Journal of Modern Languages

Editorial

Meng Huat Chau — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Modern Languages in 2021. During this tumultuous time across the globe, we are particularly humbled by and grateful for the generosity and support of our learned community. Despite the ongoing pandemic, contributors have been patient and productive, and we are on track to receive a good number of submissions for this issue. The review process has taken a bit longer than usual for some submissions as we have given reviewers extra time due to the extra stress everyone is facing these days.

As in the past two years, we are pleased to publish six full-length articles in this issue. It features an excellent range of language and multimodal investigations. Readers will find such diverse sites of analysis as newspapers, poetry book, and hippie and punk concert posters. This is an encouraging sign for the Journal, and we would like to see more varied explorations and geographic diversity among submissions to be published in this Journal. We would also like to gently remind readers of the multilingual and multicultural nature of our Journal: we are interested in and encourage studies of all languages, not just English.

The Journal of Modern Languages, like all other scholarly journals, depends on the support of individuals from a range of areas in modern language studies. The insightful comments and suggestions of reviewers allow the Journal to maintain the high quality of the articles. The number of submissions we receive for consideration of publication steadily increases each year. As a result, we need more and more external reviewers. If any readers of the Journal would like to be external reviewers, please contact us with an indication of the areas in which you have particular expertise.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue of the Journal of Modern Languages. All of us involved in the publication of this Journal wish our readers and their families good health and many blessings.

Global responsibility: An exploratory corpus assisted discourse analysis of the Rohingya crisis in online media

Jasper Roe — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

This study conducts an exploratory corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the representation of the Rohingya minority group across online news media in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the study is to identify and interpret the discursive patterns employed in popular online news media when depicting the Rohingya minority and associated crises affecting the group in Myanmar and worldwide. Through the use of a combination of frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis, a synchronic study was undertaken using data collected from fifteen major online news media producers in the United Kingdom. The data was collected over a period from January 2017 – August 2020 through freely accessible digital archives. The research study found that particular discourses of security, internationalization, and power are commonly employed when reporting on the Rohingya, while equally a sympathetic viewpoint is often adopted which focuses specifically on global responsibility and failures of international society. The findings offer insight into socio-political processes of representation and discourse in the ‘new social location’ (Scholz, 2019) of online news media, while offering relevant insight into the discourses of urgent and pressing humanitarian issues.

Marriage and family metaphors in online Jordanian sociopolitical editorials

Mohammad Abedltif Albtoush, Pei Soo Ang — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

Contextualized within corruption issues in Jordan, the Arab Spring uprisings as well as outsiders’ padded relations and interests in the Arab region, this study explores how marriage and family metaphors construct the political reality of the partners involved. The integrative principles of the conceptual metaphor theory and critical metaphor analysis along with the concept of ‘metaphor scenario’ were applied to the data gathered from online Jordanian editorials published by Ahmad Al-Zu’bi (2010-2015). These metaphors were found in 97 out of 1000 editorials used in a larger study of different metaphors. Findings suggest the political relationships of the Arab rulers with the citizens and the outsiders are akin to marriage of convenience that violate the sociocultural traditions. Gender roles also appear to be tailored to the notion of masculine authority over femininity in so far as husbands’ stubbornness or tenacity contributes to wives’ zero-tolerance, hence the collapse of marriage and family system which is reflected on the ailing situation of the Jordanian sociopolitics. The key emotion of shaming permeates in 7 metaphorical scenarios: A stepmother scenario, illegitimate pregnancy, marriage proposal, dysfunctional family, parentless children, engagement, and married partners scenarios. Rhetorically, these scenarios serve as a call for principled relations between partners and emancipation of the passive Arabs from oppressing politics.

Move analysis and their lexical verbs of research article abstracts of Filipino and American writers

Abdul Wahid Ibrahim Tocalo — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

Rhetorical move analyses of research article (RA) abstracts have established variations across disciplines and cultures. However, there is still a need for more explorations on Applied Linguistics discipline. Comparing native and other group of non-native speakers of English, such as Filipino users of the language, has also been a neglect in research as far as the researcher’s knowledge is concerned. Hence, this study investigated the rhetorical moves in the RA abstracts of American and Filipino writers who are published in two journals related to Applied Linguistics field. The study also explored the lexical verbs underlying each move in all the abstracts. Each abstract was then segmented into moves. Findings revealed that the moves Situating the Research (STR), Presenting the Research (PTR), and Discussing the Research (DTR) were obligatorily used by both groups of writers, while the moves Describing the Methodology (DTM) and Summarizing the Findings (STF) were obligatory only among Filipinos and optional among Americans. Filipino writers appear to develop their own conventions deviating from Americans who are considered native speakers and norm providers. The results also amplify the existence of cultural differences even in abstract writing. Further, the study details lists of lexical verbs that may be used to realize a rhetorical intent of each move. Hence, academic writing instructions may be informed by the rhetorical and linguistic realizations unveiled in this study. Directions for future research are likewise provided.

Visual elements in children’s concrete poems: A multimodal analysis of Rain and Ice Cubes

Thusha Devi Rajendra, Surinderpal Kaur — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

This study is based on the multimodal analysis of two children’s concrete poems from the poetry book, Splish Splash (1994) by Joan Bransfield Graham. It employs Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar as the analytical tool to analyse the visuals in terms of compositional meaning. It investigates how visual elements (words and images) are represented in the poems. In addition, it focuses on the features of the images and how they cohere on a page. The findings suggest that the representations of images in the poems reproduce the dominant theme of water and its forms. Furthermore, the interrelated-systems of salience and framing are used extensively and they contribute to meaning-making. Words and images support each other and coexist to provide meanings in the poems. Therefore, the combination of words and images creates a meaningful whole and offers readers greater opportunities to create meanings.

The significance of typography in the linguistic landscape of the 1960s and 1970s

Paolo Coluzzi — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

This article looks at the use of letterings and typefaces in the linguistic landscape through a comparison of hippie and punk concert posters. After a general introduction, some definitions and an overview on the hippie and punk movements and the posters they produced, the article introduces the methodology employed, which consisted of both an analysis of the lettering used in hippie and punk posters and a survey carried out among a sample of students at Universiti Malaya (Kuala Lumpur). This is followed by an analysis and a discussion of the data, which have led to two main findings: not only were the antithetical ideas behind these two youth movements portrayed through the specific lettering and fonts used, but the latter feature specific traits that may be linked to our mental processes and possibly our limbic system, the most primordial part of our brain.

The locus of written corrective feedback in various SLA theories

Ehsan Abbaspour — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

Whether corrective feedback is effective in L2 writing has always been a controversial issue among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) scholars despite a vast body of research investigating the issue. This conflict is rooted in the fact that different researchers subscribe to different theories of SLA which are at times contradictory in nature. The present article reviews and investigates major SLA theories with respect to their views and stance toward the efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) and error correction in second language writing. Many of these theories do not address the role of corrective feedback explicitly or merely focus on the role of oral feedback. Polio (2012) and Bitchener and Ferris (2012) have partially investigated the issue at stake reviewing a number of SLA theories. In this study, however, attempt is made to shed light on the role of WCF especially in the theories which are not directly concerned with L2 writing.