Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice

Sharpiegate

2023-04-13T08:41:31+00:00

In this article, we use the case of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the southeastern United States in 2019, to expand on the scholarship about professional vision by taking up how weather is materialized in the negotiation of seeing between members of the scientific community and the state. Attending to the controversy known popularly as Sharpiegate, in which President Donald Trump, the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Birmingham (Alabama) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offered conflicting accounts of Hurricane Dorian’s predicted path, we use discourse analysis to examine four tweets, a NOAA official statement and the Commerce Department’s investigative report to show how institutional actors negotiated their entitlement to see, accounts of what was seen and accountability to their claims as seers. We argue that Sharpiegate significantly disrupted the relationship between science and the state, which depends upon scientists’ professional re-semiotizing of hurricanes in images which the state can use to legitimize its crisis response. Our findings show how NOAA and the Commerce Department utilize strategic ambiguity, distributed agency and accountability and the careful maintenance of boundaries in their claims of what was seen and what counts as legitimate seeing in weather forecasting.

Qualitative evaluation of content similarity in the context of clinical research

2023-04-13T08:41:23+00:00

‘Burnout’ is one of those medical terms that lack a consensual definition, although its definitions may appear very similar. This paper outlines and discusses research carried out to find the shared elements of the original reference definitions of ‘burnout’ used in scientific literature between the 1990s and today, as a preliminary step towards the setting up of a harmonised definition. In order to pinpoint what is common in the original reference definitions of ‘burnout’, we developed and implemented a methodology based on the application of a linguistic – in particular, semantic – analysis. Our methodology may be of interest to researchers in other fields as a way to carry out a preliminary investigation of the definitions in use for a (specialist) term.

Occupational stress in forensic linguistic practice

2023-04-13T08:41:41+00:00

As an occupational stressor, working with disturbing material can lead to burnout and vicarious trauma. A profession where exposure to potentially disturbing data tends to be common is that of the forensic linguist, both as an academic researcher and an expert witness in investigative and court settings. Yet, very little is known about the nature of occupational stress in forensic linguistic practice or the coping strategies forensic linguists employ. We address this knowledge gap by drawing on the intersubjective perspective of twelve practitioners, who were interviewed about aspects of their work. We apply thematic analysis to the data to find out what kinds of situations potentially detrimental to psychological wellbeing they encounter in their everyday practice, and how they respond to those situations. We find that, while the practitioners acknowledge the disturbing nature of case data, they are rarely affected by it, at least ostensibly so. This could be due to a number of coping strategies they mention, such as desensitisation; talking to others; putting a distance between themselves and the work; mentally preparing themselves for what they will be seeing, hearing or reading; and seeing their work as contributing positively to society.

Multicultural content in English language teaching textbooks

2023-04-13T08:41:36+00:00

The aim of this study is to explore two sets of widely used English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks in Iran – an American ESL series known as Top Notch and an indigenous Iranian series of high school EFL textbooks known as Vision – in terms of their representation of multicultural elements at the surface and deep cultural levels, and their potential to promote language learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Interpretive content analysis is used to identify the cultural patterns in the ELT textbooks. The findings reveal that the Vision series only limitedly presents cultural elements associated with both the local and international community, and covers fewer categories and subcategories of cultural elements, whether at the surface level or at the deep level of culture. In addition, its deep culture representation is confined to the local (i.e., Iranian or Islamic) cultures. In contrast, the Top Notch series presents many cultural elements associated with the international community and embraces more categories and subcategories at the surface level. It also includes more multicultural elements at the deep level. Consequently, the Vision series limits the development of language learners’ ICC, while the Top Notch series is a better resource for multicultural education and intercultural communication. One common ground between the two series, however, is that they both present culture mostly at the surface level; thus, both series could benefit from the incorporation of more cultural elements at the deep level. This study deals with the cultural features that are presented in these two series.

Effects of directionality on consecutive interpreting between English and Persian

2023-04-13T08:43:24+00:00

The present study investigates the effect of directionality on the quality of consecutive interpreting between English and Persian by interpreting trainees. Two experiments were run in which 62 participants were recruited in two experiments at Arak University, Iran. In the first experiment, the participants (N = 30) interpreted from non-native English into native Persian (‘recto’). In the second experiment, different participants (N = 32) interpreted from native Persian into non-native English (‘verso’). The results showed better overall scores when interpreting was done into the mother tongue of the trainees. In each of the two experiments, the experimental group that had received prosody training outperformed the control group, especially on prosody-related rating scales such as pace (fluency). Finally, the performance by the experimental groups was better (relative to the control group) when the training and testing was done in the recto direction than when done verso. We conclude that the prosodic awareness training helps the interpreters to better decode the non-native input rather than to produce prosodically correct non-native output. The pedagogical implications of the present study may pertain to interpreting programs (at least in Iran). Prosody awareness training should be part of the teaching of listening comprehension in the interpreters’ curriculum.