<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2578">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Exploring Some Aspects of Foreign Language Learners’ Discourse Competence]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[Many theoretical models of second language communicative competence (Canale 1983; Van Ek 1986; Bachman 1990; CEFR 2001) seem to include discourse competence as one of its component, albeit differently labelled or encompassing different characteristics. There, however, seems to be an agreement that discourse competence is largely determined by coherence and cohesion. In the field of second language acquisition and language testing, the issue of significance of cohesion and coherence and their influence on overall quality of written production has been addressed (cf. Palmer 1999; Chiang 2003; Dastjerdi &amp; Talebinezhad 2006).    The present study sets out to explore the manner in which learners of English as a foreign language use cohesion and coherence as two essential elements of discourse competence in their written production. The sample includes 90 assignments written by learners of English as a foreign language as part of state school-leaving exam. The analysis will target the number and type of cohesive devices, as well as the appropriateness of their usage. The analysis of coherence will be carried out by examining the internal topical structure of paragraph (cf. Lautamatii 1987). This will include the analysis of progression types (i.e. parallel progression, sequential progression, extended parallel progression and extended sequential progression) used by learners in connecting ideas and thoughts within the paragraph. Finally, a potential role that these elements may play in overall quality of learners’ written compositions will be assessed. The results will be presented and interpreted. In conclusion, theoretical and pedagogical implications will be discussed.  ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[1027]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2579">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Benefits of Rubrics in Oral Assessment]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[What is the purpose of evaluation?  Do we only grade our students because they have to have a grade at the end of the term, or does evaluation reflect other aspects of our jobs?  How do we remain objective while we grade out students’ performances?   Is the grading transparent?    This paper will draw a parallel between the purpose of assessment, objective and transparent grading, as well as meeting the learning outcomes, and the use of rubrics to show the benefits of this authentic assessment tool. First, the paper will address the purpose of evaluation and explain how the evaluation of the students’ performances can reflect our success as teachers.  It will look into the validity and reliability of tests, touching upon norm- and criterion- referenced tests, and provide the readers with some tips on how to use the learning outcomes and standards set by the school or the Ministry of Education to write the lesson objectives.  Then, the paper will point out the importance of fair grading and how rubrics can serve not only as tools for objective evaluation of oral exams, but also as proof of transparency for stakeholders such as parents, school administration, or the Ministry of Education.  Finally, in a step-by-step process, the paper will instruct teachers on how to create their own rubrics and how to use them to grade the students’ performances in an oral exam.  ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[792]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2580">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Literature Circles as a Form of Autonomus Learning in EFL Environment]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[This paper reports on a large-scale study on learner autonomy in literature circles carried out with students and English instructors at Meliksah University in Turkey. The purpose of the study is to research how students attending Meliksah University Foreign Languages Education Center perceive the approach of literature circles as a form of autonomous language learning. This study also discusses how the proficiency level of students influences the students’ perception of literature circles.    Literature circles are “… small temporary discussion groups who have chosen to read the same story, poem, or book” (Daniels 1994, p. 13). “Main feature of literature circles is group meetings on a regular, predictable schedule to discuss their reading. These group meetings aim to be open, natural conversations about books, so personal connections, digressions and open-ended questions are welcome.” (Bulut, 2010). The other key features include the teacher serving as a facilitator, not a group member or instructor, which is the main autonomous perspective of literature circles and lastly, the student performance is evaluated by teacher observation through some basic predetermined criteria (Bulut, 2010).    The data are collected through a questionnaire which is administered to approximately 300 students attending English Preparatory School of Meliksah University and analyzed quantitatively to find out how students at different levels perceive the contribution of literature circles to their language learning as a form of autonomous learning.   ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[1020]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2581">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Handphone-Based Project in Improving Speaking Performance]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[This study was aimed at finding out whether the method of using handphone in project-based speaking instruction could improve students speaking performance. A quasi-experimental method was used in this study. This study involved thirty eleventh grade students of SMA Negeri 18 Palembang in academic year 2009/2010 who were assigned either in experimental or control group. In order to get the data, two instruments were used, test and questionnaire. The result of the test showed that there was a significant difference in student’s speaking performance before and after the treatment. Independent sample t-test analysis showed that t- obtained, 3.633 (df=28, sig=0.05 two tailed) was greater than the critical value of t-table, 2.048 which means that there was significant difference between students’ speaking performance who learned  through using handphone in project-based speaking instruction and the students who did not. The questionnaire distributed at the end of the treatment also showed that the students agreed that using handphone in project-based speaking instruction could be continuously applied as an effective method in speaking activity.