"Knock, knock! Is it english or portuguese sign language?"

A presente investigação mostra a importância do contacto de crianças muito jovens com línguas estrangeiras. Este trabalho concentra-se na tentativa de investigar, numa abordagem plurilingue, com enfoque para a Língua Inglesa e a Língua Gestual Portuguesa, a sensibilização de um grupo de alunos do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico para uma língua diferente da sua língua materna. Nesta pesquisa, adotou-se uma postura de investigação-ação, apoiando-se com grande particularidade numa metodologia qualitativa e com menor relevância numa metodologia quantitativa, onde os alunos, através das várias atividades que desenvolveram foram adquirindo diferentes competências nas duas línguas. Isto permitiu aos alunos despertarem todas as suas potencialidades para a aprendizagem destas duas línguas (Língua Inglesa e Língua Gestual Portuguesa), tendo como ponto de partida a sua sensibilização e a aprendizagem de alguns vocábulos. Acreditamos que esta abordagem plurilíngue poderá auxiliar os alunos no desenvolvimento de habilidades linguísticas, cognitivas e pessoais tais como: a intercompreensão, o conhecimento de características específicas de diferentes línguas existentes em seu redor, a comparação linguística entre elas, a sua compreensão lexical, e por fim a competência em relacionar as línguas a culturas, e acima de tudo, o respeito e valorização da diversidade linguística e cultural. Foram utilizadas nas aulas atividades de nível de compreensão e produção oral, num processo de sensibilização e aprendizagem de alguns vocábulos destas línguas, sendo que os resultados foram posteriormente analisados, através de grelhas de observação das atividades, de dois inquéritos por questionário e fotos. Das observações e conclusões retiradas desta análise, confirmou-se que a sensibilização quanto à Língua Inglesa assim como quanto à Língua Gestual Portuguesa promove o desenvolvimento da criança, assim como a valorização da respetiva diversidade linguística e cultural.

Subtitling Chinese cinema: a case study of Zhang Yimou’s films

In recent years, more and more Chinese films have been exported abroad. This thesis intends to explore the subtitling of Chinese cinema into English, with Zhang Yimou’s films as a case study. Zhang Yimou is arguably the most critically and internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker, who has experimented with a variety of genres of films. I argue that in the subtitling of his films, there is an obvious adoption of the domestication translation strategy that reduces or even omits Chinese cultural references. I try to discover what cultural categories or perspectives of China are prone to the domestication of translation and have formulated five categories: humour, politeness, dialect, history and songs and the Peking Opera. My methodology is that I compare the source Chinese dialogue lines with the existing English subtitles by providing literal translations of the source lines, and I will also give my alternative translations that tend to retain the source cultural references better. I also speculate that the domestication strategy is frequently employed by subtitlers possibly because the subtitlers assume the source cultural references are difficult for target language subtitle readers to comprehend, even if they are translated into a target language. However, subtitle readers are very likely to understand more than what the dialogue lines and the target language subtitles express, because films are multimodal entities and verbal information is not the only source of information for subtitle readers. The image and the sound are also significant sources of information for subtitle readers who are constantly involved in a dynamic film-watching experience. They are also expected to grasp visual and acoustic information. The complete omission or domestication of source cultural references might also affect their interpretation of the non-verbal cues. I also contemplate that the translation, which frequently domesticates the source culture carried out by a translator who is also a native speaker of the source language, is ‘submissive translation’.

The Ethics of Eating Animals in Tudor and Stuart Theaters

A pressing challenge for the study of animal ethics in early modern literature is the very breadth of the category “animal,” which occludes the distinct ecological and economic roles of different species. Understanding the significance of deer to a hunter as distinct from the meaning of swine for a London pork vendor requires a historical investigation into humans’ ecological and cultural relationships with individual animals. For the constituents of England’s agricultural networks – shepherds, butchers, fishwives, eaters at tables high and low – animals matter differently. While recent scholarship on food and animal ethics often emphasizes ecological reciprocation, I insist that this mutualism is always out of balance, both across and within species lines. Focusing on drama by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the anonymous authors of late medieval biblical plays, my research investigates how sixteenth-century theaters use food animals to mediate and negotiate the complexities of a changing meat economy. On the English stage, playwrights use food animals to impress the ethico-political implications of land enclosure, forest emparkment, the search for new fisheries, and air and water pollution from urban slaughterhouses and markets. Concurrent developments in animal husbandry and theatrical production in the period thus led to new ideas about emplacement, embodiment, and the ethics of interspecies interdependence.

