Although the usefulness of alternative assessment in second language (L2) classrooms has been extensively recognized by scholars, the use of the various types of alternative assessment in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts has not received adequate attention by L2 practitioners. To contribute to this line of research, the present research sought to examine the impact of a portfolio-based writing instruction on writing performance and writing anxiety of EFL students. To this end, a number of 41 EFL learners were recruited as the participants of this study. They were then randomly divided to an experimental group (N=21) and a control group (N=20). The participants in the experimental group received portfolio-based writing instruction, whereas the control group received the regular writing instruction with no archiving of students’ drafts in portfolios. Timed-writing tasks and the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) were employed to collect the data. The results obtained from ANCOVA analysis revealed that the portfolio-based writing instruction aided the participants in improving their writing performance more than the control group. Moreover, it was found that the use of portfolios significantly reduced the L2 writing anxiety of the participants while the traditional writing instruction did not have any significant impact on L2 writing anxiety of the control group. The pedagogical implications for portfolio-based writing instruction are discussed finally.

In this article, strategies and writing tricks (the trick of “defamiliarization”, imagery) which in Nabokov’s short story A Guide to Berlin serve to design the image of the city and simultaneously to explore the world of values (axiological map of Berlin/Eden) are being interpreted. The author of this article proves that the semantics of the title guide is connected with the strategy of transition from empirical observation and one “fragment of space” to expression of a situation in which the subject of speech has found himself. Moreover, it is shown that the subjectivity of the observer, his way of experiencing the world and his creative sensitivity seem crucial in the story, because he evaluates the surrounding reality and in the “act of individual creativity” builds upon it yet another space – an unusual, transformed one, close to the emigrant/the author of the guidebook. Attention is also paid to the differentiation of two ways of perceiving the world and two types of consciousness: the artist’s/narrator’s and his listener’s (“average consciousness”).

Academic authors employ various language means in order to construct and disseminate knowledge, to sound persuasive, to undergird their arguments, but also to seek agreement within the academic community. The aim of this paper is to analyse a selected group of rhetorical strategies used by Anglophone and Czech authors of Linguistics research articles (RAs) and research theses (RTs). These strategies are assumed to vary in both academic genres since the position of their writers within the academic community differs. Even though authors of RAs have to meet reviewers’ requirements in order for their article to be published, so their relative position may be lower than that of the reviewers’, authors of RAs may have the same “absolute status” as the reviewers may be just as expert in that particular field. By contrast, the status of research students is lower than that of their evaluators both in relative and absolute terms. Even though students may gain some learned authority in presenting an original contribution, their assessors command both learned and institutional authority, hence are endowed with a higher status. Apart from comparing rhetorical strategies used in RAs and RTs, the paper focuses on cross-cultural differences between Anglophone and Czechacademic writing traditions.

The paper deals with a little-known translation of the Vulgate Psalter which was published anonymously in 1700 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye by the printer of the exiled court of King James VII of Scotland and II of England. The paper argues in favour of the originality of the translation in the face of the claim expressed in the literature that it represents a revision of an earlier English rendition made from the Vulgate published in 1610 as part of the Douay-Rheims Bible. The adduced data draw from history, life writing studies and linguistics, thereby offering multidisciplinary evidence in favour of the originality of the rendition.

Our purpose in this paper is to show how the output of academic student-writers demonstrates the different ways in which they react to the discipline’s discoursal demands and how that, in turn, forms their writer identity. We also argue that the current Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory fails to adequately integrate notions of second language (L2) academic writer identity and the social contexts in which L2 writers produce their texts.

The conversation concerns mayor questions in the theory of historical writing, both raised or elaborated in Hayden White’s work. It focuses on the relation between history and its closest others: science and literature, as well as the issue of the function of historical studies. Conversation includes the discussion of the concepts of fiction, figure, fullfillment, figurative and conceptual language, modernism.

A silent language: imagining the dialect in Ferrante’s novels – Elena Ferrante’s novels are not examples of plurilingual literature; in fact they do not mix diatopic varieties of Italian and dialect, even if, above all in the stories in My Brilliant Friend, Italian readers can perceive the sounds of the Neapolitan dialect. To achieve this effect, Elena Ferrante uses metalinguistic glosses, which alert the reader when the characters pass from one language to another. The essay examines the features of the glosses, which are cleverly inserted, do not hinder reading, and manage to transport the reader to among the houses and the sounds of Naples.