Volume 6 (2018): Issue 2 (May 2018)

The project presented here deals with a typical human means of communication – writing. The aim of the project is to map the developmental dynamics of handwriting from the first to the fifth grade of primary school. The question remains topical because of the fact that several systems of writing have been used in the past few years. Our project focuses on comparing the systems of joined-up handwriting (the standard Latin alphabet) and the most widespread form of printed handwriting: Comenia Script. The research can be marked as sectional; pupils took a writing exam at the beginning and at the end of the 2015/2016 school year. The total number of respondents was 624 pupils, evenly distributed according to the school year, system of writing and gender. To evaluate handwriting, the evaluation scale of Veverková and Kucharská (2012) was adjusted to include a description of phenomena related to graphomotor and grammatical aspects of writing, including the overall error rate and work with errors. Each area that was observed included a series of indicators through which it was possible to create a comprehensive image of the form handwriting took in the given period. Each indicator was independently classified on a three-point scale. Thanks to that, a comprehensive image of the form of writing of a contemporary pupil emerged.

The study focuses on the process of being aware of own I in children acquiring Slovak language at an early age and living in a Slovak family. The aim of the research is to understand the process of acquiring the means by which children refer to themselves in the interaction with an adult person. The research uses the qualitative longitudinal method of individual case study. A child’s speech is researched from the very first occurrence of a self-reference mean in 16th month up to the upper limit of early age (36th month) and all that is based on audio-visual records transcripts. The following are researched: (a) succession of self-reference means acquisition in early childhood, (b) function of self-reference linguistic means, (c) process of child’s self-awareness. The results obtained based on the linguistic data in Slovak language are compared with the results of similarly focused researches in English, French, Polish, Russian and Bulgarian language. The research reveals some constants in the development of self-reference instruments that can be observed throughout various language-cultural environments. The research is a part of solutions within the grant project VEGA 1/0099/16 Personal and Social Deixis in Slovak Language.

This empirical study focused on parents who enrolled their two-year old children in preschools in the Czech Republic. Recent provision of the Ministry of Education recommended that preschools accept children who are as young as two years, in response to increased demands of mothers who want to re-enter the employment after maternity leave. The purpose of the study was to examine the reasons of parents to place their children in preschools as well as their satisfaction of the developmental progress of their children in this institution. A representative sample of parents who enrolled their children in preschool from age two was surveyed (N=520). Surprisingly, caring for the child while at work was not the most important reason. They rated it 3.66 on a five-point scale. Other reasons were rated higher: getting the child accustomed to interaction within groups of same-age children (M=4.01), acquiring cognitive skills and knowledge (M=3.89), and getting accustomed to a routine other than that found at home (M=3.75). When asked to assess the developmental progress of their children due to preschool attendance on a 3-point scale, the parents noted progress in communication ability (M=2.35), social skills (M=2.37) as well as overall progress (M=2.62). Concerning demographic characteristics, the estimate of the child’s overall progress in preschool was significantly related to the mother’s level of education and her marital status.

The paper concentrates on the problem of developing imagination understood as human trait and virtue. To realize the challenge educators have to face huge difficulties as a tendency to flatter the world and its inhabitants dominates and becomes more and more powerful. A musical fairy tale is presented as a valuable and effective school practice. From one side it refers to perennial human custom of listening, telling, and creating stories, fables, and sagas. They may base on real life or refer to imaginary situations. Thus creation may have various realizations, depending on personal knowledge, skills, life experience, cognitive horizon, individual interests and virtues. From the other side the idea of the fairy tale shown in the paper refers to the music and its uncountable possibilities of describing the world. Everything depends only on one’s imagination. The last part of the paper presents the effects of students’ work on musical fairy tales. Those students apart of being instrumentalists and vocalists of the Music Academy of Lodz, Poland plan to become music teachers in compulsory general education.

Targeting at adequate translation while teaching translation to engineers any teacher should remember about social and cultural discrepancies between languages. The difference in mentality should not be reflected in the special target text. Engineering students are supposed not only to be able to find proper equivalents and render the terms appropriately but also to analyse the communicative situation and cultural peculiarities of the source text. Teaching professionally oriented translation depends on many factors including ontological and specialised cultural levels, technological progress and its incorporation into the national, international and global culture, linguistic diachrony and its role in terminological corpus formation as well as science and technology institutional role. Teaching translation at engineering academy has a long and fruitful history, which shows the efficiency of training intercultural and sociocultural competence in teaching translation. It allows to avoid serious drawbacks in translation when a translator confronts the other language culture images and concepts.

The article aims to provide cross-cultural insight into the examination of emotion “envy” through comparative description of the emotional worldviews in Slavic (Russian and Slovak) and non-Slavic (English) linguistic cultures represented in the form of the concept. The obtained results have allowed us to clarify some common and different features of Slavic and non-Slavic nations in the realm of display the emotion “envy” to explore cultural peculiarities of nations and to contribute to the professional training and practices of professional dealing with international communication. The article also seeks to enhance public awareness on the following important issues: how cognate are perceptions of Slavic and non-Slavic nations; what universal features and cross-cultural differences are in regulation, somatization, the degree of prototypically of a seemingly equivalent concept, and how cultural rules influence the shaping of meaning and the expression of the investigated emotion in discourse.

The aim of this paper is to research the word class adjective in one sequence of the ESP: Business English, more precisely English business magazines online. It is an empirical study on the corpus taken from a variety of business magazines online. The empirical analysis allows a comprehensive insight into the word class adjective in this variety of Business English and makes its contribution to English syntax, semantics and word formation. The syntactic part analyses the adjective position in the sentence. The semantic part of the study identifies the most common adjectives that appear in English business magazines online. Most of the analysis is devoted to the word formation of the adjectives found in the corpus. The corpus is analysed in such a way that it enables its division into compounds, derivatives and conversions. The results obtained in this way will give a comprehensive picture of the word class adjective in this type of Business English and can act as a starting point for further research of the word class adjective.

The majority of people who have experienced institutionalized education have found it extremely laborious, slow and a necessarily repetitive process. The authors of this paper focus on and present possibilities for making the teaching of a foreign language more effective through mind mapping: the implementation of neuro-linguistic knowledge and mind maps into the learning process.

Sites associated with the dark and literary aspects of tourism can prove beneficial to travellers since they can play an educational role while instigating an emotional and intellectual response. This article illustrates how a tour to the Isle of the Dead at Port Arthur in Tasmania provided the nescient traveller with insights into the literary and historical heritage of the place. The experience also acted as an inner journey in that it challenged the traveller to reassess his engagement with travel destinations.

The aim of the paper is to make an attempt of theoretical synthesis connected with the idea of reception studies. It presents major aspects which are crucial for understanding the reception studies, especially for the reception of antiquity in Victorian literature (for instance chosen critical approaches to literature, contemporary tools for conducting the research like intertextuality). The paper also presents definitions of classics, classical tradition and reception and tries to explain why Victorian times and literature are a perfect research material to examine the reception of antiquity.