Volume 18 (2021): Issue 1 (May 2021)

This article introduces a new field of enquiry called revivalistics, and explores its trans-disciplinarity and various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits. Revivalistics is an emerging global, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (Zuckermann, 2003; 2009; 2020), and particularistic peculiarities and cultural relativist idiosyncrasies on the other, apparent in linguistic reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration across various sociological backgrounds, all over the globe (Zuckermann, 2020; Zuckermann & Walsh, 2011; 2014). The article focuses on the crucial differences between revivalistics and documentary linguistics. It provides examples from the field that demonstrate the complexity of the revivalist’s work and how the revivalist’s work is distinct from that of the documentary linguist. Too many documentary linguists mislead themselves to believe that they can easily be revivalists too. But there are two crucial differences between revivalistics and documentary linguistics, which are at war between themselves: (1) Whereas documentary linguists put the language at the centre, revivalists put the language custodians at the centre. (2) Whereas in documentary linguistics the Indigenous/minority people have the knowledge of the language, in revivalistics the revivalist is the one with that knowledge. Given that the Aboriginal/minority people are the language custodians, and given that the language custodians are at the centre of the revivalistic enterprise, the revivalist must be extremely sensitive. A revivalist is not only a linguist but also a psychologist, social worker, teacher, driver, schlepper, financial manager, cook, waiter, babysitter, donor etc. A revivalist must have a heart of gold, “balls” of steel and the patience of a saint. Language revival is similar to co-parenting. But the revivalist is only a step-father. The important biological mother is the Indigenous/minority community. If you are the step-father and your spouse, who is the biological mother, makes what you perceive to be a mediocre decision with regard to your children, you cannot just disapprove of it. After all, the children are your spouse’s more than they are yours. You must work together for the best possible outcome. Similarly, if the community supports a decision that is not linguistically viable, the revivalist can try to inspire the community members, but must accept their own verdict. That would be difficult for a documentary linguist with poor social skills.

The earliest stages of pidgin formation show a preference for analytic and morphologically reduced grammatical constructions relative to their lexifier or substrate languages, where the apparent morphological marking, if found, seems to be fossilized. Structural relations, therefore, are mostly expressed externally. Tense/aspect categories are marked through temporal adverbials or inferred from the context. Creole languages, however, are said to develop such categories through grammaticalization. This study examines tense/aspect marking in five Arabic-based pidgins: Juba Arabic, Turku Pidgin, Pidgin Madame, Romanian Pidgin Arabic, and Gulf Pidgin Arabic. Using Siegel’s (2008) scale of morphological simplicity, from lexicality to grammaticality, this study concludes that tense/aspect marking is expressed lexically through temporal adverbials or inferred from the context in the earliest stages of Arabic-based pidgins, which only later—in stabilized pidgins—develops into grammaticalized markers when certain criteria are met.

Multilingual environments and migration have led to an increasing number of multilingual students, and consequently, to a need to take the varying linguistic repertoire of students into account in education. The aim of the present study is to explore Linguistically Sensitive Teaching (LST) as a possible linguistically inclusive approach and to examine how LST is perceived by pre-service primary teachers in the multilingual context of the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC), where the majority language, Spanish; the minority language, Basque; and the foreign language, English are included in the curriculum, all while some students might have other additional home languages that are not part of the curriculum. The methodological approach is a qualitative research study, in which data have been collected among a group of pre-service primary teachers from the BAC through written reflections, focus groups and observations. The results show the perceptions of the pre-service teachers on education policies in relation to linguistically sensitive teaching practices, good practices identified during their school placements, possibilities to promote Linguistically Sensitive Teaching in the classroom, the role of the minority language Basque in LST, and the threats, challenges and opportunities perceived in LST. It is concluded that despite some basic notions of LST, the lack of in-depth knowledge of pre-service teachers is visible, advocating for the need to include formation on LST in Initial Teacher Training.

