Academic Lexical Items in Economics Journal Papers

This paper reports a study into the use of lexical items in economics journal papers. The corpus in this study （EC） consisted of 907,380 running words from 120 journal papers randomly selected from economics journals which were written by native English speakers. The results showed that the Academic Word List （AWL） accounted for 12.74% of the tokens in EC and the distribution of AWL in EC was uneven. In the case study of the key words, only four out of nine key words ranked by keyness were AWL words, while the other five were from the General Service List （GSL）. Moreover, those nine key words together with other three key functional expressions were employed to fulfill discourse and rhetorical functions in academic writings. Pedagogical implications are also discussed within this paper.

The Image of Jews Reconstructed in A Chinese Translation of Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Imagology

The image of Jews,as the“other”,constructed in Oliver Twist by Dickens and reconstructed in its Chinese translation by Wen’an He(1977/1997)1 is studied at the level of lexical items from the perspective of imagology in this paper.Lexical items involving the image of Fagin,the representative of Jews,are negative in the source work.In translating the lexical items to reconstruct Fagin’s image,the translator retains the features of irony and vulgarity carried with them.So,the image of Fagin is generally transported into the target culture basically unchanged.However,due to the translator’s individual reason or the social background of China at that time,those lexical items with religious connotation in the source text are translated without explanation,and as a result,the image of Jews constructed by this kind of lexical items fails to be conveyed to the target readers.

Materials Development for Adult Learners in Teaching Vocabulary

Considering the special needs and the learning styles of their learners, foreign language teachers should use the most effective methods or approaches which are appropriate for their teaching strategies. Redundant or a diverse range of teaching techniques are not meant to use in the process of their learners＇ acquiring new vocabulary items; instead, the most effective and to the point teaching techniques in terms of each language skill should be employed. Efficiency of language learners in terms of their command of the vocabulary can be assessed through their understanding any reading or listening context and managing to be productive in speaking or writing procedures in language acquisition process. Phonological, morpho-syntactic, or socio-pragmatic positions of new lexical items as well as the learners＇ learning styles and multiple intelligences should all be taken into consideration by language teachers so that their learners could really reach an efficient level of vocabulary power. This efficiency has been identified as having a language passport in terms of the proficiency level of the learners within the CEFR （Common European Framework of Reference） for Languages by all EU countries in recent years. Foreign language teachers should try very hard to supply their learners with the required qualifications in every language skill so that they can have a linguistic identity both in their own societies and inter-cultural or multi-cultural contexts. Within this framework, foreign language teachers will hopefully make use of any suggested approach presented in this study so as to widen their learners＇ horizons in language acquisition process.