Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies

English language revision through the application of learning stations and educational escape rooms: The impact on 8th graders’ motivation and engagement

Marta Dick-Bursztyn — 2025-05-11

Activating teaching techniques have been increasingly applied in the EFL classroom since they foster motivation, promote independent learning, and add variety to a standard English class. Undoubtedly, learning stations and education escape rooms are representative examples of such techniques. Regarding their beneficial influence on the learning process, their application is an effective way to prepare students for tests and exams. This study attempts to evaluate how English language revision through the application of learning stations constituting one educational escape room influences students’ motivation and engagement. Therefore, to gain insight into the students’ outlook on the motivational impact of this revision, a class was held for 8^th grade students that implemented such techniques. The students were carefully observed during the experiment. Subsequently, a questionnaire consisting of 22 questions was carried out among them. The results of the study are overwhelmingly positive in the sense of achieving a great number of positive answers concerning the motivational impact of the class conducted.

ESP Teachers’ use of motivational strategies: A classroom-oriented view of Estonian university teaching

Bochra Kouraïchi — 2025-05-11

Research on L2 motivation and English for specific purposes (ESP) is quite scarce. This study explores Estonian ESP teachers’ use of motivational strategies (MotS) and whether their students see them motivating. It also seeks to identify the MotS that teachers use most as well as highlight any differences between teachers’ self-reported use of MotS and their motivational practice. Teachers and students at an Estonian university were asked to answer a questionnaire that follows Keller’s (2010) ARCS model. Class observations were conducted for in-person and online classes using Guilloteaux and Dörnyei’s (2008) scheme. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the data. The findings show that teachers use confidence-building strategies the most.

Bilingual attitudes of philology students in a multilingual environment

Krisztián Váradi — 2025-05-11

The aim of the present study is to investigate the attitudes of philology students towards bilingualism in a multilingual environment. The research was conducted among students majoring in Hungarian, English, Ukrainian, and German language and literature at the Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian College of Higher Education in Transcarpathia, Ukraine. Data were collected with the help of an online attitude survey (N=185) and three focus group interviews (N=12). Based on the results, philology students have generally positive attitudes towards bilingual language use, code-switching and lexical borrowing. They consider language learning as extremely important nowadays, especially English if someone wants to live or work abroad, while Hungarian–Ukrainian bilingualism is most useful in Transcarpathia. The main problem is that the Ukrainian state language is taught as a first language to ethnic minorities instead of being taught as a foreign language like English. As a result, many Hungarian children cannot speak Ukrainian. Furthermore, most students are not aware of the importance of additive language teaching, which considers the native dialect of learners to be as precious as the standard language variant. Therefore, it would be advisable to introduce the additive approach into the curriculum of all prospective teachers in multilingual environments.

Imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay in the sitcom Modern Family: A relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatic approach

Magdalena Wieczorek — 2025-05-11

The paper analyses imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay, with a view to delineating the way two concepts or only one concept is valid for the discourse. Second, it investigates the source of the contextual information required for the identification of the target expression. The analysis is performed in the light of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory. It will be demonstrated that the target concept is accessed via activating a search for relevance triggered by the phonetic similarity between two concepts as well as the linguistic context. The findings of a study will demonstrate that puns stemming from imperfect homophony can be divided into those in which two concepts are facilitated and juxtaposed in linguistic context and thus their encyclopaedic entries are fully valid for the overall humorous interpretation and those in which only one novel concept is valid for the ongoing conversation. In addition, the puns under analysis can be categorised according to the criterion of the source of contextual information required for the identification of the target expression. In the paper, the key role of context will be discussed and specified, with the emphasis on the viewer’s perspective. The theoretical proposals are illustrated with imperfect homophony-based puns derived from the sitcom Modern Family.

The bright side of fashion: Environmental and social sustainability in the south of Italy

Jean M. Jimenez — 2025-05-11

Growing societal and academic concern regarding environmental damage has led the fashion industry to engage more with sustainability (Li et al., 2024). This paper examines Il Nido di Seta, a small fashion and agricultural cooperative in southern Italy, which has initiated a regenerative silk production program and has recently developed a collaborative project with Gucci. The study investigates Il Nido di Seta’s ecological language, addressing themes related to global fashion, ecotourism, and regional enhancement. Based on a corpus of texts from the cooperative’s website as well as texts from Gucci’s Equilibrium Impact Report 2022 and sections of the Kering Report which refer to their collaboration with Il Nido di Seta, this research analyses ecological discourse and assesses how these topics appear on Il Nido di Seta’s Instagram posts (N=363) from 2019 to 2024. Through corpus linguistics, content analysis, and framing analysis, the study explores term frequency, content alignment, and how ecological messages are conveyed multimodally on social media.

The role of metonymy and polysemy in academic and popular science literature

Alla Gabidullina — 2025-05-11

Metonymy and polysemy in academic and popular science texts are useful linguistic phenomena that aid in interpreting complex specialised terms by capturing various meanings in scientific terminology. The relevance of the study is determined by the necessity to clarify the functions and contextual motivation behind the use of metonymy and polysemy in conveying scientific information. The research aims to analyse theories related to metonymy and polysemy, different types of these stylistic figures, and determine which ones are most productive for scientific style. The results of the study revealed that metonymic expressions can be used to condense narratives and convey precise terms and definitions. On the other hand, polysemy assists in selecting the most appropriate among multiple meanings of the same term. The findings of this paper can be beneficial to linguists, teachers, and researchers from various scientific fields who seek to enhance the accuracy and comprehensibility of their scientific work.