This paper examines UN resolutions 242 and 338 to find whether these two milestone texts of UN discourse on the Palestine Question, taken as the basis for “the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” genuinely and practically work towards an amicable solution to this prolonged problem, this almost century-long unequal conflict. The study seeks to find out whether such UN discourse is linguistically structured to achieve such an end; with the ultimate goal being offering us “the possibility that we might profitably conceive the world in some alternative way” (Fowler, 1981 cited in Jaworski & Coupland, 1999, p. 33) as is the case with any discourse study that adopts ‘critical’ goals. The study therefore employs Ruth Wodak’s Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) — an approach within the pluralistic framework of CDA. The findings show that temporisation of the Palestine Question has been an indirect result of the bad faith and linguistic manipulation of.....

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This work addresses a number of crucial themes in the history of linguistic enquiry — themes that are still relevant today. Aiming to encourage multiple language learning, and give potential stakeholders momentum to provide supportive multilingual environments for children, the paper first addresses the question of the origins of language or the naturalism-conventionalism debate, highlighting children‘s innate potentiality for multilingual acquisition. Second, the paper highlights the pragmalinguistic functions of language, shedding light on the language-thought debate, and illustrating the centrality of language to our life, relations and the exercise of power. The paper, next, deals with the nature-nurture debate or the fantastic and prodigious potentiality of children to develop multicompetence in multiple languages with enviable unselfconscious ease. Drawing on records of longitudinal data comprising the linguistic development of three children raised as simultaneous bilinguals.....

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Since its de facto creation, Israel has endeavoured to legitimize its existence and mystify the ethnic cleansing it perpetrated in 1948, systematically working to efface historic Palestine from the Arab and global public memory. Visual discourse plays a constitutive role in the construction and preservation of national themes. This paper, a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of visual representations, aimed to examine how visual representation serves to memorialize and reconstruct national themes, and so how this semiotic mode of representation can act as a form of counter-hegemonic discourse against attempts at the memoricide of the other and mystification of history. Using Kress and van Leeuwen?s (2006) grammar of visual design as a framework for visual analysis, this social semiotic research analyzed the visual structure of a number of Nakba images to examine the role of visual representations in the memorialization of key Palestinian national themes, and so the reconstruction .....

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Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2019, which has since proved to be a pandemic of variants, the educational landscape has undergone a drastic transformation as educational institutions across the globe have shifted en masse into online learning, resulting in an unprecedented paradigm shift from on-campus face-to-face instruction to a remote teaching model. Pivotal and timely, this applied linguistic survey research, aimed to investigate this forced immersion into academic cyberspace and the challenges created by this emergency adoption of virtual education by exploring the experiences, challenges and perceptions of 50 English language faculty members affiliated with three universities in three different countries. The study sought to identify and document (1) the effectiveness of online teaching, (2) the difficulties of its implementation, (3) student interaction and engagement in the online environment, and (4) factors that could enhance its efficacy. The st.....

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This paper highlights the ESL pre-service elementary school teachers views on using English comics in the classroom and using English comics to assist elementary school pupils in improving their English language skills. A descriptive survey research design was used, and a quantitative method study was done among 64 pre-service teachers utilising an internet questionnaire as an instrument aimed to answer questions concerning their views towards the use of English comics as a medium for teaching and learning English and the effectiveness in improving pupils English language abilities. The results from the questionnaire were analysed quantitatively, and the findings were summarised using descriptive statistics and frequency count to characterise the properties of the large group of samples. From the survey, it was found that most pre-service teachers have positive perceptions of using comic books as teaching and learning tools in class. Furthermore, the findings indicated that the pre-ser.....

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