This article outlines the author’s attempt to rethink and articulate his implicit leadership theories inclusive of the personality traits and behaviors characterizing effective leaders in today’s globalized world. It points to some enduring issues that arise once research on personality psychology is incorporated to revise such theories and reflect on the nature and origins of the traits often assigned to effective leaders. It postulates that servant leaders who aim to build a better world deserve to be entitled to twenty-first-century leaders.

Reflections on Leaders’ Personality

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Implicit in some discussions around “The 21st Century Leader” are assumptions of romanticized effectiveness rooted in individual and collective consciousness. Unlike the word “manager”, the mere perception of the word “leader”, with its connotational, emotional, and imaginative associations, often drives us to picture individuals that are both intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying. Accordingly, after trait spectrums and dispositions are identified, our imaginary leaders are assumed the best of traits and the best of dispositions, resulting in a romanticized, seemingly identical Great Individual who practices an art of leadership that has vastly outstripped reality.

Issue 1: Stable Traits or Fluctuating Personality?

Picturing leaders, including those of the 21st century, as individuals with particular fixed personality traits raises several issues as the nature and origins of such traits are closely examined. First, the belief that all individuals have enduring, stable qualities consistent in all situations is no longer considered a common-sensical premise among personality psychologists. Instead, personality traits are considered “relatively consistent tendencies to think, feel, or behave in a characteristic way across a range of situations” (Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010, p. 302). Notice the emphasis on relatively in the definition. We tend to think of a person who is conscientious or extravert as consistently conscientious or extravert across all situations. Yet, both empirical research and our personal experiences have proven otherwise.

Many researchers have reported that the likelihood that a person will behave in similar ways is largely influenced by the similarity of the situations (Hartshorne & Mary, 1928; Magnusson, 2003; Mischel, 2004; Mischel & Schoda, 1995). Hartshorne & Mary (1928), for instance, investigated whether the trait of honesty applies across situations among grade school children and concluded that being honest in some situations did not necessarily mean being honest in others. Our classification of individuals as either honest or dishonest, conscientious or not conscientious, extravert or introvert does not imply that those who fall in one category always behave accordingly with no exception.

It is not implied, however, that a person’s behavior is completely governed by the situation (the theory of situationism in personality psychology) since similar situations are experienced differently by individuals with different personalities (Shoda & Lee Tiernan, 2002). Also, our situations are, to some extent, chosen and created by our personalities (Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010). An individual with high levels of neuroticism, for instance, is more likely to create tense situations than another with lower levels (A. H. Buss, 1995). The foregoing examples are intended to shift attention to the theory of interactionism, the posit that an interaction between both internal traits and external situations yields additional insight into the personalities of individuals beyond the information provided by either the traits or the situation alone.

The reference to interactionism is key in the reexamination of all personality traits we tend to associate with our imaginary 21st-century leaders. Our depiction of leaders as individuals who score higher levels of conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, and open-mindedness and lower levels of neuroticism on the Big Five Personality Test sometimes lacks the acknowledgment of potential inconsistencies, shortcomings, and imperfections present in most individuals.

Issue 2: What Traits?

Closely related to the foregoing issue, picturing the 21st-century leader as a person imbued with an amalgamation of specific personality traits foregrounds a second concern related to the very nature of these traits. Historically, early attempts to describe individuals, in their complexity, in terms of constructs that constitute units of personality are credited to Gordon W. Allport, a founding figure of personality psychology, who deviated from the psychoanalytical, behavioral, and humanistic approaches to personality and aimed at locating every term that describes individuals in English dictionaries. Having identified more than 4500 English words, Allport and Odbert (1936) proposed that all the descriptive words (which refer to traits) are to be organized in a three-level hierarchy of Cardinal Traits, Central Traits, and Secondary Traits to account for the uniqueness of every person’s personality.

The list was narrowed down to 171 traits by Carttel (1946, 1957) through factor analysis and then further into 16 broader dimensions outlined in his 16 Personality Factors (PF). The dimensions are named: abstractedness, apprehension, dominance, emotional stability, liveliness, openness to change, perfectionism, privateness, reasoning, rule-consciousness, self-reliance, sensitivity, social boldness, tension, vigilance, and warmth; each represents a continuum of opposite traits, in the highest and lowest extremes, adopted to assess individuals and represent their scores. Later on, the search for a more manageable set of personality traits urged the adoption of five separable dimensions -open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion/ introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism- that seem to cover a large number of seemingly disparate descriptions of human personality.

Every person is in certain respects like all other persons, like some other persons, and like no other person (Kluckhohn & Murray, 1948). Though boiling down personality traits into the “Big Five” facilitates inquiry, it can sometimes result in a reductionist view of individuals. Before picturing the traits characterizing effective leaders, it is necessary to bear in mind that the broader the scale, the blurrier the picture. Two leaders can be equally effective. In the aforementioned scales, their scores would be closely related or possibly identical; yet, the discrepancy between their behavioral, emotional, and cognitive tendencies unfolds only upon zooming into the details that construct their personalities.

Thus far, with careful consideration of the interrelated first and second issues relevant to our discussion, it is not unplausible to conclude that while effective leaders might share a few core personality traits displayed in a relatively consistent way over time and across situations, they can still exhibit unique tendencies and dispositions that distinguishes one from the other. This possibly justifies why little agreement was garnered to identify universal traits of leaders (Bird, 1940; House & Aditya, 1997).

Issue 3: Nature or Nurture?

A third, tacit issue that arises in our reflections about leaders’ personality traits is the origin of such traits, whether it is nature or nurture. Though the Great Man Theory, which reflects the prevailing belief in the 19th century that “great leaders” are individuals endowed with divine inspiration and extraordinary abilities associated with genetic predispositions not possessed by others, no longer counts as a valid theory, investigating why and how individuals develop the kind of personality traits they have is not as intuitive as it might appear. As we attempt to draw a profile for the 21st-century leader, provided that the core personality traits demanded by ineffective leadership are identified, what is it that drives certain individuals to develop such personality traits, while others do not? Is it a matter of biology and/or upbringing? Or just an accident and mere luck?

Starting with biology, though it is tempting to think that genes, cognition, and neurophysiology do not influence personality traits, research in neuro-psychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral genetics presents empirical evidence that proves otherwise. Some aspects of personality are biologically based, and psychologists use the term temperament to refer to an inclination to think, feel, or behave in particular ways (Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010, p. 314); an inclination that arises from the environmentally moderated effects of genes and biology and can give rise to different personality traits. One example is Buss and Plomin’s (1984) four dimensions of temperament, sociability, emotionality, activity, and impulsivity, the first two of which nearly correspond to the Big Five personality traits. Temperaments manifest in children’s behavior from early ages, and several studies found that a child’s early temperament at age 3 is correlated with her or his personality at age 17 (Capsi, 2000; Chess & Thomas, 1996).

