However Unwilling

pages 43-5

However Frail

SETTLE DOWN, FRIEND. Unpack the suitcase with the airline stickers and names of strange hotels framed in palm trees. Take off those worn shoes, polished in every shoe shine shop between Boston and Bangkok..

However Odd—Elsa Lanchester!

The article is concerned with Elsa Lanchester as an anti-star figure in British Cinema in the 1920s. It makes a comparison with the performance style of Alexandra Khokhlova in films made with the Kuleshov Workshop in Russia, suggesting that both actresses drew on a similar range of sources (notably, Bode, Duncan, Jaques-Dalcroze and Chaplin). While both seem willing to parodize themselves, embracing ugliness, their eccentrism simultaneously provides something of an ironic commentary on the ideal feminine “types” presented by Hollywood and Hollywood’s commodification of particular notions of feminine beauty

momentum from inclusion requirement, however, is waning

The upward trend in women’s representation on executive and supervisory boards of major companies in Germany continued in 2022, although the overall momentum has slowed yet again. Growth on executive boards in particular has slowed, as the most recent DIW Berlin Women Executives Barometer shows: Following a significant increase at the 200 largest companies from 2020 to 2021, there was only a one-percentage-point increase to just under 16 percent in the share of women on executive boards in 2022. The greatest increases were in the DAX-40 companies, where there was a share of women on executive boards of over 20 percent for the first time, and companies with government-owned shares, where the share reached 30 percent for the first time. A similar development can be seen in supervisory boards, albeit on a higher level. This development suggests that the companies subject to the inclusion requirement for executive boards, which has been in effect since 2021, implemented it quickly, but have since slowed their efforts. With the Equal Participation of Men and Women in Leadership Positions Act and its successor, policymakers have recently significantly improved the conditions for more women in top bodies. Now companies must do the work, as gender parity remains a distant prospect in many places. Most importantly, companies should make efforts to create an inclusive work culture

However, it

The current project examined whether and to what degree age of acquisition (AOA), defi ned as the fi rst intensive exposure to a second language (L2) environment, can be predictive of the end state of postpubertal L2 oral profi ciency attainment. Data were collected from 88 experienced Japanese learners of English and two groups of 20 baseline speakers (inexperienced Japanese speakers and native English speakers). The global quality of their spontaneous speech production was fi rst judged by 10 native Englishspeaking raters based on accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and was then submitted to segmental, prosodic, temporal, lexical, and grammatical analyses. According to the results, AOA was negatively correlated with the accentedness and comprehensibility components of L2 speech production, owing to relatively strong age effects on segmental and prosodic attainment. Yet signifi cant age effects were not observed in the case of fl uency and lexicogrammar attainment. The results suggest that AOA plays a key role in determining the extent to which learners can attain advanced-level L2 oral abilities via improving the phonological domain of language (e.g., correct consonant and vowel pronunciation and adequate and varied prosody) and that the temporal and lexicogrammatical domains of This study was funded by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research in Japan (No. 26770202). I am grateful to Pavel Trofi movich and anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful input and feedback on the content of this manuscript, and to Ze Shan Yao and George Smith, who helped with the data analyses. I also gratefully acknowledge Midori Adachi, Yuki Matsumura, Noriko Yamane, Keiko Onishi, Yukiko Simon, and Tonarigumi for their efforts to organize the data collection for this project. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kazuya Saito, Birkbeck, University of London, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, 30 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DT, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Kazuya Saito 714 language (e.g., optimal speech rate and proper vocabulary and grammar usage) may be enhanced with increased L2 experience, regardless of age. Whereas late second language (L2) learners tend to demonstrate a great amount of improvement in relation to increased L2 experience, especially around the early phase of L2 acquisition processes (i.e., rate of learning), many researchers have extensively examined the extent to which L2 learners can continue to enhance their oral ability (i.e., ultimate attainment) in a way that could lead to near-nativelike profi ciency. On the one hand, few bilinguals demonstrate perfect profi ciency in all aspects of language like monolinguals do In what follows, I fi rst provide an overview of two competing theoretical explanations for age effects on late bilingualism (i.e., the critical period hypothesis [CPH] vs. the cognitive aging hypothesis [CAH]). Subsequently, I review how recent studies have examined the interlanguage development Age Effects on Late L2 Acquisition 715 of L2 oral ability from pronunciation, fl uency, vocabulary, and grammar research perspectives. Last, I present the results of the current study, which examined in depth the role of AOA in predicting the global, segmental, prosodic, temporal, lexical, and grammatical qualities of L2 oral profi ciency attainment by 88 experienced Japanese late arrival (> 16 years old) learners. BACKGROUN