Verbs and gender: the hidden agenda of a multicultural society

This study explores the issue of gender inequality displayed in action verbs found in English language secondary school textbooks using the Hidden Curriculum Theory. The two aspects of hidden curriculum are the frequency imbalance, i.e., male occurrences are more than female, and gender stereotyping based on roles, i.e., masculine against feminine activities. This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods for collecting data. Wordsmith Tools 4.0 (WST) was used to analyse five categories of action verbs: activity verbs, process verbs, verbs of bodily sensation, transitional event verbs, and momentary verbs. The concordance tool from the WST was used to tabulate occurrences based on gender portrayals. School teachers who taught English at secondary schools were also interviewed to validate the findings and link them to the theoretical framework used. The findings reveal gender inequality is evident in these textbooks

Lexical Similarities and Differences in the Mathematics, Science and English Language Textbooks

The teaching of Science and Math in English in Malaysia is an area of great concern to educators and students alike. This study looks, in particular, at the common word classes among keywords identified in the Science, Math and English language Form One textbooks used in Malaysia and the differences in language use identified in the Science and Math textbooks

The Wordsmith As Worldsmith in Shakespeare\u27s As You Like It

N/

Help A Sista Out: Black Women Doctoral Students’ Use of Peer Mentorship as an Act of Resistance

Many Black women doctoral students entering and persisting through graduate study lack the affirmation, community, and resources necessary to confidently assert themselves as members of the academy. These barriers make it especially difficult for Black women to effectively navigate doctoral programs that privilege and normalize elite white male experiences. Using Black feminism as the conceptual lens, this manuscript presents a burgeoning peer mentorship framework of Black women doctoral students attending a predominantly white institution through a collective Black feminist autoethnography. This model highlights our strategy for not only surviving the academy, but also resisting manifestations of white heteropatriarchal violence within academia. In contrast to more common and formal faculty-student mentorship models, we engage an emergent, horizontal peer mentorship framework, comprised of three tenets: radical coping, communal sista scholarship, and the cultivation of an authentic holistic self

WHAT WORD CONCORDANCES OFFER TO FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS

Manfaat Word Concordance bagi Guru Bahasa. Sampai saat ini analisis corpus dan mesin concordance sudah banyak digunakan di negara-negara pengguna bahasa Inggris, meskipun di Indonesia belum banyak dikenal dan digunakan dalam pembelajaran bahasa dan penelitian linguistik. Artikel ini membahas manfaat analisis concordance dalam pembelajaran bahasa Inggris atau bahasa asing lainnya, terutama bagi pembelajar Indonesia. Manfaat yang dapat diambil dari analisis ini adalah bahwa pembelajar dapat mengetahui bagaimana sebuah kata digunakan dan membandingkan penggunaan kata tersebut olehnya dengan penggunaan oleh penutur asli. Dengan cara ini, pembelajar dapat mengetahui apakah penggunaan kata tersebut sudah alamiah dan tepat atau belum. Dengan bantuan analisis ini, belajar struktur kalimat, frasa, kolokasi, dan diksi menjadi lebih mudah dan tepat karena rujukan yang diambil adalah penggunaan bahasa yang nyata. Untuk pengembang bahan pelajaran, cara ini menyediakan data untuk pemilihan kata yang sesuai, daftar kata yang paling sering dipakai oleh pengguna, dan cara penggunaannya. Kata kunci: corpus analysis, concordanc

A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Language Used by Defendants of Homicide in Court

In this study we present the updated version of the Greek Corpus of Defendants’ Testimonies, GCDT and a series of new evaluations that have been carried out on the defendants’ speech. Using criteria, such as lexical richness, lexical density, part-of-speech frequencies, word and sentence length, we look for linguistic features which could characterize the stylometric profile of the defendants. We also present GCWT, a reference corpus that has been constructed similar to GCWT stylistic features. GCWT contains witnesses’ testimonies collected in the court

Analysing collocational patterns of semi-technical words in science textbooks

This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of semi-technical words in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Semi-technical vocabulary is considered to be one of the most problematic lexical areas for second language learners learning science in English, as these words usually take on extended meanings in technical contexts. The study explores the collocational and colligational patterns of semi-technical words in a corpus of 12 science textbooks. The analysis found some common lexical and grammatical patterns which seemed to share similar aspects of meaning and also showed that collocations of semi-technical words often form compounds with extended and more genre specific meanings. Thus, it is important to focus on some sense and grammar patterns as students need to understand why even though many of these collocations share similar syntactic characteristics, the flexibility of some combinations are arbitrarily blocked by usage

The construction of a Juridical Ontology

Domain ontologies are important resources in several tasks related to the language processing, especially in those related to information retrieval and extraction in textual bases. A proposal for an ontological structuring of verbs belonging to the juridical domain is presented here aiming at improving Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, and more specifically, information retrieval systems of the Department of Justice of Portugal. In order to do so, we present a methodology that is an integrated representation of the verbal content from the perspective of the Formal or Logic Semantics, Lexical Semantics, Grammatical Semantics and Pragmatics heading for the construction of an ontology. Approaches such as logic-semantic relationships, semantic roles and frames were more productive for the construction of the ontology proposed

The construction of a juridical ontology

The need for the representation of both semantics and common sense and its organization in a lexical database or knowledge base has motivated the development of large projects, such as Wordnets, CYC and Mikrokosmos. Besides the generic bases, another approach is the construction of ontologies for specific domains. Among the advantages of such approach there is the possibility of a greater and more detailed coverage of a specific domain and its terminology. Domain ontologies are important resources in several tasks related to the language processing, especially in those related to information retrieval and extraction in textual bases. Information retrieval or even question and answer systems can benefit from the domain knowledge represented in an ontology. Besides embracing the terminology of the field, the ontology makes the relationships among the terms explicit. Copyright 2007 ACM