The present volume draws on the experience of the Summer School held in August 2018 in Split, where graduate students and experienced scholars met from Germany, Albania, Serbia, Macedonia, and Croatia. All contributions discuss small-scale empirical research on the threatened ideals mentioned in the title as desirable and achievable parts of their daily lives as members of modern universities and civil societies. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse in joint teaching, research and publishing.
The present volume is the productive result of multilateral academic collaboration between institutions of higher education from Germany (Chemnitz), Macedonia (Ohrid, Bitola), Albania (Vlora) and Serbia (Niš). The collaboration, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), was set up to establish a West-East Dialogue and a better understanding and processing of the crises in Europe through the deconstruction and construction of media texts. The contributions in this volume illustrate how ‘crises’ are constructed by the media discursively, with attention paid to the linguistic elements of media texts, and in some cases accompanying images. The authors in this volume are students and established scholars that come from different but intersecting disciplines. They each focus on different ‘crises’ in different (national) media outlets, offering new perspectives on how social, political and geographical events may be shaped by the media, and how these mediatised portrayals may in turn influence public perspectives on a range of issues.
Prof. Emmanuel Efurosibina Adegbija was, at the time of his death in 2005, the first and the only Professor of English Language in the Department of English in the University of Ilorin in Nigeria. As a lecturer, researcher and professor, he had mentored many students and academics and had made a mark in international scholarship. Adegbija had been the acclaimed forerunner of the pragmasociolinguistic approach to the study of language; his publications on language attitudes in sub-Saharan Africa as well as on aspects of the lexico-semantics of Nigerian English, have continued to be regarded as basic texts in the disciplines. This volume of essays celebrates his scholarship and legacy. Contributed by language, linguistic and literary scholars, the essays in the collection cover a wide range of issues in core and applied linguistics. Some of the essays pick up the discussion on issues relating to colonial language dominance and language attitudes in Africa, while some examine syntactic, semantic and rhetorical aspects of indigenous Nigerian languages and African literatures. The book's thrust is interdisciplinary. It will undoubtedly appeal to a cross-section of scholars in pragmatics, linguistics, applied linguistics, language and literature.
The European Conference on African Studies, held in 2017 in Basel, Switzerland, provided a platform for scholars working on African youth languages from bases in Africa, Europe and North America to jointly examine issues relating to the rural -urban divide in African youth languages. This is documented in the current volume. Contributors ponder the virtual absence of indigenous, non-colonial languages of Africa in studied African youth language corpora. They demonstrate that, notwithstanding the surface linguistic appearance of the African youth languages and practices that have engaged the attention of scholars, the languages ultimately bear the mark and intensity of the rural and indigenous as a major and sometimes dominant component. This points to the need for paradigms or models that incorporate rural-indigenous factors in African youth language scholarship.
The present volume draws on the experience of the Workshop held in Benin City, Nigeria in May 2018, where doctoral students and experienced mentors met to work on their journal articles from a simple abstract or a first draft to a concrete publication proposal. Since research articles are the most important academic texts in academic careers today, young African scholars must practice to choose current topics, to use appropriate methodologies and argumentation structures, to draw tentative conclusions, and to be aware of limitations and further research necessary in their field. Mentors can advise them to apply proper statistical procedures, to edit their texts carefully and to submit them in acceptable format to appropriate journals. The contributions can also serve as a general model for open and critical international and intercultural academic discourse on publishing research articles in international journals.
The present volume draws on the experience of the pan-African conference in Yaoundé in Summer 2015, where young scholars from Cameroon met young and experienced scholars from Germany, Tanzania, Ghana, and Nigeria. They discussed not only their individual research projects, but also their personal writing experience. This volume records some of the conference presentations supplemented by specially commissioned contributions by experienced research partners in the field. It is particularly useful for young scholars who intend to demonstrate their credibility as researchers in their thesis (BA, MA, or PhD) or in their research and grant applications, in national and international networks. The examples of small projects here try to prove and illustrate that every scholar can profit from the international exchange of ideas and research experience.
This contribution introduces the key concepts of academic writing, metalanguage and genre. Metalanguage is seen to include all writer-reader interaction, esp. stance and engagement markers. The concept of genres in academic writing is discussed as a core-periphery model with the research article in the centre and the conference presentation, research monograph, handbook article and the chain from BA through MA to PhD thesis as other core genres. All concepts are explained and illustrated by examples from the ChemCorpus, which can serve as a (partial) reference corpus to all the other national mini-corpora in the SE European academic writing project and beyond. A research-based approach means that writers do not learn rules, but discover patterns and conventions themselves, either by testing ideas from textbooks or by exploring their own small corpora, even to test whether their linguistic variables are appropriate for their text/genre or socio-biographical variables. They can also use comparisons with similar corpora to position themselves in the spectrum between individual identity and disciplinary convention. Through this approach graduates gain skills that should be useful for their own writings at university and even for their professional life afterwards.
The need for a comparative empirical approach to academic writing has become evident during the development of new MA and PhD programmes in the so-called Bologna process, where academic skills components had to be included. This is not only because more and more students even at postgraduate levels seem to lack the skills that have been taken for granted for a long time at European universities or that were considered part of the autonomous efforts of young scholars themselves and not the responsibility of their teachers. This is also because with the further expansion of English as THE language of science and international cooperation during the last few decades, new challenges and opportunities have arisen for English specialists. On the one hand, there seems to be a standardising trend in international writing that discourages national styles and traditions in specific disciplines and genres that scholars need to be aware of, if they want to take part successfully in international science discourse. On the other hand, English departments and English graduates in Europe may be able to prove their “usefulness” by research and teaching in the expanding field of academic writing.