Several biologically based theories of personality exist in the literature. These include Gray’s (1987, 1991) Behavioral Activation and Inhibition Systems (BAS and BIS), Eysenck & Eysenck’s (1967) theory of personality, Cloninger et al.’s (1993) four dimensions of personality, Zuckerman's (1989) and Zuckerman et al.’s (1999) theory, and others. Aside from temperament, research on the genetics of personality has described some of the genes’ influence over different personality dimensions indicating the heritability of personality and, thus, the possible heritability of specific behaviors (Angleitner et al., 1995; Bouchard, 2004; Heath & Martin, 1990; Loehlin, 1992; Pederson et al., 1988; as cited in Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2010, p., 314).  

Nonetheless, these findings do not indicate that our personalities are entirely predetermined by biological factors alone. From a socio-cognitive perspective, our personalities are reciprocally determined by an interplay between our cognition on the one hand, and our experiences, patterns of mental processing, self-concept, self-efficacy, perceived locus of control, and sociocultural environments, on the other. Even earlier than that, the Freudian psycho-analytical approach to personality highlighted the influence of the superego which holds all the internalized values and morals an individual acquires from his or her surrounding society and implied the importance of one’s surroundings in the successful completion of the proposed five psychosexual stages.

The influence of one’s upbringing over his or her personality is also emphasized by Neo-Freudian psychodynamic theories, which expanded but broke away from the psychoanalytic school of Freud, with Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney. These influences are pointed to by Alder’s (1925) emphasis on the feelings of inferiority and birth order effects (also by Sulloway, 1996), Jung’s (1991) emphasis on collective consciousness, and Horney’s (1993) emphasis on the importance of parent-child interactions. Likewise, the influence of one’s upbringing is also pointed to by several Humanistic psychologists. Carle Rogers, for instance, argued that labeling children as “bad” may affect their developing self-concept or self-worth (Kamins & Dweck, 1999).

Integrating the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, Neo-Freudian psychodynamic approaches, humanistic approaches, and socio-cognitive approaches with current research on cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and behavioral genetics increases our capacity to engage with the multidimensional, complex nature of each individual, and thus each leader’s personality. Yet, it is not often the case that while a large number of individuals might exhibit traits and behaviors that indicate potential leaders, only a few succeed because of external, favorable situations.

Issue 4: Traits or Situation?

In organizational contexts, a drastically different view of the driving forces behind leadership emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s following a series of studies (e.g., Bird, 1940; Stogdill, 1948; Mann, 1959) when the idea that leaders who are effective in one situation may not necessarily be as effective in other situations was forwarded. Situational contingency theories of leadership illustrate that while certain leadership styles (e.g., transformational, democratic participative, etc.) are appealing, they are not always effective. An effective leader hence knows and can practice the appropriate leadership style that best fits each situation (e.g., the competencies of her or his followers, the nature of their relationship, the degree of power she or he has, how structured each task is, etc.)

Though the concept of leadership remains, to some extent, elusive and enigmatic, even with the presence of hypothetical core personality traits and optimum leadership styles necessary for effective leadership, an individual cannot become a leader without another component central to the phenomenon of leadership. A Vision.

Reflections on 21st Century Leadership

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Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal (Northouse, 2010, p. 3). Still, exploring our implicit leadership theories can sometimes sway us away from the two-way, interactive nature of leadership, the nature of the leader-follower relationship, and the nature of vision to focus more on articulating the nature of the hard and soft skills of the leader.

The increasing globalized consciousness in all sectors and societies of today’s world has paved the way for several opportunities and challenges that call for a restructuring of our conceptual framework of what leadership is to be practiced. With a clear articulation of core principles guiding the twenty-first leadership vision, the identification of twenty-first-century leaders can be easily achieved. The author’s view aligns with Allen et al., (2006) that the purpose of leadership in the twenty-first century is (a) to create a supportive environment where people can thrive, grow, and live in peace with one another; (b) to promote harmony with nature and thereby provide sustainability for future generations; and (c) to create communities of reciprocal care and shared responsibility where every person matters and each person’s welfare and dignity is respected and supported (p. 1).  

This view of twenty-first-century leadership falls under the broader paradigm of servant-leadership, described and argued for by several scholars (e.g., Greenleaf; Covey; Jones, Moxley, Beazley and Beggs, Williams, DePree, Bennis, Zohar, Ruschman, Cooper and Trammell, Showkeir, Bogle, Carver, Smith and Farnsworth, Burkhardt and Spears, Young, Jaworski, Braye, Hock, Webster, Schuster, Wheatley, Spears, described in Spears & Lawrence (2002). The best test for such leadership is to ask if those served to grow as persons, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely to become servants (Greenleaf, 1970).

Conclusion

To reiterate, twenty-first-century leadership is not narrowly restricted to a single context (i.e., political, entrepreneurial, spiritual, etc.) nor is it practiced by a single leadership style. It does not require ideal personality traits or enormous visions. Rather, it encompasses every leadership practiced to make the world, or part of it, a better place. A political, spiritual, or religious leader can be a twenty-first-century leader by mobilizing public support for causes that promote human values of tolerance and mutual respect. An educational leader can be a twenty-first-century leader with a goal and plan of improving the quality of education and creating learning environments inclusive of all students. An entrepreneurial leader can be a twenty-first-century leader by combining her or his influence over followers with enough consideration for their well-being as they co-achieve a vision that builds a better world.

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Religion is an essential element of human existence. Advancing our understanding of the religious beliefs and practices as well as the meanings assigned to these beliefs and practices characterizing every culture does not result in only advancing our understanding of human Culture and cultures -the objective of cultural anthropology- but also in coming close to a holistic and near-complete understanding of the human condition, the overall aim of anthropology.

Since the inception of anthropology of religion as a separate subdiscipline, hundreds of ethnographies have attempted to provide descriptions, representations, interpretations, explanations, analyses, and comparisons of different religions. Some of these ethnographies investigate religion as an end in itself, and some examine it in relation to culture and social institutions; some completely neglect theological questions central to religion (i.e., the truth or falsity of religious claims), treating religion as influential personal and social forces, and others advocate the necessity to adopt a historical, psychological, structural, functional, or critical approach when dealing with religion, assuming that all religions are created by human beings to fulfill certain needs and achieve certain functions.

Despite the common objective of anthropologists of religion, the diversity of thoughts, theories, approaches, and methods reflects the different answers to what studying religion “anthropologically” means, and how ethnographic fieldwork that focuses on the religious aspect of human beings (the beliefs, practices, symbols, meanings, etc.) should be done? Anthropologists themselves joke that if you gather ten ethnographers in a room you will probably get eleven opinions about how fieldwork ought to be done.

Ethnography is the primary way of building representations of assigned meanings and obtaining knowledge about experienced realities. Even with consistent fundamentals, different ethnographers frame the same methodology in different ways -resulting in different definitions of what ethnography is- and occupy different postures (standpoints) when truth claims about religion are encountered during the ethnographic fieldwork, resulting in different recommendations of how “religious ethnography” should be carried out.

