English Linguistics Research (ELR) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether ELR publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue. Reviewers for Volume 15, Number 1Adel Thamery, Imam Ja'afar Al-Sadiq University, IraqAlina Andreea Dragoescu, University of Life Sciences "King Mihai I" from Romania, RomaniaGhassan Adnan Hasan, King Faisal University, Saudi ArabiaHeena Saifullah Amjad, King Saud University, Saudi ArabiaHülya Tuncer, Çukurova University, TurkeyInaad Mutlib Sayer, University of Human Development, IraqMohsen Mahmoudi-Dehaki, Islamic Azad University, IranMuteb Alzahrani, King Saud bin Abdualziz University for Health Sciences, Saudi ArabiaPeace Chinwendu Israel, University of Education, GhanaSelene Maya-Ruiz, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, MexicoTribhuwan Kumar, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi ArabiaWesam K. Morsi, The British University in Egypt, EgyptZijun SHEN, Sichuan University of Media and Communications, China Best Regards,Camille SuEditorial Assistant, English Linguistics ResearchSciedu Press*************************************Add: Leslie St. Suite , Beaver Creek, Ontario, LB A, CanadaTel: 1-416-479-0028 ext. 210E-mail 1: elr@sciedupress.com E-mail 2: elr@sciedupress.org Website: http://elr.sciedupress.com
This study investigates disciplinary variation in four-word lexical bundles in research articles from three representative New Engineering Disciplines: artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and robotics. Three comparable, recent corpora were compiled from internationally indexed journals, consisting of full-length research articles. Lexical bundles were extracted using AntConc with frequency and dispersion thresholds selected to balance representativeness and analytical manageability. The identified bundles were then categorized structurally using Biber et al.’s (1999) model and functionally using Hyland’s (2008a) framework, with minor extensions introduced to accommodate recurrent patterns not captured by the original taxonomies. Results reveal both cross-disciplinary convergence and discipline-specific preference. Structurally, the three corpora display a profile typical of hard-knowledge research writing, with a substantial presence of verb phrase (VP)-based and other clausal patterns alongside noun phrase (NP)-based and prepositional phrase (PP)-based bundles. Biomedicine shows a comparatively stronger reliance on PP-based framing resources, consistent with the need to specify conditions and constraints, whereas artificial intelligence and robotics exhibit relatively stronger VP/clausal patterning associated with reporting and evaluation. Functionally, research-oriented and text-oriented bundles dominate across disciplines, while participant-oriented bundles are comparatively limited, particularly in biomedicine. The findings underscore the value of discipline-sensitive, corpus-informed EAP instruction for New Engineering students.
Reflective practice plays a crucial role in shaping the professional identity and teaching competence of Malaysian pre-service teachers of Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) throughout their practicum. Although reflection is widely recognized as an essential component of teacher development, many pre-service teachers tend to focus on surface-level operational issues rather than critically examining their teaching experiences. This study explores how systematic reflective practice contributes to professional identity formation and teaching competency development among pre-service TESL teachers. Guided by the theoretical perspectives of Dewey, Kolb and Schön, the study addresses three research questions: (1) What key themes and experiences emerge from pre-service teachers’ reflections? (2) How do these reflections contribute to professional identity formation? and (3) What reflective strategies support teaching competency development and identity construction? Adopting a qualitative research design, data were collected from 10 TESL pre-service teachers at a Malaysian public university through reflection journals and semi-structured interviews. The findings highlight that effective reflection involves a continuous cycle of preparation, action, observation and evaluation that empowers pre-service teachers to refine classroom management, instructional strategies and responsiveness to students’ needs. Through this process, participants developed stronger teaching competencies and a clearer professional identity as confident, adaptive and student-centered educators. However, challenges such as time constraints, limited guidance and negative perceptions of reflection reduced its effectiveness. The study recommends the systematic integration of structured reflective practices within Malaysian English teacher education programs to support a reflective teaching culture and support the development of ethically responsible, competent and lifelong learning educators.