An Ethics of Refusal: Sympathy, Intimacy and Fidelity in British Romanticism

Despite a current emphasis in Romantic scholarship on intersubjectivity, this study suggests that we still have much to learn about how theories of intersubjectivity operate in Romantic-era writings that focus on the family—the most common vehicle for exploring relationships during the period. By investigating how sympathy, intimacy, and fidelity are treated in the works of Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, and Mary Shelley, this dissertation discovers the presence of an “ethics of refusal” within women’s Romantic-era texts. Texts that promote an ethics of refusal, I argue, almost advocate for a particular mode of relating within a given model of the family as the key to more equitable social relations, but, then, they ultimately refuse to support any particular model. Although drawn towards models of relating that, at first, seem to offer explicit pathways towards a more ethical society, texts that promote an ethics of refusal ultimately reject any program of reform. Such rejection is not unaccountable, but stems from anxieties about appearing to dictate what is best for others when others are, in reality, other than the self. In this dissertation, I draw from feminist literary critiques that focus on ethics; genre-focused literary critiques; and studies of sympathy, intimacy, and fidelity that investigate modes of relating within the context of literary works and reader-textual relations. Psychoanalytic theory also plays an important role within my third chapter on Mary Shelley’s novel Falkner. Scholarship that investigates the dialectical nature of Romantic-era literature informs my entire project. Through theorizing and studying an ethics of refusal, we can more fully understand how intersubjective modes functioned in Romantic literature and discover a Romanticism uniquely committed to attempting to turn dialectical reasoning into a social practice.

Supermarkets and unhealthy food marketing: an international comparison of the content of supermarket catalogues/circulars

BACKGROUND: Supermarket marketing activities have a major influence on consumer food purchases. This study aimed to assess and compare the contents of supermarket marketing circulars from a range of countries worldwide from an obesity prevention perspective. METHODS: The contents of supermarket circulars from major supermarket chains in 12 non-random countries were collected and analysed over an eight week period from July to September 2014 (n=89 circulars with 12,563 food products). Circulars were largely English language and from countries representing most continents. Food products in 25 sub-categories were categorised as discretionary or non-discretionary (core) food or drinks based on the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. The total number of products in each subcategory in the whole circular, and on front covers only, was calculated. RESULTS: Circulars from most countries advertised a high proportion of discretionary foods. The only exceptions were circulars from the Philippines (no discretionary foods) and India (11% discretionary food). Circulars from six countries advertised more discretionary foods than core foods. Front covers tended to include a much greater proportion of healthy products than the circulars overall. CONCLUSIONS: Supermarket circulars in most of the countries examined include a high percentage of discretionary foods, and therefore promote unhealthy eating behaviours that contribute to the global obesity epidemic. A clear opportunity exists for supermarket circulars to promote rather than undermine healthy eating behaviours of populations. Governments need to ensure that supermarket marketing is included as part of broader efforts to restrict unhealthy food marketing.

Games as text, games as action: video games in the english classroom

Contemporary views of literacy, and of English and Language Arts curriculum recognise the importance of digital culture and communication forms in many young people's lives and the multiple forms of literacy students engage with as they work, interact and play. Amongst these, videogames, whether played on PCs, laptops, wiis, or on mobile devices of various kinds stand out as highly popular, engaging and sophisticated emergent cultural forms. Drawing on research in Australian secondary schools over a number of years, this paper describes approaches to working with games in the English classroom, and presents a model for critical games literacy which entails thinking of games as both text and action. It describes the ways in which the model might be used for planning and teaching with and about games, stressing the active nature of games and play, and calling on understandings of literacy as design.

