screens. The aim of this approach is to guide the generative capacities of LLMs more effectively and improve the explainability and controllability of the process. Initial experiments conducted with GPT-4 showed the promising capability of LLMs to produce high-quality user interfaces via in-context learning. Furthermore, our preliminary comparative study suggested the potential of the grammar-based approach in improving the quality of generative results in specific aspects.
Kreuzer offers guidance to scholars looking to comparative historical analysis (CHA) for the tools to analyze macro-historical questions. Like history, CHA uses the past to formulate research questions, describe social transformations, and generate inductive insights. Like social science, CHA compares those patterns to explicate generalizable and testable theories. It operates in two different worlds—one constantly changing and full of cultural particularities and another static and full of orderly uniformities. CHA draws attention to the ontological constructions of these worlds; how scholars background historical and geographic particularities to create a social reality orderly enough for theorizing, while others foreground those particularities to re-complexify it to generate new inductive insights. CHA engages in ontological triage, dialogue between exploration and confirmation, and conversation in how to translate test results into genuine answers. This book is supplemented by online materials including introductory videos, diagnostic quizzes, advanced exercises, and annotated bibliographies.
Leah Pieper, Santiago Virgüez, Edella Schlager
et al.
Since Crawford and Ostrom proposed the Institutional Grammar (IG), a conceptual tool for breaking down and organizing institutional statements, a burgeoning literature has used it to study institutions contained in single documents and to conduct comparative institutional analysis across multiple countries and time periods. Moreover, rapid advances in text analysis and computational methods are creating new analytic opportunities to study rules, norms and strategies by leveraging the IG syntax. At this stage, it is important to assess the existing literature to understand how the IG has supported institutional analysis across a variety of contexts, including commons governance. Based on a corpus of 48 empirical articles published between 2010 and 2021, we explore how analysts have operationalized institutional statements using the IG. We also synthesize the IG-based metrics and theoretical concepts developed in these articles to illustrate the contributions of IG for measurement of challenging concepts such as polycentricity, discretion, and compliance, among others. Our findings indicate that the IG is a flexible and adaptable tool for institutional analysis, especially for making empirical contributions from text-based data, and it holds promise toward building a potentially new emerging subfield we call Computational Institutional Analysis.
Knowledge of the grammar of a foreign language at the proper level is a necessary component of language proficiency in general, and therefore teachers are faced with an urgent question of how to facilitate and accelerate the process of its assimilation. The purpose of the study is to theoretically substantiate the importance of mastering grammar for applicants of non – linguistic institutions of higher education and analyse the application of the proposed exercises. The methodology of the study consists in the application of theoretical (analysis of methodological literature on the problem of study, comparative analysis of grammatical phenomena of English and Ukrainian languages, analysis of educational publications on English for students of non-linguistic areas of training) and empirical research methods (observation of the level of grammatical competence of students; questionnaires and testing of students; an experiment that consisted in organising and conducting experimental training to test the effectiveness of the developed set of exercises that contribute to faster and more complete assimilation of the grammatical component of a foreign language). Techniques and means of teaching and activating grammatical structures in the study of a foreign language are examined. English language textbooks for non-linguistic institutions of higher education are analysed. The analysis of the use of exercises and internet resources aimed at mastering and fixing the necessary grammatical rules is conducted. The results of testing the teaching of English grammar on a communicative basis in a non-linguistic institution of higher education using professional-oriented educational texts as the basis for exercises are presented. The position that this approach contributes to maintaining students’ motivation, activity, and independence is justified. Research training conducted based on the state biotechnological university confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed set of exercises in working with grammar based on professional texts. This technology can be used by teachers-philologists in teaching grammar of any foreign language, provided that they adapt accordingly, depending on the typical language difficulties and needs of students.
Leonie Weissweiler, Valentin Hofmann, Abdullatif Köksal
et al.
Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasizing the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of language, i.e., linguistic units of different granularity that combine syntax and semantics. As a first step toward assessing the compatibility of CxG with the syntactic and semantic knowledge demonstrated by state-of-the-art pretrained language models (PLMs), we present an investigation of their capability to classify and understand one of the most commonly studied constructions, the English comparative correlative (CC). We conduct experiments examining the classification accuracy of a syntactic probe on the one hand and the models' behavior in a semantic application task on the other, with BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa as the example PLMs. Our results show that all three investigated PLMs, as well as OPT, are able to recognize the structure of the CC but fail to use its meaning. While human-like performance of PLMs on many NLP tasks has been alleged, this indicates that PLMs still suffer from substantial shortcomings in central domains of linguistic knowledge.