This study, grounded in theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Ecolinguistics, analyzes the ecological discourse of high school English teachers in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms, thereby exploring the realization mechanisms of ecological educational contents in their classroom discourse. Through corpus extraction and annotation from authentic classroom teaching videos, combined with the integration of teaching moves, ecological contents, and transitivity process types, the study identifies the characteristics of teachers’ ecological discourse usage across different teaching moves and their corresponding lexicogrammatical realizations. The findings reveal that teachers’ classroom ecological discourse is predominantly concentrated in the main-body pedagogical moves, with a focus on knowledge-oriented and behaviour-related contents, a preference for action-type transitivity processes, and a lack of realizational resources for emotional engagement and interpersonal interaction. Based on these insights, the study proposes pedagogical recommendations to optimize the integration of ecological education in high school English teaching.
This study conducts an empirical comparative analysis of translations generated by four mainstream large language models (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen) for 300 Qinghai ecotourism-related eco-cultural terms across four categories (Natural Landscapes, Ecological Resources & Conservation, Tourism Activities & Facilities, and Culture & Folk Customs). A multi-dimensional evaluation system covering accuracy, cultural connotation retention, terminological consistency, and readability is employed to assess each model’s performance. The results show that Google Gemini achieves the highest overall performance, excelling particularly in accuracy for natural landscape and ecological resource terms, and demonstrating strong capabilities in cultural connotation retention and readability. Qwen ranks second, with notable strength in cultural connotation retention and balanced performance across other dimensions. DeepSeek follows, maintaining stable and consistent output with good terminological uniformity. ChatGPT offers acceptable readability and natural expression. Based on these findings, the study proposes targeted optimization strategies and constructs a reference translation corpus, aiming to support the international dissemination of Qinghai’s ecotourism culture and to enrich empirical research on LLM-based translation in regional ecotourism contexts.
Since M.A.K. Halliday introduced Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) over half a century ago, its various sub-theories have been widely applied in EFL writing instruction. In a previous study, the researcher conducted a case study on teaching Grammatical Metaphor within the framework of genre-based writing instruction for EFL students in China. Building on this, the present research integrates Appraisal Theory to examine the characteristics of appraisal resources in student writing across four genres of narration, description, exposition and argumentation. The findings show significant variations in the distribution of appraisal resources-attitude, graduation, and engagement-depending on the semantic features inherent to each genre. Furthermore, the study explores the statistical and semantic correlations between appraisal resources and Grammatical Metaphor. Based on these findings, a genre-based writing model was developed, combining instruction in the Appraisal system and Grammatical Metaphor. This model aims to enhance students’ genre-based analytical skills and their ability to construct genre-appropriate texts with logical cohesive textual flow and sophistication, thereby empowering them to engage in critical thinking and independent writing practices in academic contexts.
Recognizing the lexical units in the speech chain in Portuguese is one of the most difficult problems in processing, as the listener must delimiting them, facing distortions, pauses and hesitations, in addition to sociolinguistic and contextual phonetic variants. Such phenomena indicate that, in a pre-lexical phase of recognition, the receiver restores the information received, with inferences through the crossing of contextual data extracted from utterances (intake) with those coming from their permanent memories (topdown processes). The boundaries between lexical units are opaque, particularly when they are clitic due to external closed juncture or sandhi. Spontaneous speech frequently presents distortions and ruptures, instead of signaling ways to the listener, for dividing the speech chain into larger, gradually smaller phrases, until reaching lexical units. There are even ruptures at the inframorphemic and even intrasyllabic level. The difficulty in delimiting is very great when the listener is faced with new words. The methodology is bibliographic and I examined the texts of researchers who have addressed the topic. I conclude that the absence of isomorphy between the phonological and the morphosyntactic words challenges a scientific explanation of how the listener solves this contradiction, since, for the lexical item, she/he must pair the intake with the respective phonological lexical item in her/his mental dictionary.
