Volume 11, Issue 2

The translation and international communication of regional and national cultural ideo-symbols promote the reception and visibility of cultural identity in a globalized context and contribute to global cultural diversity and intercivilizational appreciation. Jiangsu Province exemplifies China’s broader efforts to construct or reconstruct its cultural identity for this purpose. From its huge wealth of cultural symbols, we propose six most representative interconnected yet autonomous established or reconstructed ideo-symbols, including the traditional Chinese character “蘇,” symbolizing a land of fish, rice, and botanic exuberance; “water paradise,” evoking a water-nurtured land of material affluence and civilizational excellence; “water-rhymed Jiangsu,” highlighting the presence of water in Jiangsu’s classical writings and collective consciousness; “ Jiangnan ,” often as a poeticized and romanticized space of half-earthly and half-Utopian nature; “harmonious and inclusive Jiangsu,” conveying the triad harmony of humanity, nature, and culture; and “elegant-living Jiangsu,” capturing the ritualistic transformation of everyday life into aesthetic experience and artistic existence. Comparative glocalism, both as a way of thinking and as a practice in translation, offers an effective strategy for introducing these ideo-symbols to international audiences. Through comparative glocalism, these symbols can be translated into globally relevant yet locally grounded entities within accessible discourse, retaining their significance while advancing cross-cultural and intercivilizational dialogue. To this end, we further propose a series of initiatives and practices, including employing digital storytelling and semiotic narratives, enhancing cross-disciplinary, multichannel collaborations, launching cultural exchange programs, optimizing multimodal platforms, engaging with Internet content influencers, developing specialized databases and websites, organizing cultural symbol design competitions, etc. This study offers an integrated, newly constructed newly constructed ideo-symbolic system and communication strategy for the international communication of Jiangsu’s cultural symbols. It may inform and inspire other local or national cultures’ global outreach.

The paediatric online consultative forum, where putative patients interact with physicians, has become a lifesaver for many, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown era in Nigeria. Examining the affective stance expressed by mothers in this asynchronous discourse from the linguistic perspective adds to the few existing studies on telemedicine and reveals the plight of mothers and their children in Nigeria. This study examines the discourse patterns of affective stance and its linguistic markers in online consultative encounters. Using the purposive random sampling method, 80 posts on the Facebook account “Ask the Paediatricians” between May and June 2020 and analysed using stance theory. Findings show that mothers express affectivity as interrogative, attention and hypothetical markers to project their concerns, worries, and curiosity about their children’s health status, e.g., breastfeeding, immunization, stools abnormalities, nutrition, fever, refluxing babies among others. Self-mentions and attitude markers are the two linguistic markers predominantly deployed in expressing affective stance. While the instances of self-mentions index affective representation, attitude markers, on the other hand, foreground affective attitude toward the propositions expressed. The above implies the level of emotional conditions of motherhood and sociocultural experiences of Nigerian women in the context of telemedicine encounters in child health studies.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), established on the Blue Nile, is the largest contemporary hydroelectric power project in Africa. It caused a geopolitical tension between the downstream countries (Egypt and Sudan) and Ethiopia; thus, the various narratives accounting for this environmental issue are worth exploration to promote the understanding of the link between language and the environment. Ecolinguistics is theoretical framework, which addresses pressing ecological issues to promote humans’ understanding of the link between languages and the environment. Thus, the present study investigates the Facebook posts of the official accounts of the Ethiopian Prime Minister, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Egyptian Cabinet to identify the different framings of the GERD. It reveals the interplay between the different modes of communication through an eclectic framework, which integrates the visual analytical model (Kress & van Leeuwen) to Stibbe’s (2015. Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by . London & New York: Routledge) ecolinguistic framework. The study concludes that the different framings over the GERD reflect different perceptions on environmental discourse, which promote constructive discourse on the management of water resources.

This article examines the in-text images from literature textbooks of Nigerian primary schools and how these are succinctly used to positively enhance the learning process of pupils at that level. The data for the study comprises seventy-eight (78) in-text images from 5 literature books for pupils from grade 3–5. The data was analyzed using van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and a discussion of how various visual elements may impact on their understanding of the messages and key themes in the texts with a focus on the representative metafunction level of analysis. The findings of the study show that in-text images deployed in the literature texts effectively complement the written texts, and has valuable pedagogical implications, including providing more interactive and personalized learning experiences. Also, the finding show that visual elements help pupils to cultivate good attributes in relation to taking responsibility, cultural diversity, ethics, decision making, friendship and so on. The study concludes that incorporating visual elements in the literature textbooks for primary schools can create a more impactful learning engagement for the target audience.

This study investigates the inputs of multicultural awareness in the teaching of English as a foreign language in Togo. It posits that in multicultural contexts, the teaching and learning of foreign languages face various challenges. These challenges can be successfully raised through an integration of local cultural elements while developing English learning materials. The study employed a structured questionnaire which was administered to 320 students and 8 lecturers from the two Togolese public universities. It also used interviews and classroom observations to access the English language teaching/learning system in Togo. The study is anchored on Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism Theory, which propounds that language and culture play essential roles both in human intellectual development and in how humans perceive the world. The analysis of the data showed that in a multicultural context, the designing of foreign language textbooks and learning tutorials and, classroom activities require an inclusion of foreign and local realities such as language features, culinary system, proverbs, stories and folktales, traditional festivals, and wedding celebration. The integration of local material and non-material culture help reduce student’s fear and anxiety in English language classrooms and boost their willingness to learn the language.

AI-mediated academic writing calls for new pedagogical approaches to the application of prompt engineering for writing courses. Whereas previous studies mainly inform students of prompt engineering techniques, little is known about how prompt engineering functions from the perspective of meaning negotiation between the human and generative AI. This paper explores the integration of the Pan-indexical process of linguistic signs into a prompt-based teaching model (PBTM), emphasizing its potential to facilitate meaning negotiation in prompt engineering during the early stage of AI-mediated academic writing. The PBTM consists of four key components: encyclopedic knowledge, contextual information, evaluative critical thinking, and iterative design. The application of PBTM lies in the early stage of idea development of academic writing and is organized around four major steps: crafting the initial prompt; refining the prompt with contextual information; engaging in evaluative critical thinking; iterative progression toward a desired response. This paper suggests that the Pan-indexical process of linguistics signs can be employed to AI-mediated pedagogical approaches to enhance students’ ability in optimization of prompts through a deeper understanding of meaning negotiation between the students and generative AI to support their academic writing process.

This paper offers a semiotic and postcolonial investigation of how the two terms of Orient and Morgenland shape German cultural discourse about the East. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of the sign and postcolonial concepts of othering, this research examines how these terms legitimize colonial hierarchies while fueling Romantic idealizations. The analysis reveals that Orient frequently frames the East as a developmental void requiring external intervention, whereas Morgenland casts it as Europe’s elusive spiritual cradle. Quantitative corpus data underscores their historical divergence in usage patterns across text types. Despite their apparent contrasts, Orient and Morgenland operate symbiotically to sustain Western centrality – a dual construct whose historical formation continues to inform intercultural perceptions. The study concludes by advocating a decolonial reconfiguration of these categories, demonstrating how attending to the specific interplay of such signifiers is crucial for dismantling the linguistic mechanisms that perpetuate power asymmetries.