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[844]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2582">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[The Effects of Concept Mapping Strategy Instruction on Reading Strategy Utilization of EFL University Students]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte are among the greatest novelists in the 19th century in English literature. Great expectations and Wuthering Heights can respectively be regarded as their representative works. In these novels both Heathcliff’s love for Catherine in Wuthering Heights and Pip’s love for Estella in Great expectations are considered as obsessive love.Obsessive love is a form of love where one person is emotionally obsessed with another. Obsessive love can lead to dangerous consequences. John D. Moore in his book, Confusing Love with Obsession describes the concept of &quot;Obsessive Love Wheel&quot; (OLW) which is a hypothetical circle. The wheel illustrates the four stages of Obsessive Relational Progression as part of Relational Dependency (RD). Moore suggests that for people who are afflicted with love addiction, codependency, and etc, their relationships often follow the pattern of the wheel. This obsessive love wheel is divided in four phases as: attraction phase, anxious phase, obsessive phase and destructive phase. In the above mentioned novels the characters Heathcliff and Pip followed the obsessive love wheel pattern. This paper is an attempt to examine the characters’ obsessive love through the psychological phases and how its destructive effect causes the downfall of two of the most powerful literary characters of the British literature, Pip in Great expectation and Heathcliff  in Wuthering Heights.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[911]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2583">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Violation of the Gender Stereotypes and the Readers&#039; Bewilderment in Shelley&#039;s the Cenci  ]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[The Cenci is the embodiment of Cenci and Beatrice&#039;s struggle for power and dominance. From the outset, the reader is informed about Cenci’s making abuse of power to perform whatever he wishes; he exonerated himself from charges by using his money and gold.    Cenci&#039;s daughter, Beatrice, revolts against his absolute power and invites her mother, to disregard the expectations of society with which they should comply. Her speech in the play is at odd with the stereotypical assumptions about the language of women and thus not appropriate for her gender; her behaviour like that of Antigone destabilized gender roles, and her tragic doom might be because her &quot;gender-bending&quot; behaviour; she was not a womanly woman rather she transgressed to the domain of power, which is &quot;always and only patriarchal.&quot;     Her punishment takes place off-stage, in the Cenci&#039;s palace but what the punishment is, is never uttered, yet it can be inferred from the Beatrice’s behaviour that it was sexual violence. Accordingly she decides to venture on parricide. After murdering her father, the authority at home, she has to encounter the authority in society, the church and its administrator, the Pope.    So much like her father Beatrice rejects that she employed Marzio; but in her forcing Marzio with her persuasive speeches, which “according to Payne “is a source of power, she becomes equal to her father. Now through her &quot;resenting eyes&quot; and her persuasive speech she mesmerizes Marzio. It is as if power entails domination and silencing the subordinates.     The reader is afflicted with a kind of indecisiveness and bewilderment for he has already broke with Cenci and comes close to Beatrice but soon understands he has to keep away from her as well for revenge is a blind aimless deed.  ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[860]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2584">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Will the Girl in “Hills Like White Elephants” Undergo the Operation?]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[“Hills Like White Elephants,” set in Spain, is the story of an American man and a girl sitting at an outdoor café in a Spanish train station and waiting for a fast, non-stop train coming from Barcelona to take them to Madrid.    Referred to by the American man as “Jig,” the girl is trying to decide whether or not to have an abortion; the man, while urging the girl to have the operation, says again and again that he really doesn’t want her to do so if she really doesn’t want to.      The girl is trying to be brave but she is clearly frightened of undergoing the operation; the man is clearly insisting that she do so because according to what he’s heard, it’s “natural” and “not really an operation at all.”    Finally, the express train arrives and the two prepare to board without having solved anything. The tension remains and Hemingway put it for the reader to conclude how the story ends: whether the girl undergoes the operation or she lets the child to be born.   Written, like his other short stories, on the principle of Iceberg, “Hills Like White Elephants” provides the reader with the necessary details, and then leaves him to decide what the couple are going to do about the girl&#039;s pregnancy.     