We used to think of grammar as the bones of the language and vocabulary as the flesh to be added given that language consisted largely of life generated chunks of lexis. This “skeleton image” has been proverbially used to refer to that central feature of lexis named collocation- an idea that for the first 15 years of language study and analysis gave a moment‟s thought to English classroom material and methodology.
The work of John Sinclair, Dave Willis, Ron Carter, Michael McCarthy, Michael Lewis, and many others have all contributed to the way teachers today approach the area of lexis and what it means in the teaching/learning process of the language. This also seems to have incorporated lexical ideas into the teaching mechanism and highlighted that the present knowledge of the nature of English lexis and collocation in particular raises a set of important issues for teachers in the first place. Such issues are:
1. Given that grammar still rules the sentence, lexis should be one of the principle organizing parts of the syllabus;
2. The need for different strategies for vocabulary learning at different stages of learning, both in and outside the classroom;
3. The need for more developed techniques that would help the students record and store lexis in ways that could enable them to retrieve and revise the proper words for examinations, i.e., lead them to become „lexis collectors‟.
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4. The need for a fresh look at bilingual dictionaries every now and then given that conventional dictionaries cannot give all the information necessary about collocation.
5. Lexis is an area where literal translation is often impossible; a collocation in English may be totally different in Spanish or German and thus the implication of translation should not be discarded as it is essential in English. (The translation skills of the non-native speaking teachers must be recognized in this area.)
6. The two main components of language (grammar and vocabulary) merge into one another and the dividing line is much less clear cut than teachers and textbooks often operate; yet accuracy must be treated as a late-acquired skill.
Learning a foreign language is a highly interactive process, and a belief that communicative activities foster a great amount of linguistic production provides language practice and opportunities for negotiation of meaning during communicative exchanges. Thus, this study examines what benefits learner-centered classroom setting offers compared with that of teacher–centered classroom, and how less proficient learners accomplish their tasks and activities with scaffolded help during interaction with the help of proficient classmates and under the guidance of a skilful person, i.e., the teacher. The subjects participating in this study are 30 Iraqi 4th year college students in the Department of English, College of Arts , Univer
... Show MoreThis research examines the phonological adaptation of pure vowels in English loanwords in Iraqi Arabic (IA). Unlike previous small-scale studies, the present study collected 346 loanwords through document review and self-observation, and then analyzed them using quantitative content analysis to identify the patterns of pure vowel adaptation involved in incorporating English loanwords into IA. The content analysis findings showed that most pure vowel adaptations in English loanwords in IA follow systematic patterns and may thus be attributed to specific characteristics of both L1 and L2 phonological systems. Specifically, the findings suggest that the IA output forms typically preserve the features of the input pure vowel to the maxi
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With the advancement of technology ,the study of cross-cultural communication via on line has become an important and researchable topic in linguistic theory and its applications.The aims of this study are two- fold (a) exploring the influence of cultural diversity on on-line interaction between American native speakers (NSs) and Iraqi non-native speakers (NNSs) of English which, together with other factors might potentially lead to what Thomas(1983) calls "pragmatic failure" (PF), a main cause of communication breakdowns and (b) specifying which type of PF occurs more frequently between the two groups along with the reasons behind such failures. To achie
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News headlines are key elements in spreading news. They are unique texts written in a special language which enables readers understand the overall nature and importance of the topic. However, this special language causes difficulty for readers in understanding the headline. To illuminate this difficulty, it is argued that a pragmatic analysis from a speech act theory perspective is a plausible tool for a headline analysis. The main objective of the study is to pragmatically analyze the most frequently employed types of speech acts in the news headlines covering COVID-19 in Aljazeera English website. To this end, Bach and Harnish's (1979) Taxonomy of Speech Acts has been adopted to analyze the data. Thirty headlines have been collected f
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The aim of this article is to solve the Volterra-Fredholm integro-differential equations of fractional order numerically by using the shifted Jacobi polynomial collocation method. The Jacobi polynomial and collocation method properties are presented. This technique is used to convert the problem into the solution of linear algebraic equations. The fractional derivatives are considered in the Caputo sense. Numerical examples are given to show the accuracy and reliability of the proposed technique.
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Despite scholars’ attention on the typology of modality as a linguistic phenomenon, yet the use of modality across varieties of English is not well visible in communication-based researches that take semantics, pragmatics and discourse issues as the objects for their investigation. The paper generates its data from six M. A. dissertations from Nigerian University and equal number of the M. A. dissertations from Iraqi University to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate the contextual use of modality within the pragmatic perspective. The data analysis reveals that modality such as usuality, potentiality, necessity, probability and obligation in the dissertations encapsulates interpersonal and authorial voice in which the mean
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The paper exposes a discourse taxonomy of language clichéd units in English and Russian, and presents some definitions of what is a cliché as being a semioticform of perceiving language and discourse. Also, it deals with language clichés as being units of structure reflecting a scheme of stereotypical situations of dialogue, whether among individuals of one culture, or in relation to cross-cultural communication. The paper proposes a taxonomy of units in language clichés in English and Russian by tackling clichés of daily use, such as professional, cultural, artistic, and scientific clichés.
Аннотация
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This study investigates the phonotactics of English obstruent clusters in the word-final position from a markedness theory perspective among Iraqi EFL College Students whose native language, Arabic, prefers only two-member word-final obstruent cluster as a maximum. The markedness of clusters is measured depending on Iraqi EFL College Students’ utilization of the simplification strategies. This study tries to answer whether or not word-final obstruent clusters are marked or unmarked for Iraqi EFL College Students, and whether or not the markedness of the obstruent cluster increases as to its length. In order to answer these questions, a test has been distributed among 60 Iraqi EFL Fourth-Year College students, Department of English, Colleg
... Show MoreMetadiscourse markers are means for organizing a writer’s information and create a connection with her/his readers. When students write, they usually focus on one type of these markers that is the interactive markers and belittling the use of the other type which is the interactional markers. That is to say, they emphasize on presenting and organizing their information only. Therefore, this study is conducted to bridge this gap. The researchers have selected 18 thesis abstracts. Nine of them are written by Iraqi students of English and the rest by American students. The aims of the study are to examine the types and sub-types of metadiscourse markers used by American and Iraqi students; investigate comparatively the impact of the metad
... Show MoreThe study aims at figuring out the intended meaning of intonation in some English conversational utterances together with identifying pitch variations that are determined by various syntactic constructions that impart the same illocutionary force of utterances. However, intonation is needed to delimit the communicative forces of utterances by virtue of its structure which the speakers intend to convey .This paper consists of four sections .Section one deals with phonology and its types .Section two discusses intonation in relation to style , forms and functions. Section three sheds some light on pragmatics. Section four deals in details with the intended meaning of intonation in some English conversational utterances. This paper comes up wi
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