Drawing from these, the following paragraphs in this review summarize and comment on chapter two, Doing Religious Ethnography, from James S. Bielo’s (2015) Anthropology of Religion: The Basics. After a brief noting of the fundamentals of ethnography, the review highlights i) the three typical framings with which ethnography is defined –ethnography as science, ethnography as art, and ethnography as craft; ii) the four postures ethnographers can occupy in relation with the religion they study; and iii) the inherent challenges of doing religious ethnography.

Even with the divergent definitions, approaches, and methods within ethnography, according to the author, three fundamentals distinguish ethnography as a methodology within cultural anthropology and social sciences. First, it is about being there. It requires the researcher to “go there”, participate, and engage in the settings and with the people being studied. Second, it is extended. While exactly how much time is relative to the ethnographer, time is necessary for a near-accurate and in-depth understanding of the culture or religion being studied. Third, it relies on multiple techniques to collect data. All ethnographers use some technique that is widely practiced (e.g., interviewing) and some technique that is tailored specifically to the unique details of their own fieldwork setting (Bielo, 2015, p. 31).

Questions pertaining to these fundamentals have brought about debate between ethnographers. To what extent should the ethnographer be immersed with the cultures or religions being studied? Should he/she go native, or is remaining detached imperative? Ethnographers are called to cultural immersion, yet going native is widely considered taboo and staying native even more so (Ewing, 1994). How long should the ethnographer stay with the people being studied for his/her data to be considered reliable? And more importantly, which techniques are to be adopted and which are rejected? Ethnographers’ contrasting positions with regards to these questions, together with their differing ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions have guided them to frame ethnography, the same methodology, in different ways. Bielo (2015) categorizes these ways under three typical framings that can either be adopted singly or in combination. These typical framings are science, art, and craft.

While issues of objectivity and cultural relativism can face the three framings, advocates of the first see ethnography as a kind of science and therefore emphasize the importance of conducting ethnographic fieldwork systematically. The ethnographer, in this view, relies on a set of formal fieldwork methods to collect data and is concerned with the validity, reliability, and accuracy of these data. Accordingly, Ethnographic knowledge obtained are regarded not as absolute, but as reliable within recognizable limits.

Following Taylor’s (1985) imagery, “can knowledge of the human world be erected upon the sort of apparently firm foundation that scientific knowledge of the natural world enjoys?”, the second framing of ethnography sees it as form of social art. This view recognizes the human ways in which fieldwork produces knowledge inter-subjectively (Bielo, 2015, p. 31). In this view, anthropological knowledge is interpretative and hermeneutic rather than positive, tentative rather than conclusive, relative to time, place, and author rather than universal (Carrithers, 1990).

After the reflexive and critical turn within the social sciences (i.e., scholars questioning the objectivity of their standpoints, the accuracy of their representation, and the authenticity of their writings), anthropologists also cast a reflexive and critical eye on ethnography as a way of knowing, and critique emerged around the limitations and conventions of anthropological representation, primarily written texts (Bielo, 2015). This critical stance towards ethnography doubted such thing as perfect ethnography but, nevertheless, aimed at getting better at doing it. This view characterizes the third framing, seeing ethnography as a craft.

Unlike pre-scientific apologetic approaches, i.e., not explaining religion but explaining why religion is true (e.g., Xenophanes, Herodotus, etc.), anthropological approaches to religion take their lead from the dazzling diversity between and among religions and aim at examining each religion in its social context and its own terms and attending to how religions are practiced by real people in their real socially structured lives (Eller, 2007). Aiming at an authentic ethnographic product, anthropologists strive to achieve objectivity and cultural relativism during the process of ethnography (entry to the field, building rapport, collecting data, etc.).

Yet, when ethnography focuses on religious lives and worlds, an enduring question emerges. What does the ethnographer allow himself/herself to belief about the religion being studied? And “how do they square belief, non-belief, or ambiguity of belief with their anthropological goals of explanation, interpretation, and understanding?” (Bielo, 2015), or simply put, how does the ethnographer engage the truth claims they encounter during the process of ethnography? Engelke (2002) refers to this as “the problem of belief”, and Bielo (2015) distinguishes four postures that ethnographers of religion can occupy: methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism, methodological luddism, and methodological theism.

The first posture, methodological atheism, coined by the sociologist Peter Berger in his book The Sacred Canopy (1967), deals with the truth claims of religion only in social terms. It refers to the practice of bracketing off -or refusing to consider- for the purpose of sociological study the ultimate reality of such religious objects as God, gods, angels, etc.  assuming that all scientific explanation must be this-worldly, and therefore, never referencing supernatural or transcendental realities (Porpora, 2006). The argument behind this posture, according to Berger (1967), is that it is impossible within the frame of reference of scientific theorizing to make any affirmations, positive or negative, about the ultimate ontological status of religion, and so religious ideas and practices must be traced to a human origin, considering theological explanations irrelevant for doing ethnography.

The Methodological atheist posture has been criticized by some anthropologists as a form of inappropriate bracketing of religion. The anthropologist E. E. Evans Pritchard argues that psychological and sociological theories (two wider approaches in anthropology of religion, the third being universal approaches) that approached religion solely as solely reflecting fundamental sociological realities (referred to as epiphenomenal). He argues that anthropologist has no possibility of knowing the truth the religious claims, and since that is the case, he or she cannot take the question into consideration. Following this, Ninjan Smart (1973), forwarded methodological agnosticism as an explicit alternative and a “more appropriate” form of bracketing religious explanations declaring that these truths are unknowable.

As the case with the first posture, methodological agnosticism was also critiqued for not presenting the ethnographer with positivist or neo-positivist approaches to religion which do not offer helpful perspectives to study believers’ truth claims and experience nearness to religious phenomena. Methodological luddism is presented as an alternative point of departure, and invites fieldworkers to use their human capacity for play, the capacity to deal simultaneously and subjunctively with two or more ways of classifying reality (the ludic), by identifying temporarily, but in a serious way, with believers’ claims of true knowledge (Droogers, 2011). This posture engages religious truth claims not as a question to definitively answer, but as a role to play in which the fieldworker participates in each world as if it were absolutely real and true, and to pretend in a fully committed way but never lose sight of the fact that he or she is pretending (Bielo, 2015).

By contrast, methodological theism neither brackets off religious claims nor does it encourage anthropologists to play and pretend, it is a stridently emic perspective (the insider’s view) that argues that religious claims are true and fully knowable, and should be sought as part of doing ethnography. This posture stresses on the importance of understanding religion in local terms, with local categories, and through local experiential registers (Bielo, 2015). An epitome of this posture is provided by Islamic anthropology and the Islamization of anthropological knowledge through which Islamic anthropologists exposed the colonial and oriental misrepresentations and the ethnocentric ideologies present in wester anthropology and ethnography and aimed at deconstructing it, correcting it, and reconstructing a new anthropology in which Islam is spoke about from Islam, and is represented by Muslims.

