Legitimation analysis: exploring decision-making and power in Hot Bench

Research in discourse analysis has demonstrated that power can be illuminated through analyzing discourses. Centered on the notion that power and legitimation go hand-in-hand, these discourses are distinguished by specific linguistic components. One of the ways to explore how legitimation is tranquilized is to scrutinize its discourses, which some scholars (Wang, 2006; Van Leeuwen, 2007) argue have the precedence to control some of everyday, social, and public spheres. Following this premise, this paper examines how legitimation is jostled in selected decision-making scenes in a popular syndicated three-judge panel TV court show, Hot Bench. Two objectives are set out for this study; firstly to examine how organization and resolution of cases are generally settled and secondly to identify the types of legitimation employed by the judges in their decision-making processes. Premiered in 2014, Hot Bench draws over 2 million viewers in October 2014, jumping to a staggering 2.5 million viewers in November 2014, emerging as one of the most watched syndicated legal reality TV programs in United States of America with its second season renewed through 2017. By analyzing selected conversations by judges who deliberate verdicts, this study which employs Van Leeuwen’s framework of legitimation concludes that the judges typically employ three types of legitimation, namely, authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization over the course of adjudicating TV’s court proceedings. This study ultimately contributes to the broader field of discourse analysis by tapping onto the belief that language, through discourse analysis, serves as a vehicle within which specific discourse community maintains power

Promoting interreligious understanding through the Holy Quran

This paper discusses the Qur’anic term of Ahsan al-Qawl as a basic linguistic concept of language role in interreligious communication in order to identify the meanings of (inter)religious communication based on the Qur’an and to construct the appropriate model in analysing interreligious discourse.The connection of the term with language use and language practice in interreligious communication will be discussed.The findings show that the principles of interreligious communication are mostly based on the God-man relation, and also the man-man-nature relation. These relations clearly distinguish the meanings of religious communication in the Islamic perspective from the Western perspective

Advice-giving roles and strategies in selected faculty member-graduate student advising

In mentoring graduate students, it is hard to deny the ubiquity of graduate student advising. Faculty members, who are usually engaged in advising to tease out problems and suggest solutions, could often times be faced with negative attributions concerning faculty members’ competence, as well as receive unaligned responses rather than collaborative understanding of issues or recommendations. While previous studies on advising may have focused on specific, intricate, discourse particles and microscopic perspectives on advising, studies on advice giving exchanges that depart from these dimensions are insufficient. To fill in this lacuna, this paper proposes to explore strategies and participation roles in which faculty members assume in selected doctoral dissertation advising. Through discourse analysis, specifically focusing on discourse and situational identities grounded in identities-ininteraction (Zimmerman, 1998), the study illuminates some of the many advising roles and advising strategies that are revealed as legitimate, aligning doctoral student learning experience. In particular, advising roles and advising strategies, as illustrated in this study, link social and institutional context by proposing some of the many trajectories of how both faculty members and graduate students understand the relevance of advising exchanges. By focusing on these exchanges, the paper will also contribute to the growing body of literature on a range of different factors that may constitute advising in terms of content and manner in which advising takes place

Lexical characteristic in Malaysian inter-religious discourse

The numbers of religious issues in Malaysia within 30 years indicates that inter-religious discourse among different religious adherents is not always easy to handle and cannot be easily understood due to the complexities of various issues involved. This study aims to (1) identify the keywords in inter-religious issues in Malaysia, and (2) discuss the lexical characteristic in inter-religious discourse in Malaysia. The discussion is based on the meaning concept suggested by Russell (1940). The data in the discussion relate to the three religious issues in Malaysia which are interpreted as having sensitive and provocative words from 2011 until 2015. The data were gathered taken from local newspapers and interviews with religious authorities. The discussion shows that keywords in inter-religious issues, such as hurt, disappointment, misunderstanding, ignorance etc. are based on negative perception toward the practice of people from different religion. The result also shows that negative gradable for all the issues, such as religious hatred, shocked and angry need to be encountered. The study suggests that the negative perception toward different religious practice needs to be understood comprehensively by examining the reason behind the disagreement of the practice, and any circumstance to create religious misunderstanding must be avoided

Can we not just talk about men? the bechdel test, narrative salience and female voices in two selected Malay films

Western feminist film scholars’ claim that female characters are often defined in relation to their male counterparts resonates well in contemporary film and gender studies. This claim highlights the representational biases towards male privilege and primacy as visible signifiers; the ramification of this biasness is the invisibility of female subjectivity that renders them voiceless. Therefore, inquiries into female subjectivity in films outside of Hollywood context are crucial. This paper aims at identifying and comparing the representation of female characters in two Malaysian films of two genres - romance and horror - to highlight the consonance between female voice with feminine consciousness and empowerment. This study administers the Bechdel Test on two films selected using criterion sampling - 3 Temujanji and Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam - and suggests a novel approach by adding the analysis of the film using the concept of narrative salience. The analyses using both methods revealed contradictory results. 3 Temujanji, although failed most of the test, is revealed through narrative salience as assiduous towards feminine consciousness and empowerment. Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam, which passed the test, ironically and ideologically contained female voices within the patriarchal value system. The finding contributes towards the theorisation that women's voices in Malaysian films can be considered as an integral part of the acoustic register of films that enhances film analysis technique. Scriptwriters and filmmakers can utilise the test as a reference in which women can define themselves 'not in relation to men', while creating female characters who progressively think beyond patriarchy and androcentrism