In the context of globalization, promotional films are a key tool for cultural diplomacy and soft power projection. This study examines how conceptual metaphors (CMs) in the English promotional film Encountering Love at West Lake facilitate the cross-cultural communication of Chinese cultural narratives. Grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this research employs textual analysis to identify and classify CMs (e.g., LOVE IS A JOURNEY, WEST LAKE IS A MIRROR) within the film’s commentary. It investigates how these metaphors encode traditional Chinese values such as harmony and perseverance, and how they function from an intercultural perspective to bridge—or occasionally complicate—cultural understanding. The findings reveal that CMs serve as effective cognitive bridges, enhancing emotional resonance and making abstract cultural concepts accessible to international audiences. The study concludes that the strategic use of metaphor is crucial for effective cultural promotion, offering practical implications for the translation and localization of cultural content and contributing to methodologies in intercultural discourse analysis.
Against the backdrop of the digital transformation of global higher education, digital textbooks on British and American literature, as core resources in university foreign-languages education, hold significant importance for improving teaching quality, cultivating students’ digital literacy, and promoting educational equity.Presently, the development of digital textbooks on British and American literature confronts multi-dimensional challenges. Therefore, this research points out that drawing upon an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates educational technology, comparative literature, and curriculum theory, this research utilizes literature analysis, case studies, and empirical research to put forward solutions. These methods include establishing a writing standard system based on the principle of “standards first”, surmounting the limitations of single-text formats by constructing an integrated resource architecture, and designing platforms with a closed-loop system integrating teaching, management, and feedback. Universities should collaborate with multiple stakeholders to formulate evaluation standards for textbook development, construct dynamic digital resource repositories based on national resources, promote the integration of textbook platforms and smart teaching platforms, and develop interactive functional modules.Theoretically, this research enriches the framework of digital textbook development in foreign-language disciplines and presents a novel interdisciplinary paradigm for digital education research. Empirically, it provides implementable strategies for the development and iteration of digital textbooks on British and American literature, which contributes to the enhancement of course quality and the cultivation of students’ competencies. Moreover, it offers valuable perspectives for the development of digital textbooks in other humanities disciplines and the extensive digital transformation of humanities education in higher education.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports increasingly include negative disclosures acknowledging organizational failures and safety incidents, creating tensions between transparency obligations and reputation management. This study examines how Fortune 500 companies rhetorically construct negative safety disclosures using Critical Genre Analysis. Through systematic analysis of 20 safety disclosure sections from companies across five industries, we investigate rhetorical moves, interdiscursive practices, and cultural values characterizing these communications.The analysis reveals a standardized three-move rhetorical structure: “presenting the safety scene,” “reporting safety disclosure,” and “prompting action,” comprising ten constituent steps. Key findings demonstrate systematic interdiscursivity involving demonstrative, legal, and evaluative discourse types that transform regulatory compliance into strategic positioning opportunities. Three dominant cultural orientations emerge: altruistic culture extending safety benefits beyond organizational boundaries, human-centered culture emphasizing employee value, and science-based culture foregrounding technological sophistication.Results indicate companies strategically limit detailed incident reporting (15% of reports) while universally emphasizing safety commitments (100% of reports) and future endeavors (90% of reports). Negative disclosures function as complex rhetorical achievements rather than simple transparency exercises. These findings contribute to corporate communication research by illuminating how organizations balance competing stakeholder expectations while maintaining strategic advantage through sophisticated rhetorical strategies that simultaneously fulfill transparency obligations and advance corporate positioning.
Factoids—false but seemingly true information—are widely disseminated in communication, particularly through poems. Despite their ubiquity, their cognitive processing remains understudied. Giving that typical factoids are often presented in the poems. This study attempts to explore how factoids are invented and how factoids relate to representational act and mental states from perspective of embodied cognition through a qualitative content analysis of typical poem lines. The findings of the study show that inventing a factoid is indeed a representational act, involving integrating the selection, construction, transformation, and intentional communication of imaginative information. Representational acts bridge the gap between the internal constructs of our minds and the external world. These findings have implications for education, critical thinking.
