Language use and language attitudes in Malawian universities

This study aims to investigate patterns of language use and language attitudes amongst students in Malawian universities. This will highlight whether language issues affect Malawians’ ability to engage with tertiary education. It has been claimed that ineffective language policies in developing countries restrict people’s ability to access systems such as education. As a result, this has a negative impact on their own, and their country's, development. Specifically, Malawi frequently has the lowest rates of university enrolment worldwide and is consistently ranked amongst the world’s poorest countries. Recent language policy changes within Malawi have brought the issue of language use within education to the fore, with increased debate over whether English or indigenous languages are suitable for use in education. Through targeting university students across Malawi’s universities using semistructured interviews, data was collected to illustrate aspects of the sociolinguistic situation within Malawian universities. The results reveal that both English and indigenous languages are used within the university environment, while also suggesting that issues do arise from language use within university. While students recognise both positive and negative aspects of using each language, they are generally more favourable towards the use of English as a medium of instruction within university

Plain reasons why neither Dr. Watts' Imitations of the Psalms, nor his other poems, nor any other human composition, ought to be used in the praises of the great God our Saviour--but, that a metre version of the book of Psalms, examined, with wise and critical care by pious and learned divines, and found by them to be as near the Hebrew metre Psalms, as the idiom of the English language would admit, ought to be used.

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Orthographic regularization in Early Modern English: Grapheme distribution and vowel length indication

The present study is an attempt at assessing the level of consistency in the orthographic systems of selected sixteenth and seventeenth-century printers and at tracing the influence that normative writings could have potentially exerted on them. The approach taken here draws upon the philological tradition of examining and comparing several texts written in the same language, but produced at different times. The study discusses the orthography of the editions of The Schoole of Vertue, a manual of good conduct for children, published between 1557 and 1687. The orthographic variables taken into account fall into two criteria: the distribution and functional load of the selected graphemes and the indication of vowel length.

Cross-linguistic influences in the phonetic and lexical component in English, Baque and Spanish: Contextual and individual factors in language acquisition and attrition.

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Language, discourse and politics

After discussing the meaning of the word politics, this paper shows that there are four possible approaches to the issue of the relationships between language, discourse and politics: a) the intrinsic political nature of language; b) the relations of power between discourses and their political dimension; c) the relations of power between languages and the political dimension of their usage and; d) linguistic policies. This paper addresses only the first two of these items. Languages have an intrinsically political nature because they subject their speakers to their order. The acts of silencing operationalized in discourse manifest a relation of power. The spread of discourses in the social space is also subject to the order of power. The use of language may be the space of pertinence, but is also that of exclusion, separation and even the elimination of the other. Therefore, language is not a neutral communication tool, but it is permeated by politics, by power. Because of the dislocations that it produces, literature is a form of swindling language, unveiling the powers that are imprinted on it.

Complex language functions and subcortical mechanisms: evidence from Huntington's disease and patients with non-thalamic subcortical lesions

The neuropathological changes associated with Huntington's disease (HD) are most marked in the head of the caudate nucleus and, to a lesser extent, in the putamen and globus pallidus, suggesting that at least part of the language impairments found in patients with HD may result from non-thalamic subcortical (NTS) pathology. The present study aimed to test the hypothesis that a signature profile of impaired language functions is found in patients who have sustained damage to the non-thalamic subcortex, either focally induced or resulting from neurodegenerative pathology. The language abilities of a group of patients with Huntington's disease (n=13) were compared with those of an age- and education-matched group of patients with chronic NTS lesions following stroke (n=13) and a non-neurologically impaired control group (n=13). The three groups were compared on language tasks that assessed both primary and more complex language abilities. The primary language battery consisted of The Western Aphasia Battery and The Boston Naming Test, whilst the more complex cognitive-linguistic battery employed selected subtests from The Test of Language Competence-Expanded, The Test of Word Knowledge and The Word Test-Revised. On many of the tests of primary language function from the Western Aphasia Battery, both the HD and NTS participants performed in a similar manner to the control participants. The language performances of the HD participants were significantly more impaired (p<0.05 using modified Bonferroni adjustments) than the control group, however, on various lexico-semantic tasks (e. g. the Boston Naming Test and providing definitions), on both single-word and sentence-level generative tasks (e. g. category fluency and formulating sentences), and on tasks which required interpretation of ambiguous, figurative and inferential meaning. The difficulties that patients with HD experienced with tasks assessing complex language abilities were strikingly similar, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to the language profile produced by NTS participants. The results provide evidence to suggest that a signature language profile is associated with damage to the non-thalamic subcortex resulting from either focal neurological insult or a degenerative disease.

