English Studies at NBU

The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature - Book Review

2024-06-22T19:55:55+00:00

Book Details

Title: The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature

Author: Paul Tenngart

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 249 pages

Year of publication: 2024

ISBN:
978-1-5013-8212-3 (hardback),

978-1-5013-8213-0 (eBook),

978-1-5013-8214-7 (PDF)

Academic Integrity Policies in HEIs Across Cultures

2024-06-22T19:56:28+00:00

Academic integrity is a cornerstone of higher education, ensuring that students engage in honest and ethical practices in their pursuit of knowledge. The implementation of academic integrity policies varies across countries, reflecting the unique cultural, societal, and educational contexts of each nation. This article compares academic integrity policies in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada to those in Bulgaria, highlighting the similarities and differences that exist between these diverse educational landscapes. The study applies the well-known methodology by Bretag et al. (2011) whereby an exemplary academic integrity model is evaluated on the basis of five components, namely access, approach, responsibility, detail and support. This methodology is enriched by a modification suggested by Perkins and Roe (2023) in which a sixth component is added – technological explicitness, which involves the necessity to include and constantly update information and provide guidelines about new technologies.

Innovation Approaches to Inclusive Education in Europe – The Impact of Second Chance Schools

2024-06-22T19:56:25+00:00

This article presents research and findings related to the Second Chance Schools - an innovative approach which is gaining strength and popularity in recent years but is almost unknown in Bulgaria. The documentary research, the analysis of interviews of the various actors and the online surveys during the project revealed a set of characteristics of Second Chance Schools common to most countries in Europe. The study reveals that in the countries where the SCS approach has been applied, early school leavers’ rates are going down.

Four Innovative Teaching Methods. Is There a Place for Post-Pedagogy?

2024-06-22T19:56:22+00:00

The article examines the need for a new pedagogical framework in the context of contemporary higher education, influenced by digital innovations and generational change. It introduces four innovative pedagogical approaches – Description of an Object, Humanities Laboratory, Venus of Slatina, and Time Machine – which serve as a basis for discussing 'post-pedagogy'. The approaches are united by the goal of achieving priorities such as interdisciplinary training, critical thinking, and the encouragement of curiosity. By proposing the integration of these methods, the article aims to draw attention to the changed landscape of the educational field.

Academic ESP Courses in a Hybrid Mode: Attitudes and Perceptions

2024-06-22T19:56:19+00:00

Developing academic ESP courses in a hybrid mode has come to the forefront of the educational agenda due to social and economic reasons: technological advance followed by the emergence of new communication, business and education technologies; new generations of learners who grow up in virtual reality rather than in real life; commercialisation of education; changes in workplaces and business organisations; a pandemic that resulted in increased use of the electronic and hybrid modes of interacting and working. In light of these circumstances, the research on the key actors in the educational process – learners and teachers – has gained importance and has become the reason to initiate a study of these actors’ attitudes and perceptions with regard to the academic ESP courses in a hybrid mode. The article presents and discusses the results from a survey conducted within this study and related to the preparation of reference criteria for course design in terms of parameters. Data analysis has implications for the educational sector in terms of language and subject course development, as well as of the introduction of relevant policies in higher education.

English Medium Instruction in Higher Education: Global Trends, Challenges, and the Call for Multilingual Approaches

2024-06-22T19:56:17+00:00

This review article examines the widespread adoption of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in higher education, driven by globalization and the need to prepare students for the international job market. While EMI aims to enhance English proficiency and academic and employment prospects, it also presents challenges in terms of linguistic equity, pedagogical effectiveness, and the academic success of students. Through a synthesis of research, this review explores the implications and challenges of EMI and scrutinizes the assumption that EMI inherently improves English proficiency alongside content learning. The article also critiques the monolingual ideology of EMI policies and advocates for the recent call by researchers for a multilingual approach that includes translanguaging practices to better accommodate the linguistic diversity of student populations. In doing so, it highlights the need for a critical reassessment of EMI implementation based on the suggestion that by integrating students’ wider linguistic resources, EMI can evolve from its monolingual origins to embrace a more effective and equitable multilingual framework.

Strategies for Teaching Written Language to Students with Attention Deficits

2024-06-22T19:56:12+00:00

The issue of including students with attention deficits in the educational process is a highly relevant pedagogical challenge due to the high prevalence of these disorders. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most common condition, but attention deficits can also arise from social causes, such as experiencing psychologically traumatic situations like war. This article presents key strategies for improving written language skills in students with attention deficits of various etiologies and comorbid disorders to facilitate their inclusion in the educational process. Additionally, presented are the results of a two-stage study confirming the practical effectiveness of these strategies.

