Ethnicity, ethics, and the deaf-world

This article is concerned with ethical aspects of the relations between language minorities using signed languages (called the Deaf-World) and the larger societies that engulf them. The article aims to show that such minorities have the properties of ethnic groups, and that an unsuitable construction of the Deaf-World as a disability group has led to programs of the majority that discourage Deaf children from acquiring the language and culture of the Deaf-World and that aim to reduce the number of Deaf births-programs that are unethical from an ethnic group perspective. Four reasons not to construe the Deaf-World as a disability group are advanced: Deaf people themselves do not believe they have a disability; the disability construction brings with it needless medical and surgical risks for the Deaf child; it also endangers the future of the Deaf-World; finally, the disability construction brings bad solutions to real problems because it is predicated on a misunderstanding.     

Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Insights From Deafness

The condition of deafness presents a developmental context that provides insight into the biological, cultural, and linguistic factors underlying the development of neural systems that impact social cognition. Studies of visual attention, behavioral regulation, language development, and face and human action perception are discussed. Visually based culture and language provides deaf children with affordances that promote resiliency and optimization in their development of visual engagement, executive functions, and theory of mind. These experiences promote neural adaptations permitting nuanced perception of classes of linguistic and emotional-social behaviors. Studies of deafness provide examples of how interactions and contributions of biological predispositions and genetic phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors including childhood experiences and actions of caregivers shape developmental trajectories ( M. I. Posner & M. K. Rothbart, 2007 ).     

Seeing the deaf in "deafness"

This article draws on some of the existing literature on the politics of identity and representation as related to minority group formation. It applies this to constructions of Deaf2 identity from a cultural and linguistic perspective and contrasts this with dominant constructions of Deaf people as disabled. It highlights a number of ways in which Deaf identity differs from disabled identity, demonstrating that the cultural and linguistic construction of Deaf people is a more useful tool for analysis. It raises questions aimed to examine the discourse on deafness and seeks further debate on how best the discourse can be progressed. The article raises issues related to the use of terminology and labeling in the field of deafness. It contends that the continued use of the word deafness is unworkable and should be more widely recognized as a social construct, which has current usage beyond the paradigm in which it was originally intended. The article concludes by recognizing the importance of diversity in identity formation, while simultaneously calling for an appreciation of the need to incorporate this diversity within wider theorizing, focused on commonality and cohesion in identity as a source of collective expression and political mobilization.     

Toward an "Archeology of Deafness": Etic and Emic Constructions of Identity in Conflict

Michel Foucault's concept of "archeological thinking" as a means of "making it possible to think difference" is used in this article as an organizing framework for conceptualizing the conflict between the multiple, competing social and individual constructions of deaf identity. The substantial literature dealing with deaf culture in the United States is used to explore the nature and characteristics of etic and emic constructions of deafness. Among the differences examined are the cultural, ideological, and linguistic differences that separate various constructions of deafness. In this article I emphasize the social, political, and educational implications of the different constructions of deafness.     

Culturally colored didactics: The sociopolitical at the heart of second/foreign language teaching in Francophone geolinguistic spaces

This article analyzes sociopolitical influences in the construction of national didactic spaces. First, it provides a general framework of analysis. Second, it argues that Francophonie (the French-speaking countries and communities of the world collectively) constitutes geopolitical spaces sharing linguistic, cultural, economic and institutional constructions but that it is culturally and linguistically varied. This sociopolitical context gives rise to particular ideologies of language and to the consequent need for second/foreign language didactics. The examples of France and Quebec are used to show how contexts influence these didactics. Third, from the locus of professional associations, the paper shows empirically how geographic didactic clusters are both culturolinguistically colored and continentally influenced. It concludes that dealing with diversity (didactic diversity or linguistic and cultural diversity) is not an easy task: Both second/foreign language didactics and the constituent communities of Francophonie are searching for ways of being together in a postmodern world.     

关于校园流行语使用上的性别差异调查

本文通过真实语料探讨目前校园流行语的使用在男女性别上的差异.结果发现:流行语在一定程度上反映了男性社区与女性社区在语言使用上的差异.这一差异的形成受社会、文化和心理等诸多因素的影响.但女性也在试图通过语言形式的改变,以男性的价值观重新定义自己.数据表明,一些被男生使用的词语也渐渐被女生所接受并使用.通过对态度的进一步分析表明,绝大多数认为流行语只不过是局域范围内个人交流的一种方式,不引导主流方向,具有短期流行性及不稳定性,应顺其自然.     

