1,720,957 research outputs found
Socio-cultural influence and learning the English language by analogy: Implications for second language learners
Get PDFSome second language learners of English in Nigeria are faced with the dilemma of learning the English language amidst the array of languages in a linguistic pluralistic environment as Nigeria. The intercourse of English and other languages is reflected in the language use of learners whose socio-cultural affiliations are demonstrated in their use of the target language. At various levels of education in Nigeria, effective teaching of the target language has been hampered due to socio-cultural influence and learning the English language through analogy which is lubricated by sociolinguistic factors in a multi-ethnolinguistic society. The situation has raised variants and faulty learning of the English language among learners in a second language situation. Data for the study were collected from 100 first year students of Madonna University, Okija Campus and 100 Ordinary National Diploma (OND) students of Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku admitted during the 2020/2021 academic session. Although the students were randomly selected, the researchers employed focused group discussions and written expositions to elicit their data. The work anchored its analysis on Corder‟s Error Analysis and Granger Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) theory. Findings reveal that though English is the medium of instruction in the institutions used for the study, students face linguistic challenges imposed as a result of socio-cultural influence and learning the English language by analogy (application of the knowledge of the mother-tongue consciously or unconsciously to the target language), overgeneralization and non-mastery of grammatical features. The study suggests possible practices that would discourage anomalous learning of the target language
Exploration of Impoliteness and Violation of Politeness Maxims among Undergraduates of Madonna University, Nigeria
Get PDFIt is not uncommon for people to take offence over what is said and how it is said. These actions often cause conflict and clash of interest in language use in society. Besides, scholars have decried the paucity of research on impoliteness. The paper therefore seeks to fill the gap in knowledge by conducting a research on impoliteness and maxim violations among undergraduates of Madonna University Nigeria, Okija campus. The study employed the obstructive observation method to observe instances of maxim violations and impoliteness among the students for a period of four months from November 2020 to February2021. Data for the study were collected through recorded language use of the students which were done as not to deter the students in their conversations. The recorded texts were later transcribed and analysed. Being a qualitative research, data for the study were analysed using a textual method. The analysis was done using Leechian politeness maxims. The paper concludes that studies on politeness and conversational maxim observance should be part of students’ curriculum in order to understand clearly how to avoid conflicts in language use in the university system.</jats:p
‘We Don’t Know When to Insert Them’: Misuse of Comma and Full stop among Students in Selected Institutions in Delta State, Nigeria
Get PDF. The paper investigates the misuse of comma and full stop among students of University of Delta, Agbor, Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku, and Dennis Osadebay University, Asaba— all in Delta State, Nigeria. Through a simple random sampling technique, 600 students admitted to the institutions during the 2023/2024 academic session were selected from the three institutions (200 from each). The students chosen were students who offered the Use of English course which is a compulsory course for all students in their first year of study. Data for the study were obtained from answers to structured quiz on punctuation, long essays, examination scripts of the students during their first semester and interview. Data for the study were analysed using the theory of error analysis. Findings reveal that poor knowledge of word classes, phrasal and clausal elements, over generalizations among other factors affect students’ placement of the two punctuation marks. Again, the study reveals the relationship between good knowledge of punctuation marks and effective written communication. The paper recommends that teachers should devise activities and tasks on the rules of punctuation and encourage students to put them into practice both at sentence and discourse levels.
Keywords: punctuation, comma, full stop, error analysis, effective writin
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Constructing Gender Disparity through Culture: A Socio-pragmatic Study of Impoliteness, Indirectness and Implicature in Igbo Female Degrading Proverbs
Get PDFIgbo proverbs are valuable expressions that unravel linguistic idiosyncrasies and project the essential principles of life. This study examines the extent to which fifty Igbo proverbs that contain implicit impoliteness imports and implicature are used indirectly to demean women and create bias against them in the Igbo socio-cultural setting. In this qualitative research, the fifty Igbo proverbs were selected based on their contents from the five Igbo-speaking states in the southeastern part of Nigeria (Abia, Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, and Imo). The proverbs were translated from the Igbo language to the English language, interpreted, and analyzed. The analysis was conducted using Culpeper’s theory of impoliteness. Findings reveal that some Igbo proverbs are constructed and used in a way that promotes gender disparity and debases women in the Igbo socio-cultural setting. The paper is of the view that there is a need for subtle reconstructions and mild adjustments in the use of Igbo proverbs to challenge the discursive discrimination against Igbo women
The language factor in identity politics: An exploratory research
No full textThis paper essentially interrogates the language factor in identity politics. It perceives identity politics as inevitable in societal affairs. Language is viewed from the paper\u27s functionalist perspective, whereby the language concept is interwoven with human existence. The work further investigates what it sees as a dilemma in language deployment under identity politics. The problem of the study thus centers on how language achieves its communicative purposes in its deployment under identity politics. The paper accordingly hypothesizes that the language question is intertwined with identity issues. The methodology of the research is nonquantitative, basically relying on nonnumerical presentation. The theoretical framework is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Under this theoretical template, the article focused on how group power dealings are determined and strengthened through language utilization. The contribution finally concludes that language\u27s communicative purposes can only be achieved in identity politics under mutually beneficial standards or multicultural paradigms
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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