The present essay aims at the examination of the ending of Hemingway&#039;s short story “Hills Like White Elephants,” and suggests a radically different outcome from those so far considered - the girl will not indeed have the abortion and afterwards the American will abandon her. Various indications are found in the story to support this interpretation: having the child is always accompanied by “fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro,” a river which signifies creation while aborting the child leads to a life of barrenness and sterility.  ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[864]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2585">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[On the Structure of the Lexical Plural in English]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[In our corpus extracted from LDCE (2003) I have noted some examples of the lexical plurals with s in which s is deleted in back formation or replaced in paradigmatic derivation:          (1a)	scissors &gt; scissor v., barracks &gt; barrack (soldiers) v., handcuffs &gt; handcuff v.        (b)	steelworks &gt; steelworker, environs  &gt; environed adj., thanks &gt; thankful, thankless adj.     These cases are particularly interesting because they involve the reinterpretation of the structure of words which are usually assumed to be simplex.     The theory of Hay (2003) connects the parsing of complex words to the frequency of component morphemes. Assumably the suffix is more easily parsed if the base is more frequent than the whole word. In (1a), however, the forms of lexical plurals are usually more frequent than the infinitives (eg. barracks has the frequeny of 621, and to barrack 4 according to the British National Corpus), and the parsing of -s should not be expected. However, in the cases like (1a), we must also take into account the size of  the family of words containing -s as a plural morpheme - it encourages speakers to interprete the phoneme s as a sign of plurality although s in (1a) is formally not a plural morpheme. By the analogy based on the meaning, position and pronunciation, speakers are encouraged to interprete s as a plural morpheme which can be removed or replaced. In paradigmatic derivations, it is replaced by the suffixes -er, -ed, -ful, -less in (1b). The examples like (1) demonstrate the effects of analogy in the reinterpretation of the structure of words which once have been assumed to be simplex.  ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[1009]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2586">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Using A Moodle Platform In An Online Exchange To Enhance Intercultural Sensitivity: A Practical Experience In Higher Education]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[As the Council of Europe suggests foreign language teaching needs to comprise not only linguistic performance but also intercultural consciousness and intercultural skills. Despite being grammatically and lexically competent, many university students have limited experience in handling cultural difference due to a lack of exposure to intercultural interaction (Belz, 2006). As O’Dowd (2007) states, online communication tools not only offer more opportunities than before to interact with peers from distant societies but they also provide an authentic and effective way of preparing learners for intercultural enrichment through partnership.    The aim of this talk is to present a summary of the experience and the findings of a semester long online exchange between specialist learners of English at the University of Vic (Barcelona, Spain) and at the University of Opole (Poland) during the 2011-2012 academic year. The immediate objective pursed by both institutions was to establish a closer relationship between third year students both physically and virtually so as to foster a better understanding of their counterparts’ culture. The project rested on the principles of reciprocity and learner autonomy, so the communication was asynchronous and fundamentally developed outside the classroom. In order to test the impact of the online communication on the students’ intercultural sensitivity a small scale study was conducted. During the session, the structure, outcomes, challenges and future of the experience will be discussed and some preliminary results of the research project will be presented.  ]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[770]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/2587">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[Gender on the Sphere of Written Text; in Persian and English Short Fictions]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[This article is a field study that tries to verify the effect of gender on the scope of Persian and English written texts. Variables such as color terms, swearing, hedges, intensifiers, tag questions, adjectives of approximation and adjectives are considered for analysis in the study of selected literary texts in the corpus. The findings of this study show that in terms of color terms, both English and Persian female story writers use more color terms in their stories. Male writers are generally supposed to use more swearing in their stories. In terms of the use of hedging devices in the stories, it is shown that hedging expressions are found more frequently in female authored texts. The study of intensifiers (up graders, boosters) in Persian and English stories shows that, the use of intensifiers is more common within women&#039;s writing style. In spite of the very infrequent use of tags in the stories, male authored texts provide more examples of tag questions. Challenging tags are more frequent in men&#039;s writing; female writers on the other hand prefer the use of epistemic tags. Frequency of the use of adjectives of approximation is not a good criterion to differentiate female authored texts from male authored ones in Persian corpus. On the other hand the use of this linguistic feature in English corpus demonstrates that female authored texts use these adjectives more frequently. The study of the use of adjectives in English and Persian corpus shows that female writers use adjectives more frequently in their writing.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2012-05]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[1004]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description></rdf:RDF>