Asian Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies

Linguistic studies have taken such rapid strides in recent years that the range is baffling to the innocent and amazingly delightful to the linguistics-oriented. Applied linguistics is concerned with many fields and subjects on planet earth and possibly beyond that. A piece of literature largely depends on thought and style. This poem is categorized as a Pastoral poem, “winter” being the feature that makes the poem a pastoral poem. Shakespeare who is popularly known for his love sonnets deviated and delved into pastoral poetry describing the harshness of winter and the activities carried out by the people during winter. The entire poem can be anlysed using the theory of pragmatics to see if it follows the four Gricean maxims. The Gricean maxims were posited by Paul Grice as cooperative principles that help in explaining the links utterances have in a speech community. This analysis justifies the claim that stylistics is a linguistic study in that the features of language description and a linguistic theory have been used to analyse a literary work in order to further explore the poet’s style of writing and his intended meaning. The style adopted by the poet which is the use of rhyme, capitalization of the first letter of the first word in the beginning of a new sentence, nature theme, etc. is the style that was most popular during that time period.

The Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf, has received many views and reviews on various perspectives. Feministic or anti-feministic terrain is not unsought through this piece of work. This article aims to note on the binary opposition of the two female characters, Wealtheow, the wife of Hrothgar and Grendel’s mother. Both the characters are weighed with the balance of an Anglo-Saxon code, namely ‘Domestic Code’ proposed by Molter and the fate of them is decided upon that balance. An important thing to be noted in this article is that the female characters are viewed from a societal perspective, but not on the basis of their physique. Grendel’s mother exercises the social norms expected from the descendant of Cain. She is not distinctively appeared as a child bearing mother as is not done to Wealtheow as a queen of distinction. No question of survival can be traced here. They work as a programmed machine. But the matter of concern is that the programming of Grendel’s mother loses appropriateness with the consideration of values nourished by the society of     Beowulf.

Story has allured a child since time immemorial. It has provided him with unadulterated pleasure by making him soar in the sphere of mysteries and fantasies. Pleasure, according to Freud, is the controlling force of the unconscious, the abode of one’s true self. As the infant develops into a child, he enters into the conscious world. But this development initiates, too, a separation from mother with whom he was related in an asocial pleasurable unity until the present. Consequently, the child seeks at this stage of life other means to compensate the loss of his primary necessity, pleasure. One of those ways is listening to stories, something that enables him to escape from the world of reality (consciousness) to the delightful world of day-dreams. As pleasure is the primary need of the unconscious, and as day-dreams provide a child with pleasurable experience, there lies a close relationship between stories and the unconscious demands. Tagore realized this truth, and conveyed the same it in the story ‘Tell Me a Story.’

The demand for higher education institutions to internationalize their practices is an indication of rapid globalization and transformation processes, contributing to change the of existing education system landscape. To be competitive globally, many universities open their doors to international students to fashion diversity to university’s settings, which in turns enriches and enhances university’s experiences for students. However, cross-cultural adjustment for international students can be challenging. Numerous researches have established that it is more susceptible for the international students to create their own circle and be detached from the local community; consequently, leads to social and cultural disassociation from host countries. Various studies reported that intercultural communication competence (ICC) is one of the exogenous factors for adaptation to exist. Thus, this study is aimed to probe the perceptions of international students towards the perceived nuances of communication competence, acculturation attitude and language acculturation. These established dimensions were measured by adapting Berry’s Acculturation Framework (1997). The results revealed that the acculturation strategies employed by the students in acquainting to the host culture have amplified their intercultural communication competence; hence, making them to be more culturally sensitive. Nonetheless, only 25% (N=3) of the participants were categorised as highly competent/ competent, suggesting that there are other contributing factors to language acculturation, as the notion of ICC is a profoundly incongruent and complex concept. The domain of inquiry could potentially contribute to the modelling of social programmes for educational institutions in Malaysia to increase the value of cross-cultural mobility’s significance for international students’ successful integration in the new environment.

This study is concerned with political discourse development on transgender people’s rights in Greece in terms of intentions and legislation, directly correlated with the education policy and educational act. Focus is placed on the period 2017-2019 in order to analyse political symbolic discourse constructions about transgender people’s rights. To this end, political texts, interventions by the Ministry of Education, Institute for Education Policy (IEP) and pressure groups are the focal point of this study. Based on discourse analysis, we delve into meanings conducive to forming narratives on gender as well as the biological, social and sexual identity. Educational practices, in particular, are utilized to analyse issues of applied gender-related education policies in Secondary education. The policy of intentions along with the legislation is deconstructed into interpretative conceptualisations on gender as well as educational practices defined by the value system. Distinctive features of the Greek culture regarding the identities of the “other (male) and the “other” (female) in terms of gender are also taken into consideration. As far as the education system is concerned, the role of the Christian orthodox religion is highlighted in relation to developing curricula and the overall school operation. More special issues on equality, inequality, solidarity and citizenship are re-defined, putting forward the apparatus for constructing discourse on inequality and the legalized marginalization of one more group of “others”. The implemented education policy is particularly interesting because every time a political ideological section on the policy of rights is discredited, every procedure of adapting social upgrading is downplayed; and this issue does not concern solely the policy of transgender people’s rights. Despite the existing law on transgender people’s rights, which is in line with the European Union and international organisations’ decision, this study reveals that Greek males and females are not socialized within educational institutes in order to accept the “other” (male) or the “other” (female) in terms of gender. Selective educational interventions are accomplished by IEP, as the transgender issue is included in a broader thematic on sexual identity. Thus, the question whether education can contribute to a new narrative on transgender people’s rights is still pending.