In fact, issues of ethnocentric bias and ideological subjectivity within not only ethnography and cultural anthropology, but the social sciences in general are not raised by Islamic anthropology alone, other post-colonial, feminist, and critical race theories all demonstrated how many methodological and theoretical frameworks reproduced dominant, often oppressive, ideologies (Bielo, 2015). Following Clifford Geertz’s question “what does the anthropologist do?” a general common-sensical belief used to be that anthropologists straightforwardly conduct ethnographic fieldworks, living with members of other cultures and engaging in an ethnocentric-free, cultural relativistic participant observation, assuming that such a methodology is fairly reliable in producing objective knowledge about other cultures, and the answer stops at this point. If, however, the question was paraphrased: How does the anthropologist convey this “objective” knowledge to others? Then the answer is, obviously, by writing ethnographic works; hence Geertz’s answer “He (the ethnographer) Writes.

To highlight one example of the implications of such answer, examining colonial texts reveals how the colonizer’s used language; that is, the semiotic signs and linguistic expressions, the traditions and conventions of narration, the rhetorical strategies, and the literary means of representation –the irony, metaphors, tropes, allegories, lexical and grammatical choices— has played a key role in the “othering” and “misrepresentation” of the colonized’ culture. This goes without mentioning the implicit and often explicit imperial agendas of promoting and disseminating of the colonial ideology –through descriptions of other cultures- which justifies and legitimizes colonization under the pretext of “the civilizing mission”.

With this recognition, the set challenges integral to both doing ethnography as a product and producing a successful ethnographic product start to reveal. The author stresses of the value of being critical reflexive towards all the decisions made during ethnographic fieldwork focusing on religion. Whether to confess or not, join the ritual or stand aside, belief or not, stay or go, sit or stand, close eyes or keep them open, write the field or wait, record or remember, pray or pass, sing or hum, week or keep emotions snug to self, and countless other decisions should be carefully chosen by the ethnographer (Bielo, 2015).

The author distinguishes three broad categories that encompass these areas of reflexive inquiry, the dilemmas of participant observation, the formative nature of fieldwork relationships, and the unavoidability of fieldwork ethics (Bielo, 2015). The first questions what it means to do participant observation in religious settings? And itrefers to all pragmatic, methodological and ethical decisions pertaining to participant observation and the degree of cultural immersion required when studying religion. The second encompasses decisions pertaining to establishing, negotiating, losing and celebrating relationships with members of the religion being studied.

The third area of reflexive inquiry encompasses decisions pertaining to the ethnics of doing religious ethnography. These include ethical issues when designing research, being in the field, and more crucially, producing representations of the religions being studied. This crisis of representation is expressed in the separation of the representation (as a construct) from the thing that is represented (as a reference to reality), which can result in a distorted portrayal of religious beliefs, practices, symbols, and meanings.

Clearly, adopting a single anthropological approach or theory, or a consistent ethnographic methodology cannot succeed in capturing all of the depth of religion. While each can help sensitize us to important dimensions of religion, each still exhibits deficiencies and blind-spots that limit our field of vision and capacity to engage with the multidimensional complexities involved. It is through the diversity of these approaches, theories, methodologies and frameworks that we can contribute a portion to our final understanding of religion.

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Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theoryof religion. New York: Anchor books.

Bielo, S. J.(2015). Anthropology of religion: The basics. Routledge

Droogers, A. (1996). Methodological ludism: beyond religionism andreductionism. In Conflicts in Social Science. Anton van Harskamp, ed. pp.44–67. London: Routledge

Engelke, M. (2002). The problem of belief: Evans-Pritc.

Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element inculture. Boston: Beacon Press.

Knibbe, K.E., & Droogers, A. F. (2011). Methodological ludism and the academicstudy of religion. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 23(3-4),283-303. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006811X608395

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The age of technology—the digital age— is an age where what we seek is seeking us, and what is seeking us is seeking so strongly that it winds up evolving into common-sensical patterns with which objects are represented, meanings are mediated, and our very identity is constructed; thereby molding our cognition and subsequently influencing our behavior. Pondering on the most salient factor (or gift) without which humanity could never have reached the level of scientific and technological development it has reached nowadays forwards human beings’ ability to learn. As trivial as seems as first glance, imagining two young twins, one raised in an isolated forest by some primitive culture and the other taught from early ages by the best of educators, scientists, language teachers, spiritual masters, and skilled craftsmen is sufficient to comprehend how despite being equipped with the same innate cognitive abilities, the correct harness of the ability to learn can make all the difference. The first twin would likely conceive the other as smarter, more knowledgeable, and more civilized; and the second would also consider the first as inferior, intellectually less developed, or even biologically less evolved.

The foregoing example is highlighted as an epitome illustrating the importance of education –the right one. Pondering on an age in which individuals only need to have the desire and will of learning whatever they want in order to find hundreds of teachers, thousand of books, and countless materials with a few clicks might lead us to conclude that most of them would be so busy achieving their full potential and grow intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and ethically as human beings. We are living in that age. As more people are gaining access to the internet, information and communication technologies (ICT) and other technologies, the massive amount of information that can be learned is still increasing day after another; and nevertheless, such technologies have also “undermined our humanity in some respects (Ananou & Yamamoto, 2015). In ‘Humanity in the Digital Age: Cognitive, Social, Emotional, and Ethical Implications’, Ananou and Yamamoto (2015) discuss some of these ‘respects’ in which humanity is undermined due to technology use, framing human nature in terms of four dimensions: the first three, the cognitive, social and emotional are addressed by Deragon (2011), and the remaining fourth, the ethical, forwarded by the authors. Their argument is that while basic human nature remains constant, these four dimensions are molded are molded by interaction with the environment through the use of technology (Ananou & Yamamoto, 2015).

While Ananou and Yamamoto (2015) point to some negative cognitive effects of heavy reliance on technology, namely the lack of direct verbal interactions, the insufficient practice and therefore failure in non-verbal communication necessary for face-to-face interactions, and multitasking, a large body of literature within Media Studies, Cultural Studies, critical linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, psychology, political communication, cognitive linguistic, and even spiritual scriptures also investigate the extent to which our cognition is often ideologically influenced by ICT, new media (e.g., social media, the internet, etc.), and other technologies.

Scholars and researcher bring together different perspectives and theoretical frameworks from the aforementioned disciplines to help sensitize us to important dimensions of technology, and each accounting for the deficiencies and blind-spots exhibited by others which limit our field of vision and capacity to engage with the multidimensional complexities involved.  Briefly, the quest is to reveal how exposure to technology or new media results in and the production of meaning through representation and the subsequent production of knowledge through semiotic resources. Such meanings and such knowledge is usually mediated by ideologically framing objects is such a way that leads individuals to follow a particular line of interpretation, assign already cultured meanings to themselves and their surroundings, accept certain ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions, internalize them as the obvious common-sensical ways of interpretation, and accordingly controlling how we act and react.

