Papers by Rachelle Ballesteros- Lintao
The ability to successfully communicate in English is crucial in order to meet the demands of a c... more The ability to successfully communicate in English is crucial in order to meet the demands of a competitive 21st century economy. Through this impetus, this study sought to investigate the spoken English communication difficulties and coping strategies employed by selected Filipino medical technology students at a private university in Manila. A mixed-methods research paradigm was employed, where Nakatani’s (2006) Oral Communication Strategy Inventory was administered to 79 respondents through convenience sampling; after which, 20 students were invited to participate in a focus group interview and a journal-writing activity. The results of the survey were obtained by identifying the modal score of each communication strategy category, while difficulties were identified using traditional content analysis in light of Dörnyei and Scott’s (1995; 1997) taxonomy. Specifically, results of the study yielded that the students’ communication difficulties are mostly rooted upon the distinctive features of the other speaker’s speech style, lack of sufficient knowledge on technical concepts, and affective factors that prevent them from relaying and understanding messages in the interaction. Meanwhile, preference to holistic coping strategies was identified based on survey findings, while form is also given importance. Both pedagogical and research recommendations are surmised in light of these findings.
The reporting of terrorism and armed conflicts has been extensively investigated in previous medi... more The reporting of terrorism and armed conflicts has been extensively investigated in previous media discourse studies across various contexts. However, a dearth in the literature exists regarding newsworthiness and its establishment in different forms of news discourse. Based on this niche, this paper seeks to present how an important local terrorist assault – the 2017 Marawi City siege –might be constructed in print news reports as newsworthy. Specifically, it aims to determine (a) the linguistic and visual resources that construe news values and (b) the news values employed to construct the event’s newsworthiness. In fulfilling these objectives, 60 news reports from leading Philippine broadsheets were analyzed using Bednarek and Caple’s (2017) discursive news values framework. For this presentation, this multimodal corpus was studied using two methods, namely, (a) collocation analysis of two high frequency and widely dispersed lexical words (i.e., MARAWI and MAUTE) and (b) a manual examination of news images in the corpus. Based on the results, common news values could be gleaned from both semiotic modes such as Negativity, Eliteness, Proximity, and Personalization. However, other news values such as Impact and Positivity seem to be highlighted more in the news images partly due to the limitations of corpus techniques such as collocation analysis. Nonetheless, it is hoped that this presentation will shed light on journalistic practices of Philippine print media in dealing with crisis situations, which may contribute not only to the discursive news values analyses, but also to corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analyses.
Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature
This research paper was aimed at providing a thorough content analysis on memes’ linguistic aspec... more This research paper was aimed at providing a thorough content analysis on memes’ linguistic aspect and further understanding them in the light of their usage as political propaganda. A total of 60 memes were culled from July 2016 to December 2018. According to the memes’ linguistic and visual organization, they have the ability to create and simplify complex political narratives by employing primarily the categories of Shops, Text, and Stacked Stills based on Milner’s (2012) Taxonomy of Meme Collectives. The memes’ humor signifiers were mainly intertextuality, parody, and binary opposition which highlighted how memes are contextual in nature and use exaggeration and opposing concepts to elicit humor. On the other hand, the memes vary in their respective denotations as well as in their connotations which often point to humanization and discreditation. Lastly, for the memes’ propaganda characteristics, they possess all 10 of Walton’s (1997) propaganda characteristics while the audienc...
International Journal of Construction Management
International Journal of Legal Discourse
In courtroom discourses, evaluative language serves a pivotal role in assessing witnesses for det... more In courtroom discourses, evaluative language serves a pivotal role in assessing witnesses for determining the credibility of the testimonies provided and consequently influencing the outcome of the trial. Adopting the appraisal framework, this paper conducted a case study to examine the attitude resources used by court participants in a Philippine drug trial to determine the presence and use of evaluations in courtroom discourse, particularly across trial stages. Results showed that JUDGMENT is the most prevalent valuation in the study with its sub-system Tenacity scoring the highest frequency, followed by APPRECIATION and its sub-category valuation, while AFFECT was uncommon in the trial. The attitude items were also found to be most prevalent in the direct-examination and cross-examination stages to highlight the following: the knowledge of the witnesses on the incident, their involvement in the incident, and the sources of their information. It also showed the adherence of the ju...
