1,720,961 research outputs found
Views of teachers of English as a second language (ESL) on the use of literature on learners' academic writing: A case of senior secondary schools in the Khomas educational region
No full textA thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Education.This study is a depiction and portrayal of the views of Namibian Grade 11 and 12 teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) on the use of English literature in ESL classrooms. The study also presents the rationale and conceptualisation underlying the significance of the use of English literature in the quest to improve English proficiency levels of students. The study was premised on the social constructivist and communicative Approaches which are anchored in the Learner Centered Philosophy; a vanguard of Namibia’s epistemology for language learning and teaching. A questionnaire that contained both qualitative and quantitative items was used to gather data. The respondents in general agreed that the study of literature could be used to enhance learner proficiency in the ESL classroom. They agreed that the benefits of literature in an ESL classroom are multidimensional. These benefits include, among others; attainment of pragmatic skills, grammar and vocabulary expansion, extensive reading motivation, intercultural awareness, language skills and critical thinking skills
Herstory, subjectivity and the public sphere in female narratives of the liberation struggle in Namibia: The case of Ndeshi Namhila, Lydia Shaketange, Libertine Amathila and Tshiwa Trudie Amulungu
No full textA dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in EnglishThis study was an exploration of the autobiographical representation of the experiences of four Namibian women who participated in the country’s liberation struggle. The premise of this study was to interrogate how the autobiography genre was used to depict ‘herstory’, subjectivity and the public sphere in these female narratives. Herstory in this study portrays autobiography as a tool of narrating women’s personal history, analysed from the postcolonial-feminist perspective; subjectivity depicts how these women represented themselves as makers of history, taking cognisance of the fact that each individual is unique. Though they all participated in the liberation struggle, they exclusively narrate herstory as individuals through experience, memory, identity, space, and embodiment; as the material/ physical body of the narrator, “the body is a site of autobiographical knowledge, as well as a textual surface upon which a person’s life is inscribed (Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 37) and agency. The study was premised on the postcolonial-feminist and autobiography theories. These two theories helped in critiquing the distinctiveness of each narrative analysed in this study. The study employed a qualitative, desktop research design, whereby four Namibian female autobiographies were critiqued. The selected autobiographies were; The Price of Freedom by Namhila (1997), Walking the Boeing 707 by Shaketange (2009), Making a Difference by Amathila (2010) and Taming my Elephant by Amulungu (2016). The purposive sampling procedure using the criterion sampling technique was employed to select the four autobiographies analysed in this study. These works were chosen firstly, because they best informed the research questions presented in this study. The works tell ‘herstory’ during and after the colonial period. Also, through purposive sampling, the researcher was able to select autobiographies that provided the richest information as these autobiographies were most nteresting and manifested the characteristics that were closely related to the topic of the study. Critical concepts and issues in the works were identified and interpreted using the postcolonial feminist and autobiography theories. The theory of postcolonial feminist provides a useful account of how women from third world countries make a strong case against the general Western feminist theory that had for a long time attempted to exclusively advocate for experiences of all women in the world. The autobiography theory is also relevant to this study because the development of women autobiography in general and the African women autobiography in particular challenges the classical conceptualisation of the genre of autobiography as proposed by Gusdorf (1956).
The findings of this study revealed that human agency is ubiquitous because despite the different places that the authors lived in during the apartheid era, their human instincts for survival led them into exile in the quest for Namibian independence. The narrators successfully negotiated the public sphere despite the challenges that sometimes overwhelmed them in their private spheres. It was concluded in this study that women tend to portray their identities as relational to others. Therefore, the analysed autobiographies’ ‘I’ is not only personal but it tends to be inclusive of all significant others in the life experiences of the narrators. Consequently, the personal lives of the narrators are exposed to the public through the autobiography genre which eventually finds its way into the public domain. This study concluded that autobiography was used as a powerful tool to articulate herstory, subjectivity and the public sphere by the narrators of the selected autobiographies in order to claim their places in the liberation struggle of Namibia and nation building thereof
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
Namibian multilingualism and sustainable development
No full textThis position paper provides a critical discussion on the significance
of indigenous languages in development in Namibia. The importance
of the relationship between language and society is unquestionable
as language in general allows communication to take place in
society. The premise of this line of reasoning is to argue that though
multilingualism may provide a challenging linguistic scenario for a
country like Namibia which has a fragmented population running
across different ethnic groups, the role of native languages in
economic and social development should not be ignored as native
languages can perpetuate sustainable development. This paper
used qualitative content analysis, employing a desktop examination
of secondary sources that pertain to language and economic
development. As a desktop study, the data was collected through
critical reading and analysis of language and development literature
Namibian multilingualism and sustainable development
Get PDFThis position paper provides a critical discussion on the significance of indigenous languages in development in Namibia. The importance of the relationship between language and society is unquestionable as language in general allows communication to take place in society. The premise of this line of reasoning is to argue that though multilingualism may provide a challenging linguistic scenario for a country like Namibia which has a fragmented population running across different ethnic groups, the role of native languages in economic and social development should not be ignored as native languages can perpetuate sustainable development. This paper used qualitative content analysis, employing a desktop examination of secondary sources that pertain to language and economic development. As a desktop study, the data was collected through critical reading and analysis of language and development literature
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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