The Impact of Authentic Listening-Viewing Materials on ESL University Students’ Listening Comprehension Skills

2024-06-22T19:56:09+00:00

The study investigates the effects of authentic listening-viewing and textbook listening material on ESL university students' listening comprehension skills. The experimental and control groups, that consist of second-year university students, completed pre- and past-tests. The pre-test showed approximately the same level of listening comprehension skills in the experimental and control groups. The result of the post-test does not show a significant impact of authentic listening-viewing material on listening comprehension of the experimental group. Employing the post-questionnaire, that the experimental group filled out, we determined the challenges, such as speakers’ tempo and accents. However, students have a positive attitude to such authentic aids. These findings confirm the constant difficulties caused by implementing listening-viewing material and indicate students’ positive perception of authentic aids. The study also proves that the regular employment of authentic listening-viewing materials decreases anxiety of the experimental group and improves confidence when working on authentic videos.

Language Brokering in Healthcare Settings in Spain: An Insight Based on Testimonies

2024-06-22T19:56:06+00:00

There were 6,491,502 foreign residents living in Spain in January 2024, a number that indicates a significant increase since the beginning of the 21st century. Among this foreign population, the largest communities are Moroccans, Romanians and British, whose mother tongue is not Spanish. According to the results from several studies conducted over the last decades, when these allophone residents use the Spanish healthcare services, they frequently ask their children to help them communicate with healthcare providers through linguistic and cultural mediation, even when professional interpreting or mediation services are available. How did these children feel while mediating for their parents in this context? Did they have any negative experiences? We intend to provide answers to these questions through semi-structured individual interviews with adults who had mediated for their parents in healthcare settings in Spain when they were children or young adults. These answers contribute to a clear understanding of the consequences of language brokering, thus promoting the use of professional interpreting and mediation services in these settings.

Henry Holdship Ware: a U.S. Military Interpreter, a Soviet Spy, and an Economist

2024-06-22T19:56:03+00:00

This article looks at the life of Henry Holdship Ware (1908-1999), the grandson of the founder of Atlanta University. Captain Henry H. Ware was an aide and interpreter to Major General John Deane, Chief of the U.S. Military Mission to the Soviet Union during World War 2. In this capacity, he was an interpreter with the U.S. Army assigned to the Tripartite Conference in Moscow (1943) and Conferences at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), and a liaison officer and interpreter during Operation Frantic, a joint American-Soviet campaign of shuttle bombing missions in Poltava, Ukraine, in June–September 1944. He was also present at the official surrender of the armed forces of Nazi Germany at Karlshorst on May 8, 1945, and interpreted toasts at the banquet of celebration after the ceremony. Henry Ware learnt Russian during his five-year stay as a student at Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, where he studied economics and was recruited by the NKVD to report on the American community in Moscow. Back in the USA, he was independently recruited by the Golos-Bentley Soviet espionage network under the codename ‘Vick”. In 1975, probably inspired by his study of the Soviet economy, he founded the Useful Services Exchange (USE), a community-based organization in Reston, Virginia, enabling neighbors to help each other through the exchange of services. The discussion draws on available visuals, memoirs, newspaper sources, and declassified documents.

Narcissist Traits and Transfiguration of Domestic Territory in Anne Tyler's “Saint Maybe”

2024-06-22T19:56:00+00:00

Men and women in the domestic territory are predominantly presented as the main sources of family in most of the contemporary American novels. Yet their significance is portrayed with multitudes of familial responsibilities in nurturing their children. Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe appraises the familiar theme of ordinary people and their encounter with sufferings to culminate in transfiguration of domestic territory. This paper displays the outlook of ordinary people in Saint Maybe to prevent them from falling astray. More crucially, the framework of the paper lays its emphasis on how Ian Bedloe sheds his narcissistic traits to capture the attention of his brother’s children in the domestic sphere after the death of their parents. Therefore, this paper purports to bring out the effect of narcissistic traits in which Tyler has ingrained a real and a fervent tone about religion to protect Ian Bedloe as a surrogate father.

Native American History as Counter-Discourse in James Welch’s Narratives: The Examples of “Fools Crow” and “Killing Custer”.

2024-06-22T19:55:58+00:00

A peculiar dimension in the Native American writing is the documentation of the history of the Native Americans’ traditional lives before, during and after their encounter with the white settlers. It is a development that is essentially explicable within the purview of postcolonial discourse, given that, in some contexts, historical distortions from the perspective of the ‘other’ have been asserted as the rationale for such creative explorations on the part of the Native writers. In the context of this study, such a dimension, with particular reference to James Welch’s novels, is considered as, indeed, counter-discursive. Two of his novels, Fools Crow and Killing Custer, are selected with a view to assessing how the historical documentations in the texts translate to counter-discourses in the context of the Native Americans’ historical evolution. The study reveals that, while the Native American histories in the texts dovetail into each other, they are largely inspired by the Native Americans’ colonial experience vis-à-vis the need to represent their history from the perspective of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘other’. It concludes that the narratives have, in a significant way, performed the allegorical configuration function, as a counter-discourse strategy described by Slemon (1987). This holds in that they have conceivably assumed ‘readings’ and ‘contestations’ of the previously textualised colonial experience of the Native Americans from the perspective of the ‘other’.

2024-06-22T09:25:52+00:00

Table of Contents
Volume 10 Issue 1 2024

Editor's Message

2024-06-22T09:29:50+00:00

Editor's Message