International Journal of Law, Language and Discourse, 2020
Language is the primary vehicle in which public policies are expressed for "all concepts in ... more Language is the primary vehicle in which public policies are expressed for "all concepts in law are linguistically constituted and expressed" (Silbey, 1989, p. 1) to the people. Public policies are acquired and consumed by the public through the media that today has taken on a new platform which is the internet. However, laws have a reputation of being incomprehensible due to the complexities of the legal language and become a problematic situation for the people who are directly affected by such difficulty. Hence, this research aimed at looking into how public policies are integrated and explained in online news articles. Furthermore, the study attempted to determine the text comprehensibility of these articles among the lay people in explaining the details of the laws embedded within these texts. Forty online news articles containing the Free Tuition Law and TRAIN Law were collected from two main news organizations in the Philippines. Pan and Kosicki's (1993) Framing...
Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS), 2020
Language and law are considered to be inseparable since language is needed to frame and understan... more Language and law are considered to be inseparable since language is needed to frame and understand the law. In the Philippines, English is widely used in the legal domain; hence, it is the language employed in court trials. To accommodate court participants who speak languages other than English to actively take part in court proceedings, the court recognizes the value of court interpreting. Court interpreting is perceived to promote successful communication among court participants who speak languages other than the court's official language. It helps the judges and jury in courts of law to ensure that a message is accurately conveyed and that fair decisions are derived. However, there are cases in which misinterpretation occurs. For instance, an interpreter may have problems translating words in a witness' testimony from English to Filipino and vice versa, leading to communication breakdown. To avoid this problem, court interpreting should ensure that qualities such as acc...
This paper attempts to investigate whether or not translation facilitates the accuracy of the pas... more This paper attempts to investigate whether or not translation facilitates the accuracy of the past tense. It looks at the correlations between the two translation tasks and the actual writing of a narrative genre. One hundred seventeen second year university students from the General Education program enrolled in Writing in the Discipline took the four writing tasks as their prelim examination. Four writing tasks included: word level morphological transformation, sentence level translation, paragraph level translation, and actual writing of a narrative genre. Results show that both translation tasks, and paragraph writing are statistically different when students are grouped according to the language used at home. All four writing tasks are high in level whether students are bilingual or multilingual speakers. The correlations between sentence level translation and paragraph level translation to the actual paragraph narrative writing aver that translation facilitates the accuracy of...
International Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2020
Information communicated and produced by the government is essentially fundamental as the governm... more Information communicated and produced by the government is essentially fundamental as the government is set and deemed as a reliable and a credible source of information. This study assessed the readability, comprehensibility, and document design of two brochures on prohibited drugs awareness, which were produced and distributed by the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB), a government agency that is responsible in instituting policies about the use of illegal drugs in the Philippines. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, a total number of 120 participants comprised of students, those employed, the unemployed, and drug patients from a rehabilitation center answered two 10-item multiple choice questionnaires and Likert scales to assess and evaluate the comprehensibility and document design of the two brochures. Using the Coh-Metrix tool to analyze the readability of the two brochures, results showed that the two existing brochures were not that readable with the huge discrepancy o...
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2020
The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international communi... more The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international community. In the course of 3 years, China and the Philippines had undergone arbitral proceedings over the maritime rights and entitlements in the South China Sea. As the Permanent Court of Arbitration reached its decision, this paper aims to examine the interpretation process of the Arbitral Tribunal in the judgment of the South China Sea conflict between China and the Philippines. The primary objective of the study is to reconstruct or explain how the Tribunal came up with its interpretation of the written arguments presented by the parties involved and to distinguish whether such reconstruction the Tribunal has successfully interpreted or made sense of the said arguments and submissions. Doing so would necessitate a pragmatic analysis-the relevance-theoretic account of human communication and cognition. Data analyzed include written submissions and arguments as well as the legal documents used during the arbitral process. Using content analysis, the data were evaluated through applying the tool of interpretation based on the criteria set by the three conditions of the relevance theory: (1) logical condition, (2) pragmatic condition, and (3) condition of optimal relevance. This paper argues that in order for the addressee of an utterance, in this case the Arbitral Tribunal, to attain a successful interpretation, it should meet these three conditions. This study found that the reconstruction of the interpretation based on the three conditions showed that the Tribunal had attained a valid and correct interpretation of the Philippines' and China's arguments. Furthermore, the paper asserts that implied conclusion and the contextual assumptions can be a guiding principle for the cognitive comprehension or interpretation of legal texts.