Lost (and found) in translation: learning from German language educators

This essay introduces two presentations (or Vorträge) by Ulf Abraham and Thomas Zabka that were originally published in the German journal, Didaktik Deutsch. I reflect on the complexities of translation and intercultural communication, and ask how we might meaningfully compare the policy environment of one country with that of another. In this era of globalisation and standards-based reforms it is easy to suppose that those reforms are the same everywhere. The essays by Abraham and Zabka, however, provide insights into a policy environment where debates about the importance of language and literature are being played out differently vis-à-vis standards-based reforms than is the case in the Anglophone world. I ask what we can learn from these essays, and how the insights they provide might be applied in an Anglophone context.

English in the digital age: making english digital

Despite the emphasis in the press and elsewhere on the print-based nature of English curriculum, opportunities to develop digital English, with attention to web-based and multimodal forms of text, literacy, location, and activity, are present in the draft national (Australian) curriculum for English, alongside more traditional forms. This paper examines the place of digital and multimodal texts and literacies within the draft paper for the Australian English curriculum, and the possibilities offered by a national curriculum, for exploring and imagining an English for the Digital Age.

Investigating Miami English-Spanish Bilinguals' Treatment of English Deictic Verbs of Motion

This investigation focused on the treatment of English deictic verbs of motion by Spanish-English bilinguals in Miami. Although English and Spanish share significant overlap of the spatial deixis system, they diverge in important aspects. It is not known how these verbs are processed by bilinguals. Thus, this study examined Spanish-English bilinguals’ interpretation of the verbs come, go, bring, and take in English. Forty-five monolingual English speakers and Spanish-English bilinguals participated. Participants were asked to watch video clips depicting motion events and to judge the acceptability of accompanying narrations spoken by the actors in the videos. Analyses showed that, in general, monolinguals and bilinguals patterned similarly across the deictic verbs come, bring, go and take. However, they did differ in relation to acceptability of word order for verbal objects. Also, bring was highly accepted by all language groups across all goal paths, possibly suggesting an innovation in its use.

The McSweeney's Group: Modernist Roots and Contemporary Permutations in Little Magazines

The purpose of this project centered on the influential literary magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Using Bruno Latour’s network theory as well as the methods put forth by Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman to study modernist little magazines, I analyzed the influence McSweeney’s has on contemporary little magazines. I traced the connections between McSweeney’s and other paradigmatic examples of little magazines—The Believer and n+1—to show how the McSweeney’s aesthetic and business practice creates a model for more recent publications. My thesis argued that The Believer continues McSweeney’s aesthetic mission. In contrast, n+1 positioned itself against the McSweeney’s aesthetic, which indirectly created a space within the little magazines for writers, philosophers, and artists to debate the prevailing aesthetic theories of the contemporary period. The creation of this space connects these contemporary magazines back to modernist little magazines, thereby validating my decision to use the methods of Scholes and Wulfman.

Book review: Laurel Kamada, Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being Half in Japan. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010

