Journal of Basra researches for Human Sciences

This paper acoustically scrutinizes the variant articulatory timing of English polysyllabic words produced by Iraqi learners of English as a foreign language. sixteen Iraqi students, from the 2nd and 4th stages at the department of English, pronounced words of 2-7 syllables that were later analyzed acoustically. They produced these words with variant timing. Variation was proportional to syllables number in a word.

As politics is considered to be a struggle for power in order to put certain political ideas into practice, language plays a crucial role for every political action is prepared, accompanied, influenced and played by language (Horvath, 2015:45). The aim of a critical approach to discourse analysis is to reveal the hidden and out of sight values, positions and perspectives (Paltridge, 2012:186). Depending on Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this study attempts to investigate and analyze certain selected Barack Obama's speeches on the representation of Iraqi's war against Daesh. It aims to reveal Obama's implicit meanings, and to make clear how he used language to persuade the audience with his policies. Specifically, from the point of nominalization, transitivity, modality, passivization and repetition, we can learn how language is used to serve ideology and power. Consequently, we can unveil the political purposes of these speeches.

The present paper investigates the cultural barriers that obstacle EFL learners in translating culture - specific terms and expressions from English into Arabic. The barriers are posed in translation because of the learners' lack of cultural competence of the source language (SL) and their failure to find their counterparts in the target language (TL) due to the influence of the native tongue, and the improper use of bilingual dictionaries. This will lead to misunderstanding of the meaning and hence mistranslating the cultural equivalents in the targeted language. The purpose of the study is to emphasize the effective role of the cultural factors in translation, and their close relation to language, as a subject matter of translation process. The study also aims to show how the cultural problems are encountered in translating some specific terms and expressions from English into Arabic by inexperienced EFL learners of translation. Some proper translation strategies are proposed as best solution to overcome such problems for the sake of conveying the intended meaning of the SL into the TL. To fulfill the aim of the study, some representative samples for cultural - related difficulties at hand are discussed. The study concludes with some recommendations to be employed when practicing translation by EFL learners to overcome the cultural barriers, and improve the students' performance in translating and the quality of translated texts from English into Arabic.

This study explores synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) among university- level EFL learners. In essence, this paper tries to investigate how EFL learners at university level interact and hence how they enhance their communicative performance. It examines the strategies adopted by those learners in categorizing their messages and processing their interaction structures. It so attempts to provide a visualization on the coherence vs. incoherence of message sequences among the participants in a CMC chatting. To achieve the study, the researchers will adopt a discourse analysis model that may be suitable to materialize the assumptions. Accordingly, the expected outcomes of this study might take account of the impact of CMC on the EFL students’ communicative competence in using the language , besides the improvement of the EFL students' linguistic capacity in both lexical and grammatical aspects.