Ethical behaviours of student teachers’ mentors in forced same-gender and cross-gender matches in a Malawian Initial Primary Teacher Education programme: implications for mentor selection and development

The popularity of assigned or forced same-gender and cross-gender matches between school mentors and student teachers has heightened concerns regarding the ethical and/or unethical behaviours of mentors. In this article the authors present the findings of a crosssectional survey study on the prevalence of ethical and/or unethical behaviours of school mentors in forced same-gender and cross-gender matches from the perspective of their student teachers in Malawi’s Initial Primary teacher education mentoring programme. The study was grounded in a positivist paradigm and a quantitative approach was followed. A structured questionnaire was dropped to and picked up from a census sample of 616 student teachers who were attached to 92 school mentors in 92 primary schools by one of the Primary teacher training colleges in Malawi. Univariate and bivariate analysis using SPSS version 20.0 was employed to analyse the quantitative data. The results revealed that school mentors in forced same-gender as well as in cross-gender matches exhibited more unethical than ethical behaviours to their student teachers; and that their unethical behaviours were graver in demonstrating deontological responsibility such as using their power and authority to expose student teachers to risky conditions. The study also found no significant difference in ethical and/or unethical behaviours of mentors in forced same-gender and cross-gender matches. Overall, the results supported the need for careful mentor selection; regular mentor development opportunities; and regular monitoring of the mentoring processes.     

The Effect of Formal Policies and Informal Social Learning On Perceptions of Corporate Ethics: Actions Speak Louder than Codes

This research investigates how two cues in an organizational setting, codes of conduct and company responses to ethical transgressions, affect the kinds of inferences individuals make about the ethical climate of the company. The business community has adopted the legal approach, emphasizing that the ethical climate of a corporation can be effectively mandated in a code. However, social psychological analysis intuits that management can define the ethical climate more powerfully through their overt actions. Study 1 and Study 2 find that it is not so much the presence/absence or strength of a code but how a company responds to violations of the code that influences how ethical a company will be judged. Study 3 examined motives for establishing a code, and showed that a company was judged as more unethical when its code was motivated by situational constraints. Employees' ethical judgments are critical to their acceptance of ethical conduct.     

Representations of deaf characters in children's picture books

Picture books can influence how children perceive people of different backgrounds, including people with disabilities whose cultures differ from their own. Researchers have examined the portrayal of multicultural characters with disabilities in children's literature. However, few have specifically considered the portrayal of deaf characters, despite increased inclusion of deaf characters in children's literature over the past two decades. The present study analyzed the portrayal of deaf characters in picture books for children ages 4-8 years. A content analysis of 20 children's picture books was conducted in which the books were analyzed for messages linked to pathological and cultural categories. Results indicated that these books did not portray Deaf characters from a cultural perspective but, rather, highlighted aspects of deafness as a medical condition, one that requires fixing and that perpetuates stereotypes of deafness as a disability.     

Discourses of Linguistic dominance: A Historical Consideration of French Language Ideology

The paper offers a historical perspective on the linguistic and cultural imperialism embedded in the struggle to maintain French as a leading international language. France was the nation-state where the ideology of national language was first clearly formulated and directly extended to overseas colonies. This shows the close relationship between linguistic nationalism and imperialism. It was believed that French was the language of universal human reason and had the power to civilize people who spoke it. This myth of the "clarté française" and the "mission civilisatrice" had a strong influence on various kinds of metalinguistic discourses that created the taken-for-granted representation of French as dominant language. It is the essential strategy of language dominance to establish the hierarchy of languages as if it were natural order of things. When French was obliged to yield the status of international language to English, there emerged the ideology of "Francophonie" which tried to defend its privilege against the monopoly of English, but the same ideology is also directed against minorities' claims for their own linguistic human right. It could be said that these discourses form a recursive prototype of language dominance whose variations are to be found in other shapes almost all over the world.     

英汉语言禁忌的对比分析

语言禁忌是各种语言中都普遍存在的现象,本文对英语和汉语中的语言禁忌现象进行了探讨和对比分析,并揭示了其相似性和相异性。不同的文化会对语言禁忌现象产生很大的影响,在学习语言时,必须要了解该语言的文化背景,弄清楚什么是需要避讳的,以避免误解,达到预期的交际目的。     

教师职业道德规范的边界

目前,我国教师职业道德规范还没有一个清晰的边界,与教师活动中的经济、政治、法律、技术和语言这些非道德规范有所混淆。本文逐一分析了教师职业道德规范与这些非道德规范的区别与联系,指出了它们之间相互混淆的原因与不当之处。总体来看,这些混淆不仅造成了人们对教师职业道德规范的认识混乱,还给教师职业道德规范的实施带来了困难。考虑到教师职业道德规范边界的重要性,本文最后给出了相应的建议。     

Discourses of Linguistic dominance: A Historical Consideration of French Language Ideology

The paper offers a historical perspective on the linguistic and cultural imperialism embedded in the struggle to maintain French as a leading international language. France was the nation-state where the ideology of national language was first clearly formulated and directly extended to overseas colonies. This shows the close relationship between linguistic nationalism and imperialism. It was believed that French was the language of universal human reason and had the power to civilize people who spoke it. This myth of the "clarté française" and the "mission civilisatrice" had a strong influence on various kinds of metalinguistic discourses that created the taken-for-granted representation of French as dominant language. It is the essential strategy of language dominance to establish the hierarchy of languages as if it were natural order of things. When French was obliged to yield the status of international language to English, there emerged the ideology of "Francophonie" which tried to defend its privilege against the monopoly of English, but the same ideology is also directed against minorities' claims for their own linguistic human right. It could be said that these discourses form a recursive prototype of language dominance whose variations are to be found in other shapes almost all over the world.     