English Linguistics Research (ELR) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether ELR publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue. Reviewers for Volume 14, Number 1 Alina Andreea Dragoescu, University of Life Sciences "King Mihai I" from Romania, RomaniaPeace Chinwendu Israel, University of Education, GhanaVahid Hassani, Farhangian University, Iran Best Regards,Camille SuEditorial Assistant, English Linguistics ResearchSciedu Press*************************************Add: Leslie St. Suite , Beaver Creek, Ontario, LB A, CanadaTel: 1-416-479-0028 ext. 210E-mail 1: elr@sciedupress.com E-mail 2: elr@sciedupress.org Website: http://elr.sciedupress.com
This article explores Setswana poetry illustrating cultural relevance and restitution that it embodies and might teach. Setswana language functions primarily in the realm of orality and language preserves extensive use of proverbs, history and folk stories. Cultural images pervade Batswana life and imagination, touching the sensations, emotions and imagination, and therefore run as a thread that connects language, proverb, oral and written poetry and history. Bhabha’s theory uses analogy and translation, and this study advocates the use of African culture. This background links well with Raditladi’s cultural connoisseur in his poetry. This research argues for the revitalization of African poetry in all spheres of life.
This paper examines the innovative integration of technology in literacy development for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, focusing specifically on secondary school students in Malaysia. As educational practices shift from traditional methods of the 20th century to advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), ESL students encounter unprecedented opportunities to engage more effectively with the English language. Employing a comprehensive literature review and thematic analysis methodology, this study identifies emerging themes in technology integration within ESL education. Key themes explored include the effectiveness of gamification, AI-assisted tools, and multimodal literacy, as well as the challenges posed by the digital divide, particularly concerning disparities in resource access between urban and rural areas. The findings highlight the urgent need for equitable access to technology and tailored interventions to support literacy development among all ESL learners. By prioritizing enhancements in technological infrastructure and fostering personalized learning experiences, educators and policymakers can bridge the literacy development gap. This paper advocates for a balanced approach to technology integration that promotes critical thinking, collaboration, and human interaction, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to fully leverage technology in their literacy development journey.
Language is important in every social context, as through language people communicate, interact and express oneself. At the same time tourism plays an important part in shaping the perception of self through experiences of other people and places. This study explores the intersection of language, identity and tourism under the Saudi vision 2030. It explores the perspectives of international tourists, Saudi locals from major cities, and rural areas to understand the evolving linguistic landscape and its influence on the Saudi people, tourists and the tourism experience in general. The findings reveal that language plays a fundamental role in shaping and expressing one’s cultural identity and hence influencing tourists’ experiences. They also illustrate the importance of language as a source of authenticity and a means of cultural engagement. They reveal complex dynamics, with international tourists highlighting the challenges of language barrier and at the same time admiring the beauty and authenticity of Arabic language and the role this language played in their overall experience. On the other hand, local Saudis express a range of views on the role of Arabic and English in tourism and national identity, as some admitted that while speaking a very good English, they preferred to communicate with tourists in Arabic to enrich their experience and to show another part of their culture. Moreover, photographic evidence further explores the different linguistic patterns in rural areas and major cities and provides more insights into the effects of such bilingual practices on tourists and citizens. This study contributes to understanding the role of language use on the tourism industry and how it can enhance cultural exchanges. It also contributes to the understanding of the sociocultural implications of Saudi Arabia's vision 2030 and its ambitious developmental goals and provides insights for policymakers.
