Volume 5, Issue 3

ABSTRACT This paper describes a study that applies Functional Language Analysis (FLA) in Chinese college English reading context to promote students’ understanding of the reading texts. Different from other commonly practiced reading activities, FLA encourages students to explore text meanings from aspects of content, organization and attitude, and how clues of lexical and grammatical resources help construct these three meanings. Thirty freshmen from a university in Beijing, China received FLA instruction for four months. Data were collected from students’ analysis of reading tasks, presentations, and questionnaires. The study found that FLA is effective in facilitating Chinese students’ active exploration of the text. Specifically, through an examination of participants, processes, and circumstances, students were able to comprehend the content meaning accurately. With attention paid to themes, conjunctions, and other linking devices, they could picture the text structure. They also started to understand the author’s attitude by examining grammatical elements of formality, voice, mood, and modality. Additionally, FLA helped improve students’ confidence and interest in English reading. Positive influences of this approach on students’ other English skills such as listening, writing, and speaking were also reported. The findings suggest that FLA can be successfully implemented in Chinese reading classes.

ABSTRACT Logical meaning, which is broadly concerned with relations between clauses, has long been of interest in linguistics. In particular, accounting for logical meanings in the language of Chinese is a continuing concern. The previous studies have taken a lexicogrammatical approach and described distinct features in terms of logical meaning in Chinese, which have caused difficulties in the analysis of logical meanings in Chinese. Against this background, this study departures from the stratum/level of lexicogrammar and sets out in the discourse semantics to introduce an alternative approach in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analysing logical meanings in Chinese. This study will use as data from Chapter One of the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng , and take an initial step in providing a relatively comprehensive account of logical meanings in Chinese according to the discourse semantic system of connexion. This description will explain how logical meanings in Chinese can be analysed through the dimensions of explicitness, type , and externality . It will also describe a distinct feature found to be relevant to the analysis through the three dimensions: indeterminacy of logical meanings in Chinese. It is hoped this approach can make some contributions to the field of discourse analysis so that analysts are equipped with useful linguistic tools in the discourse semantics when analysing logical meanings in Chinese.

ABSTRACT Despite positive attitudes towards Punjabi in the urban areas of Pakistani Punjab, there is a shift towards the Urdu language in almost all domains. This study shows that significant differences in language choices are found between the rural/urban and male/female residents of Punjab province. Urban females are leading this shift in spite of their positive attitudes towards Punjabi. Urban females use Punjabi very little and only in the home domain. In social and business domains Punjabi language is almost non-existent among urban, educated, and middle class females. The shift from Punjabi to Urdu in the educated urban female group is almost complete in spite of their positive attitudes towards their ancestral language. Urban males use more Punjabi than the urban females. In rural areas Punjabi is still used in most domains by both males and females.

ABSTRACT This paper explores linguistic ideologies surrounding The 1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement . The reform, which aims to uniformize Lusophone orthographies and strengthen Portuguese as a global language, is approached through the reactions of native speakers participating in an online debate within a Portuguese-language blog. Drawing on the notion that language planning is a personal, political and ideological rather than a purely linguistic enterprise, the study focuses on the social meanings assigned to Portuguese orthography by the Lusophone debaters. Upon so doing, it tracks the different ideologies orienting participants’ arguments for or against the reform, showing the interplays of language ideologies with culture, nation and citizenship; how linguistic practices and language-mediating technologies, like orthography, become sites of ideological (re)production; and how “folk” and “expert” perspectives about language are not distant but rather dialectically inform and implicate one another, with local debate discourses embedded within broader and older social process and relations.