L3 acquisition has begun to attract the attention of many scholars in recent years. Heritage contexts are especially fruitful areas to understand how linguistic and nonlinguistic mechanisms interact with one another. The current study focuses on L3 English acquisition of object pronouns with L1 Turkish, L2 German speakers. We seek to find out whether the speakers could produce object pronouns accurately, whether L3 English proficiency has any effects on their acquisition, and finally, whether all object pronouns are acquired in the same way. Data for this study come from a corpus consisting of written and oral productions of 167 participants, who were students in four distinct grades, namely 5^th, 7^th, 10^th and 12^th graders at different schools in Berlin, Germany. The results reveal that participants were highly meticulous in their object pronoun use. Also, no clear L1 effect was observed, while L2 impact is implied. Lastly, proficiency and linguistic features are noted as significant factors that have an impact on L3 acquisition.

In Sweden, the state-sponsored language education, Swedish for immigrants (Sfi), provides language and cultural knowledge for the integration of newly arrived adult migrants in Swedish society. Sfi’s educational quality has sustained severe criticism. Through qualitative investigation of Sfi teacher work, this study aims to find out what pedagogical priorities guide the teachers’ classroom practices with linguistically and culturally diverse students. Furthermore, it aims to compare the contributions to Sfi learning environments of ethnically diverse teachers whose language experiences are different. Research into second language acquisition and native and non-native second language teachers contextualize the research aims. Bakhtin’s (1986) conception of human understanding as the meeting of two consciousnesses and García’s ideas about translanguaging in language education for adult migrants provide theoretical perspectives. Classroom observation alongside teacher focus groups generated data. Content analysis condensed the data into five essential support strategies that foreground students’ existential needs, their home languages as a learning resource, integration, learning challenge and instructional partnership between ethnically diverse teachers. Findings do not support the view that non-native language teachers are better equipped to teach second language students than their native counterparts but illuminate the unequivocal advantage of harnessing the pedagogical strengths of both teacher groups cooperatively.

The continuously progressive education system of the 21^st century requires the introduction of innovative teaching methodologies incorporating up-to-the-minute technology-oriented styles, which are capable of changing the traditional ways of conducting classes presenting teachers as the ultimate source of knowledge, with a new notion which considers teachers as facilitators and guiders in the world of information. A plethora of research has been conducted with respect to flipped learning, however, the number of research papers presenting content analysis is limited indicating the deficiency and lack of content analysis-based papers on Flipped Classroom in Education. Thus, to fill this gap in the literature, there is a demand for conducting a content analysis. In turn, the aim of this paper was to identify the importance and impact of the distributed documents on a Flipped Learning Model (FLM) in Education which was done by gathering data from the SCOPUS database with keywords ‘Flipped Classroom in Education’, within the range of ten years (2011-2020). All studies published in SCOPUS, were statistically analyzed and examined according to the year of publication, subject area, document type, country/territory, languages, source type, types of research and the research methods. It was found that the publications related to FLM in education had dramatically increased from the year 2011 to 2020. The findings of this study also highlighted the importance of FLM in education, especially in courses that require cognitive skills like social studies, medicine, and computer science.

Quite many companies or organisations experience smaller or larger crises for an abundance of various reasons and yet a situation is not immediately named a crisis as such, even though the signs are rather clear. That was the case with the crisis communication of Vinted. The research aimed to analyse the external crisis communication in Vinted (as mother company in Lithuania) and Kleiderkreisel (as daughter company in Germany) for the topic is hardly analysed, especially linguistically. The material for crisis communication in Vinted was gathered from the articles in business news portal Verslo žinios (www.vz.lt) and the material for the analysis of crisis communication in Kleiderkreisel was gathered from the official Kleiderkreisel internet forum. It was noticed that the types of crises are different and because of that companies choose different ways for communication, meaning that where and how the company communicates with its community was influenced by the type of crisis itself. Communication of Vinted (statements in Lithuanian language) and Kleiderkreisel (statements in German language) was analysed and compared using the discourse analysis method which later led to recognition of different types of crises and the different crisis communication models that were applied. Due to the reason, that the data of Vinted covers 2016–2017 and the data of Kleiderkreisel covers 2014–2016, it allows to see the outcomes of both cases of crisis and further communication. In 2019 Vinted has received a new investment and became the first Unicorn in Baltic countries. Because the company grows further in the year 2020, it can be presumed that communication and managements strategies applied in the years of crisis were correct.

