Colloquium: New Philologies (E-Journal)
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Problem-based Learning for Preservice Teachers of English as a Foreign Language
Get PDFProblem-based learning (PBL) is an appropriate teaching approach for university courses with a strong foundation in reality. It merges theory with practice, cultivates students’ sense of agency, encourages self-regulation and teamwork, and leads to the sustainable acquisition of a multitude of relevant skills. This article demonstrates how PBL is used in a teacher education course for preservice English teachers at a university in Austria. It explains how the problem-solving process underlying the approach is applied, analyses the roles of the students and the teacher in a PBL classroom, and highlights the advantages of PBL in teacher education.
 
English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at the University of Klagenfurt: A Study on the Attitudes and Language Proficiency of Students and Teaching Staff
Get PDFThis study empirically questions the context of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in a university setting, namely the University in Klagenfurt, Austria, where the primary language of instruction is German. English has been proposed in the study as a language of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), which is a teaching method whereby students learn a new content in a foreign language. Apart from examining the attitudes towards English in this respect and the levels of proficiency of the students at the University of Klagenfurt (AAU), the study also covered said attitudes and proficiency of the teaching staff. One survey was prepared for the staff and another for the students. Twenty links to different C-tests, aimed at attesting English language proficiency, were distributed across departments and faculties. 114 students took the survey and 75 of them completed the C-test. Moreover, 21 teachers completed the survey and 15 of them completed the C-test
Le metriche ritmiche applicate allo studio del parlato bilingue: Stato dell’arte e implicazioni per possibili studi sul contatto slavo-romanzo nell’Alpe-Adria
Get PDFWhile the rhythm of natural languages has been extensively studied, also by calculating the rhythm metrics, the acquisition of rhythm in (early) simultaneous bilingual speakers is a field of research that remains under-investigated. This article critically assesses the most important recent studies on the rhythm of bilingual speakers and offers reflections on their application in future research, exemplarily applied to the Alps-Adriatic region
‘The opposite of hatred’: Undoing nationalism in Joyce\u27s Ulysses
No full textThe epitome of chauvinist narrow-mindedness in Joyce\u27s Ulysses is the drunken brawler and anti-Semite depicted in the novel\u27s twelfth chapter, ‘Cyclops’. Using his mock-heroic approach as one of the essential stylistic devices in Ulysses, and one of the chief sources of humour in the text, Joyce connects his character to the one-eyed giant Polyphemus of the original Homeric epic. As Randall Stevenson suggests in his study Modernist Fiction (1992), Joyce uses the allusion to Cyclops to warn his readers of any ‘one-eyed’, narrow or single-minded view of reality (such as nationalism) and the dangerous patterns of behaviour that might ensue from it. However, Joyce\u27s intention is not just to repudiate or mock nationalism, but also to offer an alternative, a way of resisting the dangerous mindset embodied in Cyclops. Stevenson argues that Joyce accomplishes this by the very narrative method his novel employs: with its constantly shifting perspectives, its myriad styles and points of view, it successfully fights against any narrowing of vision – and so, by implication, against any tendency towards localism, division, ethnic or religious hatred. The key word for understanding this strategy in the novel is ‘parallax’, one of the scientific concepts that Joyce\u27s protagonist Bloom speculates about, referring to the effect whereby the position of an object seems to change when viewed from different points of observation. As Stevenson points out, Joyce uses parallax to fight against paralysis – by which he means the paralysis of Dublin\u27s drab, unimaginative middle-class, and their myopic political views. In her study Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), Martha Nussbaum likewise focuses on the twelfth chapter of Ulysses in order to analyse the novel\u27s political stance and its repudiation of nationalist and religious bigotry. In Nussbaum\u27s opinion, however, Joyce\u27s strategy in dealing with these issues is inseparable from one of the major motifs in the novel, i.e., the author\u27s celebration of physical love. Namely, Nussbaum argues that hating the Other may be psychologically connected to self-hatred – which stems from our inability to embrace our human experience in its totality, including its bodily, disorderly and mundane aspects. Especially sexuality, as Nussbaum maintains, tends to become metonymic and imply everything in our life which defies control. Accepting only the controllable, rational and orderly portion of our being may lead us to project the undesirable psychic contents onto the Other, thus making him/her the object of our hatred. Such self-hatred – eventually leading to the hatred of the Other – may even be prompted by certain works of art, those which, according to Nussbaum, constitute the so-called ‘ascent’ tradition. These works (written by Plato, Augustine, Dante, Spinoza, Whitman or Proust) project a sublimated image of love and life, constructing in the reader\u27s mind some idealized version of his or her own self, removed from the messiness of one\u27s ordinary existence and one\u27s “real-life body with its hungers and thirsts and fantasies” (Nussbaum 2001). As a result, Nussbaum argues, these works create a wide gap between the constructed reader and the real-life reader, which may cause us anger and self-disgust when we return from the experience of reading and discover that we are still ourselves. Joyce\u27s Ulysses, on the other hand, closes the selfsame gap with the narrative method which Nussbaum calls ‘\u27transfiguration of everyday life’ and ‘the descent of love’. Nussbaum explains it primarily as a descent into the chaos and disorder of erotic love. Joyce\u27s novel, in her opinion, seems to argue that it is only through love (and bodily love at that) that human beings can find an exit from solipsism and connect with the reality of another life. Furthermore, since bodily needs are universal, focusing on bodily love may be an important step towards embracing our common humanity and adopting a cosmopolitan view. Cosmopolitanism is also explicitly advocated by Joyce\u27s protagonist Leopold Bloom. In the twelfth chapter, standing up to ‘Cyclops’, Bloom points out that insult and hatred cannot constitute a proper ‘life for men and women’, and ‘it\u27s the very opposite of that that is really life’. Militant nationalism, as a chief source of insult and hatred, is the opposite of love and therefore of life. Using Stevenson\u27s and Nussbaum\u27s insights as a starting point, the paper will proceed to explore Joyce\u27s ethical and political preoccupations in Ulysses in order to outline the predominant narrative strategies which the author employs in undoing nationalism
