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

Cross-Cultural Variation of Politeness Orientation & Speech Act Perception

This paper presents the findings of an empirical study which compares Jordanian and English native speakers’ perceptions about the speech act of thanking. The forty interviews conducted revealed some similarities but also of remarkable cross-cultural differences relating to the significance of thanking, the variables affecting it, and the appropriate linguistic and paralinguistic choices, as well as their impact on the interpretation of thanking behaviour. The most important theoretical finding is that the data, while consistent with many views found in the existing literature, do not support Brown and Levinson’s (1987) claim that thanking is a speech act which intrinsically threatens the speaker’s negative face because it involves overt acceptance of an imposition on the speaker.  Rather, thanking should be viewed as a means of establishing and sustaining social relationships. The study findings suggest that cultural variation in thanking is due to the high degree of sensitivity of this speech act to the complex interplay of a range of social and contextual variables, and point to some promising directions for further research.

Normativity and Variation in the Address Terms System Practiced among the Jordanian Youth Community

This study investigates the key forms of address used amongst Jordanian university students, the impact of gender on using these forms and what accounts for the variation in their address system. By addressing the issue of normativity and heterogeneity in the use of address terms, in different social settings, the study enriches the understanding of the internal variation of the address term system. Data collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were analysed, based on Watts’ discursive approach to politeness and Agha’s approach of indexicality. The results revealed that the identified normative patterns represent Jordanian university politic behaviours, which index different social meanings and relations among the youth community, in relation to specific social contexts. The most frequent strategies university students use for addressing others are personal names, innovative terms, descriptive phrases, pronouns, titles, teknonyms, and religious, military, attention attractors, as well as a combination of these terms. It also seems that there are no absolute stable patterns of address term usage among the youth community, speaking Jordanian Arabic. Rather, there is an infinite society-internal heterogeneity in the address terms usage. The results also revealed that an intra-group variation signifies social struggles over the norms of address term usage and potentially normative incertitude

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