Journal of English Language and Literature (JELL)
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An existentialist reading of K.S. Maniam’s ‘The Return’
No full textAccording to Peyre (1948:21), the fathers and forefathers of existentialism were mostly Germans, but it was adapted and transformed by the French and was re-exported to the rest of the world. Peyre’s inference reduces the history of existentialism to a nutshell. Existentialism can be defined as an intellectual movement that reflects all aspects of modern life. In literature, this theory acts as a useful approach to analysing literary works in order to make sense of the complexities, contradictions and dilemmas surrounding the characters. The purpose of this research paper is to study the novel of Subramaniam Krishnan, popularly known as K. S. Maniam, an Indian Malaysian academic and novelist, from an existentialist perspective. His novels deal with the lives and problems of the post-colonial Indian Diaspora in Malaysia. In 2000, he received the Raja Rao Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Literature of the South Asian Diaspora. His first novel ‘The Return’ is an autobiographical novel which deals with cultural struggle and cultural identity. This novel will be analysed from an existential perspective.
The Effect of multimedia glosses on L2 reading comprehension and vocabulary production
No full textThe present study was conducted to investigate the effect of different multimedia glosses on reading comprehension and vocabulary production. To this end, 65 female students of a high school in Qazvin, Iran were selected for the treatment. They consisted of four groups, one comparison group and three multimedia gloss groups. Glossed groups included pictorial gloss group, textual gloss group, and textual-pictorial group. They were given a pre-test before the treatment and two post-tests of vocabulary production and reading comprehension at the end of the treatment. Data were analyzed using One-Way ANOVA procedure. The results of the data analyses indicated that multimedia glosses performed better than the comparison group on vocabulary production, and there was no difference among three glossed groups. Moreover, for reading comprehension no significant differences were found among the groups
Humanism in the Autobiographies of Edward Said and Nelson Mandela: Memory as Action
No full textThis paper focuses on the concept of memory as a form of humanist activism in the autobiographies of Nelson Mandela and Edward Said, namely The Long Walk to Freedom (1994) and After the Last Sky (1999), respectively. I have chosen Mandela and Said because they dedicated their lives and efforts to the service of the cause of freedom in South Africa and Palestine. Their engagement with the political causes of their countries turns into a concern with worldwide struggles for human rights and racial equality. While Mandela emerged as a vital force against apartheid in South Africa, Said was a well-known and influential Palestinian critic and intellectual whose writings tackle the Palestinian struggle for justice within the worldwide experience of imperialism and its binary oppositions of white/black, male/female, superior /inferior. I argue that their autobiographies bear witness to the plight of Black South Africans and Palestinians as both a shared memory resistant to erasure and as a call for justice. Mandela and Said use their personal memories and life stories to construct a public reading of the meanings of the events that shaped them. Both are concerned with the ways their people have been represented by others, and how they struggle to represent themselves
College Students’ Attitude Toward and Learning of Differentiated Instruction in Products
No full textTeachers should adjust their curriculum and instructional practice to meet the needs of individual learners, because one size does not fit all (Kaplan, Rogers, &Webster, 2008; Tomlinson, 2003). This study focuses on the implementation of differentiated instruction in products, “tiered assignments,” in a Children’s English class in a teacher education program in Taiwan. The study concludes that 52 college students held a positive attitude toward these tiered assignments and that they learned theories and instructional strategies not only from lectures and tasks in the university classes but also from completing different choices. Another important finding is that participants’ choice of completing these assignments is based on the level of easy of the assignments. Two suggestions are made to effectively implement differentiated instruction in products in teacher education programs in terms of explicitly modeling and explaining differentiated instruction in products and designing tiered assignments based on the levels of challenge as well as learners’ readiness, interests and profiles
Teachers’ Perceptions of the Significance of Local Culture in Foreign Language Learning
No full textLearning takes place in an environment, and environment includes the local culture which is extremely important while learning in general. The question remains critical if the local or foreign culture is crucial in the learning process of a foreign language. There isn’t much difference of opinion on the relevance of British culture in an English class, however the usefulness of the local culture (the Saudi culture in this context) is questioned. The present study is a modest attempt towards answering some such questions formulating the basis and the hypotheses for this research
Chinua Achebe’s Dynamic World in Things Fall Apart
No full textThe society of Umuofia in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart can be seen as a dynamic world based upon Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theory of social heteroglossia. The opposing social worldviews reflected in these languages or speech, in Bakhtin’s words, can be referred to as two contrasting forces, the centripetal forces and the centrifugal forces. In Things Fall Apart, the centripetal forces are represented through the unified centralized rigid social ideologies while the centrifugal forces are revealed through the disunified decentralized flexible social ideologies in the speech of characters. The society of Umuofia is an active dynamic one within which the diverse social ideologies or forces interact and contest
The Sick Novel From Anemic State: Sickness As Praxis In The African Novelist’s Agenda
No full textThe African novel, like most other literary genres from the same region, has thrived under different nomenclatures. Hence within the sub categories of the genre are critics’ labels like pre-colonial, colonial, post colonial, disillusionment, political and apolitical. Interestingly it has been discovered that the christening of the African novel has always been the directives of the self-instructive profile of the genre, adequately powered by the analogous critical idioms supplied by the critics. For instance Chinua Achebe had labeled Armah’s The Beautyful ones are not yet Born as ‘the sick book’ in his popular, and instantaneous criticism of the novel. Little did Achebe know that his emblematic utterance on Armah’s premier narrative would serve as a signature to understand what other African novelists have done in their works. In this essay, we attempt to hypothesize with the notion of ‘sick novel’ in a bid to buttress the enduring themes and tropes in selected novel.
Heteroglossia in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
No full textThings Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s first African novel, is a story about the traditional Igbo life in the pre-colonial period. It is often seen as an African national epic by literary critics because of its characterization of a bellicose hero, Okonkwo. These critics pay attention to the unitary epic viewpoint represented by the hero but ignore the diverse opposing viewpoints in the Igbo society of Umuofia. Hence, this paper aims to represent the double-voiced discourses in the novel by adopting M. M. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia. Bakhtin’s four fundamental forms for incorporating heteroglossia in the novel are utilized to reveal the double-voiced discourses, the voices of the masculine and feminine traditions, in the languages of the novel
A Discourse Analysis of Language use in Femi Osofisan’s The Midnight Blackout
No full textThis study critically examines the language use of Femi Osofisan’s characters/casts as portrayed in The Midnight Blackout and how such usage is affected and determined by situations and contexts. Analysis of discourse in the play is premised on a model adaptation of Discourse Analysis presented in Hyme’s (1962) Ethnography of Communication and Grice’s Conversational Maxim. The study employs Hyme’s Ethnography of Communication model which is encapsulated in the SPEAKING acronym, and Conversational Maxims by Grice which engages the maxim of quantity, quality, relation and manner. This critical analysis reveals language as an indispensable and instinctive medium in human communication. Analysis also reveals the linguistic and social surrounding or environment of Femi Osofisan’s The Midnight Blackout and foregrounds language as the spectrum through which the society can be appreciated
The Effect of Teacher Talk Modifications on Second Language Learners’ Comprehension and Acquisition
No full textIn this review of literature, we have explored the effect of pre-modified input, interactionally modified input, and modification of information structure on the comprehension and acquisition of second language (L2) learners. While the effect of modifications on comprehension is evident, the same cannot be said of acquisition. Some studies support the effect of modifications on acquisition, yet others shed doubts on the value of modifications in terms of promoting internalization of language knowledge