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The advent of corpora has opened new vistas for language study and restructured linguists' and academicians' approaches to lexicography and English language teaching (ELT). After 1980s, the use of online language corpora and computer tools garnered tremendous attention of English language teachers and academicians. Keeping in view the modern trends and needs of learners, this research focused on the practical implications of online corpora for ELT and its utility in the Pakistani context. Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is used as a reference corpus for this research. MICASE is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed speech (almost two hundred hours of recording). The transcribed data of MICASE includes wide range of speech events like seminars, lectures, advisory meetings and lab sessions. The study identified the utility of lexical items at syntactic level and its usage in various contexts. Furthermore, the layers of meanings and uses of lexicons through in-depth study of right and left collocates were explored in the reference corpus. The results showed that lexicons can be used as noun, verb and adjective depending upon the context of the study and right and left collocates play a significant role in understanding the meanings of lexical items in various contexts. Thus, this strategy can be fruitful for English language learners and academic discourse community who are interested in understanding the versatile uses of lexical items and their contextual meaning.

This study investigates the use of foregrounding that involves deviation and parallelism as a strategy to maintain the identity and disclose racial discrimination in poetry of Langston Hughes, a famous twentieth-century Afro-American poet during Harlem Renaissance. By adopting qualitative approach, researchers selected three different poems from three different volumes of Hughes's poetry by adopting random sampling technique and analyzed them by applying theory of foregrounding presented by Leech (1969). The foregrounding, a stylistic device emphasizing certain linguistic features to create emphasis or deviation from normative language patterns, serves as means for the poets to reclaim agency and articulate their unique experiences, histories, and perspectives. Researchers found that Hughes's poetry presents many foregrounded features upon the different levels, i.e., phonological, graphological, grammatical and semantic. The findings show that these foregrounded features upon different linguistic levels help the poet to maintain his identity and disclose racial discrimination. Therefore, these foregrounding features also help the poet revolt against the racial discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experts in English language teaching have, of late, been recommending the development of requisite language competencies through an outcomes-based education (OBE). Following this spirit, the government of Punjab in Pakistan outlined the desired core competencies for secondary school students in the National Curriculum for English Language (NCEL) in 2006. Foregrounding Biggs' (2014) theory of Constructive Alignment, this study attempted to explore the extent of alignment of these core competencies with the classroom practices. For this purpose, 5 focus group discussions of two-hour duration, each consists of 7 members, were held with 35 teachers, who teach English to grade 10 in the government secondary schools of district Jhelum. The data was transcribed and analyzed thematically following interpretative analysis approach. The findings show a lack of alignment of teachers' selfreported classroom practices with the learning outcomes presented in NCEL. Lack of awareness of the teachers regarding OBE, absence of professional qualification and training, a traditional assessment system, and lack of expertise of the teachers and students in English language were found to be some of the main reasons for this lack of alignment. The study has implications for policymakers who devise and implement policies without taking sufficient actions on the ground at the micro-level. It recommends an overhaul of the teaching and assessment system to make the OBE work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family is the most fundamental part of a civilization. Only an educated family is capable of ensuring a civilized community. On the other hand, a morally depraved and primitive family may produce a corrupted and wicked society. A family is also the first and most fundamental educational and training institution. As a result, Islam has placed a strong emphasis on a family's foundation and moral training. Islam has provided clear regulations for preserving the family, and these norms are founded on revelations that are completely consistent with human nature. In Islam, the family is regarded as the epicenter of passionate affiliation, protection, and mutual collaboration, and it is here that righteous education and Islamic ultimate values are instilled. Unfortunately, in modern and post-modern societies, this unit of society has experienced widespread crises. The crisis is causing a slew of problems and challenges in human civilizations, including psychological issues, social exploitation, and ethical disarray. This is the culmination of postmodern ideas, social media, western culture, and civilization. It is critical to determine the causes behind the difficulty in order to establish a family structure based on mutual cooperation, fraternity, equity, fair dealings, respect, and reverence. This scientific, critical, and descriptive study examines the effects of postmodernist ideas and concerns on the family structure and proposes a remedy based on the Holy Quran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study attempts to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and semantics by exploring semantic prosody in the corpora of American and Pakistani English songs. The study is based on comparative analysis of the semantic prosodies of lexical patterns in the songs. To achieve the objective of the study, corpora of Pakistani and American English songs are developed and then similar words are extracted from the developed wordlists of the corpus. The study highlights the linguistic contexts encoded in the semantic prosodies of the selected lexical items in the corpora of American and Pakistani English songs. American songs were selected from American Billboard from the year 2000 to 2015; whereas, all the available Pakistani English songs from 2000 to 2015 were selected. Lancsbox was used to explore the semantic association of lexical