Articles

Romancing the Stone Age: John Updike's 'Wife-Wooing' and the Naturally Occurring Nuclear Family

Susan Norton — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:15:14 PDT

John Updike's 1960 story "Wife wooing" is a short tale of married life that connects mid-twentieth century suburbia to a pre-historic past.

Betwixt and Between: Creative Writing and Scholarly Expectations

Susan Norton — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:34:27 PDT

Romancing the Stone Age: John Updike's "Wife-Wooing" and the Naturally Occurring Nuclear Family

Susan Norton — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:29:26 PDT

Assessing the Writing of International Learners: a Discussion in Two Voices

Susan Norton et al. — Mon, 21 May 2012 07:13:39 PDT

Crossing Borders in Anne Tyler's Fiction

Susan Norton — Mon, 21 May 2012 06:46:28 PDT

Restauration und Ambivalenz: Maskulinitaet im Deutschsprachigen Film nach 1990 im Lichte des Neuen Deutschen Films

Sascha Harris — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:18:59 PDT

Restoration and Ambiguity: The Male in Post-Wall German Film

As the programmatic, if diverse tenets of the Neuer Deutscher Film began to lose their hold on German film-making in the eighties, filmic narratives and cinematography emerged which on the one hand draw on this tradition, especially in seemingly postmodern narratives of subversion, minority and subjectivity, but on the other combine these with conventional, even restorative film language and narrative construction. Reunification has set a development in motion which to a remarkable extent echoes the cultural metanarrative of the post-war period. The role and representation of male characters in a significant number of post-reunification films illustrates this problematic, post-postmodern

transformation, in which cultural dislocation and alienation is met with private reassertion, the experience of exclusion is answered with the construction of multiple conventionalities and issues of role and purpose are debated with deliberate ambiguity.

Don't Go There: When to Abandon Lesson Plans and Venture, Humbly, Into Ground Zero

Susan Norton — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:33:02 PST

This paper discusses pedagogical styles that are appropriate in the classroom.

Shared and Mutual Knowledge in Language Learning

Marty Meinardi — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:52:30 PST

This article discusses the matter of shared knowledge from the perspective of the different deictic centres of understanding. Difficulties, which may result from a possible lack of a shared knowledge between NSs and NNSs due to differences in language experiences and personal backgrounds, are identified.

Speed Bumps for Authentic Listening Material

Marty Meinardi — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:52:29 PST

This article investigates whether authentic NS to NS speech can be made available to the learner listener through the use of a novel slow-down tool. Results from various preliminary tests which have been carried out seem to indicate that the use of a slowdown algorithm in many cases, and in particular in samples with a higher speed rate and word count, leads to an improvement in subjects’ ability to perceive and understand what was being uttered in the samples. Tests revealed that even NS listeners (as opposed to NN listeners) prefer to hear authentic NS speech which is either unscripted or is influenced by regional accent, at a slowed down speed. It also seems that ‘unexpected’ words (such as words with high contextual value, but which cannot be processed in a top-down fashion because of the size of the sound snippet) are initially not understood at the original speed of delivery, even in a scripted and carefully pronounced pedagogic sample. Samples containing chunks or formulaic sequences, however, appear to be easily understood at 100% by the majority of NS listeners due to the holistic processing of these language units.

To Catch a Thief: What to Do with Plagiarists in the Language, Literature or Culture Classroom

Susan Norton — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:51:35 PDT

This paper looks at why students in Higher Education, particularly in language, literature and culture couses, plagiarise. It considers some of the ways assessors respond.

They Don't Really Want to Know Us: Experiences and Perceptions of international Students at the Dublin Institute of Technology

Almut Schlepper — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:51:34 PDT

This paper seeks to explore the experiences and perceptions of international, non-EU students at the Dublin Institute of Technology. My interest in the subject derives from my work as a lecturer at a college with an increasing number of international students and from my participation as a student on a course which made me appreciate the value of a diverse student and lecturer body. The sample of the survey I carried out included international students and lecturers at one campus of the Dublin Institute of Technology. While the results indicated that international students are just as heterogeneous as Irish students, they are faced with specific problems deriving from difficulty with language, differences in academic culture and segregation from the Irish students. They are also subjected to discrimination and racism, which is often not expressed explicitly and therefore hard to challenge. Because of falling numbers of Irish students, institutions of higher education have increasingly become dependent on the recruitment of international students, but do not appreciate the educational benefits of a diverse student population. The revenue generated by the international students does not correspond to an adequate infrastructure of support and services. The lack of acknowledgement by the institution corresponds with the failure to recognise the international students as an integral part of life on campus. As a consequence the international students expressed the feeling of being ignored and neglected. As Irish students were not part of the survey their attitude could be deducted only from how the international students perceived them. The fact that the majority of lecturers regarded international students as an asset gives an indication of the hidden potential of diversity. The detailed suggestions of both students and lecturers could help to improve the situation and to create the conditions for an intercultural campus. In addition, the institution needs to develop policy guidelines and codes of practice for the development of awareness of diversity issues and recognition of the value of a diverse student population.

Discourse Analysis as an Approach to Intercultural Competence in the Advanced EFL Classroom

Susan Norton — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:09:10 PDT

In 1991 Michael McCarthy wrote in his Preface to Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers that discourse analysis is ‘not a method of teaching languages; it is a way of describing and understanding how language is used’. By 1994 he had reformulated his position and, with Ronald Carter, published Language as Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching, which argued in favour of providing students with a metalanguage by which to analyse the language they were learning. These days, owing to the work of McCarthy, Carter, and others, the basics of discourse analysis can indeed comprise an appropriate subject matter for the advanced English learner, especially in a multicultural setting. This paper outlines one way in which discourse analysis can not only give Advanced EFL learners the opportunity to sharpen their critical thinking skills, but to simultaneously examine the cultural assumptions embedded in both their target and native languages.