Elsa Skënderi Rakipllari | University of Bergen (original) (raw)

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Papers by Elsa Skënderi Rakipllari

Synergies in Communication (SiC), 2023

In terms of cultural diplomacy, countries have been using various mechanisms, some aiming at gett... more In terms of cultural diplomacy, countries have been using various mechanisms, some aiming at getting their language taught around the world. Teaching materials and books are specifically designed to best convey the image of the country to language-learning foreign students. Textbooks for foreign languages are part of larger discursive and pedagogical practices, thus being historically embedded in the political, cultural, and social context. The present paper examines the most common frames used to project the image of Albania, its political regime, and its culture in the textbook 'Gjuha Shqipe 3' (1981), (Albanian language 3). This textbook for advanced learners of the Albanian language was published under communist rule. Following a framing analysis method, we determine which cultural/political/historical aspects of Albania are made more salient in the textbook for the sake of perpetuating and imposing the ideology of the communist regime. In the textbook, there are multiple forms used to display a glorious communist image of Albania: the reading materials, the illustrations, as well as the grammar sections are all devices displaying the omnipresent communist ideology. This approach is important to understand how textbooks for foreign language learners shape the image of a country by complying with the dominant ideology and the language policy of that specific country.

Advanced linguistics, Nov 30, 2022

The present paper aims to analyse the discursive construction students of COVID-19 (era), which h... more The present paper aims to analyse the discursive construction students of COVID-19 (era), which has been broadly used as a label to refer to all the students, who were shifted to online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Following the critical discourse analysis theoretical approach, we examine the discursive planes that have built and reinforced this discursive construction. The paper focuses on three main areas that have reinforced this discourse construction: the science (s) plan, (online) media plan, and everyday life plan. The scientific discourse on education has emphasized the detrimental effects the pandemic has had, and is expected to have on learners. Moreover, traditional, online, and social media have continuously pointed to the negative impact of the pandemic on the academic performance of students. Especially social media has been using a very powerful tool to convey this kind of discursive stance, i.e., memes. The everyday life plane has also played a role in the discursive construction of students of COVID-19 era by bringing up and building upon the real-life experiences of the learning loss that students have been facing. The paper analyses representative discursive fragments from all the above-mentioned discourse planes, to shed light on the discursive construction "students of COVID-19", as a pathologizing label used for a whole generation of learners affected by COVID-19 pandemic.

Language. Text. Society, 2015

Advanced Linguistics, 10, 2022, 2022

Revista "Hylli i Dritës", 2022

The present paper aims to provide an interpretation to some of the poetic works of the Kosovan wr... more The present paper aims to provide an interpretation to some of the poetic works of the Kosovan writer, Teki Dërvishi. Despite the impressive productivity, Dërvishi's literary corpus, seems to be understudied and has not received enough critical recognition compared to his companions. Thus, the scope of the paper is twofold: to draw attention to Dërvishi's modern scriptable poetry and to propose a certain way of reading his poetry, by focusing on some of the most prominent features of several poetic works. In the poetic volume "Nimfa" (The Nymph), the lyrical subject, because of betrayal, suffers from intense feelings of hatred, obsession, which incite misogyny. The paper argues that the Nymph and women in general in Dërvishi's poetries, are represented both sentimentally (as objects of deep love and admiration) and misogynistically. Given the socio-cultural context, the poet does not depart much from the existing attitude toward women, whereas from a literary movement context, Dërvishi seems to meet a feature of modernist male writers, which mainly feminist critics consider as inherently misogynist. In his other poetic volumes, especially in "Shtëpia e Sëmurë" (1978) (The sick house), Dërvishi's style reaches greater proliferation, and the modernist features of his poetry are more obvious. Through introspection, lyrical hermeticism and a prosperous cultural, historical, symbolic reference net the poetries is not merely lisible (in terms of Barthes), but it becomes clearly scriptible. The modernist features of Dërvishi's poetries are not to be found merely in breaking free of traditional rhyme schemes and techniques, but also in breaking free of genre restrictions, as the poet within a single poetic text in verses abruptly departs to the prosaic realm. The lack of clear boundaries between poetry and prose in his so-called poetic volumes is one of the prominent characteristics of Dërvishi's poetic individuality, which still calls for critical interpretation and reception.

Seminari Ndërkombëtar për Gjuhën, Letërsinë dhe Kulturën Shqiptare, 2019

Comparative Legilinguistics

This paper aims to explore the traces of ideology in court decisions from the Communism period in... more This paper aims to explore the traces of ideology in court decisions from the Communism period in Albania. A court judgment on a certain case, except from playing a role in setting the punishment, it also reinforces the ideological stance of dictatorship. As recent studies of Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis highlight, ideology is linguistically mediated. The CDA methodological tools are used to analyze the linguistic categories that are marked by ideological traces. The paper also examines conceptual metaphors and the metaphoric scenarios employed in the above legal discourse fragments, which help communism construct its own legal and political reality. All the findings of this research prove that ideology outreaches the political realities, and it may also affect the legal discourse, especially during the lead of a communist dictatorship.

Ars & Humanitas, 2020

This paper focuses on an essentially environmental and recurrent debate about foreign waste impor... more This paper focuses on an essentially environmental and recurrent debate about foreign waste imports in Albania. The aim of this paper is to examine the frames that are used by parties in this debate in order to persuade the public in favour of or against importing foreign waste. The representative actors of the foreign waste debate are politicians and environmental activists. Salient fragments of their speeches were collected and divided into two groups (in favour vs. against). Framing analysis is a widely used methodological approach in social sciences, with various conceptualizations in different research fields, such as in communication studies (Entman 1993), linguistics (Fillmore’s semantic frames; critical discourse analysis frames or schemata), psychology (frames in thought), sociology (frames in communication). The theoretical background section of the paper provides an overview of these main approaches in defining, detecting and extracting frames. In the present paper a ling...

Semantic priming has been a major subject of interest for psycholinguists, whose aim is to discov... more Semantic priming has been a major subject of interest for psycholinguists, whose aim is to discover how lexical memory is structured and organized. The facilitation process of word retrieval through semantic priming has long been studied. The present research is aimed to reveal which semantic category has the best priming effect. Through a lexical decision task experiment we compared the reaction times of masked primed pairs and unprimed pairs. In addition, we analyzed the reaction times and priming effect of connected semantic relations: antonymy, frame, synonymy, implication and verb-object. The data collected and interpreted unveiled that the mean reaction times of primed pairs were shorter than those of unprimed pairs. As to semantic priming, the most significantly primed pairs were those of implications and verbobjects, and not those of synonymy or antonymy as it might be expected