items. The findings of the study reveal different interesting themes extracted from different lexical patterns and the difference in semantic prosodies of similar lexical items in both the corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical bundles (LBs) are indispensable building blocks and essential constituents of academic discourse. The appropriate utilization of the lexical bundle's approach can effectively enhance students' understanding of academic discourse. LBs in various academic genres have extensively been studied concerning written and spoken language. However, less research has been conducted to explore the occurrence, nature, and frequency of LBs in Pakistani academic discourse, especially in textbooks. Therefore, the present study aims to explore four-word common LBs and their functional taxonomies employed in Pakistani Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) level textbooks of Chemistry and Physics. A specialized corpus of these textbooks was built which was run on Antconc software for the identification and extraction of the LBs in the corpus. The classification of the identified LBs was then carried out utilizing Biber functional taxonomies of LBs. The study found 102 LBs occurring in the selected textbooks. In functional categories, there was a dominant use of discourse organizers and referential expressions. The findings related to frequent strings of words which can have significant educational implications for teachers, language material developers, and syllabus designers. The list of LBs with discourse functions provided by this study can significantly be used to enhance students' academic writing and their ability to comprehend different types of scientific texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language change, shift and death are dynamic processes which happen under several sociohistorical, demographic, geographic and linguistic metamorphoses in the world. The economic romance with China Pakistan Economic Corridor is considered to be a "game and fate changer" for the regions especially South Asia, South East Asia, Middle East and even Africa. Whether this economic consecration would also result into changes in social dynamics or consequences in the forms of linguistic apocalypse, socio-cultural cataclysm and evolution in the literary produce would become a serious cause of "game and fate changer" for linguistic ecology of the regions. Perhaps, the history has not observed and witnessed pidginization, creolization and hybridization of languages at such a large scale that CPEC is going to leave nothing more than a byproduct. Here we hypothesize that this by product would change the linguistic ecology of Pakistan altogether which poses serious challenges for language maintenance in different domains of its function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter as a tool for opinion-making, building repertoire, and winning fame has achieved its maximum use and influence especially by coming under the fingertips of the politicians. Its socio-political impact can easily be gauged by examining its role in various social and political situations. However, the role of social media tools especially Twitter has become very crucial and decisive in electoral campaigns all over the world in general and US presidential elections in particular. The social media wings, supporters of the political parties, hired companies, and the candidates themselves become very active users of the innovative use of Twitter for campaigning to win elections (Ferrara, Chang, Chen, Muric & Patel, 2020). The current study intends to explore concurrent themes/issues highlighted in tweets of Donald Trump and Joe Biden made during the 2020 presidential election campaign in the USA. Only the written tweets from September 02, 2020, to November 17, 2020, were collected for the analysis. Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis as two methodological strands for data analysis and interpretations were used as analytical and theoretical frameworks respectively. These two strands were used to identify the discursive practices related to the construction and propagation of the political ideologies owned by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The concordances of the six most frequent words were generated and analyzed in order to identify the most unique themes/issues to the election campaign. These themes include ideological stands of both candidates on Covid-19 policies, environmental issues, racial unrest, and othering each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the language used by men and women have intrigued scholars since long. However, the use of corpus-based techniques for such research is infrequent, especially in Pakistan. After the advent of the concept of World Englishes, corpora are developed to show the identity of different countries, individuals, regions and areas of the world. Likewise, English spoken and written in Pakistan is different from the English language used in various countries/areas of the world. There is not only worldwide differences in spoken and written discourses, researches show that language used by men and women is also different. Therefore, this research aims at exploring lexical items used by men and women and ultimately developing Gender-based Pakistani Academic Word List (GPAWL). The research articles from three disciplines of social sciences (Education, History and English) published in HEC recognized research journal of Y category were collected. Academic word lists, occurrences/frequencies of lexical items and contextual uses of lexicons by Pakistani writers in research papers are explored through corpus-based techniques. The academic word list of male writers comprises of more words (124 words) than female writers (37 words). Variation in contextual use of language is explored by using lexical item language. The findings demonstrate the variations in language used by men and women in Pakistani written academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a multilingual country, Pakistan faces innumerable problems in language in education policy and medium of instruction in educational institutions (Ammar et al. 2015; Mehboob. 