Lorena Mihaes
University of Bucharest, Modern Languages, Faculty Member
Today’s world is completely engaged in a new type of revolution: the digital one. Higher education is one important field which can benefit from the advent of digital technologies. Blended learning has emerged as a groundbreaking concept,... more
Today’s world is completely engaged in a new type of revolution: the digital one. Higher education is one important field which can benefit from the advent of digital technologies. Blended learning has emerged as a groundbreaking concept, which combines the student’s traditional learning experience with the support offered by the computer, the teacher guiding him all the way. The mission of Adapt2jobs, a project developed with the help of the European Union’s structural funds, is to create a learning platform, where seven traditional courses from three distinct fields of study, developed by experienced academics according to the labour-market requirements, have been transferred to the digital medium by ICT (Information and Communication Technology) specialists. The project is intended to implement a piloting programme, which involves 210 students enrolled at the seven courses, and, eventually, to measure learning effectiveness by means of the tools developed as part of the learning platform. A research methodology has been designed in order to assess the overall learning experience of the students involved in the project, and, thus, to provide valuable insights to teachers, who are given the opportunity to enrich their teaching methods and teaching philosophy, and to make them able to adapt to new ICT technologies in education. The feedback from students is collected with the help of two online evaluative surveys: a general one applied prior to Adapt2jobs learning experience, and a specific one, tailored for each course, applied at the end of the piloting stage. This allows us to make a comparative analysis between the students’ expectations and their previous learning experience, which is mainly traditional, and the new type of learning experienced during the piloting months. Data collection is made via LimeSurvey, a digital open source which will assist us in interpreting students’ responses. The survey variables have been selected to describe the students’ past experience in using computer and online learning materials, to explore their perception of learning effectiveness on a personal level, and, on a more general level, to compare traditional learning with blended learning. The paper’s aim is to analyse the preliminary results available for the two surveys and, thus, to evaluate the implementation scheme proposed by the project and, therefore, the effectiveness of technology-mediated instruction.
The aim of this paper is to present narrative unreliability from the vantage point of pragmatics, namely Brown and Levinson's Politeness Principle. My claim is that narrative unreliability always encodes a face-threatening act to the... more
The aim of this paper is to present narrative unreliability from the vantage point of pragmatics, namely Brown and Levinson's Politeness Principle. My claim is that narrative unreliability always encodes a face-threatening act to the narrator's face, one he would evade no matter what. Politeness strategies allow the narrator to perform such an act while saving face at the same time in front of his narratee – his interlocutor in the fictional world. While Stevens' politeness strategies in The Remains of the Day are mainly directed at maintaining his negative face, Ono in An Artist of the Floating World is especially concerned with saving his positive face. To put it differently, Stevens makes claims to his territory, personal preserves and rights to non-distraction, while Ono is interested in creating a positive consistent self-image in the eyes of his fictional interlocutor. Both strategies result in a less conspicuous, more natural unreliability of two narrators who seem to be partly conscious of the difficult position they are in when narrating their guilt-ridden past.
Research Interests:
This paper looks at the evolution of the narratological concept of unreliability since Booth coined it in 1961. The interest of this paper resides solely in the rhetorical essentialist approach and leaves out the cognitive constructivist... more
This paper looks at the evolution of the narratological concept of unreliability since Booth coined it in 1961. The interest of this paper resides solely in the rhetorical essentialist approach and leaves out the cognitive constructivist stance taken by a number of narratologists. The rhetorical approach to narrative unreliability is based on the anthropomorphic agent called the implied author, responsible for intentionally marking the text as such. If the implied author endorses the narrator's account and the evaluation he attaches to it, then the narration is reliable; if not, it is unreliable.