The Pleasures of Polyglossia in Emirati Cinema: Focus on From A to B and Abdullah

Polyglot films highlight the coexistence of multiple languages at the level of dialogue and narration. Even the notoriously monolingual Hollywood film industry has recently seen an increase in polyglot productions. Much of Europe's polyglot cinema reflects on postwar migration. Hamid Naficy has coined the phrase " accented cinema " to define diasporic filmmaking, a closely related category. This essay considers polyglot Emirati films as part of an increasingly popular global genre. It argues that the lack of a monolingual mandate is conducive to experiments with language choices, and that the polyglot genre serves best to emphasize efforts made to accommodate the diversity of cultures interacting in urban centers in the United Arab Emirates. Case studies of Ali F. Mostafa's From A to B (2014) and Humaid Alsuwaidi's Abdullah (2015) demonstrate the considerable contributions Emirati filmmakers have already made to a genre, which offers a powerful potential for cinema in the UAE. A comparative analysis identifies the extent to which each of the two films reveals elements inherent in three of the five sub-categories outlined by Chris Wahl

Promoting international cultural and academic collaborative communication through technologies of open course ware

In the diverse cultures of an increasingly transnational world where\ud academic literacy in English or Englishes is required for advancement in\ud universities, communication technologies play critical roles. This paper integrates\ud scholars from diverse cultures through online technology which allows for\ud participants from several universities to develop their awareness of diverse\ud cultures and academic English across disciplines. This research addresses the issue\ud of how online collaboration among scholars can develop their technological,\ud cultural and academic literacies which are essential to their academic progress. By\ud creating electronic discussion forums that include scholars from universities\ud worldwide it is possible to engage in transcultural dialogue regarding how diverse\ud cultures view technology as a means to advance academic and cultural literacy.\ud Through combining the wealth of academic Open Course Ware (OCW) through\ud the consortium and linkages with international universities it is possible to create\ud credit courses for students in each of their home universities thereby overcoming\ud the major limitation of OCW by providing access to credit for OCW courses

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Gendered educational leadership: beneath the monoglossic façade

Recent gender retheorisation has drawn on Mikhail Bakhtin's literary and linguistic theories of monoglossia and heteroglossia to reconcile seemingly contradictory gender discourses. Thus, girls/women and boys/men as they are biologically sexed might be discussed within a poststructural gender theory discourse that disconnects gender from the body. The concepts of gender monoglossia, gender heteroglossia and polyglossia have been applied here to empirical research into the construction of gendered leadership as it was seen to be done by one woman head teacher. The accounts of members of staff expose heteroglossia in the articulation of their understandings of gendered leadership beneath the construction of a monoglossic façade. They also reveal an understanding of polyglossic simultaneity as the head teacher is observed to ‘switch’ seamlessly between modes of doing gendered leadership depending on context and circumstances. There is also evidence of polyglossic simultaneity in the reports that might lead to the rejection and/or redefinition of gender theory discourses

Unravelling family truths: narrative polyglossia of The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton

Das Werk Die bunten Menschen (The Speckled People) von Hugo Hamilton, das nicht als Memoiren markiert wird, doch in diese Kategorie eindeutig fällt, unterscheidet sich empfindlich von der Reihe anderer Kindheitserinnerungen der irischen Katholiken, meistens dank ihrer komplizierten Textualität mit der Erzählung eines Kindes, die die umliegende Realität widerspiegelt sowie die Berichte seiner Eltern umschließt. Die komplexe Lage des Kindes, das einer kulturell verwickelten Familie angehört, erlaubt die bestehenden Sprach- und Identitätsprobleme deutlicher zu zeigen, sie weder zeitlich noch räumlich zu begrenzen. Paradoxerweise befreit die Mehrsprachigkeit, wie der Text zeigt, den jungen Hugo nicht, sondern drängt ihn zusätzlich an den Rand; die Liminalität des Protagonisten und die Komplexität der Erzählung macht das Werk zu einem der besten Beispiele der irischen Lebenserinnerungen

The Bright Triad and Five Propositions: Toward a Vygotskian Framework for Deaf Pedagogy and Research

L.S. Vygotsky’s contributions to social research shifted paradigms by constructing now-foundational theories of teaching, learning, language, and their interactions in education. This manuscript contextualizes and elucidates a nearly-forgotten, century-old component of Vygotskian deaf education research. The Fundamentals of Defectology compiles decades of Vygotsky’s experimental, methodological, and theoretical research about deafness, the psychology of disability, and special methods of pedagogy. Drawing on Defectology, two arguments are developed using the method of dialectics; they first synthesize Vygotsky’s deaf research corpus, then juxtapose it against contemporary theories and evidence. The first argument describes three principles that exemplify Vygotsky’s optimistic framework for deaf pedagogy: positive differentiation, creative adaptation, and dynamic development. The second posits five propositions about deaf development, including: the biosocial proposition, the sensory delimitation-and-consciousness proposition, the adapted tools proposition, the multimodal proposition, and finally the conflict proposition. By leveraging Vygotsky’s characteristic optimism in response to the absorbing and difficult challenges of deaf pedagogy and deaf research methodologies, these arguments constitute a future-oriented call to action for researchers and pedagogues working in deaf education today

The Journey of the Water

This piece follows the course of the Mapocho river in Chile from its origins in the Andes through to its discharge into the Pacific Ocean. It has also sought to include a number of Scottish words to create a form of polyglossia and experiment with the texture of the prose

Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: how real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit? Evidence from the history of late Sanskrit passives and pseudo-passives

by Pāṇinian grammarians and the forms and constructions that are actually attested in the Vedic corpus (a part of which is traditionally believed to underlie Pāṇinian grammar). Concentrating on one particular aspect of the Old Indian verbal system, viz. the morphology and syntax of present formations with the suffix ‑ya-, I will provide a few examples of such discrepancy. I will argue that the most plausible explanation of this mismatch can be found in the peculiar sociolinguistic situation in Ancient India: a number of linguistic phenomena described by grammarians did not appear in Vedic texts but existed within the semi-colloquial scholarly discourse of the learned community of Sanskrit scholars (comparable to Latin scholarly discourse in Medieval Europe). Some of these phenomena may result from the influence of Middle Indic dialects spoken by Ancient Indian scholars, thus representing syntactic and morphological calques from their native dialects onto the Sanskrit grammatical system

The emergence of isiZulu in Skeem Saam (2011)

This study aims to investigate how an ecological understanding of polyglossia is used in the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) television channel, SABC 1 to maintain and create ethnolinguistic dominance. Key arguments this study will make are: (1) polyglossia is a language ideology masquerading as ethnolinguistic pluralism, (2) there is a loss of ethnolinguistic pluralism in SABC 1 because of the polyglot culture and its transmissions, (3) isiZulu is emerging as a language and cultural flare of the channel. This paper concluded that isiZulu’s presence is rising in a soap initially meant to be a Sepedi show. And this has negative consequences for language equality in the SABC