2017; Channa, Manan & David, 2020) There is an intellectual divide among the proponents of English, Urdu and regional languages. English is important for science and education while Urdu reflects the national sense of pride. A history of ethnic strife has also led to the rise of regional and provincial sense in the context of languages. This paper attempts to investigate attitudes towards these languages and the choice of language as a medium of instruction. The focus is to examine code switching or translanguaging in classrooms. The findings of the study are based on data generated though a questionnaire and audio/video recording of classroom lectures. Among the respondents of the study are included 300 students and 30 instructors of three educational universities in Islamabad. The survey conducted through questionnaire examines the attitude of students towards the use of language while classroom sessions have been recorded and transcribed to authenticate the quantitative data. The study reveals that there is no uniform approach to the use of language and variation in the respondents’ pattern of thinking. This cognitive persona of respondents shows that they are not decisive about choosing medium of instruction. The study recommends designing and implementation of the practice of translanguaging that maintains cultural pluralism and is flexible and accommodative to increase linguistic resources in an educational setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metadiscourse is an interesting linguistic and cultural construct of interpersonal communication which affects the process of communication in order to achieve communicative goals of persuasion, negotiation and information-transmission. This culturally grounded linguistic phenomenon of interaction has been widely studied in different discourses of various disciplinary cultures such as media discourse, academic discourse, and particularly research discourse. The text types of research discourse including theses, dissertations, and research articles produced by the authors belonging to various disciplines of hard and soft fields have gained special attention of the researchers. The findings of these studies not just helped understanding culture oriented disciplinary variation of interaction but the results have also been proven reliable guide for novice researchers engaged in producing research discourse especially in their second language which is usually English. Unfortunately, this metadiscursive practice which is responsible for making interaction more communicative has been neglected in academic context of Pakistan. Therefore, the current study attempts at exploring employment of metadiscourse with the perspectives of its occurrence and prototypicality (i.e. conventional usage) in research discourse produced by the authors of History research articles published in Pakistani research journals. Emerging techniques of corpus linguistics were used in analyzing employment of metadiscourse quantitatively and qualitatively. The study found conventionally localized use of metadiscourse grounded in restricted disciplinary cultural schema which demonstrates metadiscursive strategies causing the interactional practice to some extent less communicative. Considering these results, we suggest an eclectic model of teaching academic writing to postgraduate students in order to make their research discourse more effective and communicative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metadiscourse is a recent enterprise of applied linguists through which the text-internal nature of discourse is explored with reference to persuasion, negotiation, and engagement of the writers with their own discourses and the readers too (Hyland, 2005). Metadiscourse, with respect to genre, register, and cultural situatedness, has been the major foci of inquiries till now. However, patterns of interaction situated among different discourse communities of academics through metadiscourse need more attention in general and, in Pakistani context, in particular. Therefore, the current study intends to investigate interactive and interactional metadiscourse in Pakistani research discourses of English, Education, and History. For this purpose, we collected 52 research articles comprising corpus of 231529 words published in research journals recognized by Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. We applied Hyland's framework of metadiscourse for mapping expressions as metadiscursive. For identification of 300 metadiscursive markers proposed by Hyland, a recent corpus tool named MetaPak (Abbas et al. 201b) was used successfully. The study revealed noticeable variation in occurrence and prototypicality of metadiscourse employment in Pakistani research discourses while comparing with other international studies. This variation, consequently, may be considered one of the important factors causing dialogic closure in order to achieve persuasion, negotiation, and engagement of the international gate keepers, reviewers, and readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experimental study was ascertained in birds to assess the toxicological effects of arsenic (sodium arsenate) and urea alone or in different combinations. After two weeks of acclimatization, all the birds were randomly divided into six equal groups (T0-T5) each containing 15 birds. Arsenic (A) and urea (U) was given to chickens (mg/kg body weight) daily for 39 days as follow: T1 (A10U0.5), T2 (A15U0.75), T3 (A20U1.0), T4 (A25) and T5 (U1.5). Various signs of toxicity such as depression, dullness, tremors, watery droppings, gasping, anemic comb and wattle were prominent in treated birds. Feed consumption and body weight of experimental birds treated with arsenic and urea decreased significantly. The absolute and relative weights of different visceral organs such as heart, liver, kidneys, spleen and bursa of treated birds were decreased significantly. Histologically, tissue sections of liver showed necrosis of hepatocyte, fatty degeneration and mild congestion. Microscopically, necrosis of renal tubular epithelial cells, congestion and increased urinary spaces in kidneys, mild congestion in spleen and vacuolation in bursa of Fabricius of treated birds was evident. Hematological assessment indicated significant decrease in hemoglobin, erythrocyte count, hematocrit percent and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentrations. Results revealed significant increase in serum cardiac iso-enzyme, triglycerides, cholesterol and malondialdehyde concentration in treated birds as compared to untreated birds. A significant decrease in serum total proteins while increased concentrations of alanine aminotransferase, asparatate aminotransferase, lactate dehydrogenase, creatinine and urea was estimated in treated birds. Significantly increased frequency of micronucleus and nuclear abnormalities in erythrocytes was recorded. It was concluded that arsenic and urea in combinations even at low levels affect clinical attributes, hemato-biochemical parameters and erythrocyte morphology in layer birds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]