The focus of this book, which is a collection of twelve studies, is sociolinguistic transformations in marginal contexts that are not usually covered by mainstream publications. The term ‘margin’ in these studies refers to smaller nations and communities located in the peripheries of global hubs. The book includes online margins as well, contemplating the impact of the internet and mobile devices on people’s lives, where standard programs and instruments employed in informal settings are often not applicable. The collection is published on time when the notion of margins and language needs rethinking and reinterpretation. The topics can be characterized as interdisciplinary, and as such the chapters are densely intertwined with both linguistic and social issues, including the impact of technology on the creation of language varieties, the effect of territorial administration on identity development, the role of media in spreading the languages of subcultures, the effect of mobile phones on the transformation of identities. The methods include linguistic landscaping, content analysis, interviews and conversations, and participant observation. Although some chapters employ a combination of several methods, most studies have used a dominant method to collect data. The editors have collected diverse topics of sociolinguistics in this book, which is a very helpful resource for educational institutions, where theories and methods of applied linguistics are a part of their curriculum. It is also a unique complementary literature useful for junior students of applied linguistics who are in the process of exploring research topics in less discussed contexts. The review combines both descriptive and critical approaches, and includes an overview of each case study and their research methods.

Growing interest in Spanish-speaking countries in Lithuania leads to the increased number of translations of Spanish and Latin American literature. Therefore, it is important to analyse translations from Spanish into Lithuanian and vice versa to improve the quality of translation work. One of the most difficult elements to translate are culture-specific items that reveal cultural uniqueness. The novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez contains many culture-specific items related to Colombia, that could be difficult to translate. This article aims to analyse and compare translation strategies of culture-specific items from Spanish into Lithuanian, which were used in 1972 by Elena Treinienė and in 2017 by Valdas V. Petrauskas, to translate the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Firstly, this article defines the concepts of cultural elements and culture-specific items. It also discusses the classification of culture-specific items based on the works of Eugene Nida, Peter Newmark, Sergej Vlahov, Sider Florin and Laura Santamaria Guinot. Furthermore, this article describes translation strategies of culture-specific items emphasized by Amparo Hurtado Albir, Eirlys Davies, Georges L. Bastin and Pekka Kujamäki. In this research, culture-specific items are counted and described using Santamaria Guinot’s classification, which allows to claim that there are 69 different culture-specific items in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and they are reflected by 252 examples in the text. These culture-specific items are related with concepts of ecology, social structures, cultural institutions, social universe and material culture. The most common ones are culture-specific items from the category of ‘material culture’. The results of the research allow distinguishing six translation strategies, used in different frequency: transcription, equivalence of situations, actualisation, usage of exoticism, extension and explication, and omission. Both Lithuanian translators Treinienė and Petrauskas mainly used strategies of transcription and equivalence of situations. The analysis of the translation of culture-specific items was performed using the methods of quantitative, comparative, and descriptive translation analysis.

The research analyses incongruent Polish and British criminal law terms. British terms are the names of legal institutions characteristic of three independent legal systems: of England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. The Polish terms that have been discussed come from the Polish Criminal Code Act of 6 June 1997 (Journal of Laws 1997 No. 88 item 553). Moreover, they are legal terms pursuant to their interpretation by Morawski (1980, p. 187). The English equivalents under analysis have appeared in four Polish Criminal Code translations into English. The research aims at a verification of whether or not the classification of translation methods applied in the Polish-English translation of incongruent succession and family law terms (called civil law terms) (Kizińska, 2015, p. 175–178) encompasses translation methods used in the process of translation of incongruent law terms characteristic of criminal law into English. In the paper the translation method is interpreted according to the definition by Hejwowski (2004, p. 76). In the theoretical part of the paper the following linguistic phenomena have been presented: a term (by Zmarzer & Lukszyn, 2001, p. 9) and incongruity of terms (by Šarčević, 1989, p. 278). In the initial stage of the analysis the definitions of a given Polish term and its suggested equivalents have been compared. Next, the appearance of a given equivalent in the sources of British law texts as well as the English language has been checked to determine the translation methods used while forming a given equivalent. Finally, the list of translation methods applied has been drafted, to conclude, among other things, that the translation methods presented in the above-mentioned typology of translation methods applied in the translation of incongruent civil law terms from Polish into English are to be determined as exclusively primary or secondary.