Volume 5, Issue 2

ABSTRACT The debate on the status and the role of Standard/Classical Arabic versus Dialectal Arabic in the Arab World has a long history. In parallel to this, voices calling for giving Dialectal Arabic the status of the official state language and cancelling Standard Arabic altogether are becoming louder. This debate is being fuelled by the rapidly developing theory of superdiversity which claims that, due to the rapid changes that happened to the world after 1991, and increasing globalization associated with worldwide migration, easy access throughout the world to internet and social networks, video hosting services and satellite television, societies all over the world have become extremely diverse linguistically. This theory also draws on language ideologies, the concept that suggests that the traditional idea of a “language” is an ideological artefact. Is this approach valid for understanding what is happening in the Arabic language? I will attempt to answer this question by examining the status of the Arabic language on the margins of the Arab world – in Zanzibar. For centuries, the Arabic language has been one of the key languages spoken in Zanzibar, but it has now been practically replaced by Swahili.

ABSTRACT A thesis is a formal academic writing; however, since nowadays communication tends to become more informal, some theses may also use informality features. This study aims at analyzing the undergraduate thesis abstracts from the years of 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 of Indonesian EFL students. This study found that the thesis abstracts contained eight types of informality features: first-person pronouns, second-person pronouns, sentence-initial conjunctions/conjunctive adverbs, sentence-final prepositions, run-on sentences/expressions, sentence fragments, contractions, and direct questions. From those eight features, four of them have constantly appeared over time. The statistical calculation shows a negative correlation between the years and these four features: the first-person pronouns, the sentence-initial conjunctions/conjunctive adverbs, the run-on sentences/expressions, and the sentence fragments. This means that the use of informality features has decreased overtime. This could signify that there has been an improvement in the teaching and learning process or that the EFL learners have become more conservative in their academic writing.

ABSTRACT Textbooks are a central pedagogical resource for science teachers. As such, they have been a subject of enduring interest in science education research, with many questioning whether their quality has improved over the past decades. In this paper, we examined the prose quality of an expository text on coral reefs in seven successive editions of one popular environmental science textbook. Specifically, using tools from systemic functional linguistics, we analyzed two discursive aspects that impact the comprehensibility of the texts – how causation is construed and how information is structured. Our analyses reveal that the prose quality of the texts on coral reefs has improved, regressed, or remained the same. In the area of causation, cause–effect relationships are construed in increasingly implicit ways, with causes and effects consistently constructed as grammatical abstractions that bury human or social agencies. In the area of information flow, semantic leaps and semantic ambiguities are reduced across the sample texts analyzed, which places fewer text processing demands on the reader. Our study suggests that writing a perfectly considerate text is a tall task and that micro-linguistic analysis can illuminate the comprehension challenges that school textbooks present to students and inform efforts to improve students’ science literacy.

ABSTRACT Within the framework of Poynton’s power of tenor of discourse, this study explores the power relationship between the author and the translator and how the relationship is presented in the peritexts of the translations of Mengzi . The study firstly reinterprets Poynton’s power of tenor of discourse and proposes two new concepts, viz. “primary factor” and “secondary factor”. And based on this, the power relationship between the author and the translator is expounded. When the “primary factor” is status, the author and the translator are equal, but when the “primary factor” is expertise, the author and the translator are unequal, with the author dominant over the translator. The analysis of the peritexts of the translations of Mengzi shows that the equality can be presented in the subtitle and the structure of the translations while the inequality can be displayed in the interpretation of culturally loaded words, particularly Confucian core concepts, and Mengzi’s thoughts. It is also found that the equality is usually caused by translation purpose, strategy, publication requirements, etc. and the inequality is generally relevant to the translator’s limited knowledge of the original, his/her thoughts, beliefs, and life experiences, the social, cultural and historical backgrounds, inadequate references, etc.