Arguably, the catalyst for the best research studies using social analysis of discourse is personal ‘lived’ experience. This is certainly the case for Kamada, who, as a white American woman with a Japanese spouse, had to deal first hand with the racialization of her son. Like many other mixed-ethnic parents, she experienced the shock and disap-pointment of finding her child being racialized as ‘Chinese’ in America through peer group taunts, and constituted as gaijin (a foreigner) in his own homeland of Japan. As a member of an e-list of the (Japan) Bilingualism Special Interest Group (BSIG), Kamada learnt that other parents from the English-speaking foreign community in Japan had similar disturbing stories to tell of their mixed-ethnic children who, upon entering the Japanese school system, were mocked, bullied and marginalized by their peers. She men-tions a pervasive Japanese proverb which warns of diversity or difference getting squashed: ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’. This imperative to conform to Japanese behavioural and discursive norms prompted Kamada’s quest to investigate the impact of ‘otherization’ on the identities of children of mixed parentage. In this fascinat-ing book, she shows that this pressure to conform is balanced by a corresponding cele-bration of ‘hybrid’ or mixed identities. The children in her study are also able to negotiate their identities positively as they come to terms with contradictory discursive notions of ‘Japaneseness’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘halfness/doubleness’.The discursive construction of identity has become a central concern amongst researchers across a wide range of academic disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, and most existing work either concentrates on a specific identity cate-gory, such as gender, sexuality or national identity, or else offers a broader discussion of how identity is theorized. Kamada’s book is refreshing because it crosses the usual boundaries and offers divergent insights on identity in a number of ways. First, using the term ‘ethno-gendering’, she examines the ways in which six mixed-ethnic girls living in Japan accomplish and manage the relationship between their gender and ethnic ‘differ-ences’ from age 12 to 15. She analyses in close detail how their actions or displays within certain situated interactions might come into conflict with how they are seen or constituted by others. Second, Kamada’s study builds on contemporary writing on the benefits of hybridity where identities are fluid, flexible and indeterminate, and which contest the usual monolithic distinctions of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. Here, Kamada carves out an original space for her findings. While scholars have often investigated changing identities and language practices of young people who have been geographi-cally displaced and are newcomers to the local language, Kamada’s participants were all born and brought up in Japan, were fluent in Japanese and were relatively proficient in English. Third, the author refuses to conceptualize or theorize identity from a single given viewpoint in preference to others, but in postmodernist spirit draws upon multiple perspectives and frameworks of discourse analysis in order to create different forms of knowledge and understandings of her subject. Drawing on this ‘multi-perspectival’ approach, Kamada examines grammatical, lexical, rhetorical and interactional features from six extensive conversations, to show how her participants position their diverse identities in relation to their friends, to the researcher and to the outside world. Kamada’s study is driven by three clear aims. The first is to find out ‘whether there are any tensions and dilemmas in the ways adolescent girls of Japanese and “white” mixed parentage in Japan identify themselves in terms of ethnicity’. In Chapter 4, she shows how the girls indeed felt that they stood out as different and consequently experienced isolation, marginalization and bullying at school – although they were able to make better sense of this as they grew older, repositioning the bullies as pitiable. The second aim is to ask how, if at all, her participants celebrate their ethnicity, and furthermore, what kind of symbolic, linguistic and social capital they were able to claim for themselves on the basis of their hybrid identities. In Chapter 5, Kamada shows how the girls over time were able to constitute themselves as insiders while constituting ‘the Japanese’ as outsiders, and their network of mixed-ethnic friends was a key means to achieve this. In Chapter 6, the author develops this potential celebration of the girls’ mixed ethnicity by investigating the privileges they perceived it afforded them – for example, having the advantage of pos-sessing English proficiency and intercultural ‘savvy’ in a globalized world. Kamada’s third aim is to ask how her participants positioned themselves and performed their hybrid identities on the basis of their constituted appearance: that is, how the girls saw them-selves based on how they looked to others. In Chapter 7, the author shows that, while there are competing discourses at work, the girls are able to take up empowering positions within a discourse of ‘foreigner attractiveness’ or ‘a white-Western female beauty’ discourse, which provides them with a certain cachet among their Japanese peers. Throughout the book, Kamada adopts a highly self-reflexive perspective of her own position as author. For example, she interrogates the fact that she may have changed the lived reality of her six participants during the course of her research study. As the six girls, who were ‘best friends’, lived in different parts of the Morita region of Japan, she had to be proactive in organizing six separate ‘get-togethers’ through the course of her three-year study. She acknowledges that she did not collect ‘naturally occurring data’ but rather co-constructed opportunities for the girls to meet and talk on a regular basis. At these meetings, she encouraged the girls to discuss matters of identity, prompted by open-ended interview questions, by stimulus materials such as photos, articles and pic-tures, and by individual tasks such as drawing self-portraits. By giving her participants a platform in this way, Kamada not only elicited some very rich spoken data but also ‘helped in some way to shape the attitudes and self-images of the girls positively, in ways that might not have developed had these get-togethers not occurred’ (p. 221). While the data she gathers are indeed rich, it may well be asked whether there is a mismatch between the girls’ frank and engaging accounts of personal experience, and the social constructionist academic register in which these are later re-articulated. When Kamada writes, ‘Rina related how within the more narrow range of discourses that she had to draw on in her past, she was disempowered and marginalized’ (p. 118), we know that Rina’s actual words were very different. Would she really recognize, understand and agree with the reported speech of the researcher? This small omission of self-reflexivity apart – an omission which is true of most lin-guistic ethnography conducted today – Kamada has written a unique, engaging and thought-provoking book which offers a model to future discourse analysts investigating hybrid identities. The idea that speakers can draw upon competing discourses or reper-toires to constitute their identities in contrasting, creative and positive ways provides linguistic researchers with a clear orientation by which to analyse the contradictions of identity construction as they occur across time in different discursive contexts

