Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal
Modern cultural, literary and linguistic perspectives
Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal
Modern cultural, literary and linguistic perspectives
At Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal we have followed a policy in recent issues of choosing a topic and collecting papers by academics working in various fields related to the study of the English language (including pedagogy and translation), literature in English, and English-speaking cultures. Consequently, we have been able to provide an interesting palette of studies looking at the same broad topic from completely different perspectives. Many of those papers were written by faculty members at Kodolányi János University which is the institution to which Freeside is affiliated.
The current issue is special in several ways. For one thing, there is no central unifying topic. For another, the papers have been prepared by our students, usually based on their degree papers which they submitted as part of their bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature at Kodolány János University. These students came to us having learnt English as a foreign language prior to university. Some of these students are still with us, studying in a different program of our University, some have gone on to study further at other institutions, whilst still others are scattered far and wide in Hungary and the world. All these students were selected to take part in a conference we organised in October 2019 during our thematic week programs. And due to the success of the conference and the standard of the presentations, we were happy to ask some of the speakers to submit articles to Freeside. It is these papers that you will be able to read now.
The very diverse interests of students studying English language and literature are reflected at least to some degree in the focal points of the research they undertook for their degree papers and therefore of the articles. For students of a foreign language, the contrast between their L1 and L2 can be fascinating. Zaymus focusses on translation, specifically on the translation of the titles of literary works and analyses five strategies used by the translators when translating from English to Hungarian. This is the only paper that considers two languages, but the paper by Barbara Káli-Rozmis on the visits of Empress Elisabeth of Austria to Britain and how she is seen by the English and the Irish of the times looks at cross-cultural perspectives. The Irish thread is picked up by Károly Káli-Rozmis, who sketches and discusses the complex, mortal and immortal, origins of the banshee. Moving from supernatural beings to fairy tales, Moos considers the intercultural differences in the structure and narrative of fairy tales by looking at the differences in versions of the Cinderella story in Scotland, Russia and Hungary. In Molnár’s article, it is the deconstruction of the free will and personal autonomy in Poe and Lovecraft characters that forms the central focus. Perceptions of the behaviour of individuals are examined in the article on Donald Trump’s speeches. Linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of several of his speeches in 2016 reveal that aspects of these that some perceive as ill-prepared and badly expressed contributed to creating a perception of him as authentic, and may thus paradoxically have helped him to win the election.
The final three articles move towards the field of education. After introducing the education approach known as Content and Language Intergrated Learning, Laszlóné Csere presents the development and piloting of a course in First Aid for 8th Grade pupils, where the content of the course is given in English and the pupils are helped to learn both the content and the language used. Jedlica reflects on his brief experience in teaching a student who was found to have Autism Spectrum Disorder and considers how such a student could be helped to integrate and to develop through better understanding of the condition and by modifying the classroom and teaching. Finally, Jani-Demetriou presents a setting in which diverse international students attend a summer school with an English-only policy. Using a critical ethnographic sociolinguistic approach, she analyses the ways in which the language practices of these students interact with their social identity and group formation, highlighting the importance of emotions, attitude and identity.