Sharing best practices in introducing and teaching ethics principles to public administration employees : research report

O projeto, financiado pelo Programa Aprendizagem ao Longo da Vida, decorreu entre 1 de agosto de 2011 e 31 de julho de 2013 e foi coordenado pelo Instituto de Administração Pública de Praga, tendo como parceiros a Escola de Economia e Direito de Berlim, a Escola Nacional de Administração Pública da Polónia e o INA, de Portugal. A coordenação portuguesa do estudo esteve a cargo da Prof. Doutora Helena Rato e da Dra. Matilde Gago, com a colaboração do Prof. Doutor César Madureira e da Dra. Margarida Quintela, ex investigadores do INA, atualmente na DGAEP.

Marketing education, distance learning and hypermedia : teaching 'current issues in marketing' in a virtual campus

This article reports on a project at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC: The Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona) to develop an innovative package of hypermedia-based learning materials for a new course entitled 'Current Issues in Marketing'. The UOC is a distance university entirely based on a virtual campus. The learning materials project was undertaken in order to benefit from the advantages which new communication technologies offer to the teaching of marketing in distance education. The article reviews the main issues involved in incorporating new technologies in learning materials, the development of the learning materials, and their functioning within the hypermedia based virtual campus of the UOC. An empirical study is then carried out in order to evaluate the attitudes of students to the project. Finally, suggestions for improving similar projects in the future are put forward.

Variables que incideixen en el coneixement de català i castellà de l'alumnat estranger a Catalunya: un estudi amb alumnat de sisè de primària

El domini de la llengua escolar apareix en totes les polítiques educatives com el tema central a través del qual s’ha d’incidir per garantir la igualtat i la cohesió social, ja que l’èxit escolar passa per desenvolupar una bona competència en la llengua vehicular de l’ensenyament (OECD 2008). A Catalunya, tot i els esforços destinats, els resultats lingüístics de l’alumnat estranger continuen essent molt més baixos que els de l’alumnat nacional (Consell Superior d’Avaluació del Sistema Educatiu 2009). No obstant això, hi ha molt pocs estudis que hagin analitzat els factors que s’amaguen darrere dels resultats lingüístics de l’alumnat estranger. Amb aquest objectiu en ment, l’article presenta les dades d’una recerca que pretén aprofundir les variables que incideixen en el coneixement de català i castellà escrit de l’alumnat estranger escolaritzat en 57 escoles de primària repartides pel territori de Catalunya

Is there a relationship between bilingual language switching and executive functions in bilingualism? Introducing a within-group analysis approach

Several studies have suggested a bilingual advantage in executive functions, presumably due to bilinguals' massive practice with language switching that requires executive resources, but the results are still somewhat controversial. Previous studies are also plagued by the inherent limitations of a natural groups design where the participant groups are bound to differ in many ways in addition to the variable used to classify them. In an attempt to introduce a complementary analysis approach, we employed multiple regression to study whether the performance of 30- to 75-year-old FinnishSwedish bilinguals (N = 38) on tasks measuring different executive functions (inhibition, updating, and set shifting) could be predicted by the frequency of language switches in everyday life (as measured by a language switching questionnaire), L2 age of acquisition, or by the self-estimated degree of use of both languages in everyday life. Most consistent effects were found for the set shifting task where a higher rate of everyday language switches was related to a smaller mixing cost in errors. Mixing cost is thought to reflect top-down management of competing task sets, thus resembling the bilingual situation where decisions of which language to use has to be made in each conversation. These findings provide additional support to the idea that some executive functions in bilinguals are affected by a lifelong experience in language switching and, perhaps even more importantly, suggest a complementary approach to the study of this issue.