An Issue of Pedagogical Concern: Why does it Take So Long to Albanian Students to Develop English Communicative Fluency?

AbstractDespite the early launch of English language teaching, officially at the third grade of elementary public schooling in Albania upward till university studies, communicative fluency of spoken English remains a noticeable struggle to Albanian students conducting academic programs in English. This paper will examine the causal factors that negatively add to this situation arguing that it is related to the irrelevant pedagogic philosophy of English teachers. This teaching approach is mainly driven by teacher ⿿centred grammar translation method. Moreover, we argue that the most successful approach to be urgently pursued is the interactive communicative one. Once having ascertained and made the case of Albanian students finding hard to express themselves fluently and coherently in English, we emphasize and propose ways of utilizing interactive communicative approach in English language academic courses demonstrating that this is the sole approach to prioritize and fulfil effectively the students⿿ linguistic needs and English communicative potentials

Democratization and gender-neutrality in English(es)

"Democratization" and "gender-neutrality" are two concepts commonly used in recent studies on language variation. While both concepts link linguistic phenomena to sociocultural changes, the extent to which they overlap and/or interact has not been studied in detail. In particular, not much is known about how linguistic changes related to democratization and gender-neutrality spread across registers or varieties of English, as well as whether speakers are aware of the changes that are taking place. In this paper we review the main theoretical issues regarding these concepts and relate them to the main findings in the articles in this issue, all of which study lexical and grammatical variation from a corpus-based perspective. Taken together, they help unveil some of the conscious and unconscious mechanisms that operate at the interface between democratization and gender-neutrality.Peer reviewe

Gender Voices:telaah kritis relasi bahasa-jender

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The future of English?: A guide to forecasting the popularity of the English language in the 21st century

London64 p.; 29 c