School of Linguistics and Language Studies

This paper draws on theories that describe interrelationships between identity, language and the media to investigate how the Kurds utilise two forms of electronic media—satellite television and the Internet—to construct their identities. The data for this study is generated from four sources: a Kurdish satellite television channel (Kurdistan TV), a variety of Kurdish Internet sites, literature reflecting on the place of the new media among the Kurds, and informal interviews and personal communications with Kurdish media producers and audiences. Strategies including participant observation and online ethnography have been used to select data. Data analysis is informed by a critical discourse analytic approach that calls for examination of data at three levels: discourse practices, text, and socio-cultural contexts (Fairclough in Media discourse. Arnold, London, 1995). Findings suggest that the Kurdish language is held as one of the most important and salient manifestations of Kurdish identity. Satellite television and the Internet have magnified the symbolic role of the Kurdish language in defining Kurdishness. In addition, these new media have enabled Kurds from different regions and all walks of life to share and discuss cultural, social and political ideas and issues publicly and dialogically, and to construct and reconstruct their identities discursively with relative freedom and ease. The study also underlines significant differences between these two forms of new media in relation to identity construction and language use. Whereas satellite television seems to foster mutual intelligibility among the speakers of different Kurdish varieties the Internet tends to further diversify the language across alphabet and regional lines.

In this paper, I illustrate that the people of Iran do not "enjoy
equal [language] rights". Indeed, whereas Persian as the language of about 50% of the population is declared official, other languages have been marginalized and excluded from some of the most important domains within which languages can thrive, develop, and be validated, e.g., education and public administration. Despite Article 15 of the same constitution, which acknowledges Iran as a multilingual society, and
'allows' for the use of minoritized languages in the teaching of
their literature and 'ethnic media', Persianization of the country remains the official language policy.

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This study is an illustration of the value of appraisal theory in studies of writing assessment. To demonstrate its functionality and value, appraisal theory is used to examine rater variability and scoring criteria through an analysis of the evaluative nature of rater comments. This allows an exploration of the values raters bring to the scoring task of rating second language writing proficiency. The written comments of three raters scoring the same sixteen writing tests were analyzed through appraisal theory and correlated to each test score. The analysis of the comments suggests that textual features external to the scoring rubric influenced raters' scoring decisions. The findings shed light on raters' perception of the construct of "good writing" and show how raters bring their own interpretations to the rating task. The findings also suggest that there may be unidentified shared rater values, as was evidenced when all raters awarded the same score but disagree...

Minority languages have been oppressed, denied, and neglected for a long time, and their decline is accelerating. Whereas estimates show that half of the world's languages disappeared from 1450 to 1950, half of the remaining 6000 to 7000 languages could disappear in this century alone. Some observers include globalization and new media technologies among the factors contributing to this extinction. Some others, however, see new media, such as satellite television and the Internet, as the salvation of minority languages. This book is a solid and major contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between media, language maintenance, and language development. Although the book mainly focuses on Western Europe, its eclectic range of topics could resonate with minority language situations around the world. The book serves the editors' ambitious project: to establish minority language media as a discrete field of study connected to, but independent of, media studies, and applied linguistics or sociolinguistics. Initially developed out of the First Mercator International Symposium on Minority Languages and Research, a 2003 symposium sponsored by the European Commission, the book consists of fourteen chapters. In addition to the excellent introductory and concluding chapters by editors Mike Cormack and Niamh Hourigan, there are twelve chapters organized into two sections. The first section sets the context, describing key terms (e.g., minority language), presenting a rich literature review of the field, and mapping the theoretical and methodological issues. This section also furnishes an insightful analysis of networks of campaigns for minority television, the "knowledge economy" of digital media and its implications for minority language media, and recording the history of minority language broadcasting. The second section contains incisive case studies featuring more specific issues: the empowering affordances of the Internet for minority cultures, the crucial role of local television in the Basque Country and Catalonia in language normalization ("the recovery of public use of [the minority] language in all fields") (p. 171), the representational affordances of local television in Wales, emphasizing the linguistic aspects of minority media production (e.g. translation, dubbing and subtitling), and finally, the struggle for putting sign language on British television. A common thread that connects these chapters is the belief that it is important to maintain and develop minority languages and the stance that the media have a crucial role to play in maintaining and developing minority languages. Minority language media are deemed

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has increasingly served to examine the content of textbooks. Given momentum by critical social inquiry pertaining to textbook content, this study looks at peer-reviewed literature drawn from three scholarly databases (JSTOR, ERIC, and SAGE; cross-referenced with searches on Google Scholar) that use critical discourse analysis for those investigations. Reviewing the selected literature, this study asks: What are the most represented approaches of CDA used for examining textbooks? What contextual themes appear to draw the most attention? In what fields of study are the examined textbooks situated? How do these emergent themes appear to be connected? What areas of research appear lacking in the collected literature? The findings illustrate that, while the methods of CDA and types of textbooks examined are diverse, the lion’s share of contextual attention and critical utility appear to be given to foundational approaches to CDA and textbooks used for En...