Laymen’s Narratives in Amouddou’s Eco-documentary: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Documentary films, generally of short or medium-length, have informative and educational purposes. They present authentic reports on areas of life, human activities, and the natural world. Particularly, eco-documentaries aim to raise environmental awareness towards the degradation of natural elements; they present alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation. To reinforce the argumentative process of environmental documentaries, laymen discourse contributes a lot to the meaning-making of productions. Within the framework of discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, this work examines fear and threat expressions used by ordinary witnesses to reinforce argumentation in Lahoucine Faouzi’s eco-documentary entitled “Whining of the Blue Lagoon. In this vein, the ‘perceived severity and perceived susceptibility’ model was used to investigate the implication of fear and threat appeals in laymen’s testimonies. The results show that these expressions are common among laymen’s narratives. This study has many implications for eco-documentary makers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research to explore other linguistic features in eco-documentaries on man’s perpetrated damages to the environmental resources

Perceived Barriers to Critical Thinking Development: The Student’s View

Recent research in language learning and teaching has prompted revived attention to developing learners’ critical thinking skills. Training learners to think critically serves as a significant opportunity to improve their knowledge and skills, yet it is still a key issue in need of enormous research in terms of its application. Despite its evident importance, the way to enhance students’ thinking skills is challenging and impeded by numerous barriers. This survey study sets out learners’ perceived barriers to critical thinking in two state Moroccan universities. Surveying 110 EFL students, the respondents were invited to openly comment on the obstacles that hindered their reflection. By way of qualitative content analysis, the results displayed that enhancing critical thinking skills is governed by factors related to teaching, learning and the education system. Amongst the nine challenges the Moroccan students face, lecturing and student content knowledge were reported to be the two major obstacles that significantly influenced the development of critical thinking