Aside from cognitive implications, social and emotional implications mentioned in the article include the tendency of an increased number of people to prefer computer-mediated-communication (CMM) using social media platform than face-to-face communication. The result is that people are “becoming disconnected in a face-to-face relationship due to too much time spent online (Ananou & Yamamoto, 2015), which in turn infringes our social functioning. Also, access and easiness of making unkind remarks, uploading embarrassing videos and pictures of others in online platform (Englander, Mills, & McCoy, 2009) drives many to deploy such platforms to do more harm than good. Furthermore, the availability of portraying one’s self as one pleases also paves way to catfishing and a blurred sense of reality. Ethical implications, on the other hand, are the result of the remarkable access to abundant content on the internet regardless of geographic and social limitations which makes it easier for students to engage in academically dishonest activities such as plagiarism (Ananou & Yamamoto, 2015).

The authors assert that when technology is not well orchestrated, it can distract the process of strengthening humanity and diminishing our inquisitive abilities. They argue that correct and wise harness of technology to improve our cognitive abilities, emotional awareness, social skills, and ethical values require a “framework” guided by empathy, self-knowledge, good decision-making, impulse control education, and academic honesty. Evidently, increasing one’s awareness regarding the multidimensional influence of technology use is in itself one step to emancipate from -at least the major- negative effects of technology, and instead exploiting it to grow as human beings.

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Ananou, S. & Yamamoto, J. (2015). Humanity in the digital age: Cognitive,social, emotional, and ethical implications. Contemporary EducationalTechnology, 2015, 6(1), 118. https://doi.org/10.30935/cedtech/6136

Deragon, J. (January, 2011). The influence of technology on humanity.Retrieved on 18 June 2014 from The Relationship Economy website:http://www.relationshipeconomy.com/2011/01/technologys-influence-over-humanity/

Englander, E., Mills, E. & McCoy, M. (2009) Cyberbullying andinformation exposure: Usergenerated content in post-se.

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The increasingly growing inventions, innovations, and overall technological development has rendered technology so integrated in modern society that individuals no longer conceive it as complementary, but rather as indispensable for their daily lives. Since the advent of technology, the quest for the ‘optimal’ language learning and thus teaching method have pushed curriculum developers, educators, teachers, and applied linguists to investigate the impact and effects of computerization, multimedia devices, mobile phones, audio/visual effects applications, social media, the internet and all-encompassing information and communication technologies (ICT) on foreign and second language learning, aiming at drawing correlations or cause-and-effects relations between the autonomous reluctance on ICT or its integration in formal education from the one hand, and developing competence in a target language on the other.

This article takes Gui and Tabatabaei’s article The Impact of Technology on Teaching and Learning Languages as a starting point to further investigate the positive impact as well as the challenges and negative effects of i) the learning and acquisition of specific linguistic systems autonomously with the help of ICT and other technologies, ii) the teaching of specific linguistic systems solely through ICT and other technologies; and iii) the incorporation of ICT and other technologies in parallel with other face-to-face second language teaching/learning approaches and methods.

Comparing modern technology with that of 2011, the article’s date of publication, rises concerns towards the validity and reliability of its results. For this reason, with the article’s results in mind, this paper dives further into the relationship between technology and second/foreign language learning and teaching, incorporating prominent theories within applied linguistics with the large body of literature concerning computer assisted language learning (CALL), mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), robot-assisted language learning (RALL), and, broadly, technology-enhanced language learning (TALL) to speculate on and demonstrate the contribution of technology in existing language teaching and learning methods and approaches, as well as its advancement of new online methods.

Reflections on the impact of technology on autonomous language learning, i.e., learning on one’s own without a formal language teacher or instructor, are usually limited to thinking about individuals watching YouTube 101 videos, playing in mobile applications (e.g., Duolingo, Memrise, etc.), or chatting with other individuals, natives or non-natives, through social media platforms. Nonetheless, answering the question of how can technology be deployed to develop linguistic competence first requires distinguishing between the two independent ways in which such competence is developed and then speculating on the effects of technology on each. Krashen (1982), in his acquisition-learning hypothesis, distinguishes between acquisition, the natural, subconscious process through which the lexico-grammatical and discourse-semantic features of language is internalized, and learning, the conscious and formal way through which these features are explicitly taught and subsequently learned. With this in mind, and assuming the validity of innateness hypothesis, it is possible to argue that using technology to simply provide enough linguistic input should result in the gradual development and eventual mastery of any linguistic system (even the ones common-sensically considered difficult to learn such as Chinese, Arabic, etc.). Adding Krashen (1982)’s comprehensible input hypothesis and Vygotsky’s similar Zone of Proximal Development as a premise to the foregoing argument proposes that the ‘enough linguistic input’ should also be comprehensible (i+1). Hypothetically, if individuals are exposed to continuous and extensive amount of comprehensible input of a specific language via technological tools (e.g., watching shows, reading e-books, navigating online material in a target language, etc.), then these individuals should achieve proficiency in that target language. Though some children do indeed succeed to internalize a remarkable amount of a specific language by watching cartoons speaking that language (Moroccan children acquiring Standard Arabic from TV channels broadcasting in Arabic, for instance, despite the absence of empirical evidence is required), practically, it is common to see adults spending lengthy hours watching specific programs (Turkish Drama, K-Drama, Japanese manga or anime, etc.), but only succeeding to acquire few common expressions at best. So what is the reason behind that?

From a critical period hypothesis perspective, it is possible to argue that since the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a language, even with similar linguistic input, children are more likely to acquire the target language via technology. And apart from innate justifications, other reasons include the lack of intrinsic or instrumental motivation in parallel with the high affective filter (Krashen, 1982) among adults compared to children. In fact, one common reason for why adults do not succeed to acquire language even with massive linguistic input is simply the poverty and insufficiency of that very input. Adults might seem to watch Korean drama or Spanish soap opera, but it is likely that such shows are dubbed or, at best, subtitled.

Also, arguing for acquiring language autonomously via technology assumes the autonomy, motivation, and independence of the learner, as well as the awareness and strong belief in their ability to acquire any given language of individuals. Yet, just as technology grants access to a plethora of materials in most (but not all) languages, it also offers similar, or at times, the exact same materials translated to one’s native language. Based on this, one can say that technology’ provision of linguistic input -which is difficult or impossible to access otherwise- can either facilitate or obstruct the process of second/foreign language acquisition.

Apart from acquisition, the contribution of technology in conscious learning of a target language is clearer. Again, assuming autonomy, even without traditional language teaching classrooms, a number of individuals demonstrate proficiency in target languages through online learning alone. The learner can engage in meaningful authentic language practice with native speakers or communities of other learners textually or audio-visually through social media and other computer-mediated communication (CMC) platforms, play and interact with online games hosting other native speakers or learners, , access and read countless books, novels, news, and writings, study countless language courses provided by a countless language instructors or teachers, use dictionaries and online translation to translate and memorize vocabulary, ‘google’ a specific question and instantly receive the answer, develop learner autonomy and allows informal learning experience, take online assessment tests, and sometimes receive one-to-one feedback.