ABSTRACT Words classified as ‘interjections’ tend to be treated in descriptive grammars as outside of morphosyntax, too contextually bound to warrant a systematic description of their syntagmatic relations. In this paper we argue that if one takes grammar to include recurrent patterns in conversational turns that are routinely connected with particular interactional functions, such as assessments and acknowledgements, then the grammar of interjections can indeed be incorporated into language description in ways that show the systematic relationships between form and function. We use a comparative corpus of conversations in four typologically distinct Australian Aboriginal languages (Garrwa, Gija, Jaru and Murrinhpatha) to illustrate how such an analysis may be developed. We focus on forms which have been described as ‘compassionate interjections’, which express that the speaker takes a compassionate affective stance towards something described in prior talk or evident in the situation. Despite differences in the morphological properties of these words in the languages we compare here, they display remarkable similarities in where they occur within conversational turns, and the functions they serve in different turn-related positions.
In the following article, an attempt is made to define basic approaches for a future successful design of German minority teaching in Poland. On the one hand, reference is made to the thirty-year history and current situation of teaching in Poland and, on the other hand, to the already researched fields of activity of German minority teaching in Eastern Europe. Linguistic as well as cultural and methodological aspects are explored. The contribution should be understood as a scientific suggestion to redefine the term minority language in a didactic context.
This paper explores the job satisfaction of translators working for an international intergovernmental organization. The extant literature on translators’ job satisfaction has explored a number of constructs. Based on developments in the field of organizational theory and the complexity of translation as a job, it is argued that psychological ownership may prove an adequate framework to explain translators’ job satisfaction and instrumental in establishing a dialogue between the various analyses of different workplaces in the field of translation and interpreting studies. The study focuses on a specific multilingual intergovernmental organization and draws on the interviews of 17 Spanish-native translators of different nationalities. Their feelings of ownership are analyzed and variations in how they relate to constructs of psychological ownership — feelings of control, intimacy of knowledge, and self-investment— become apparent. Exploring patterns shows those variations to be related to translators’ differing translation dosas, that is, they're divergent, competing, and sometimes conflicting understanding of what translation is and should be. Furthermore, relationships between psychological ownership, translation doxa, and translators’ efforts to advance their own doxas in the organization are examined with a view towards creating means to engage professional translators in advancing a doxa shaped by and for translators across workplaces.
The article presents the life and work of Bolesława Kopelówna, a Polish literary translator who was especially active (and widely criticised) in the interwar years in Poland, and is now almost completely forgotten. The article attempts to answer the following questions: why was Kopelówna so intensely criticised? Why has she disappeared from the collective memory? Why was she so active in the field of translation? And, no less crucially, who was this enigmatic figure of Bolesława Kopelówna? Through an application of microhistorical tools to fragments of Kopelówna’s life and work, I will re/deconstruct her seemingly non-existing archive. Combining interdisciplinary tools from literary history, history and feminist studies, my aim is not only to bring back the voice of a silenced, overlooked, and underestimated translator, but also to encourage other researchers to attempt to fill blank spaces in translation history.
Audiovisual translation has long struggled to strike a balance between corpus-based analysis of large amounts of text and the need to systematically integrate multimodality in its research scope, in order to fully acknowledge the complex nature of the audiovisual product. This paper aims to relate on the experimentation that is currently being conducted at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with the collaboration of the University of Basel (Switzerland): using an existing software (created for pragmatics) for audiovisual translation. The main aim is to make sure this software is able to support the researcher in transcribing, annotating, adding metadata, managing and querying text and video files. The experimented software has never been used for parallel aligned audiovisual text so far. The contribution here presented first briefly describes a framework developed to analyse language variation and multimodality (with a focus on character design) in audiovisual translation, which was then immersed in the software. Subsequently, the software itself is described in detail, with specific attention to its potential and limits in the use within the field of Translation Studies and audiovisual translation. This is done by showing examples from a pilot study that belongs to a broader corpus currently under construction.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Communication. Mass media
Este artículo científico se enmarca dentro de la línea de la sociolingüística, disciplina que permite identificar la manera de hablar de una comunidad, así como su incidencia en los procesos de cambio que se dan al interior de la lengua, reflejada en la variedad lingüística. Se toma como variables sociales: género, nivel de instrucción y edad; en cuanto a las variantes lingüísticas se trabajó como variante fija general la fraseología, y como variantes específicas las locuciones adjetivas. El objetivo principal es averiguar si en la comunidad de habla barranquillera se emplea de forma significativa este tipo de recursos léxicos. Para esto se emplea un corpus elaborado con base en el Diccionario Fraseológico Documentado del Español Actual (2009). Se tomó como muestra a 48 hombres y 48 mujeres, tres niveles de instrucción y cuatro grupos etarios. La metodología empleada es de carácter sociolingüístico en donde el enfoque investigativo se basa en el análisis de la información. En forma particular, el resultado derivado de las variables sociales, en consonancia con la variante lingüística sintagma preposicional más adjetivo, permitió demostrar que las mujeres hacen un mayor uso de las locuciones adjetivas. Las identidades que ellas conllevan tienden a implicar una función de marcación de fronteras mediante un uso particular de la lengua y una coherencia interna altamente marcada, gracias al dominio de determinados rasgos lingüísticos.