International Journal of Legal Discourse, 2018
As majority of criminal cases in the Philippines are often challenged by the plight to obtain vol... more As majority of criminal cases in the Philippines are often challenged by the plight to obtain voluntary narratives from Children who are in Conflict with the Law (CICL) (National Police Commission, Department of the Interior and Local Government, Republic of the Philippines 2009.Adoption of the police manual on the management of cases of children in conflict with the law (CICL) and the simplified rules in the apprehension and investigation of CICL, Resolution No. 415.), and Forensic Linguistics being a relatively new field in the local setting, it is timely to assess the questioning strategies heavily relied upon by law enforcement officers in the investigative process. However, questioning strategies geared to address purely the investigations of children in conflict with the law has so far been hardly formally investigated. This study was aimed at examining the questioning strategies used in by the authorities in investigating adolescents accused ofcrime against property. Fifteen ...
Advanced Science Letters, 2018
International Journal of Legal Discourse, 2016
Modality, from the cognitive linguists’ perspective, relates to a “speaker’s assessment of, or at... more Modality, from the cognitive linguists’ perspective, relates to a “speaker’s assessment of, or attitude towards, the potentiality of a state of affairs” (Radden and Dirven, 2007, p. 233, Cognitive English grammar. USA: John Benjamins Publishing Company). A type of modality that is very much visible in contracts is the deontic modality. A considerable body of literature, various empirical studies and actual Philippine court cases put forward how deontic uses in legal documents such as contracts can bring about issues and confusion leading to comprehension problems. Contract drafting entails a specialized work that a legal drafter must be able to write assessable and comprehensible contracts. This study addressed how contractual modalities are interpreted in the Philippine context and investigated how the most commonly misused modal shall is employed in different Philippine contracts. In examining deontic meanings, this work attempted to address the following questions: 1) What modals...
Advances in Language and Literary Studies
This study examined a cross-cultural perspective on how the top popular press in the Philippines ... more This study examined a cross-cultural perspective on how the top popular press in the Philippines and China portray an evaluative stance as regards the current South China Sea tensions. It set out to reveal the news writers’ positions through examining Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework particularly the attitude category. The analysis of the media reports from the two countries culled from a three-year period (January 2013-December 2016) focused on how the news writers construed their attitudinal judgment and positions. Findings reveal that the high occurrences of appreciation resources in both corpora provide subtle or indirect expressions of behavioral judgment in the course of journalistic writing where conventions relating to objectivity are necessary. Even if dominated by appreciation evaluative language that construes value of phenomenon relating to aspects of the disputes, affect (manifesting emotions) and judgment (relating to behavior) evaluative resources are emp...
Abstract. From the perspective of a Hallidayan grammar, the meaning of a text is realized from th... more Abstract. From the perspective of a Hallidayan grammar, the meaning of a text is realized from the interlacing of words or lexicon that progresses to the structuring of phrases and clauses that make up a particular text. This study has attempted to analyze the lexical features of a Philippine consumer-finance contract, particularly a bank‟s credit card terms and conditions document, in the hope of determining the material‟s comprehensibility to its target users. Specifically, it focused on identifying certain linguistic features in the document that could explain the thorny and problematic state of the consumers in comprehending the document. Both the vocabulary used as responses given by the participants during the cloze testing and the actual vocabulary of the document were examined vis-à-vis Cutts‟s (2011) reference material as framework. Findings show that a significant number of words in the document warrant further scrutiny and must be replaced as they considerably keep the co...
