This article intends to understand how the postcolonial ecocritical writers attempt to reterritorialize their land, its history, and its culture by underscoring the hazards of tourism. In the wake of capitalism, tourism has increased environmental racism and environmental injustice encountered by people of marginalized communities. For this study, we have analyzed a creative nonfiction work A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid in the light of postcolonial ecocritical theory presented by Donelle N. Dreese. This literary theory deals with the exploitation of land, its resources, its environment, and its people in the context of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Dreese’s subdivision of the concept of reterritorialization into mythic, psychic, and environmental reterritorialization has been applied on A Small Place. The article explores how Kincaid has reterritorialized her ancestral homeland Antigua by recording the oppressive colonial past of the land that has been ravaged under imperial rule by exploitation of the natural resources (plantations) and subjugation of the human resources (slavery). She has observed that under the influence of capitalism, her homeland is currently facing a new form of colonization in the name of tourism industry that is actually promoting new ways of foreign occupation of the land, enslavement of the local people, and environmental racism. The article concludes by drawing attention toward tourism, which can turn into neo-colonization under the clutches of capitalism and corrupt leadership. We attempt to underscore that there is a dire need of continuous process of planning and management by the local authorities to minimize the problems faced by the natives and to make tourism industry environment friendly.
This research explored the lives and worldviews of Asian immigrants in the United States presented in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's stories in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001). Central characters in Divakaruni's narratives embody the sufferings of immigrants in the New Land. Precisely it was proposed to study the stories from the perspective of the diaspora. In this collection, the researcher has selected five stories, including "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," "The Intelligence of Wild Things," "The Blooming Season for Cacti," "The Names of Stars in Bengali," and "The Unknown Errors of Our Lives." Since the characters like Mrs. Dutta, Mira, Radhika, and Kahuku's mother emigrate from India to different zones of America, they combat issues of cultural contradiction, identity crisis, disruption and family strives. Unlike them, Tarun, Mrs. Dutta's son, and her family are assimilated into the American society, whereas the characters such as Mrs. Dutta, Didi, and Mira recurrently remember their original house and early childhood days with friends. It is because they are fragmented and frustrated in America. The study concluded that the characters in her stories are ambitious and want to live a luxurious life but because of the lack of opportunities, they could not fulfill their desires and even some of them decided to return to their homeland to get a better life.
ESL/EFL scholarship has traditionally adopted a cognitivist andpsychoanalytical approach towards learning a language based on the premisethat languages are abstract unitary systems. In recent decades, however, therehas been a greater emphasis on the role of social, cultural, andautobiographical factors in language learning. Bakhtin’s socially-orientedphilosophy of language offers a useful lens to view EFL learning as a situatedactivity and EFL learners as multidimensional social actors who configuretheir English learning trajectories within broader social and institutionalfactors. Based on a broader ethnographic study, analysis in this article takes aBakhtinian perspective to understand how multilingual EFL learners innorthern Pakistan construct their identity at the intersection of social,domestic, and future-oriented factors. The analysis shows that locallanguages, school, and family language policies, and imagined Englishspeaking communities have significant implications for learners' orientationand motivation towards learning EFL. The article suggests that responding tothe social turn in applied linguistics, EFL classroom, and pedagogy inPakistan needs to broaden its purview to support individual learnerseffectively negotiate their complex learning trajectories and build empoweringlearner identities.
Purpose of the study: The present research aims to study the effectiveness of using learner autonomy in English language classrooms at the university level from teachers' perspectives. The study seeks to determine what roles can be performed by the language teachers while fostering learner autonomy at the university level. Methodology: The study is descriptive and qualitative. The data has been collected with the help of a structured interview. The researchers prepared a list of questions to collect data from the interviews with 19 ESL teachers. The respondents are from the five universities of South Punjab. The interviews are recorded and transcribed and further analysed in terms of thematic categories discussed with the teachers. Main findings: The research explores a great deal of awareness of the concept of learner autonomy among university teachers, which they use indirectly or directly in their classroom teaching. The teachers discuss many roles they can perform to develop and use autonomy in the English language classroom. They express that practising autonomous learning in an ESL context could result in learning the English language more naturally and effectively. Application of this study: The present study contributes to using and developing learner autonomy in an ESL context. It would be an inspiration to research and explore more avenues of systematic inquiry in the field it deals with. The pedagogical implication of the study is that it would help ESL teachers practice the concept in their classroom teaching effectively. Novelty/Originality of this study: Most of the studies found in the field of learner autonomy are learner-centered. our research explores the phenomenon from the viewpoint of language teachers. The study focuses on the effectiveness of learner autonomy perceived by the teachers. It further records the teachers' opinions about what role(s) they can perform to practice it in the classroom.
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