Philology. Linguistics, Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar
Külli Prillop, Tiit Hennoste, Külli Habicht
et al.
Within the project “Pragmatics above grammar: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Estonian registers and text types” (PRG341) we are studying the expression of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in different written and spoken registers of modern Estonian. We focus on adverbs that function as discourse markers (e.g. vist ‘maybe, probably’, ilmselt ‘apparently, obviously’, tegelikult ‘actually’), markers that develop from main clauses containing cognition verbs that take sentence complements (e.g. (ma) arvan ‘I think’, usun ‘I believe’, (mulle) tundub ‘it seems (to me), it appears (that)’) as well as modal and performative verbs (e.g. võib (juhtuda) ‘can (happen)’, peaks (tulema) ‘should (come)’; kinnitan/väidan (olevat) ‘I affirm/claim’). The analysis combines quantitative corpus-linguistic and qualitative pragmatic approaches, thus belonging to the field of corpus pragmatics. Unlike previous studies of related topics, the project systematically compares the usage of markers in different registers (spoken, online communication, print texts) and text types.
The pilot studies performed thus far have revealed several problems with the existing Estonian corpora, important in the study of pragmatics. Firstly, some text types are underrepresented or not represented at all, the text types cannot always be distinguished, and the particular text may not always correspond to the nominal text type (e.g. an academic text may contain quotes from texts of other types). All of this makes it difficult to do comparative statistical analysis of different text types. Secondly, the markers under examination are multifunctional and identifying their (inter)subjective function requires consideration of context broader than a single sentence. However, the public search systems for the existing corpora do not provide this context. For instance, the discourse marker function of cognition verbs is indicated primarily by the fact that the topic of the conversation or text follows through the subordinate clause, not the main clause. Since the available search systems do not provide context larger than a single sentence, the identification of the topic of the discourse, and therefore of the potential discourse-marker function of the verb, is made more difficult.
To avoid these problems, the project working group is developing a new “Pragmatics” corpus, being created in the SketchEngine environment. The corpus is made up of 10 subcorpora representing different text types and registers. Each subcorpus contains roughly 500,000 words.
A presente tradução é parte uma primeira revisão do trabalho tradutório apresentado em dissertação de mestrado (SOUZA, 2016). A proposta foi traduzir os dísticos elegíacos de Ovídio em uma forma que ecoasse o ritmo original do poema latino. Para isso, partiu-se da proposta de Carlos Alberto Nunes, a substituição de longas em posição princeps por tônicas. Porém, nesta tradução, ao contrário da de Nunes, permitiu-se também o seguimento desta tônica por apenas uma átona, formando troqueu que pode ser executado em performance como espondeu. Dessa maneira, a possibilidade de variação no metro foi mantida, mas os dátilos foram mantidos fixos no quinto pé do hexâmetro e segundo hemistíquio do pentâmetro. A cesura obrigatória do pentâmetro datílico foi executada com a aproximação de duas tônicas e enfatizada com espaçamento obrigatório, que induz o leitor ao reinício do ritmo. Para manter o andamento do metro, foram utilizados recursos como deslocamento de tônica, elisão entre o fim do hexâmetro e início do pentâmetro, elisões em geral. A presente revisão apresenta alterações no hexâmetro, que procura executar as suas cesuras, porém com o resultado de várias cesuras femininas. Além disso, o tom do poema procurou maior leveza e fluidez, com a eliminação de hipérbatos radicais e o rearranjo de informações dentro do dístico, que é a unidade dentro do poema. O poema traduzido, oitavo do livro 1, apresenta a figura da alcoviteira, personagem comum na comédia nova latina, que aqui é a presentada como uma bruxa que influencia a amada a extorquir os seus amantes e a desprezar o eu-poético, que sendo poeta, não tem como dar presentes valiosos além dos próprios poemas.
Language and Literature, Translating and interpreting
In this paper, we are interested in the syntax of comparatives, and more particularly in the semantic analysis of sentence structures expressing the comparison. Comparatives, however, seem to be a very delicate field of research in syntactic analysis. The minimalist framework of generative grammar has proposed an analysis of the morphological traits specific to categories and their lexical realizations, which makes it possible to control the acceptability of structural configurations by syntax by referring to their semantic structures ; the objective of this study is to provide such an analysis and to allow a better understanding of the formation of comparative structures. By modeling comparisons in the form of predicate-argument pairs linked by semantic roles, we will try to present another semantic framework for representing the meaning of various natural language comparison constructs.