Understanding ESL practitioners’ challenges in teaching academic english for technical and engineering purposes

The English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) competencies of ESL practitioners teaching at Malaysian engineering and technical (MTUN) universities is vital in ensuring quality learning and teaching of language and communication skills at the institutions. In understanding the necessity of the competencies, this study aims to explore the challenges faced by the practitioners teaching the skills. The study comprised data gathered from a survey on the practitioners and semi structured interviews of the experts in technical and engineering fields. Findings from both quantitative and qualitative inquiries on the practitioners and experts revealed several challenges; therefore, the necessity of wider knowledge and understanding of ESAP in teaching the context became the prevalent competency for the practitioners in overcoming the challenges. The practitioners’ competency was substantially indispensable because it could affect their learners’ interest in learning the skills as well as in understanding the content subject. The challenges faced by the practitioners call for a specific professional development training to elevate their status and recognition. Subsequently, it implicates the need for the institutions and local quality agencies to review and specify the requirement and guideline for ESL practitioners teaching the skills in a specific academic technical and engineering context

Physiological and psychological of listening to Holy Quran recitation in the intensive care unit patients: a systematic review

Stress and anxiety are common among intensive care unit (ICU) patients especially those who are on mechanical ventilation. Non-pharmacological interventions such as music and prayer are recommended because they are opioid sparing, easy to provide, cheap and safe. There is a growing body of evidence on the effects of Holy Quran Recitation (HQR) in reducing stress and anxiety in critically ill Muslim patients. The aim of this review is to evaluate the physiological and psychological effects of HQR specifically in ICU setting. This review was performed on articles published between 2007 and 2018. Extensive search was done using PubMed, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus and Google Scholar. Systematic review articles are also assessed and relevant literatures are hand searched based on reference lists and citations made in key publications. Studies related to HQR which were done outside adult ICU setting were excluded. A total of nine articles are included in the final list for detail analysis. Findings of this review revealed six studies with significant results in improving stress responses, hemodynamic stability and conscious levels. HQR is a potential nonpharmacological tool to reduce stress and can also be used as auditory stimulus to improve conscious level in comatose patients. More studies in this area are recommended aiming for low risk of bias, appropriate calculation of sample size and adequately powered to detect significant outcomes

Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism

Websites of private hospitals are significant channels for delivering the communicative acts in relation to information of hospitals’ facilities and expertise to international medical tourists. However, studies that involved communicative acts have mainly focused on examining the language mode. It overlooked the multimodal perspective which hinder prospective international medical tourists from receiving the intended promotional messages. This study, therefore, aims to examine multimodal realisations of representative and commissive communicative acts in Thailand’s private hospital website. Within Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective, Halliday & Matthiessen’s model of textual analysis (2004) and Daneš’ classification of thematic patterns (1974) were utilised for language analysis, while Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework was adopted for visual analysis. Three webpages from a Thai private hospital website were analysed in relation to theme types and thematic progression for textual function in language analysis, and information value, saliency and framing elements for compositional function in visual analysis. Results based on the analysis of the communicative acts in the selected webpages aimed to inform and persuade prospective medical tourists. The multimodal communicative acts created a technologically established, sophisticated, reliable and caring representation of Samitivej Hospital through the high occurrence of unmarked themes, reiteration patterns, salient visuals and absence of framing. The findings provided communicative strategies to promote medical tourism to copywriters, website designers and medical tourism stakeholders in designing such websites

Public perceptions on climate change : a sentiment analysis approach

Public perception on climate change is a paramount component that affects the implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures. Taking into account the public perceptions on the issue may assist decision-makers in producing appropriate strategies to ameliorate the impacts of climate change. A corpus-driven sentiment analysis approach was done to classify the polarity of Malaysian public perceptions, identify the sentiment lexicon, and analyse the public sentiments. A part of a specialised corpus namely the Malaysian Diachronic Climate Change Corpus (MyDCCC) was developed from The Sun Daily and was used as the data for this study. The methodology involved the employment of Azure Machine Learning software to conduct sentiment analysis to explore the polarity of public sentiments, corpus analysis approach to identify the sentiment lexicon and discourse analysis to analyse public sentiments based on the identified sentiment lexicon. The results revealed that the majority of public sentiments appeared to be negative, depicting sentiment words such as long, critical, and serious. Positive sentiment words also prevailed such as better, best and hope. The discourse analysis revealed that the public is reasonably insightful of climate change although their sentiments appeared to be negative. However, the negative stance was largely influenced by the public's indignation with how decision-makers handle the climate change issue. Ironically, the negative sentiments may be an indication for the decision-makers to improve their approach in addressing climatechange. This study has contributed significantly to research on public perceptions of climate change in the Malaysian context