Complete reliance on technology to learn a given language, nevertheless, can result in a somewhat negative impact over the language learner. The Heavy dependence on can lead to the isolation of the learner, the disuse of non-verbal cues (when most communication takes place through text messages), and the subsequent failure in direct face-to-face communication. Besides, the continuous exposure to informal discourse through online can yield at the lack of distinguishing between the formal and informal and standard and non-standard use of language. Furthermore, when the learner is not used to autonomous language learning, the lack of formal language teacher can cause him or her to jump from one course to another with no clear objectives, potentially repeating similar courses and eventually losing interest.

Moving to the effects of integrating technology in teaching second or foreign languages, one way to investigate such effects is to examine how it has affected existing language teaching approaches and methods, and how it has brought about new online language teaching methods. The prominent approaches and methods discussed in language teaching literature include the Grammar-Translation Method (GT), the Direct Method (DM), the Audiolingual Method, the Reading Approach (RA), the Natural Approach (NA), Communicative Language Teaching (CLT),) , and the Silent Way.

Besides using technology as a medium of communication in time when face-to-face communication is not an option, e.g., teaching languages in times of crisis (Covid19 for instance), teaching students regardless of their geographical locations, opponents of each language teaching method or approach can benefit from technology in a number of ways. Despite heavy criticism of the method, opponents of GT can provide online materials for students as homework materials to translate, automate the process of assessment and how learner’s errors are identified, gain both time and effort. Adopting a flipped-classroom as a pedagogy in this method enables students to independently use ICT to easily find and learn the grammatical rules prior to the class.

Language teachers adopting DM or NA, on the other hand, can deploy social media platforms to account for the major challenge facing the approach, accessing native speakers. Teachers can encourage and instruct students to engage in meaningful discussions and authentic language use with native speakers, teach other materials using audio-visual tools in the target language to facilitate the process of language acquisition, etc.

Tabatabaei and Gui’s (2011) survey mentions some benefits of using technology to teach Chinese language in 2011. Similarly, A number of consecutive studies were carried out to reveal the importance and positive effects of technology use not just on teaching a specific language, but on motivation and language learning in general (e.g., Akobirov, 2017; Barreto, 2018; Chen & Kent, 2020; Genc Ilter, 2015; Gill, 2006; Gocerler, 2018; Fandino, Munoz & Valandia, 2018; Kalanzadeh, Soleimani & Bakhtiarvand, 2014; Sun & Gao, 2020; Tavakoli, Lotfi & Biria, 2019; Wong, Tan & Lin, 2019) summarized in Aysu (2020). And generally, regardless of the adopted method or approach, the advantages of integrating technology in language teaching include enabling learners to collaborate, co-construct knowledge, and build communities (Kessler, 2018; Reinders & White, 2016), enabling computer adaptive testing, allowing learners to construct a new social identity online which may give them confident to interact with native speakers, i.e., to find a medium between their first language learning and the targer language (Blake, 2016; Garrett, 2009); Godwin-Jones, 2015; Kern, 2006; Kessler, 2018), facilitating individualized learning experiences for learner-centered instruction (Kessler, 2018), enabling access to big data as corpora that can be used by teachers to create authentic learning activities (Godwin-Jones, 2017; Kessler, 2018), enabling immersion in authentic contexts via the use of immersive technologies such as VR AR online games, simulations, telepresence, videoconferencing tools, and providing multimodal hands-on activities of reading, writing, speaking, and listening; thereby accommodating the strengths of different learners (Blake, 2016; Flix, 2008) and reducing language learning anxiety (Hong et al., 2016).

Whether we argue for or against the adoption and reliance of technology to either acquire or learn a target language or its integration and incorporation of within and in parallel with existing face-to-face teaching methods, technology remains a neutral but powerful tool that can either facilitate or hinder the process of second or foreign language learning and teaching based on how it is used or implemented. As the authors assert, One should not try to exactly duplicate the classroom activities to teach the language online and second life as a medium, it should be viewed as a classroom providing new set of activities to practice in teaching the language (Tabatabae & Gui, 2011).

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Aysu, S. (2020). The use of technology and its effects on language learning motivation. Journal of Language Research(JLR), 4(1), 86-100.

Krashen, S.T.(1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford:Pergamon.

Tabatabaei, Manouchehr, Ying Gui. 2011. "The Impact of Technology on Teaching and Learning Languages." Education in a Technological World: Communicating Current and Emerging Research and Technological Efforts, Antonio Mendez-Vilas (Ed.): 513-517 Badajoz, Spain: Formatex Research Center. source: http://www.formatex.org/ict/ isbn: 978-84-939843-3-5 https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/info-sys-facpubs/42

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Unlike before, the emergence of mass communication technologies has rendered mass media more pervasive in presence. Increasing concerns towards how contemporary media has also become more concentrated in ownership, more centralized in operations, and more international in reach have culminated in extensive research investigating mass media effects over the audience’ cognition and behavior within not only media studies and mass communication theory, but also linguistics, Cultural Studies, political communication, Critical Discourse Studies, etc.

While each of these theories help sensitize us to important dimensions of media effects both on the micro and the macro level, each still exhibits deficiencies and blind-spots that limit our field of vision and capacity to engage with the multidimensional complexities involved, and hence the need to combine them together in one coherent, though not all-encompassing, exposition. This article introduces the main mass media effects theories, attempting to answer: i) what exactly is meant by media effects? ii) to what extent media affects audiences iii) how do media messages affect us? vi) why mass media affects (or aims at affecting) us? and related questions.

Third-person effects hypothesis

The choice to start with the Third-person Effects Hypothesis arises from its stress on, not the direct effects of mass media, but rather why most, even media literate individuals are still subject to such effects. According to Davison (1983), “individuals who are members of an audience that is exposed to a persuasive communication (whether or not this communication is intended to be persuasive) will expect the communication to have a greater effect on others than on themselves” (p. 3).

Hypodermic needle model

Forwarding the question “to what extent does media affects us?”, researchers examining the effects of Nazi propaganda and Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s considered media audiences as vulnerable, passive receivers in the communication process (Hasani, 2006). This viewpoint was later referred to metaphorically through multiple names, most of which are the Hypodermic-needle or Magic Bullet Model of communication as it suggests that mass communication inject ideas, attitudes, and dispositions directly into the behavior of passive, atomized, extremely vulnerable individuals (Simonson, 2012).

Limited media effects model

Two-step flow theory

In his study of 1940s presidential elections, Lazarsfeld (1944) forwarded the concept of opinion leaders and the two-step flow theory. Opinion leaders point to individuals who pay close attention to media and pass on their interpretation of media messages to others.  This concept later gave rise to The two-step Theory, suggesting that media effects are indirect (as opposed to direct) and established through the personal influence of opinion leaders (Lazarsfeld et al. 1948).

