Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume:11 Issue: 2, Summer Autumn 2020

This study was designed to trace the developmental path of the nominal and pronominal referring systems in the production of an English-Arabic bilingual child. The child’s spontaneous speech was recorded and data were analyzed. Data sets were clustered into 5 age spans starting from 1;9 to 3;9. The study was conducted under the framework of the semantic complexity hypothesis embedding 3 psychological principles of acquisition (i.e., ease of observability of referent, meaningfulness of referent, and distinctiveness of the sound signal that indicates the referent). The person-role hypothesis was also used as a framework to explain the development of the pronoun systems of both languages. Findings provide further evidence for the early advantage of nouns as referring expressions. They also reveal the early emergence of nouns with concrete referents as well as nouns of meaningful referents. These findings confirm the importance of the person-role hypothesis in the sequence of acquiring pronominal referring expressions.

Scrutinizing translated and nontranslated texts in a language reveals the characteristics of translationese. Additionally, thematic structure is among the most widely used tools for doing so; therefore, the research aim was to examine how thematic structure was presented in the Persian translated news, translated from English into Persian, and to compare it to the thematic structure in the Persian nontranslated news texts taken from 2: UTPECC and Persica. A total of 2,190 clauses were chosen to examine their thematic structure, employing mainly Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) classification of the thematic structure as the functional model. Results of the chi-square test revealed no significant difference between the application of the different thematic elements in both corpora, meaning that the Persian translation of news texts reflects the Persian language thematic structure, rather than the original English texts. Moreover, further analysis showed that the 4 categories of the thematic structure present characteristics of the third code.

Because language and culture are inextricably intermingled, scrutinizing the indispensable role of the language of a speech community can yield significant information about its culture. Conceptualized under an overarching field of study, culturology of language, Pishghadam (2013) postulates how the realizations of cultuling (culture in language) and metacultuling can be entrenched in a language. Each metacultuling is composed of interrelated cultulings, appearing in the form of linguistic expressions. Cultuling can be manifested if we embark upon the macrosocial factors such as region, ethnicity, age, social status, and gender on language in (inter)action and on intralingual pragmatic conventions embedded in variational pragmatics (VP). This study elaborates on the aforementioned conceptualizations along with the previous studies drawing on cultuling analysis (CLA) as an innovative method for the analysis of language. It also illuminates how CLA can manifest the cultural memes hidden in language and the cultural functions of linguistic expressions. Finally, it discusses how identifying defective cultural memes can help purify culture and pave the way for euculturing.

Because an understanding of reading attitude is pivotal to reading encouragement, this study investigated the multidimensionality of recreational reading attitude among Jordanian EFL students. A survey of recreational reading attitudes was administered to 225 EFL tertiary students at the University of Jordan. The responses to the 10-item survey were factored using (1) exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and 2 factor dimensions were obtained for the recreational reading attitude: efferent (cognitive) and aesthetic (affective). Results were, then, validated using (2) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using IBM Amos 23. Results provide statistical evidence and a confirmation through using mixed statistical approaches (i.e., EFA and CFA) that the recreational reading attitude of EFL students is multidimensional, which will yield a better understanding of how attitudes can affect EFL students’ engagement in reading and choices of reading materials, thus introducing a new definition for recreational reading attitudes to encompass their multidimensional nature.

An in-depth investigation of vocabulary depth knowledge by lexical researchers plays an important role in language teaching and learning. However, little is known of empirical research related to the correlation and prediction of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, which represent vocabulary depth knowledge to reading comprehension in an EFL context like Bangladesh. Therefore, this study examined the correlation and prediction of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations to academic reading comprehension, employing standard multiple regression analysis under a quantitative approach amongst 175 Bangladeshi undergraduate EFL students.  The results of this study showed that a significant and strong correlation existed between paradigmatic relations and reading comprehension. In addition, paradigmatic relations made a statistically more significant unique prediction to reading comprehension than syntagmatic relations, and it had a larger effect on reading comprehension than syntagmatic relations. Providing an insight into the research gap, the present study suggests that paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations’ knowledge of vocabulary depth knowledge would have practical use for EFL students, English teachers at the tertiary level, and further implications for lexical researchers.

The widespread use of the English language raises concerns about maintaining the mutual intelligibility across different nonnative English varieties. Some have viewed nonnative English varieties as distorted forms of English that cannot stand on their own that would cause the language to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible varieties. This study is an attempt to ascertain if there is mutual intelligibility between Nigerian and Malaysian English speakers, as there is little exploration of the intelligibility of African English varieties to Malaysians and vice versa. Forty Nigerians and 80 Malaysian undergraduate ESL students took part in a vowel discrimination task. The Nigerians listened to the words recorded by Malaysian speakers while the Malaysians listened to the words recorded by Nigerian speakers. Seven pairs of vowels were chosen as target vowel contrasts tested.  Results showed that the Nigerians and Malaysians performed well in the discrimination task with performance above the guessing threshold for most of the selected pairs of vowel contrasts. Findings suggest that mutual intelligibility exists between the 2 recognized nonnative English varieties.

Many readers and critics regard Khaled Hosseini’s fiction as an insider’s account of life in Afghanistan. This study, however, aims to depict how Hosseini’s novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, reinforces the orientalist discourse toward Afghanistan through certain narrative structures. Greimas’s actantial model and Todorov’s equilibrium/disequilibrium model are used. Then, Said’s postcolonial theory is used to interpret the orientalist attitude revealed by those narrative studies. The deep structure of the novel suggests that all the positive actants have affiliations with the West and are exceptional to the East. In addition, the cause of disequilibrium is the East, whereas the West restores equilibrium. These narrative structures tend to naturalize in the readers the binary opposition of the West vs. the East and, in accordance with the post-9/11 media discourse, depict Afghanistan as the Other of the U.S. which needs to be saved from itself.