Politology and International Studies

Learner autonomy is of vital importance in language teaching, particularly in reaching better outcomes in language acquisition, in integrating foreign language use, as well as in increasing motivation. How far learners become autonomous greatly depends on the method within whose framework they learn. The present study explores the extent to which a pedagogical approach supporting self-directed learning can be applied successfully in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). The student-centred instruction method under investigation poses "contextualized, real-world situations" to learners in order for them to "develop content knowledge and problem skills", and has become known as problem-based learning (PBL). Introducing the seven jump model by Schmidt (1983), the paper compares and contrasts PBL, which has not been widely used in foreign language teaching, and task-based language learning (TBLL), which is a wellresearched and widely practiced language teaching method. Given that PBL originates from medical sciences, it is heavily researched in its mother field and other related sciences. Providing an overview of PBL in various academic environments through compiling the results of several meta-analyses, the study examines the effectiveness of PBL over the last four decades. Relying on the results of numerous empirical research projects conducted in several fields, the paper discusses the advantages and shortcomings of the method. Concerns that need special attention when implementing PBL are also addressed. Based on the experience and findings of educators and researchers of PBL in various academic fields, the study provides implications for EFL teachers willing to foster self-directed learning.

While considerable research has been conducted on analysing biology
related research articles, relatively little is known about the register
of biology textbooks written for secondary school students. To fill this
lacuna, the present study aims to explore biology textbooks from a
lexical point of view. This research sets out to describe the nature of
the typical lexis prevalent in English language biology texts written
for secondary school students. The purpose of the study is to gain
insights into one of the possible reasons for which 10th grade bilingual
students might find studying biology in English difficult. Within the
register perspective, data was collected through a representative
mini-corpus, and the frequency of lexical items was computer counted
by using text analysing software program WordSmith version 5. In the
process of analysis, words of the same root were lemmatized in order
to find the most common specific word families of the register.
Individual words and lemmas were manually sorted out into any of the
following three categories: biology terms, academic English
vocabulary, and general English lexis. Using the KWIC (key word in
context) application of the same software, collocations of the specific
lexis were searched. By describing the lexical environment of specific
lexis, it is intended that the study will serve the purpose of giving
assistance to biology ESP teachers. The findings of the research
reveal that the biology corpus does not abound in biology terms; the
use of academic English is rare; and it is general English lexis that is
massively present in the register. The results imply that the use of
specific lexis does not count for the difficulty bilingual students face
when processing biology text.

English as a second language (ESL) teachers instructing general English and English for specific purposes (ESP) in bilingual secondary schools face various challenges when it comes to choosing the main linguistic foci of language preparatory courses enabling non-native students to study academic subjects in English. ESL teachers intending to analyse English language subject textbooks written for secondary school students with the aim of gaining information about what bilingual secondary school students need to know in terms of language to process academic textbooks cannot avoiding deal with a dilemma. It needs to be decided which way it is most appropriate to analyse the texts in question. Handbooks of English applied linguistics are not immensely helpful with regard to this problem as they tend not to give recommendation as to which major text analytical approaches are advisable to follow in a precollege setting. The present theoretical research aims to address this lacuna. Respectively, the purpose of this pedagogically motivated theoretical paper is to investigate two major approaches of ESP text analysis, the register and the genre analysis, in order to find the more suitable one for exploring the language use of secondary school subject texts from the point of view of an English as a second language teacher. Comparing and contrasting the merits and limitations of the two contrastive approaches allows for a better understanding of the nature of the two different perspectives of text analysis. The study examines the goals, the scope of analysis, and the achievements of the register perspective and those of the genre approach alike. The paper also investigates and reviews in detail the starkly different methods of ESP text analysis applied by the two perspectives. Discovering text analysis from a theoretical and methodological angle supports a practical aspect of English teaching, namely making an informed choice when setting out to analyse texts in English. It can be concluded from the literature that the register perspective yields more readily applicable data of text analysis for ESL teachers instructing in a pre-college environment. Besides teachers working in bilingual secondary school, the pedagogical conclusions of the study are also useful for teachers instructing in

While considerable research has been conducted on the register analysis of English language tertiary textbooks, relatively little is explored about the register analytical features of secondary textbooks. The purpose of the present pedagogically-driven study is to analyse the register of biology textbooks for secondary students from the point of view of English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching by describing the register of the biology corpus (BIOCOR) that 10 th grade students need to process during their studies at a bilingual secondary school. The research reports on the characteristic linguistic features of the BIOCOR with regard to the complexity of the texts syntactic structure. The BIOCOR (consisting of 7,021 words) is compared to a reference corpus (REFCOR) of general English texts at a CEFR B2 level (comprising 7,098 words) by exploring the frequency of ten types of syntactic structures (simple, compound and complex sentences of various number of dependent and independent clauses). The results of the investigation disclose that syntactic simplicity is prevalent in the BIOCOR: simple sentences abound, complex sentences are used in a modest manner, while complex-compound sentences are hardly present in the corpus. The syntactic simplicity of the biology textbook can be regarded as one of the linguistic features revealing the non-academic but popularizing nature of the secondary textbook register.

