AN EXPLORATION OF GRAFFITI ON UNIVERSITY’S WALLS: A CORPUS-BASED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS STUDY

Graffiti have received a great attention from scholars as they have been considered a vital cultural phenomenon for many years (Trahan, 2011; Divsalar Nemati, 2012; Zakareviciute, 2014; Farnia, 2014; El-Nashar Nayef; 2016). Although there are extensive contemporary researches on graffiti in many disciplines, such as linguistics, cultural studies, politics, art, and communication (Pietrosanti, 2010;  Farnia, 2014; Oganda, 2015), there are few studies exploring graffiti on classrooms’ walls in higher education milieus (Farnia, 2014). To the best knowledge of the researchers, very few studies were done on the Jordanian context (e.g. Al-Haj Eid, 2008; Abu-Jaber, et al., 2012) and none was done on the Jordanian universities. Therefore, this study aims at analysing the content and communicative features of writings found on universities’ classrooms’ walls, corridors, and washrooms and their relation to the socio-cultural values of the society in order to explore how universities help students voice their attitudes and thoughts. The linguistic features that characterise these writings were also examined. Graffiti-writings, which were collected from the University of Jordan and the Hashemite University, were coded and analysed using the thematic content analysis technique (Braun Clarke, 2006) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995). The analysis of the data has shown that graffiti serve different communicative language functions related to personal, social, national, religious, political, and taboo matters. The most salient linguistic features of these graffiti are simplicity and variation. It can be concluded that graffiti are distinctive and silent ways of communication, particularly in students’ society. The study will be of great importance to linguists, sociologists, educators, administrators, teachers and parents. It is enrichment to the available literature on linguistic studies

The impact of COVID-19 and its terminology learning strategies on EFL learners’ vocabulary repertoire

COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented crisis worldwide posing many linguistic challenges including understanding and learning new related terminology. This study explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its terminology learning strategies on EFL learners' vocabulary acquisition, particularly in Jordan. A triangulated approach was employed for collecting data including interviews, tests and a questionnaire distributed to 100 EFL learners at a Jordanian university. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data showed a positive influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its terminology strategies on EFL learners' knowledge of vocabulary. It also revealed that the participants were “medium” users of cognitive, determination, and social strategies and “high” users of metacognitive and memory vocabulary learning strategies for acquiring COVID-19 associated terminology. The analysis of the tests demonstrated that the COVID-19 and its Vocabulary Language Strategies (VLSs) have a significant positive impact on students' vocabulary knowledge size. Thus, it verified the effectiveness of the reported strategies for acquiring COVID-19 terminology. The learners' vocabulary repertoire has been enriched with new COVID-19 related vocabulary such as quarantine, lockdown, incubation, pandemic, contagious, outbreak, epidemic, pathology, infectious, asymptomatic, covidiot, pneumonia, anorexia, etc. The findings highlighted the importance of employing efficient strategies for investing newly emerging contexts to cultivate learners’ vocabulary repertoire. This study contributes to the area of language acquisition through extensive illustrations of COVID-19 associated lexicon and the intensified-in use associated vocabulary learning strategies. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications and recommendations for further research