Essay writing is one of the basic and most prized competencies in our post-industrial and global world. One of the serious indictments of the traditional teaching approaches to essay writing is their essential inadequacies and incompatibilities with the present-day pedagogical trends. Writing essays in SL is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most significant tasks we engage our students in as human beings. Writing essays can assist us to find out what we think, and consequently, to know who we are. Not only does it help us to interact with others, but also to participate in our discourse community. Moreover, essay writing also requires from a writer to communicate persuasively in a disciplined way. In short, essays entail creativity of ideas and thoughts which reveal the critical perspective of the writer, and a form which is intelligible, logical and free from errors of lexis, syntax, discourse, spelling and punctuation. The following research study was, in fact, conducted to find out how SL teachers teach essay writing to learners to develop communicative/discourse competence in them to enable them to perform in real-life situations. Further, the study was carried out to realize the assessment practices of the teachers in two of the universities of Pakistan. It was, primarily, a mixed method research, utilizing quantitative and qualitative paradigms of research. For this purpose, the researcher made use of the Common European Framework of Reference 2001 (a worldwide renowned document for teaching and testing of English language) for language teaching and testing as a theoretical framework and designed questionnaires, an interview guide and an observation sheet for data collection. These instruments were pilot tested, and their validity and reliability were established thereby. Later, the questionnaires were administered to learners and teachers. Moreover, the researcher conducted interviews of the teachers and made the classroom observations as well. These three different research tools were used to triangulate, compare, contrast, and validate the data. The quantitative data were analyzed through SPSS (version 21), and the qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The research findings demonstrate that there exist gaps in the teaching and testing practices. Finally, it has been, therefore, recommended that a student-centered, content-based and task-oriented communicative classrooms ought to be created in such a way that the learners’ linguistic needs and content goals along with communicative/discourse competence in essay writing could develop to deal with the real-life challenges.
Whenever we chronically morph into the history of the American intervention in Afghanistan it adheres to the fact that the war on terror was a rigid response of US aggression towards their failure in resisting the 9/11 attack of 2001 or for the sack of utter humanity or humanitarian rights. But on the contrary, many analysts and scholars on realistic ground justify the notion of war on terror as a strategic war which none the less determined the most figure of sustenance of US- hegemony in South Asia along with enormous illustrations of uncountable violation of human rights or the right of liberty the US administration, under the prism of liberalism. And now when the NATO alliance has existed from Afghanistan after a long constitutive war of 20 years without a remediate response, it enacts a dispersed or iconic philosophical thought that was the war on terror was a success or utter failure? The article will foretell the events that led to the war on terror from USA perspectives and policies its decisive defeat along with the rising of Taliban government with future threat and ties of it among state, under the prism of realism or the realist school of thought.
Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in Pakistani English Novels This study examines the issue of code-switching and code-mixing in written medium that is Pakistani English novels on the grounds that characters, speech communities, and context presented by Pakistani competent novelists are the representation of real life people, speech communities, and contexts. This shows that the use of code-switching and code-mixing by the characters in their dialogues/conversations is authentic. By using content analysis as a method and applying the theories (frames) of types, reasons and context of situation given by Hoffmann (1991), Saville-Troike (2003) and Wallwork (1978), this study investigates the types, reasons and context of code-switching and code-mixing found in the dialogues/conversations of characters. For this purpose, three famous Pakistani English novels are selected which are Moth Smoke (2000), The Crow Eaters (2005) and Salt and Saffron (2000). The theoretical framework for analysis consists of six types of code-switching and code-mixing, eleven reasons of code-switching and code-mixing and five ingredients of context of situations. The results show that the sociolinguistic theories of code-switching and code-mixing presented by Hoffmann (1991) and Saville-Troike (2003) and context of situation ingredients given by Wallwork (1978) are applicable to data in hand. The findings also reveal the fact that most of the characters in Pakistani English novels use intra-sentential code-mixing in their conversations. In this instance, the main reason for them to do code-switching or code- mixing is to express group identity which happens to be a common practice in informal context. The analysis of the data exemplifies some new categories apart from the set theoretical framework which opens new dimensions for future research.