Selective exposure theory

Klapper (1960) argued that TV, indeed, played an important role in the lives of people, but it did not dominate them. He viewed Mass communication as a contributory agent, but not the sole cause, in the process of reinforcing existing conditions, arguing that people resist media’ influence by relying on community norms, beliefs, and values (Klapper, 1957, p.458).

Rediscovered powerful media effects phase

It is important to remember that the Limited Media Effects Model was forwarded in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when mass media’s presence as well as development were notably incomparable to the decades that followed. As mass media became more integrated in society, and with the increased interest towards media’s effects within media studies, Cultural Studies, political communication, mass communication theory, linguistics, semiotics, Critical Discourse Studies, and other disciplines, the extent to which individuals’ cognition and behavior was shaped by media messages was, once again, considered more than ‘limited’.

Media in Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies is primarily concerned with contest and contention within media representations (and misrepresentations). A -justified- premise in the field is that media discourse is heavily infused with the ideologies of its producers; the mission of scholars is, hence, to scrutinized such discourse deploying textual, structural, semiotic, and other methods attempting to deconstruct it to construct the hidden ideologies beneath it.

In this viewpoint, media is seen as (in Althusser’s words) an ideological state apparatus functioning to disseminate certain ideologies through certain discourses with the ultimate goal of “positioning or interpellating subjects within such ideologies (Althusser, 1971), manipulating them (the subjects), and  persuading (not convincing) individuals to unquestionably accept such ideologies as commonsense. Ideologies (perpetuated by media), therefore, get naturalized and eventually evolve into common-sense, propping up the status quo by privileging the already-accepted interpretation of reality (Griffin, 2010). And as a result, media contributes to binding society to sovereign power by will rather than by power (see Gramsci’ hegemony).

Manufacturing Consent Theory

Herman & Chomsky (1988) hold that he major decisions -within society- are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations, conglomerates, investment firms, etc., and that the primary function of mass media is to mobilize public support for such decisions and other special interest that dominate the government and private sector. In this theory, Mass media are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion (Herman & Chomsky, 1988).

Spiral of Silence Theory

Noelle-Neumann (1977) asks, “Why some groups remain silent while others are more vocal in forums of public disclosure?’. She then answers, through her Spiral of Silence Theory that people who believe that they hold a minority viewpoint on a public issue will remain in the background where their communication will be restrained; those who believe that they hold a majority viewpoint will be more encouraged to speak (West & Turner, 2010).

Uses & Gratifications Theory

Rather than focusing on how does Media effect the audience, Katz (1973) came up with a new Media and Communication theory called Uses and Gratification. It mainly focus on the fact that people have needs and gratifications which make them choose to consume a type of Media, and that the effect of media messages differ from one person to another. The theory is in contradiction with the Magic Bullet Theory. It Is based on the socio-psychological communication tradition and focuses on communication at the mass media scale. It assumes that audience members are not passive consumers of media. Rather, the audience has power over their media consumption, and aims to understand why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs.

Media System Dependency Theory

Media dependency theory is  expended from uses and gratifications theory and introduced by Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur in 1976. According to the theory, there is an internal link between media, audience and the large social system. Audience’s learning from the real life is limited, so they can use media to get more information to fulfil their needs.

Agenda Setting Theory

The theory was first developed by Professors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in 1972 when it was published as a scholarly article in Public Opinion Quarterly. McCombs and Shaw conducted a study on the 1968 US Presidential elections which featured Lyndon Johnson against Richard Nixon. They concluded that news media have a strong impact on the public opinion pertaining to important issues. They found a strong correlation between the most important election issues as reported by the media and the citizens’ perception of the most important issues.

Thus, they argued that media set the agenda for the public opinion because media filter and shape reality rather than reflecting it. Shaping reality is achieved through increasing the salience of particular issues using various techniques such as frequent and prominent coverage, placement of news and articles as well as the size of headings.  

Framing: The expansion of Agenda-setting theory

In 1998, McCombs argued that the media do not only tell us what to think about, but they also influence how we think about a story. Framing is a process in which some aspects of reality are selected, and given greater emphasis or importance, so that the problem is defined, its causes are diagnosed, moral judgments are suggested and appropriate solutions and actions are proposed (Entman, 1993).

Frames draw attention to some aspects of reality at the expense of others. Defining frames must take into account what is described and what is left out. Framing strategies include selection, omission, emphasis and elaboration. These strategists aim at normalizing and naturalizing events and practices.

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Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In L.Althusser (Ed.), Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York: MonthlyReview Press.

Ball-Rokeach, S. J., & DeFleur, M. L. (1976). A dependency model ofmass-media effects. Communication Research, 3(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365027600300101

Bryant, J., & Heath, R. (2003). Human communication theory andresearch: Concepts, contexts, and challenges. Routledge.

Cohen, B. C. (1963). The press and foreign policy. Princeton, N.J:Princeton University Press

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Cottle, S. (2006). Mediatized conflict: Developments in media andConflict Studies. Open University Press.

Entman, M. R. (1993). Framing : Toward  clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journalof Communication,43, 51-58.

Gerbner, G. (1998). Cultivation analysis: An Overview. MassCommunication & Society.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decodingin the television discourse. University of Birmingham.

Klapper, J. (1957). What we know about the effects of mass communication:The brink of hope. Public Opinion Quarterly, 21(4), 453–474. https://doi.org/10.1086/266744

Katz, E., Blumler J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1974). Utilization of masscommunication by the individual. In The uses of mass communications: Current perspectiveson gratifications research. Blumler J. G. & Katz E. (eds.). Sage, BeverlyHills.

Klapper, J. T. (1960). The effects of mass communication. FreePress.

Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). Thepeople's choice. Duell, Sloan & Pearce.

Lippmann, W., & Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection (Library ofCongress). (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace andCompany.

McCombs, M. E., & Shaw,D. (1991). The agenda-setting function of mass media. In D. L. Protess & M.E. McCombs (Eds.), Agenda setting: Readings on media, public opinion, andpolicymaking (pp. 17–26). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (Reprinted from"Public Opinion Quarterly," Vol. 36, pp. 176-185, 1972, University ofChicago Press).

Noelle-Neumann, E. (1984). The spiral of silence: Public opinion,our social skin. University of Chicago Press of Communication.

Peter, J., Valkenburg, P. M.,& Walther, J. B (2016). Media effects: Theory and research: Annual Reviewof Psychology, 67. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122414033608

Simonson P. (2012). The Rise and fall of the limited effects model.University of Colorado Boulder.

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Discussed under the term ‘international education’ at first, often through mobility-related or curriculum-associated terminology, the internationalization of higher education (hereinafter IoHE) refers to the integration of an international dimension into higher education institutions (HEIs) in response to globalization. The concept, however, has received a number of definitions and has been regularly updated by scholars over the past three decades (De Wit, 1999; Killick, 2012, 2017; Knight, 1994, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2012; Robson, 2011; Vavrus & Pekol, 2015; etc.) which renders encountering or forging one consensual definition difficult if not problematic.