解构主义批评视野下的《迷舟》

先锋文学或许有耀眼的语言实验,但是如果仅止于此,那么这样的先锋充其量只是一种浅度的先锋,只有那种在进行形式革新的同时仍坚持不回避文学伦理责任的先锋文学才是真正的先锋,深度的先锋.     

从文化误读到文化冲突——《沉没之鱼》中的三个意象

《沉没之鱼》体现了谭恩美对于文化冲突问题深刻的伦理思考。通过对小说中的“鱼”、“子宫洞”、“神之军队”等意象的表现,作家探讨了东西方文化中的不同生活习性、不同宗教信仰、不同生活方式的并存和相遇,以及在这种相遇中必然产生的矛盾与冲撞,并认为,如果缺乏必要的沟通、对话和理解,就必然会导致一种悲剧的结局。     

经济新闻中语内冗余成分英译策略

冗余与信息的可预测性相关,它是信息传输过程的可预测或规约的信号,是语言的内在属性。任何语言都包含50%左右的冗余成分,这些可预测信息成分可排除噪音的干扰和解码疲劳,确保语内交际的成功。冗余表现为显性的语义冗余和隐性的文化冗余。由于语言的差异性,直接翻译会导致目的语的冗余成分过多或过少,不利于目的语读者解码。笔者以汉语经济新闻为例,探讨翻译应该尽量使源语和目的语的"语言和文化冗余相互匹配",达到预期交际效果的途径。     

Special educational needs: a public issue

This article explores the contribution of sociological scholarship to understanding and analysing the notions of ‘special educational needs’ and ‘disability’ and the ways in which the two notions have been reconfigured and theorised as ‘public issues’ rather than ‘personal troubles’. Barton's contribution is signified both in terms of his contribution to the evolution of the ‘sociological imagination’ – as a powerful theoretical tool for unravelling the highly political and contested nature of disability and special educational needs – and also in terms of his analysis of the emergence and development of sociological theorising in the field. The parochial obsession with deficit and medical‐oriented approaches to dealing with ‘difference’ and ‘need’ have been significantly challenged through the ‘sociological imagination’ aimed at pointing up the highly political and complex nature of disability and ‘special educational needs’. Times have changed and sociological theorising has evolved, but presumed ‘personal troubles’ are still not unequivocally conceptualised as being intertwined with, resting upon and emanating from ‘public issues’ embedded in the social, cultural and political edifice of educational, social and national communities. The ‘sociological imagination’ should be constantly invoked and deployed in order to expose and challenge the sophisticated ways in which individual pathology accounts and special educational imperatives re‐invent themselves through more inclusive linguistic veneers.     

国际化进程中语言文化的"和而不同"

国际化进程必然带来语言文化的融合,但这种融合体现为不同民族、不同文化在持续交往中形成的相互理解能力的加强;同时,国际化和民族性相互作用的结果是新的差异的产生,正是这些差异维持了语言文化多元的前景。因此,保持语言文化的不同有其可能性。国际化进程中各语言文化正是在互识、互证、互补的过程中,通过相互依存达到独立。     

Teaching critical thinking: The struggle against dogmatism*

Abstract

From a Wittgensteinian point of view, my goal is to argue against the idea that teaching critical thinking should have as one of its aims the possibility of changing or adapting our deeply held beliefs. As pointed out by the Austrian philosopher in On Certainty, we have a world-picture which is neither true nor false, but above all, ‘it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting’ (OC, §162). Besides that, in his remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein insists on the idea that different communities have their own rituals that express ways of acting, which become crystallized in their customs and institutions, similar to the magical rituals described by Frazer. The degree of similarity among them is greater than we suspect, and what interested Wittgenstein was to understand how we see things by looking for the links between the various ritualistic events. Based on these remarks, I argue that, if our deeply held beliefs are a source of necessity, instead of aiming to change/adapt them, teaching critical thinking should—by showing the links between diverse cultures—essentially avoid employing them in a dogmatic way, since our own deeply held beliefs could have been different ones.     

Higher education and linguistic dualism in the Arab Gulf

This paper examines the spread of English as a medium of higher education in the Arab world, addressing questions about the relationship between higher education, language shift and cultural (re)production through such post‐colonial educational bilingualism. Drawing on exploratory ethnographic research, it documents how both Arabic and English have been implicated in the re‐configuring of collective identities through mass higher education in one Arab Gulf country against a context of rapid modernisation with a regional undercurrent of recurrent pan‐Arab and Islamist‐tinged nationalism. It examines how far the resulting linguistic‐cultural dualism amounts to a loss of linguistic–cultural diversity, and how far there is a linguistically‐framed discourse of resistance to such a process. Theoretically, the paper engages with discourses relating to socio‐cultural reproduction, collective identity, educational standardisation, change and cultural chauvinism, and markets. It offers insights into the potential for both language and higher education to act as tools or fields for cultural transformation and for resistance identity construction.