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Intercultural Communication: Sociocultural Rapprochement in the International Class. The international class is a nexus of manifest linguistic and cultural proclivities of identity making, even while it mirrors the language contact phenomena occurring worldwide as a direct consequence of the growth in the spread of English across the globe and as the lingua franca of higher education. This paper explores the consequential theoretical assumptions as to how the curricular scenarios need to be adapted culture-wise so as to avoid miscommunication and identity conflicts and ensure intercultural harmony in the ever increasing number of multi-ethnic classes of international higher education programmes.
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Preserving and Transcending Ethnic Identity as a Means of Personal and Collective Empowerment. Considering that most societies nowadays live under the sign of globalization and wide-spread consumerism, one may justly wonder whether the distinct ethnic and/or national identities will retain their importance in the years to come, whether people will still look to their old language, religion, traditions, and myths for guidance. I believe that these elements are still strong enough to generate a sense of kinship, empowerment and comfort given by common identity, which may help each person find the values, he/she needs to confront an impersonal bureaucratic, money-driven, shallow society.
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Culture in Spanish as a Foreign Language Classes. This article pleads for the use of cultural elements in Spanish as a foreign language classes due to the close connection between the different components of an efficient communication: language, social, cultural, discursive, strategic skills, that are involved when interacting with native speakers in concrete, real contexts. Teaching and learning cultural elements contribute to the acquisition of knowledge, improve communication skills, open windows to a new world and create values and expectations, which is one of the objectives of education.
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The Complexity of the Self in Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai. The aim of the present paper is to examine several facets of feminine and masculine identity in Eliza Haywood’s novel Adventures of Eovaai, and to demonstrate that, in the woman writer’s view, the complexity of the self, of personal identity is ensured by the body/mind/soul triad.
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Elements of Pragmatics in Political Discourse. Politics is about “language in context.” Put simply, there could be no political discourse outside a political context and without the support of language. Seen from this perspective, pragmatics plays a decisive role in the process of political communication. Still, the most interesting part is to detect these elements of pragmatics in political discourse and to analyse if they are used properly, that is, in accordance with pragmatic laws. Of course, the speaker may be or may not be aware of all these pragmatic rules, most of them “squeezed” into discourse at the well-nigh intuitive level of common-sense, but if we detect that they are broken too often, we might talk about cases of linguistic manipulation.
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Strategies for Enhancing Geography Students Communication Skills. In an era of technology and globalization, communication plays a major role. We may say that helping students to develop their communication skills in English is the need of the hour. On the other hand, selecting the most effective strategies and the most appropriate pedagogies to enable students to enhance their communication abilities is a real challenge for every ESP teacher. The main advantage of an ESP teacher is the fact that their learners are adults who are interested in their subject-matter field which provides them the meaningful context. Therefore, it is easier to motivate and help them, through various strategies, to become confident and proficient speakers of English. In communicative language teaching, there are various techniques used on a large scale in the classroom to achieve this goal: pair and group work, role-play, task and fluency-based activities etc. The aim of this paper is to present some strategies, adapted to Geography students’ needs, I use in my ESP classes. These ‘methods’ are meant to help learners to expand vocabulary, to improve fluency, to exhibit confidence and enthusiasm while using the English language, in other words, to communicate better.
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Dan Douglas, Assessing Languages for Specific Purposes, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, XIII + 311 pp. COLUMNA, no 20 / 2014, 113 p., Romanian Language and Culture University of Turku, Finland Théa Picquet, Florence, berceau de la Renaissance, Aix-en-Provence, Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015, 170 p.
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Technology-Enhanced Communication in Business English (BE) – A Four-Year Project. The study presents the results of using integrated blog-writing for four years with the aim of extending BE students’ productive and receptive skills. The online component provided opportunities for collaboration, increased visibility of student feed-back and consideration of individual learning styles. Content analysis of blog posts, comments, reflections and interviews demonstrate that technology-enhanced learning was the preferred learning style and increased the quantity and quality of language learning, student motivation and satisfaction.