Fördermöglichkeiten, Anreizsysteme, Incentives. Motivationspsychologische Grundlagen und konkrete Handlungsüberlegungen
Get PDFThe Postmodern Turkish Novel\u27s Resistance to the Return of Nationalism
Get PDFTurkish Novel’s Resistance to the Return of the Nationalism The emergence of the first wave of nationalism in the late 18th, the early 19th century was underpinned not only by traditional historiography but also by the historical novels written to verify the legitimacy assertions of the nationhood ideals. Although at that time historical novels were not considered as passable as history books whose faculty to represent the facts was not in question, still, they served in the gathering of the people on the distant peripheries around the same central idea of commonality, perhaps, even more effectively than historiography did. The novel, along with the newspapers, as Benedict Anderson and the others argued, was the most efficient medium in concretizing the ambiguous nation imagination with the effective use of vernacular, the function to employ different writing styles, and the inherent claim to represent every member of the nation. The utilization of the novel, especially of the romantic novel, in strengthening the foundations of the nation-state, first had started in the Western countries and then spread to the all the world, including the colonies of those Western countries. This kind of utilization of the novel continued after the end of the World War II, by drawing the new borders for the new nation-states and new colonies in the world. Turkey, once a big empire with many multi-national possessions, experienced the binary positions of nationalism, during and after its Independence War (1919–1922) against the Allied Powers. Before the World War I, as Ottoman Empire, it had strived to protect its vast territories with the help of the ideal of Ottomanism that referred to the equality of every citizen of the Empire without any religious or ethnic division. But, in the end, this and other overarching ideas, such as ‘Islamism’ or ‘Westernism’, could not hold against the nationalism\u27s aura. Primarily, Ottoman Empire started to lose its elements in the Balkans subsequent to a series of nationalistic revolts, then the heavy loss of the World War I came. The intelligentsia was already offering the solution as Pan-Turkism; the attempts of imperial powers to share the fields of the country among its neighbors and stateless subjects, and then to colonize the remaining parts, only helped to consolidate them around nationhood ideal. Winning the Independence War, the founder of Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) and his staff officers established the Turkish Republic in 1923 upon the base of one nation (Turks), one religion (Islam), and one sect (Sunnism). The concept was similar to the other nation-state building processes; initially, the deportation/extermination of the elements having a different religious identity, and the assimilation of the elements having a different ethnicity, or a different sect of Islam, in the melting pot of Turk-Islamism. The role of the novelists was crucial in fulfilment of the theoretical, moreover, it was expected to show a parallelism with the suggestions of historiographers. The expectation was met, but, it also created a problem of representation. Because the presupposed real being represented was the reality of the dominant subject. However, there was still a significant amount of cultural, ethnic, and religious minorities living in the country, yet excluded from the circuit of representation. The emergence of postmodernism has shifted this paradigm which was preoccupied with the reproduction of the discourse of the dominant. Against the canonized robustness of the modernist representation and referentiality, postmodern fiction, by availing of post-structuralism, offers to turn the tables in favor of the oppressed ones. Postmodernist literature has redefined the concept of the historical fiction by diverting its course from a central, singular, and homogeneous position to a peripheral, plural, and heterogeneous direction. Postmodern historical fiction, or by the term “historiographic metafiction” as Linda Hutcheon has coined, designates a narration with two predominant features; a) It is principally a retelling of a historical occurrence from a counter-position against the supposed factuality of the original story, and b) It contains the self-reflexivity of its author which enables him/her to question boundary between fact and fiction, if there is any at all. Obviously, Hutcheon’s conception upon this particular category of postmodern fiction was mainly derived from the approach which stresses the inherent narratological characteristics in history writing, argued by Hayden White, and other theoreticians. What is my research question in this work is how successfully historiographic metafiction is utilized by postmodern writers in Turkish literature. Has postmodernism been able to challenge the traditional admissions of representation in Turkey? What kind of resistance can provide postmodern literature after the return of the second big wave of nationalism, especially, in a strongly nationalist country, like Turkey? In order to respond to these questions, I offer to analyze a certain postmodern text, The Black Book (“Kara Kitap” 1990; in English 1994), written by acclaimed contemporary Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (1952–)
„Alle wissen was gemeint ist, bis jemand danach fragt“. Vom Verständnis des Wissenstransfer-Begriffs
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Unification and/or Brexit? Nationalism(s) and the Good Friday Agreement
Get PDFWith Brexit being an ongoing issue for all of the European Union, one of the key issues in the negotiations is how to treat Northern Ireland, which is still divided on Brexit ideologically, even 20 years after the official peace treaty (the Good Friday Agreement), which – at least legally – put an end to armed conflict in the area. This paper will look at how in 2018, the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, the two prevalent opposing nationalisms – unionism and republicanism – are represented in a selection of widely-read newspapers in Northern Ireland. Using Spitzmüller and Warnke’s DIMEAN model, the paper will look at how – given the different ideological backgrounds of the newspapers themselves – these publications treat the anniversary and give a voice to the different parties involved (or abstain from doing so) and whether or not they make explicit links to the Brexit negotiations and the question, whether Northern Ireland is to continue as a part of the United Kingdom, the European Union or a separate customs union solution, in order to both keep the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and deal with two broadly different civic realities, brought about by opposing notions of nationalism