Abstract

Examining the instructional reading strategies that happen in the Bilingual classrooms is needed if we, as educators expect an increase parent or guardian involvement that will support the students' reading development. Research has shown students who have a strong literacy foundation in early elementary years are often successful in later grades Cook, C., Health F., and Thompson, R.L. (2000). The number of ELLs (English Language Learner) increased in U.S. schools, and the literacy gap between ELLs and students who speak English as a first language continues to increase (Rodríguez, 2008). ELLs need to gain oral language skills and literacy in English in an effective manner to gain the same level of proficiency as mainstream students. Identifying effective instructional literacy strategies for children from various linguistic backgrounds will foster in providing suitable instruction to meet ELLs' needs. Examining how teachers strengthen a partnership with caregivers to support K-3 ELLs regarding reading strategies may contribute to the students' reading achievement.

Abstract

Context and discourse intonation have major influence on intended meaning in English-medium product advertisements on radio and television in Nigeria. Previous studies on Nigerian English phonology have confirmed the appropriate use of stress and intonation as the main challenge which many Nigerian speakers of English as a second language hardly manage to overcome. The studies have focused more on rule-based intonation (attitudinal and grammatical) to the neglect of context of use, which is essential to communication. This study, therefore, investigated the use of intonation in radio and television product advertisements in Nigeria in order to determine the primacy of social context in the representation of intonation meaning in advertisements. Using David Brazil's Discourse Intonation (DI) and some acoustic analysis for accurate pitch tracking, the study found out that the allocation of prominence to a word is an advertising model's decision based on context-of-use. There is a preponderant assignment of stress on structural words to achieve contextual prominence in the advertisement data. The proclaiming tones are dominant while the referring tones are few, and are used deliberately to attract the listener's attention. There is also the surprising sparse use of the risefall and fall-rise tones. Where allocated, the referring tone is used as a contextual common ground marker that sometimes needs reactivation. Intonation ambiguity is avoided in the selected advertisements by the prevalent use of the mid-key, which has the function of “additionally informing”. No remarkable difference is observed between the contextual use of intonation in both radio and television advertisements.

Abstract

Oscar Wilde is one of the most hilarious playwrights in the history of English literature. And ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is his masterpiece. With Wilde's humorous and witty language as the starting point and aided by the concordancing software WORDSMITH TOOLS, a detailed analysis was carried out on this comedy from lexical level and syntactical level, interesting and significant findings are found: 1) The comedy is about love and marriage. It mainly focuses on being earnest and is related with the behavior of bunbury. Besides their individuality, all characters have the nature of superficiality and hypocrisy. Each one treats the serious things such as death and religion with triviality, yet regards name and pleasure as things of vital importance. The main theme of the comedy is the duality of Victorian people, who are earnest and elegant in appearance, but superficial and absurd in nature, and who is wearing the mask of manners and telling lies whenever they like. Wilde holds a disapproving attitude against the society by frequently using the words of negative meaning or in the negative context. Some words give new meaning to describe the occurrence of things that cannot be controlled, but people act as if they could be, presenting characters' power in controlling things and other people. All the above statements are justified by lexical features of the text. 2) Wilde has an opposed and ironic attitude to the world he was living in. He knew the upper class, and he knew that the lives they led were so dry, boring, concerned with manners and customs, and so perfectly earnest that it was almost inhuman. Therefore, a lot of negatives appear in the text. High occurrences of negatives also show characters' ideas against convention and people's expectations.

Corpus-assisted literary analysis provides authentic contextual data that show meaningful information in the text and give students an immediate sense of the style of the text. Driven by objective data of linguistic features and the background language, students can see the foregrounding characteristics of a given text and its artistic values and consequently can appreciate the literary work better and have a deeper understanding of the language.

Abstract

In the arena of English as Second Language (ESL), the teachers play the most significant role in the bilingual pattern of contemporary India. For an effective teaching, teachers' attitudes have an important role in their decision-making regarding the type of materials, activities, and instruction they will use in their lessons. This study is an effort to find out various attitudes of teachers towards teaching English grammar and their effects on actual instructional practices. Some researches in this area have been conducted in the context of English teaching in schools in different parts of the world. However, no such study had been found conducted on the teachers in eastern India and so the present attempt was made. The study was conducted on 100 English teachers in both rural and urban areas of the Howrah Sadar subdivision of West Bengal. Data are analysed by using percentages and descriptive statistics. The study found that teachers possess a set of complex, interconnected and sometimes conflicting attitudes towards grammar teaching and the relation between their attitudes and actual classroom practices is complex.

Abstract

In a time of increased accountability for U.S. schools, teachers are working tirelessly to meet the needs of their everchanging and diverse classroom populations. Many of these children come to school with a myriad of learning differences and disabilities. The most noted reading disability in many U.S. classrooms is dyslexia. This qualitative case study examined the self-efficacy of teachers who were trained and used a structured literacy tutoring program that utilized the Orton-Gillingham method of phonetic instruction. The results indicate that with sufficient training teachers' self-confidence improved significantly. Knowledge in teaching strategies may have the greatest impact on teachers' self-efficacy, which in turn, effects instructional planning, instructional implementation, and student achievement.