This paper examined the use of hedging in information subsidies about the Anglophone Crisis. More specifically, it sought to determine which hedging devices were used in government information subsidies about the crisis, establish the discourse and communication functions of these hedges, and determine the crisis response postures reflected through hedging. The paper adopted a documentation and records method to obtain 83 information subsidies (speeches, communiques, reports, policy statements, media statements or ‘outings’, press releases, press conference presentations, press kits, etc.) from twelve government institutions. These twelve institutions were purposively chosen because of their centrality to the government’s crisis communications about the Anglophone Crisis between October 2016 and December 20. Nvivo was used for content analysis of information subsidies. Quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis, presentation and discussion were used. The study identified six categories of hedging devices which served varied discourse and communication functions. For example, approximators and rounders were used to distance the government from particularly controversial claims about key crisis issues; while contrastive conjunctions served to highlight support for government crisis management strategies, protect government credibility, and diminish the amount of crisis responsibility attributed to the government. Conditionals were used to express beliefs, claims and stances about Anglophone Crisis events in a way that restricts potentially controversial interpretations. Plausibility and attribution shields reduce the force of government crisis managers’ claims by signalling uncertainty towards crisis messaging content and attributing particular crisis-related beliefs or commitments to other stakeholders. These findings show the role of hedging in crisis communication about the Anglophone Crisis. Given the divergence in crisis response postures reflected, this study recommends greater synchrony in the use of hedging devices.

With the development of modern technology and high education, the mobile phone is not only an essential piece of equipment to use in life but also becomes an ideal tool for students to improve their knowledge, so it cannot be denied that students can use mobile phones to improve their English effectively. Therefore, mobile-assisted language learning is considered a new multidisciplinary field of educational technology. We hope that the results of this study could serve as the basis for other researchers to do research on the effects of mobile phones when improving English in an academic environment and provide people who have an interest in this topic with the relationship between students and the necessity of using mobile phones to support learning in classes, especially in English. This study could be helpful for teachers to pay more attention to developing a new way to bring knowledge to their students instead of focusing mainly on the old method like books, boards or fundamental theories.

This study investigates the linguistic features of 50 American English food advertising slogans. An analysis of the words in these slogans will highlight the distinctive features of the term use and its impact on the customers. The result of the study will contribute more data on the language of advertising slogans and clarifies the linguistic characteristics of American English to help advertisers have more information to create exciting advertising slogans and achieve optimal performance.

English has become an international language, with a large number of governments promoting its study for national prosperity and economic development. However, there have been only a few empirical studies concerning the impact of English proficiency on the economic development of countries. These studies utilize economic development indicators such as GDP, GDP per capita, as well as GDI. They also adopt various English proficiency indicators: average TOEFL scores, average EF Standard English Test scores, and a comparison of the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. They focus on the influence of English proficiency on economic development and foreign trade, but not on prosperity, which consists of some elements other than these. Furthermore, results in this field significantly change depending on the types of indicators. Therefore, further research is necessary with various indicators to draw a more complete picture. This study adopts the Legatum Prosperity Index as a prosperity measurement and compares the Expanding Circle and the Outer Circle with a t-test. The result shows that the former is superior to the later. The study further investigates the situation in Asia and Africa, since these regions have a significant number of Outer-Circle countries. The research outcome indicates that there is no significant statistical difference between the two circles. These results suggest that having a large number of people who have high English proficiency does not always lead nations to prosperity.

Dyslexia is a disorder that impacts a child negatively and, as such, should not be overlooked when it manifests in a child. As a reading and writing disorder, it always gives concern to parents whenever a child who has attained speaking and writing ages is not able to read or write as he/she ought to. Therefore, the main focus of this work is to evaluate the language disordered children with dyslexia with the view to ascertain the teachers’ levels of awareness of this disorder in Port Harcourt city. This work adopted the descriptive survey protocol, and data was got from ’THE CHILD” Special School, Kaduna street, D-line Port Harcourt. It is worthy of note from the data obtained in this investigation, that the teachers were obviously ignorant of what dyslexia means, and so it can be concluded that their levels of awareness of this disorder is very low. The low awareness of this condition makes it so difficult for both the teacher and the affected child to cope well with each other. This is more prominent when the child is enrolled in a mainstream school, because teachers in such schools lack competence in the various special ways to handle the children with the disorder.

This study aims to investigate the lexical features of American English and Vietnamese food advertisements. In particular, the study focuses on analyzing and describing the lexical features of American English and Vietnamese food advertisements. Moreover, the article gives an analysis of the language of advertising from the linguistic point of view and lexical features of food advertising in 100 slogans in American English and Vietnamese. The advertising slogans chosen for the analysis on a random basis were divided into many different groups with a focus on word classification and lexical elements. The result of the study will contribute to enhancing the understanding of the advertising language aspect, helping advertisers in Vietnam create a highly effective advertisement that has positive effects on advertising viewers.

The study aims to investigate the pragmatic information in Chinese-English dictionaries. A general survey was made to examine the status quo of the pragmatic information in the existing Chinese-English dictionaries. It was found that all large- and medium-sized dictionaries under investigation provided some pragmatic information. However, these dictionaries only provided the pragmatic information about the Chinese headword but not the English equivalent. The author argues that since the target users of these dictionaries are Chinese EFL learners, they should state clearly the pragmatic differences between the headword in the source language and the equivalent in the target language. Moreover, the cultural notes provided should be focused on the English equivalents instead.