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Dysphemisms for Ethnicity: Cautionary Labelling of Disparaging Ethnic Words in Some Romanian Dictionaries. The present article is an attempt to investigate the policies of inclusion and labelling of derogatory ethnic words in nine major dictionaries of Romanian. After providing a brief overview of recent theories of ethnicity and identity, and of some controversies over definitions of ethnic words in Romanian dictionaries, I shall examine the treatment of 40 terms of ethnic derision and abuse. I thus aim to discuss and assess the extent to which disparaging ethnic labels are properly marked for negative attitude in Romanian dictionaries.
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Cultural Communication in European Advertising: Addressing Identity through the “Made-In” Effect. Nowadays expansion of advertising in European markets is primarily a matter of economic development and a proof of market heterogeneity. Even if the European space consists of a common identity, the communication process is hardly a homogeneous entity. In this respect, the paper will analyze the framework of advertising representation towards European customers and the premises that allow a cultural discourse to cover distinct values and norms. Having decided upon the framework of reference, it is salient to discuss the relevance of the “made-in effect” that producer countries instill when advertising products in European markets.
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Images and Places of Memory in Herta Müller’s Prose. The current paper applies the concept of transfer-images and seeks to determine the role they take on in a memory discourse. Transfer-images become, in the case of authors who transit several spaces and languages, mobile archives of individual and European memory (see Assmann, 2006). In short, transfer-images are narrative vehicles that contain and retain, metaphorically, the characters’ mental and physical relocation. Transfer-images transport the traumatic dimension of such an experience, by configuring the latter spatially and temporally. Transfer-images can signalize, on a textual level, other traumas as they are mechanisms that coagulate and display traumatic experiences. The way in which historical and political tensions (in this case Romanian communism) reflect on language and on the hybrid imaginary of authors that relocate, like Herta Müller, can only be traced by discussing a fundamental issue at hand: such authors write and construct places that do not exist in the language they write.
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Romanian as a Foreign Language in the Context of Language Assessment in Europe. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is at the basis of a coherent system of assessment of language competence. The assessment of Romanian as a foreign language can benefit from the premises of quality offered by the relationing with such a system. The present study shows some of the steps taken in this sense at the Department of Romanian language, culture and civilisation from the Faculty of Letters in Cluj-Napoca. Our intention is to make available, quite soon, a complete system of assessment for any person who would like to verify and certify their knowledge of Romanian as a foreign language.
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Women’s Condition and Sexuality in Jacqueline Harpman’s Work. The objective of the present article is to point out the tight relationship between the way in which Jacqueline Harpman’s female characters experience their sexuality and their perception of women’s condition. First, we discuss certain theoretical aspects in order to show that sexuality is a sociocultural construction to a large extent and that it is an important aspect of women’s condition. Then, we prove that sexuality is one of the domains in which the female characters of this writer manifest their revolt against the cultural constraints imposed on women by traditional femininity.
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CLIL Teaching: A History Lesson Framework. One goal of the current study was to give an example of a CLIL lesson in the topic of history. Content and Language Integrated Learning is the name given to a kind of teaching and learning where the students study a subject and, at the same time, learn the language they need to understand and talk about the subject in the second language. It is different from ESP (English for Special Purposes) that makes use of English in a particular context related to employment needs. The study provides an extended presentation of the course content in order to give background information for the subject. The history course focuses on Zionism in Romania and on the development of the Zionist press in this country.
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Tandem as a Motivational Strategy in foreign Language Learning. The following article is based on the analysis of the accounts given by a group of students Francophone and Romanian students who have participated in the Tandem project implemented at the Medicine and Pharmacy in Cluj in collaboration with the Babes-Bolyai University, in 2013 and 2014. The students’ answers showthat the intercultural exchange with a native speaker facilitated a clearer point of view on the respective country and culture. It led to bonding and to an increased motivation in second language learning. The authors’ conclusion is that tandem learning, seen as complementary to the traditional language class, is an innovative and efficient motivational strategy.
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Pre-Service Students’ Perspectives on the Changing Roles of Teachers in the Digital Age. The use of digital technologies as pedagogical tools offers meaningful and diverse possibilities for teaching and learning foreign languages. Still, in order to integrate efficiently digital technologies in education, teachers need to make proof of their digital competence. Moreover, digital technologies could also be perceived as a cultural hub since they enable users to have a multileveled contact with various socio-cultural contexts. In today’s digital world, the teacher is required to question, in this new and dynamic learning environment, the relationship between self, identity and language.
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