Making the Men of Tomorrow: American Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1965 – 1974

Suggesting that the political diversity of American science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a response to the dominance of social liberalism throughout the 1940s and 1950s, I argue in Making the Men of Tomorrow that the development of new hegemonic masculinities in science fiction is a consequence of political speculation. Focusing on four representative and influential texts from the 1960s and early 1970s, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, this thesis explores the relationship between different conceptions of hegemonic masculinity and three separate but related political ideologies: the social ethic, market libertarianism, and socialist libertarianism. In the first two chapters in which I discuss Dick’s novels, I argue that Dick interrogates organizational masculinity as part of a larger project that suggests the inevitable infeasibility of both the social ethic and its predecessor, social liberalism. In the next chapter, I shift my attention to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a way of showing how, unlike Dick, other authors of the 1960s and early 1970s sought to move beyond social liberalism by imagining how new political ideologies, in this case market libertarianism, might change the way men see themselves. Having demonstrated how the libertarian potential of Heinlein’s novel is ultimately undermined by its insistent and uncompromising biological determinism, I then discuss how Le Guin’s The Dispossessed uses the socialist libertarianism of the moon Anarres to suggest a more egalitarian form of masculinity, one that makes possible, to some extent at least, a future in which men might embrace not only the mutual aid of socialism, but also the primacy of individual rights that is at the heart of all forms of libertarianism and liberalism.

A kingdom near lost: English military recovery in Ireland, 1600-03

Ireland was rarely a peaceful realm for Elizabeth I, but Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and his allies brought the edifice of English power in Ireland to the brink of collapse. The war in Ireland at the end of the sixteenth century devoured money, lives and reputations at a prodigious rate. However seven years of Irish success ended when in 1600 the Queen appointed Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy as Lord Deputy. Success replaced failure, but only after the new Lord Deputy transformed English strategy and rebuilt the army into an instrument fit for purpose.

Digital literacy matters. Increasing workforce productivity through blended English language programmes

Current workplace demands newer forms of literacies that go beyond the ability to decode print. These involve not only competence to operate digital tools, but also the ability to create, represent, and share meaning in different modes and formats; ability to interact, collaborate and communicate effectively using digital tools, and engage critically with technology for developing one’s knowledge, skills, and full participation in civic, economic, and personal matters. This essay examines the application of the ecology of resources (EoR) model for delivering language learning outcomes (in this case, English) through blended classroom environments that use contextually available resources. The author proposes the implementation of the EoR model in blended learning environments to create authentic and sustainable learning environments for skilling courses. Applying the EoR model to Indian skilling instruction contexts, the article discusses how English language and technology literacy can be delivered using contextually available resources through a blended classroom environment. This would facilitate not only acquisition of language and digital literacy outcomes, but also consequent content literacy gain to a certain extent. This would ensure satisfactory achievement of not only communication/language literacy and technological literacy, but also active social participation, lifelong learning, and learner autonomy.

Editorial: English afloat on a digital sea

In the 21st Century, new technologies, in particular interactive multimedia and the internet, challenge many aspects of our teaching practice and assumptions. What counts as knowledge, what counts as literacy, the ways we teach, and even the relationships we form are coloured and reshaped by changing cultural and social practices, such as global commerce and ICTs. These issues, and the relationships between them, need to be considered anew. Two current frames of reference for thinking about these changes and their implications for subject English are the notion of an "information revolution" (Castells 1996) and the changing nature of literacy, with its shift towards multiliteracies, or thinking of literacy as design (New London Group, 2000). Both frames have significant implications for how we conceptualise English curriculum (for example, literacy, texts and assessment), for how we re-imagine English teaching, and for the ways in which we ask students to work with and within digital culture and new media.