Racial Conflict in the United States of America : A Deconstructive Perspective on Native Speaker by Changrae Lee

Written about the time of the Golden Venture incident, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker makes a particular reference to that incident, whereby implying that particular immigrants, on the grounds of their racial identities, are mistreated and considered as aliens by some Americas. While some whites discriminate against immigrants, there is widespread ethnic tension between Korean Americans and African Americans. Significantly, racial conflict between Koreans and blacks and the racist attitude of some whites toward immigrants are mirrored in the relationship between the Korean-American protagonist Henry and his American wife Lelia. That is, due to their different racial identities they do not understand each other and they always argue. However, toward the end of the novel, Henry and Lelia come to understand each other. While ethnic conflict between Koreans and blacks and certain whites’ discriminatory attitudes toward immigrants is serious one, the novel suggests the unimportance of racial identity. In other words, the novel concludes that there is no discriminatory treatment of immigrants and, in fact, every one is a native Speaker in America. In the novel there is no message of how racial conflict could be resolved. However, this essay suggests that by investigating how the tension between Henry and Lelia is resolved, one could suggest a solution for the ethnicity problem in America and in real life.

Contemporary Approaches to Translation in the Classroom : A study of students' Attitudes and Strategies

The purpose of this study is to explore the strategies and attitudes of students towards translation in the context of language learning. The informants come from two different classes at an Upper Secondary vocational program. The study was born from the backdrop of discussions among some English teachers representing different theories on translation and language learning, meeting students endeavoring in language learning beyond the confinement of the classroom and personal experiences of translation in language learning. The curriculum and course plan for English at the vocational program emphasize two things of particular interest to our study; integration of the program outcomes and vocational language into the English course - so called meshed learning – and student awareness of their own learning processes. A background is presented of different contrasting methods in translation and language learning that is relevant to our discussion. However, focus is given to contemporary research on reforms within the Comparative Theory, as expressed in Translation in Language and Teaching (TILT), Contrastive Analysis and “The Third Space”. The results of the students’ reflections are presented as attempts to translate two different texts; one lyric and one technical vocational text. The results show a pragmatic attitude among the students toward tools like dictionaries or Google Translate, but also a critical awareness about their use and limits. They appear to prefer the use of first language to the target language when discussing the correct translation as they sought accuracy over meaning. Translation for them was a natural and problem-solving event worth a rightful place in language teaching.

Actitudes hacia el castellano y el catalán : Un estudio sociolingüístico entre veinteañeros y sus padres en el ámbito

This study focuses on the attitudes toward Catalan and Spanish, the two main languages spoken in Barcelona, on the East coast of Spain, in Southwestern Europe. The aim of this study was to compare those attitudes between two generations of informants. The informants of one generation were born 1984-93 and were thus in their twenties at the time of the investigation, in 2013. The aforementioned generation was labelled with the name "Children", whereas their parents were labelled with the name "Parents". The method applied was direct, where the informants had to answer an online survey, and the number of informants that were studied was 15 for each generation, or 30 in total. The conclusion of the study, derived from the results to the aforementioned survey, is that the generation of the Children have a more positive attitude toward Catalan and more negative toward Spanish than the generation of the Parents.

Estudio comparativo de las actitudes hacia elmurciano.

The aim of this study is to measure and analyse the attitudes towards a linguisticvariety called murciano. This variety is a regional standard of Spanish, namely, theSpanish talked in Murcia, a city located in the South of Spain.There are two groups of informants in this study. The first group is composed of12 people from Murcia and the second group consists of 12 people who know thevariety of murciano but are not natives from the city of Murcia. The methodapplied is the indirect method matched guise. The informants listened to fourdifferent recordings of voices acting as either a Spanish speaking person or amurciano speaking person. Ten short questions related with the voices were askedto the informants, who gave their answers on a Likert attitude scale.The results show that the attitudes towards murciano and the standard Spanishdiffer in both groups of informants. The group of natives from Murcia show morepositive attitudes toward the variety murciano than the group of non-natives fromMurcia. However, when the results towards the variety murciano and the standardSpanish are compared with each other, it is the standard Spanish the one thatreceives more positive valuations. In addition, the observations show that thegroup of non-natives from Murcia are more critical and negative in their attitudestoward the different linguistic varieties than the group of natives from Murcia.