While considerable research has been conducted on the register analysis of English language tertiary textbooks, relatively little is explored about the register analytical features of secondary textbooks. The purpose of the present pedagogically-driven study is to analyse the register of biology textbooks for secondary students from the point of view of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching by describing the register of the biology corpus (BIOCOR) that 10th grade students need to process during their studies at a bilingual secondary school. The research reports on the characteristic linguistic features of the BIOCOR with regard to the complexity of the texts syntactic structure. The BIOCOR (consisting of 7,021 words) is compared to a reference corpus (REFCOR) of general English texts at a CEFR B2 level (comprising 7,098 words) by exploring the frequency of ten types of syntactic structures (simple, compound and complex sentences of various number of dependent and independent clauses). The results of the investigation disclose that syntactic simplicity is prevalent in the BIOCOR: simple sentences abound, complex sentences are used in a modest manner, while complex-compound sentences are hardly present in the corpus. The syntactic simplicity of the biology textbook can be regarded as one of the linguistic features revealing the non-academic but popularizing nature of the secondary textbook register.
English as a second language (ESL) teachers instructing general English and English for specific purposes (ESP) in bilingual secondary schools face various challenges when it comes to choosing the main linguistic foci of language preparatory courses enabling non-native students to study academic subjects in English. ESL teachers intending to analyse English language subject textbooks written for secondary school students with the aim of gaining information about what bilingual secondary school students need to know in terms of language to process academic textbooks cannot avoiding deal with a dilemma. It needs to be decided which way it is most appropriate to analyse the texts in question. Handbooks of English applied linguistics are not immensely helpful with regard to this problem as they tend not to give recommendation as to which major text analytical approaches are advisable to follow in a precollege setting. The present theoretical research aims to address this lacuna. Respectively, the purpose of this pedagogically motivated theoretical paper is to investigate two major approaches of ESP text analysis, the register and the genre analysis, in order to find the more suitable one for exploring the language use of secondary school subject texts from the point of view of an English as a second language teacher.Comparing and contrasting the merits and limitations of the two contrastive approaches allows for a better understanding of the nature of the two different perspectives of text analysis. The study examines the goals, the scope of analysis, and the achievements of the register perspective and those of the genre approach alike. The paper also investigates and reviews in detail the starkly different methods of ESP text analysis applied by the two perspectives. Discovering text analysis from a theoretical and methodological angle supports a practical aspect of English teaching, namely making an informed choice when setting out to analyse texts in English. It can be concluded from the literature that the register perspective yields more readily applicable data of text analysis for ESL teachers instructing in a pre-college environment. Besides teachers working in bilingual secondary school, the pedagogical conclusions of the study are also useful for teachers instructing in
Sympathy is a powerful principle in human nature, which can change our passions, sentiments and ways of thinking. For the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, sympathy is a working mechanism accountable for a wide range of communication: the ways of interacting with the others’ affections, emotions, sentiments, inclinations, ways of thinking and even opinions. The present paper intends to find a systematic reading of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) from the point of view of what the mechanism of sympathetic communication implies in terms of strengthening our action of understanding, of being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of others. Hume’s description of the sympathetic mechanism appears to suggest that sympathetic passions come upon us purely by natural means in a passive manner, without the active use of any of our faculties. Consequently, scholarly attention is drawn to the mechanistic character of the sympathetic process; its automatic nature is emphasized to such an extent that some experts even find it to be completely void of any reflective process. The current study investigates to what extent the sympathetic process can actively be modified and in what manner sympathetic feelings can be generated as described in Hume’s system of emotions. The paper identifies at which points the otherwise mechanically and passively operating process of sympathetic feelings is open to be modified by actively altering or strengthening certain skeletal points of the mechanism. I argue that the alterations can be initiated by the person who receives the sympathetic feelings and also by the person whose passions are transmitted, moreover even by a third party. In a seemingly mechanic model, there is room for altering or at least amplifying one’s sympathetic feelings.
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