In April 2017, the Hungarian government launched a national consultation entitled 'Let's stop Brussels!' focusing on topical issues such as Brussels' prohibition of reductions in household utility charges; illegal immigration; foreign attempts to influence the domestic political scene; Brussels' attacks on tax reductions and job creation programmes in Hungary. The ruling party's intention of conducting the consultation was to gain alleged public support for the government's implementation of measures the EU has been concerned about. The present paper investigates the extent of the presence of manipulation in the rhetoric of the questionnaire of the consultation sent to Hungarian eligible voters by using van Dijk's (2006) triangulated Critical Discourse Analytical (CDA) approach. Van Dijk's three-layered approach to the investigation of manipulation in discourse is an integrated theory that establishes links between three different dimensions of manipulation: society, cognition and discourse. The findings of the study show that in all the three dimensions various rhetorical tools of manipulation were applied in the text of the national consultation.

Sympathy is a powerful principle in human nature, which can change our passions, sentiments and ways of thinking. For the 18-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, sympathy is a working mechanism accountable for a wide range of communication: the ways of interacting with the others’ affections, emotions, sentiments, inclinations, ways of thinking and even opinions. The present paper intends to find a systematic reading of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) from the point of view of what the mechanism of sympathetic communication implies in terms of strengthening our action of understanding, of being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of others. Hume’s description of the sympathetic mechanism appears to suggest that sympathetic passions come upon us purely by natural means in a passive manner, without the active use of any of our faculties. Consequently, scholarly attention is drawn to the mechanistic character of the sympathetic process; its automatic nature is emphasized to such an extent that some experts even find it to be completely void of any reflective process. The current study investigates to what extent the sympathetic process can actively be modified and in what manner sympathetic feelings can be generated as described in Hume’s system of emotions. The paper identifies at which points the
otherwise mechanically and passively operating process of sympathetic feelings is open to be modified by actively altering or strengthening certain skeletal points of the mechanism. I argue that the alterations can be initiated by the person who receives the sympathetic feelings and also by the person whose passions are transmitted, moreover even by a third party. In a seemingly mechanic model, there is room for altering or at least amplifying one’s sympathetic feelings.

The past decade has seen a scholarly debate about Adam Smith’s scepticism with regard to the knowledge gained as a result of pursuing sciences. In his works, Smith does not explicitly state, discuss, or even refl ectively analyse his scepticism. Since Smith is a constructive
philosopher on the whole, it is disputed whether he is a sceptic at all.
Smith is expressly treated as a sceptical realist by Ryan Hanley (2010)
and Cremaschi (1989). He is implied to be one by Labio (2016), who stresses the importance of the imagination in Smith, as well as by
Redman (1997), who underlines the primary significance of the mere
psychological need for the pursuit of philosophy. Eric Schliesser (2005;
2010), Leonidas Montes (2008; 2016), and Kwangsu Kim (2012) argue for a non-sceptical Smithian philosophy of science. In the present paper I will examine in what ways Smith is a sceptic regarding both the process and the results of enquiries in natural philosophy –
or in modern terms, regarding research design and research results
in sciences – as expressed in his posthumously published Essays
on Philosophical Subjects. First, I will show that the Smithian concepts of the drive, of the nature, and of the aim of scientific research bear heavy traits of scepticism. Next, I  will focus on the sceptical implications of the metaphor of the opera house, which Smith deploys in his  History of Astronomy  as a means to illuminate what stops us feeling wonder, the psychological source for carrying out scientifi c investigations. Subsequently, I will engage in considering the nature and the extent of the Smithian scepticism of natural philosophy by using William’s ( 2008 ) taxonomy. Here I also underline the importance of the
emotion of admiration, which can dispel scepticism, or at least the sentiment of scepticism, according to Smith.

