2019-2020
On Sunday October the 20th, 2019 a seminar was presented about (Damaged brain caused the disorder of the patient's speech) by Miss Bahar A. Amin. An abstract of the seminar follows; It is because of the eloct of the blood in the vessels that prevents the oxygen to pass through them. This spoils the process of uttering the sounds in normal way. Aphaisa and dyspaisa are two terms concerning this topic. First the linguist were used to use the first one to refer to disorder speech but since it means to be entirely speechless, nowadays the second one is used for it means to be able to speak yet not normally.
On Sunday 27/10/2019. Miss Bahar A. Amin presented a seminar about (The three terms; utterance, sentence and proposition) and how they have different functions and features. The seminar also shed light on how they are used in every language and every day communication since they have direct connection with each other. There are some characteristics that these three terms share like being true or false and some other where they differ in like being related to a particular language like sentence and utterance yet proposition is not concerned in this point.
On Wednesday the 30th of October 2019, a seminar was held at English Department, which was presented by Mr. Hemn A. Karim. The seminar was about (Stages of the Development of Applied Linguistics). The presentation started with the definition of applied linguistics, and then the rise of applied linguistics introduced. After that, the stages of its development were shed light on in detail. Finally, the importance of this field in the process of language learning and teaching has been explained.
On Sunday, November the 3rd, a seminar was presented by Dr. Nasrin Othman Darwish. There is an abstract of the seminar. Throughout the 19th century English drama went through a period of sterility, but at the last quarter of the century very important innovations came with two historic playwrights Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw who were both Irish.Dandy character was best introduced in Wilde’s plays and this can be regarded as one of his contributions to the 19th century drama. Wilde proved ,through his play, that the dandy character is a moral character rather than merely comic or funny.
November the 3rd, a seminar was presented by Dr. Ibrahim Ali Murad at English department about "Somebody blew up America".
The seminar dealt with one of the controversial poems of the African-American poet, Amiri Baraka. In it, the poet tries to prove that the US authorities were responsible for the twin attack of September 11, 2001. He refers to some media sources where the US government was cautioned by the intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, and Israel in advance about the attacks, but they did not react neither paid attention to the forthcoming danger. Baraka says that they behaved so on purpose to find justifications for the wars that they later launched in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
November the 6th 2019, there was a seminar at English Department, presented by Mr. Abbas Mohammed Salih about Morphological Description of Words. Its abstract is presented below;
Morphology is a branch of linguistics that deals with the study of words. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has a meaning and cannot be divided into other smaller parts. There are two types of morphemes; free morphemes and bound morphemes. The former type can stand alone with a meaning such as: eat, date, weak while the latter cannot stand alone with a meaning like the morpheme “ly” in the word “happily”.
Further, Free morphemes are composed of lexical morphemes which include all lexical content words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., and functional that is comprised of all grammatical morphemes in sentences such as prepositions and conjunctions. Likewise, Bound morphemes are made up of derivational and inflectional morphemes. Therefore, due to the importance and complexity involved in understanding the various meanings of words, the seminar has attempted to explain the morphological description of words as a strategy in which the meanings of words can be established or inferred through checking their meaningful components (i.e., prefixes, suffixes, roots, etc.).
On Wednesday 13/11/2019. Mrs. Vian A. Karam presented a seminar about Code-switching. She presented the idea as follow;
Code‐switching is a very important aspect of bilingualism, and is a natural occurrence when two bilingual speakers engage in discourse. For the most part, such individuals are not consciously aware that they are code‐switching. Nonetheless, it serves an important social function. Whenever there is more than one language spoken in a community, their populations will code‐switch. The purpose of this seminar is to first determine the types of code‐switches that bilingual speakers use and listener attitudes toward this behavior.In ELT classrooms, code switching comes into use either in the teachers’ or the students’ discourse. Although it is not favored by many educators, one should have at least an understanding of the functions of switching between the native language and the foreign language and its underlying reasons. This understanding will provide language teachers with a heightened awareness of its use in classroom discourse and will obviously lead to better of instruction by either eliminating it or dominating its use during the foreign language instruction.
