The role of language in students’ justifications of scientific phenomena

Making decisions and constructing arguments with scientific evidence and reasoning are essential skills for all members of society, especially in a world facing complex socioscientific issues (climate change, global pandemics, etc.). Argumentation is a complex linguistic practice, but little is known about how students from diverse language backgrounds engage in argumentation. The goal of this study was to identify how students’ English language proficiency/history was associated with the reasoning demonstrated in their written arguments. We found that students with lower English proficiency and less English history produced fewer causal responses compared to students with higher English language proficiency and history. Follow-up interviews with fifteen participants revealed that students’ comfort communicating in English on assessments depended on a combination of general and academic language experiences. Findings suggest a need to identify what barriers students from diverse language backgrounds encounter during argumentation to ensure students from all language backgrounds have equitable opportunities to demonstrate their abilities.

Un rey para el olvido: la figura de Alfredo el Grande a través de la pantalla

Alfred the Great is, without a doubt, an important figure not only in English history, but also in that of the European Middle Ages. His policies for dealing with the Nordic invasion of England, as well as his cultural, educational and legal reforms, have made this king a revered figure in English intellectual circles, especially in the 19th century. It is striking that, in spite of his popularity, this monarch does not have a more prominent presence within audiovisual media, which is the artistic mass media par excellence of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The objective of the present work is to investigate the historical popularity and audiovisual trajectory of this king, as well as to analyze his representation in the cinema and television productions that have dealt with him. Alfredo el Grande es, sin duda, una figura importante no solo de la historia inglesa, sino de la propia Edad Media europea. Sus políticas para hacer frente a la invasión nórdica de Inglaterra, así como sus reformas culturales, educativas y jurídicas, han convertido a este rey en un personaje reverenciado en los círculos intelectuales ingleses, sobre todo en el siglo XIX. Resulta llamativo que aun así este monarca no tenga una presencia mucho más destacada dentro de los medios cinematográficos y audiovisuales, los medios artísticos de masas por antonomasia del siglo XX y XXI. Es justo el objetivo del presente trabajo trazar la trayectoria mediática y popular de este rey, así como analizar su representación y construcción en las producciones audiovisuales que han tratado su figura.

Shadowing Shakespeare

In his 1980 film Kagemusha or Shadow Warrior, Akira Kurosawa presents the sixteenth-century Takeda clan engaging a lower-class thief to impersonate their recently deceased leader, Takeda Shingen. I examine Kagemusha as a critical engagement with Shakespeare’s English history plays and ‘shadow’ counterpart to Kurosawa’s trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations, Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Ran (1985). In keeping with Shakespeare’s dramatisation of English history, Kurosawa creatively reworks historical sources, incorporating stories of intergenerational rivalry and fulfilled prophecies, to depict the transition from medieval civil conflict to the early-modern nation-state. Kurosawa also deploys the motif of the double to explore the distinctively Shakespearean theme of power as performance, engaging in a dramatic examination of Machiavelli’s ideas about politics. I argue that Kurosawa’s use of the double posits a theory of influence, drawing on Japanese cultural traditions, in which doubling can achieve a form of transcendence through self-annihilation.

The Influence of English Anticlericalism on the Studies of “Becket’s Controversy” Conducted by British Historians in the 18th Century

In this paper, some historical writings dating back to the 18th century and focused on the life of St. Thomas Becket and his relationship with King Henry II Plantagenet were considered. In a broad historical context, the causes of the growth in the popularity of anticlericalism in the interpretation of the catholic past by the British scholars during the Age of Enlightenment were singled out and covered in detail. Based on the analysis of the works written by P. de Rapin, J. Oldmixon, J. Lockman, J. Littleton, D. Hume, E. Burke, D. Berington, and some others, the methodological approaches to viewing and portraying the figure of T. Becket were revealed. The “controversy” that accompanies the discourse about him was identified. Based on a thorough investigation of the European political conjuncture in the 18 century and on the ideological and religious affiliation of the above-mentioned scholars, as well as their influence and popularity, three main periods were distinguished in the study of “Becket’s controversy” within the English historiography of that time: the period of the Circle of P. de Rapin (with him, J. Oldmixon, J. Lockman, J. Littleton, and E. Burke) was followed by the period of D. Hume and later by the Catholic reactionism of D. Berington. It was concluded that the works of P. de Rapin and his Circle promoted a negative image of T. Becket and undermined his role in English history over almost the entire 18th century.