It was the Oxford University's Students Union (OUSU) which first promoted the use of genderinclusive pronouns to avoid gender-binarism in the English-speaking European academic life. OUSU finds it supportive if students declare their chosen pronouns by which they wish to be addressed at meetings (he, she or ze). Public attention turned to the emergence of the new pronoun. The present study aims to explore the social perception of the newly appearing genderneutral neologism by mapping public attitude towards the idea of institutionally introducing a neopronoun (ze) in the English language for the sake of celebrating gender diversity. The discourse plane investigated in the research was comments given to online newspaper articles. The genre of comments provides insights into the opinions and feelings of the general public. A near-thousand comments of online dialogues displayed on the websites of six British newspapers (three broadsheets and three tabloids) during a one-year timespan (December 2016-December 2017) were analysed qualitatively. Arguments on either discourse position were studied, hidden premises were uncovered. The results of the exploratory study reveal that there is a notable imbalance in the voicing of opinions: the promotion of the gender-neutral English pronoun is markedly underrepresented in the public (1.32%) while the set of arguments against its introduction is versatile. The findings of the analysis indicate that the voice of the people does not consider pronoun-binarism as a sign of exclusion or the marginalizing of gender-diverse people; however, the novel pronoun tends to excite shock and refusal in the public.

The present mixed-methods research investigates how a lexical field was created around the theme of violence promoting non-violence. Using a CDA framework, the study explores the narrative recontextualisation of the so-called Chemnitz events in online English-language newspaper articles from four quality press sources (BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times). Linguistic analysis was carried out on articles reporting on the importance of attending a rock concert after the protests in Chemnitz, Saxony, in 2018. The analysis applied van Leeuwen's (2008) sociosemiotic inventory of the ways in which social actors and social actions are represented discursively. The findings suggest that the articles heavily apply the conceptual field of violence and disproportionally represent the social actors, which result in the encouragement of the mobilisation of 'us'.

While considerable research has been conducted on d escribing the discourse features of academic writing in the field of biology, there is hardly any research available on the register speci fic features of textbooks written for secondary students, in partic ular on those of biology textbooks. The present qua ntitative investigation aims to fill this niche by means of d eveloping an analytical instrument capable of provi ding data that describe the dominant grammatical features of English language biology texts used in the instruct ion of Hungarian students in a bilingual secondary school in Budapest. The results of the study reveal that b iology texts for secondary students are less complex in terms of grammar than general English reading texts for int ermediate (B2) learners. The findings are hoped to be of assi stance to biology ESP teachers and general English teachers instructing in a bilingual secondary school alike.

While the register of English language tertiary textbooks has been investigated substantially, moderately little is explored about the register analytical features of secondary textbooks. The purpose of the present pedagogically-driven study is to analyse the register of biology textbooks for secondary students from the point of view of English as a second language (ESL) teaching by describing the lexical uniqueness of the register of the biology corpus (BIOCOR) 10th-grade students need to process during their studies at a bilingual secondary school. The BIOCOR (consisting of 7,021 words) was compared to a reference corpus (REFCOR) of general English texts at a CEFR B2 level (comprising 7,098 words) by exploring its high-value positive and negative keyness lexical items. The results of the investigation disclose that the lack of specialised uniqueness is prevalent in the BIOCOR with regard to academic English and specific biology terminology. The lexical plainness of the biology tex...

While considerable research has been conducted on describing the discourse features of academic writing in the field of biology, there is hardly any research available on the register specific features of textbooks written for secondary students, in particular on those of biology textbooks. The present quantitative investigation aims to fill this niche by means of developing an analytical instrument capable of providing data that describe the dominant grammatical features of English language biology texts used in the instruction of Hungarian students in a bilingual secondary school in Budapest. The results of the study reveal that biology texts for secondary students are less complex in terms of grammar than general English reading texts for intermediate (B2) learners. The findings are hoped to be of assistance to biology ESP teachers and general English teachers instructing in a bilingual secondary school alike.

English as a second language (ESL) teachers instructing general English and English for specific purposes (ESP) in bilingual secondary schools face various challenges when it comes to choosing the main linguistic foci of language preparatory courses enabling non-native students to study academic subjects in English. ESL teachers intending to analyse English language subject textbooks written for secondary school students with the aim of gaining information about what bilingual secondary school students need to know in terms of language to process academic textbooks cannot avoiding deal with a dilemma. It needs to be decided which way it is most appropriate to analyse the texts in question. Handbooks of English applied linguistics are not immensely helpful with regard to this problem as they tend not to give recommendation as to which major text analytical approaches are advisable to follow in a pre-college setting. The present theoretical research aims to address this lacuna. Respec...