Social Darwinism in "The Whiteman's Burden" was another seminar on Wednesday 13/11/2019 presented by Dr. Ibrahim Ali Murad.
The seminar tackled social Darwinism as a theory and applied it on a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling entitled "The Whiteman's Burden". Kipling shows in the poem that the Indians should be thankful for Britain that a large number of its soldiers to India to cultivate and teach the "barbaric" Indians how to live. Whatever the British do in India, Kipling stresses, is just for the sake of the local people there and that the British soldiers and workers just get tired and consumed and the result of their toil goes to the local people. The poem contuse with a string of ironies since what Kipling wrote can be true only if they were reversed.
November the 20th a seminar was presented by Mr. Hemn Adil Karim on the “21st Century Learning and Teaching Skills”. at the very beginning the presenter started talking about the traditional classroom and how content is delivered to the learners. Then, the 21st century classroom was introduced and the skills applied in classrooms were explained including (effective communication, learning and innovation, life and career, and ICT). Finally, the implementation of the skills in English language classes was discussed among the audiences.
On Wednesday 4/12/2019, a seminar was presented by Mrs. Kazhaw J. Abdullah about "Learning Styles". She focused on the topic as follow;
Our brain has tremendous potential, yet the average human being only uses between five and ten percent of this capacity.
One of the ways to realize this potential is to discover the best way in which you learn.
Four decades of psychological research have shown that each person has a distinct way of learning, known as his or her personal learning style.
Learning styles can be defined as the way you learn best.A learning style is the unique collection of individual skills and preferences that affect how a person perceives, gathers, and processes information. Learning styles are the manner in which brains learn and store information. Your natural learning preference or style dictates how your brain works most efficiently to process, comprehend and learn new information, and how easily or quickly you learn something new.
There are three main learning styles among students:
1. Visual,
2. Auditory, and
3. Kinesthetic.
You may be more comfortable with one or a combination of these learning styles.
There was another seminar at English Department on Wednesday 4/12/2019 about "The Psychology of Speaking", which was presented by Mrs. Vian A. Karam. She shed light on the following ideas;
Speaking in front of groups of people is a top ten human fear and for most a very stressful experience. However thanks to break through techniques based on years of professional speaking fear of public speaking when practiced in the right environment can be overcome and even enjoyed. Adopt the most powerful ways to use fear to build momentum think on your feet find confidence and convey your ideas with confidence, clarity and charisma regardless of the size of the group, and in just about any setting. There are certain strategies that can help to reduce your fear such as, be audience-centered In order to conquer fear, you have to remember that your presentation is not about yourself.Accept that you make mistakes No one is born a perfect speaker. Ditch all that negative self-talk,present daily I'm not just talking about practice, I'm talking about incorporating it into your daily life.Practice Makes near Perfect I'm repeating this point from the last session because it is that important. This may seem simple enough, but the truth is the more you know your material, the more confident you'll be as the fear of forgetting will disappear almost entirely.
November the 6th, a seminar was presented at English department by Mrs. Roshna Ahmed Muhammed. It was about a great figure in the history of English literature at all called CHARLES DICKINS and his great and unique technique of narration of his story telling , he talks to his audience as really as the situation may hold meanings, the reader gets involved with the characters more than the symbols in the story . one needs to read the whole story without any interruption to understand the picturized scene.
On Wednesday, November the 13th 2019 a seminar was presented by Mrs. Roshna Ahmed Muhammed. It was about teacher's knowledge concerning teaching and their personal experiences while teaching. here the focus is on the ability of the teacher is he/she able to teach only or makes it a scene from a movie I.e make the lesson or lecture interesting by teaching the subject as its and scientifically too. thus teaching is an art and a science too at the same time.
On Wednesday 20/11/2019 Mrs. Bushra Othman Sidiq presented a seminar at English Department. The seminar was on ECO- Criticism elements in "The outermost house by Henry Beston".
The focus of the seminar was on Eco- criticism and its rise from naturalism in some old writings like the " outermost house " by Beston. Furthermore, Henry Beston's biography was a part of the discussion. Finally, some extracts from" The outermost house " were shed light on , and given details.