Journal of Teaching English For Specific and Academic Purposes, Dec 9, 2014
From the perspective of a Hallidayan grammar, the meaning of a text is realized from the interlac... more From the perspective of a Hallidayan grammar, the meaning of a text is realized from the interlacing of words or lexicon that progresses to the structuring of phrases and clauses that make up a particular text. This study has attempted to analyze the lexical features of a Philippine consumer-finance contract, particularly a bank"s credit card terms and conditions document, in the hope of determining the material"s comprehensibility to its target users. Specifically, it focused on identifying certain linguistic features in the document that could explain the thorny and problematic state of the consumers in comprehending the document. Both the vocabulary used as responses given by the participants during the cloze testing and the actual vocabulary of the document were examined vis-à-vis Cutts"s (2011) reference material as framework. Findings show that a significant number of words in the document warrant further scrutiny and must be replaced as they considerably keep the consumers from getting a clear grasp of the material.
Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS), 2018
Evaluation of a curriculum and all other aspects related to it, including the use of materials fo... more Evaluation of a curriculum and all other aspects related to it, including the use of materials for both teachers and learners, is meant to refine educational programs and later use the results as inputs toward improved teaching and learning. This paper reports on a textual evaluation of the existing curriculum guide in 10th grade English under the newly implemented K to 12 Basic Education Program in the Philippines. A total of 30 Grade 10 English teachers from selected public secondary schools in Tarlac Province, the Philippines evaluated the content of the curriculum material using the criteria set by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) intended for English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum guides. The evaluation revealed that the material generally suffices the criteria needed for a language curriculum guide. However, it was found that the reading content of the curriculum guide hardly meets the criteria for the ELA reading component and that the design of the material...
International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse, 2020
Language is the primary vehicle in which public policies are expressed for "all concepts in law a... more Language is the primary vehicle in which public policies are expressed for "all concepts in law are linguistically constituted and expressed" (Silbey, 1989, p. 1) to the people. Public policies are acquired and consumed by the public through the media that today has taken on a new platform which is the internet. However, laws have a reputation of being incomprehensible due to the complexities of the legal language and become a problematic situation for the people who are directly affected by such difficulty. Hence, this research aimed at looking into how public policies are integrated and explained in online news articles. Furthermore, the study attempted to determine the text comprehensibility of these articles among the lay people in explaining the details of the laws embedded within these texts. Forty online news articles containing the Free Tuition Law and TRAIN Law were collected from two main news organizations in the Philippines. Pan and Kosicki's (1993) Framing Analysis was used to determine how laws were incorporated in the news articles through syntactic structures. Focus group discussion was conducted to determine how lay readers comprehend the legal information in the news articles. In this study, it was revealed that public policies are used in the online news articles as an extension of the 5Ws and H of the story. This study also revealed that although public policy related news articles have similar dominant presentation styles, it can be noted that they also have differences.
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2018
This study examined a cross-cultural perspective on how the top popular press in the Philippines ... more This study examined a cross-cultural perspective on how the top popular press in the Philippines and China portray an evaluative stance as regards the current South China Sea tensions. It set out to reveal the news writers’ positions through examining Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework particularly the attitude category. The analysis of the media reports from the two countries culled from a three-year period (January 2013-December 2016) focused on how the news writers construed their attitudinal judgment and positions. Findings reveal that the high occurrences of appreciation resources in both corpora provide subtle or indirect expressions of behavioral judgment in the course of journalistic writing where conventions relating to objectivity are necessary. Even if dominated by appreciation evaluative language that construes value of phenomenon relating to aspects of the disputes, affect (manifesting emotions) and judgment (relating to behavior) evaluative resources are employed to reflect or represent the socio-cultural and political contexts, government policy and even capture the local sentiment in which the news reports are written. As regards the difference between the two, the Chinese news reports lean towards a more diplomatic stance through the noteworthy use of evaluative affect and appreciation resources that underscore enhancement of relationship, partnership and accord while the Philippine news reports are more inclined to express implied negative subjective attitudinal stance on the issue. This paper set out the significance of language in framing positions, sentiments, opinions and policies in which meanings are construed in news reports. Examining media discourse from the lens of the appraisal system or evaluative language underscores how subjectivity occurs where beliefs, notions and values in a society are generated
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Papers by Rachelle Ballesteros- Lintao