The present paper proposes a cognitive view on prominence relations of utterances by treating them as prosodic relations with weak-strong metrical structure. Considering this aspect, prosodic relations have a cognitive structure and a prominence structure, both of them reflecting the structures of cognitive relations generated at cortical level during the evocation of auditory objects corresponding to speech constituents. Ladd (2008) introduces two types of relations in the F0 contour description, prosodic and prominence relations, but we suggest a single type of relation between speech constituents, named prosodic relation, and consider it is in the same time a prominence relation due to its weak-strong metrical structure. In section 2, the paper presents the cognitive model of information structure by defining the categories used for the description of cognitive and prominence structures of prosodic relations. In section 3, the cognitive and prominence structures of four utterances of the word permit as noun and verb, in descending and ascending F0 contours, are compared with those of four utterances of certain small statements and questions having words as constituents. All the contours mentioned are useful for understanding how utterances can be decomposed into binary hierarchies of prosodic relations with local or global prominent (strong) constituent, aiming to motivate researchers to take into account the cognitive interpretation of F0 contours.
Following her emigration to Germany in the late 1980s, Herta Müller’s essays began to focus on the writing process and the interplay between memory, creative thought, and the written text. This thematic concern also appeared in her early fictional works. Self-reflective approaches to writing first surfaced in her essay collection Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel. Wie Wahrnehmung sich erfindet (1991) and continued in later collections such as Der König verneigt sich und tötet and Immer derselbe Schnee und immer derselbe Onkel (2011). This article aims to examine how Müller stages the act of writing in a self-reflexive manner in her 1990s essays, and how this is mirrored in her fictional works. The article addresses this question in detail.
The paper presents a new F0 contour partitioning approach by using the category of prosodic relations also used by Ladd (2008) for improving the F0 contour descriptions based on phonological categories. The new approach involves a cognitive view on the low-high and high-low ’metrical’ structures of prosodic relations, by relating them to the structures of cognitive relations generated during speech object representations at the cortical level. In section 2, the paper presents the information structure model by defining the cognitive categories that describes prosodic relations of F0 contours involving their two overlapped structures and nuclear positions. CU_predicate-CU_argument and CU_theme-CU_rheme are the two structural levels of prosodic relations. The model proposes a binary-tree hierarchy to describe the articulation of prosodic relations within utterances. Two rules are formulated for the identification of nuclear constituents of prosodic relations. The utterances analysed in section 3 illustrate how prosodic and prominence relations can be identified by analysing acoustic cues of their F0 contours. Utterances correspond to English borad focus and narrow focus statements. Focus positions are deduced by only using the rule of the cognitive model.
American poet Wallace Stevens describes nature in his poetry, discussing the relationship between poetry writing and nature, and expresses his ecological poetics to the world. The poet also integrates the concepts of Buddhism into his ecopoetry, advocating that humans should control the constantly expanding material desires, being indifferent to fame and wealth, and form a peaceful state of mind, thereby reducing human damage to the environment and nature, and constructing a deep ecological view which advocates all creatures are equal.
This study investigates face value in conversational closings in American soap opera Desperate Housewives. Using qualitative method combined with quantitative method, we collected altogether 52 scripted conversation excerpts among the five leading characters and analyzed them within the thoeretical framework of face and politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Analyses of the scripted conversations showed that conversational closings in Desperate Housewives consist of three main patterns, closing, pre-closing (+insertion) + closing (+after-close), and leave-taking. Most pre-closing and closing strategies involve face consideration, with the most frequently used ones being “giving reasons”, “mentioning a future relationship”, “discourse markers”, and “apology for leaving”. These strategies are deployed to save either the positive face or the negative face of the other party. Some conversations end with one party’s walking away due to anger or pique, consequently threatening the other’s face, but it occurs in irregular situations for dramatic effects. The findings suggest that closing a conversation can threaten both the positive face and negative face of the other party, and that in doing so, even familiar people or friends are concerned about interlocutors’ “face” or “face-saving” by deploying some strategies.This study contributes to both the conversational closings study and face and politeness study.
