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This study investigates three learners’ self-directed learning (SDL) strategies in a college beginner level Chinese language classroom. Using a focus group and interviews to explore how the students recognize their own learning strengths and weaknesses, what strategies they develop during the SDL process, their awareness of learning contexts while adopting SDL, and how they exercise their agencies for SDL. Findings suggest that technology fluency, the disconnection between learning goals and SDL strategies, and learners’ unawareness of their learning strengths affects individuals’ agency regarding SDL strategies. These findings suggest the need for further discussion of language teachers’ role in instructing SDL strategies, the role of technology, and the use of written corrective feedback. © 2021

This article examines the controversy caused by the Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Hum Dekhenge” during the protests triggered by the approval of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizens at the end of 2019 in India. In addition to a Spanish translation of the actual text, it also offers a background of the debate, a biographical sketch of the poem’s author, and diverse interpretations. The production of meaning is a complex articulation between text, readers, and the sociopolitical context. “Hum Dekhenge” is a poem of various linguistic, literary, and political registers. Without question its reading is open to multiple possibilities. © 2021. Estudios de Asia y África.

From the epic saga of the Buendía family in One Hundred Years of Solitude to the enduring passion of Love in the Time of Cholera to the exploration of tyranny in The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez has built a literary world that continues to captivate millions of readers across the world. His writings entrance modern audiences with their dreamlike yet trenchant insights into universal issues of the human condition such as love, revenge, old age, death, fate, power, and justice. A Nobel Laureate in 1982, he contributed to the global popularity of the Latin American Boom during the second half of the 20th century and had a profound impact on writers worldwide, including Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami. The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez brings together world experts on the Colombian writer to present a comprehensive English-language examination of his life, oeuvre, and legacy--the first such work since his death in 2014. Edited by Latin American literature authorities Gene H. Bell-Villada and Ignacio López-Calvo, the volume paints a rich and nuanced portrait of "Gabo." It incorporates ongoing critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, while elucidating key aspects of his work, such as his Caribbean-Colombian background; his use of magical realism, myth, and folklore; and his left-wing political views. Thirty-two wide-ranging chapters cover the bulk of the author's writings-both major and minor, early and late, long and short-as well as his involvement with film. They also discuss his unique prose style, highlighting how music shaped his literary art. The Handbook gives unprecedented attention to the global influence of García Márquez-on established canons, on the Global South, on imaginative writing in South Asia, China, Japan, and throughout Africa and the Arab world. This is the first book that places the Colombian writer within that wider context, celebrating his importance both as a Latin American author and as a global phenomenon.

This article reports on a collaborative research project involving faculty in writing studies, communication disorders, and applied linguistics that sought to empirically describe the reading skills of students (N = 910) in freshman composition classes at one college and two universities in the northeast United States. The research team developed and administered a questionnaire that evaluated students’ reading abilities according to six categories: inferential ability, background knowledge, general comprehension, vocabulary, figurative language/jargon, and morphosyntactic structures (grammar/syntax). Our statistically significant results showed that students scored best in the categories of background knowledge and general comprehension, which are well researched in a college population. However, students struggled in categories such as figurative language/jargon and morpho-syntactic structures, which are not well researched in a college population. Further, comprehension seemed generally discrete (understanding specific points of an essay) rather than holistic (indicated by an ability synthesize those points into a general statement about the author’s thesis). These findings suggest that further empirical research in this area will help describe the reading skills of college students and consequently will inform the development of pedagogical approaches that more effectively address students’ current needs. © 2021 College Reading and Learning Association.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Retrospect gathers fifteen essays by noted scholars in the fields of Latin American literature, politics, and theater. The volume offers broad overviews of the Colombian author’s total body of work, along with closer looks at some of his acknowledged masterpieces. The Nobel laureate’s cultural contexts and influences, his variety of themes, and his formidable legacy (Hispanic, U.S., world-wide) all come up for consideration. New readings of One Hundred Years of Solitude are further complemented by fresh, stimulating, highly detailed examinations of his later novels (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Of Love and Other Demons) and stories (Strange Pilgrims). Further attention is focused on “Gabo’s” labors as journalist and as memoirist (Living to Tell the Tale), and to his sometime relationships with the cinema and the stage. Reactions to his enormous stature on the part of younger writers, including recent signs of backlash, are also given thoughtful scrutiny. Feminist and ecocritical interpretations, plus lively discussions of Gabo’s artful use of humor, character’s names, and even cuisine, are to be found here as well. In the wake of García Márquez’s passing away in 2014, this collection of essays serves as a fitting tribute to one of the world’s greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.

This article explores contemporary Spanish writer Luis Mateo Díez’s 2007 novel, La gloria de los niños, focusing on the construction of a redemptive child who mends the broken world and keeps alive historical memory. The author looks beyond one single nation state in his reconstruction of children and childhood under the Franco regime. Hidden behind his approach to the reconstruction of the ‘glorious children’ under Franco emerges, on the one hand, his dissolution of any authoritative version of Franco-era children and, on the other, his broader vision and desire to examine Spain and Spanish historical memory in a global context. © 2020 Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

Abstract  Evaluating a student's accent in a foreign language is a complex process. Although it is obvious to the instructor whether or not the sound is correct, it is difficult for students both to hear the incorrect sound and to correct it. Too often the instructor merely tells the students that they have spoken incorrectly, expresses the sound properly, and then tries, often without lasting success, to have the students imitate. In a phonetically oriented course, diagrams are used as visual aids to teach correct articulation; but, especially at lower levels, it is difficult and often uninspiring for students to identify their speech production with such text figures. In a new method an improvised television “studio” captures the individual student's speech in an easily reviewable, permanent form on videotape. This visual, personal approach can make spectacular improvement in pronunciation, and the technique appears to be adaptable to any level of language learning. © 1981 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages

The Center for Adaptive Technology at Southern Connecticut State University was established in 1988 to provide access to computers for students with disabilities. The challenge of keeping current with both standard and adaptive technology has caused our service to evolve from a focused, centralized model to an integrated model providing technology access to students regardless of their location on campus. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.

This article traces the origins of the familiar quotation, 'there is always something new coming out of Africa'. It demonstrates that the phrase was a proverb that originated in Greece no later than the fourth century BC. It charts the transmission of the phrase from Aristotle to the twentieth century, noting that Erasmus is the most important link in the Renaissance and that he may be responsible for the current form in which the phrase is used. The article also shows that the meaning of the phrase was very different in ancient times from what it is today. Whereas 'something new' to Aristotle meant strange hybrid animals, current writers use the phrase with a sense of admiration.