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This study investigated the impact of an asynchronous learning community (ALC) on English as a second language (ESL) learners' skills acquisition. The ALC was designed by incorporating the community of inquiry (CoI) framework, which highlights cognitive, social, and teaching presence. The participants of this study consisted of 24 ESL learners and four ESL educators, and they were selected using a purposive sampling method. Focus groups and one-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather data. The responses were analysed using thematic analysis. The results showed that opinion-based discussions play an essential role in enhancing learners' skills, particularly their higher-order thinking skills. The study also identified some challenges ESL learners encountered in the ALC, such as improper time management skills, lack of participation, and a sense of isolation. Therefore, some effective strategies were proposed to overcome these challenges. The study recommends that the ALC approach that integrates the CoI framework should be embedded in the ESL curriculum to develop learners' skills and foster a sense of community in the virtual learning environment. This approach can lead to better outcomes for learners in terms of skill acquisition and their ability to succeed in academic and professional settings.

The current study investigated the ability of Saudi EFL students in the southern region of Saudi Arabia to produce and recognise utterances related to the speech acts of making promises. The qualitative study was conducted at Jouf University. To achieve the the objectives set in the study, 10 hypothetical situations adapted from Beebe et al.'s (1990) DCT were selected. These 10 situations expressed the speech acts of promising and imitated real-life situations in Saudi Arabia; These situations were collected orally from 8 female Saudi students through semi-structured interviews (hereafter SSI) conducted with them. In addition, three questions of the SSI and five situational statements were proposed to enhance and enrich the findings. The focus was placed on identifying the various ways of promising when producing a promise in communication. The study's population for the SSI was chosen from the English Department at Jouf University in Tabarjal's 3rd and 4th year- 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th levels. The collected data were then transcribed using the NVivo software-12 version and analysed using thematic analysis. The study focused on the various responses to each question provided by each respondent. The findings indicated that Saudi EFL students faced significant difficulties when it comes to recognising the speech act of promising. Specifically, while 45% of students demonstrated the ability to recognise the speech act of promising, the majority of students (55%) did not. Additionally, the findings showed that students frequently made unconditional promises rather than conditional promises, refusing promises, or delaying promises. In summary, the analysis revealed that Saudis issue pledges in various ways for various reasons. Indeed, the current study made a contribution to linguistics by focusing on examining speech acts in general and the speech acts of promising in particular by focusing on the prominent ways and reasons of the speech act of promising.

Heroic images appear in ancient myths, legends, or folktales from almost every corner of the world. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung proposed the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes in the early 20th century, and his hero archetype has inspired numerous literary critics, mythologists, and writers to investigate the narrative structures of the hero's journey. The 18th century witnessed a boom in British Gothic novels and Chinese supernatural tales, among which Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi are the most prominent. Both literary genres belong to supernatural fiction, with the hero being the typical character. Based on archetypal criticism and qualitative approaches like comparative method, historical approach, and textual analysis, this study attempts to compare the heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction, revealing the resemblance and diversity of human cultures through the analysis of the heroes' characteristics and journeys in The Castle of Otranto and Liaozhai Zhiyi. The findings show that their heroic images are created by the hero archetypes from their national mythologies and social contexts, which demonstrates the transformation from the extraordinary to the ordinary.

Pound's Cathay is a vivid case of cultural exchange between China and English-speaking countries. The most translated Li Bai's poems in Cathay not only promoted better reception of Li Bai's poems in a foreign context, but also injected powerful vitality into the Western literary world. This paper investigated Pound's translation practice of Li Bai's poems in Cathay and specifically interpreted Pound's internal and external motivations in the selection of source text, textual features formed through translation strategies and the reception of English translation of Li Bai's poems by drawing on three main concepts: field, capital, and habitus in Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory. It was found that Pound's selection of Li Bai's poems was made under the influence of the combined force of utilitarian American sinology field and flashy literary field, which conformed to the mentality of the people in war, harmonized with his Imagist principles and reflected his emotional empathy with Li Bai. Pound's habitus with cosmopolitanism and historicism shaped by American sinology and literary fields in a specific social background initiated his translation idea of "translation as creation", which further formed such main translation strategies as the ideogramic method by image juxtaposition, formal freedom by using modern English in free verse etc., language energy by deletion or expansion, etc. Finally, Pound, with his wide social network and authoritative literary status carried great social, cultural, and symbolic capital, promoting better reception of Cathay, especially Li Bai's poems. These results revealed the powerful interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological theory in literary translation and shed light on the communication of Chinese translated literature overseas.

In Malaysia's present scenario, competency in English is not a surety despite it being part of the curriculum from the very start of primary education. In view of the importance of lexical knowledge in language development and the hypothesised superiority of pictorial stimuli, the present study tested the effectiveness of an image-driven intervention for receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge development among Malaysian Year 1 students. A quasi-experimental design was utilised, involving Experimental and Control groups (totalling 159 participants). Three tiers of testing were administered – pre-testing, post-testing to measure for recall, and delayed post-testing for retention. The Experimental group experienced five imagedriven sessions designed for lexical development (one session per week, 30 minutes per session). The Control group was not accorded the same treatment. Approximately 90% of the participants belonged to the B40 (Bottom 40%) group – the group with the lowest income level in Malaysia. Despite the lack of statistical significance, our findings on the whole show development with respect to the participants' lexical knowledge after experiencing the image-driven intervention, with raw scores clearly indicating receptive and productive vocabulary improvement at both the recall and retention stages. The study's findings extend the current knowledge base, especially within the Malaysian domain which suffers from an unfortunate lack of similar studies focusing on lower primary learners. Also, the results appear promising (with only five treatment sessions) and pave the way for more research concerning the effectiveness of the intervention among young ESL/EFL learners.