Knight (2004), a prominent and frequently cited scholar in the field, defines IoHE as the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions [teaching, research, and social service], or delivery of post-secondary education. Soderqvist (2002, p. 29) added that internationalization of higher education is “a change process from a national higher education institution to an international higher education institution leading to the inclusion of an international dimension in all aspects of its holistic management in order to enhance the quality of teaching and learning and to achieve the desired competences”.

Other scholars include the goal of IoHE as an institutional adaptation to forces of globalization in its definitions, asserting that the concept otherwise implies the misconception that IoHE is an end in itself, not a means to an end. Relevant is Van der Wende (1997) who describes IoHE as any systematic sustained efforts aimed at making higher education responsive to the requirements and challenges related to the globalization of societies, economy, and labor markets. Similarly, Tanhueco-Nepomuceno’s (2019) definition is also goal-based, foregrounding the act of openness to the world because of globalization. In his words, IoHE is “an institutional process that in some way internalizes the concept of openness to the world in all the activities and organizational aspects of the university” (pp. 152-171).

As a concept, IoHE appears in the literature post 1990s. Before, there was already a substantial tradition of research and practice on the international dimension of higher education under the term ‘international education’, or under terms that reflect some kind of international activity (de Wit et al., 2015). These terms were either related to mobility, such as study abroad, exchanges, international students or academic mobility, or related to curriculum, such as multicultural education, international studies, peace education, area studies [etc.] (de Wit et al., 2015).

In Knight’s (2002) aforementioned definition, the term “process” denotes the non-static, continuously changing structure that characterizes higher education. The term “integration” indicates the implementation of such approach through the improvement of the curricula and digital learning; through strategic cooperation, collaboration, and partnerships with renowned international institutions; and through the use of new digital technologies, knowledge, people, values, and ideas from different international context [sic] (Knight & de Wit, 1997, as cited in Mudiamu, 2020). The term “international”, aside from denoting geographically dissimilar nations, indicates that IoHE reinforces international relationships between countries. “Intercultural” because it refers to existing cultural differences between these countries; and “global” because within the very nature of this whole phenomenon, there lies a global dimension (Chan & Dimmock, 2008).

It is evident that the concepts used in the definition of IoHE were not chosen at random; rather, they were consciously selected owing to a number of particular significations that they contain (Bunnel, 2006; Knight, 2004, 2008, as cited in Kireçci et al., 2016).

The attention IoHE has excited among not only scholars and educators, but also policymakers in the past decades has emanated from the increasing demand for interculturally competent graduates who are expected to excel in the complex global economy of present-day globalized societies. Responding to the forces of globalization, such as rapid innovations in information and communications technology (ICA), increased labor mobility, free trade, the creation of a knowledge economy and its emphasis on lifelong learning, etc. (Knight, 1997, p.7), universities aiming to provide better opportunities for students and enhance their global perspectives have considered IoHE a critical component of the institutional culture (Knight, 1995) and a priority in the education of graduates. Internationalization, therefore, has become a rapidly growing trend among HEI around the world, and several universities have developed a number of training programs to improve the teaching-learning process in internationalized higher educational environments. Clearly, IoHE has transformed from a marginal set of programs and activities to a more comprehensive process (de Wit et al., 2015).

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IoHE Rational & Impact

The impetuses that drive the realization of IoHE vary from one university to another based upon the expected potential benefits as well as the underlying rationales stirring such expectations. While some accept IoHE for reasons pertaining to idealist or educationalist rationales (Stier, 2004), i.e., for equality and the broadening of academic experience, other institutions, and evidently countries, are more inclined to implement IoHE primarily for instrumental purposes, aiming to take advantage of all the social, political, and economical benefits it provides.

According to Knight (2004, p.23), there are four rationales that drive the internationalization of HEIs: social and cultural, political, economic, and academic. The social and cultural rationale includes enriching national/cultural identity, enhancing intercultural understanding, improving the recognition and support of cultural and ethnic diversity, contributing to individual social and professional development, and developing [global and national] citizenship (Knight, 2004). The political involves the promotion of foreign policy, national security, technical assistance, peace and mutual understanding, and the national and regional identity. The economic rationale intends economic growth and competitiveness, labor market, and financial incentives. Altbach and Knight (2007, p.292) assert that “earning money is a key motive for all internationalization projects in the for-profit sector and for some traditional non-profit universities with financial problems”. Many international universities attract large number of foreign students due to the prestige attached to their universities and their collaborations with corporate bodies to provide employment opportunities for students (Larbi & Fu, 2017). Last, the academic rationale awaits the achievement of an international dimension to research and teaching, the extension of academic horizon, the promotion of global interdependence through scholarship and research, the preparation of graduates to be national and international citizens, and the overall enhancement of graduate and postgraduate education.

Focusing on the educational rationale, Valiulis and Valiulis (2006) state that IoHE is carried out “a) to promote multicultural and intercultural education; b) to contribute to the improvement of the learning experience of exchange students at host institutions; c) to contribute to improving the teaching experiences of teachers who instruct exchange students in mixed groups with home students; d) to raise awareness within universities regarding multiculturalism; f) to describe exchange students’ specific needs in the classroom; and g) to promote continuous staff training for multiculturalism and inter-culturalism” (p.221). Summarized by Rumbley et al. (2012):internationalization is affecting what, how, where and from whom students learn; how higher education institutions and systems conceive of their mission and roles; how research is carried out and disseminated; and how fundamental paradigms of cooperation and competition in higher education are understood and elaborated. (p. 22)The forgoing benefits render IoHE indispensable not only for the enhancement of graduate and postgraduate education as it imbues students and teachers with refined skills to tackle global challenges, but also in the economic and sociocultural development of countries.

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IoHE Approaches

Over the last decade, several authors used a similar typology of ‘approaches’ as a reference to the stances adopted by educators and noneducators in leadership positions towards the implementation of IoHE (Aigner et al, 1992; Arum & Van de Water, 1992; De Wit, 1995; Knight, 1994, 1996, 1997, as cited in Qiang, 2003). The authors (e.g., Altbach & Knight, 2007; Bunnell, 2006; Chan & Dimmock, 2008; Stier, 2004; Scott, 2000; Yalçıntan & Thornley, 2007; etc.) distinguish four approaches: the activity approach; the competency approach; the ethos approach; and the process approach.

The activity approach promotes activities such as student/faculty exchange or technical assistance (Qiang, 2003). The activities involved include both academic and extracurricular activities, among which are curricular development and innovation; student, scholar, and faculty exchange; area studies; technical assistance; intercultural training; international students; and joint research activities (Kireçci et al., 2016).

The competency approach stresses on the development of skills, attitudes [, information], and values among students, faculty, and staff (Qiang, 2015). Qiang (2015) explains that, in this approach, the development of internationalized curricula and programs is not an end in itself but a means towards fostering the appropriate competencies in students, staff and faculty.

The third approach – the ethos approach – puts more emphasis on cultivating an ‘ethos’ or culture that appreciates intercultural and international perspective. This approach acknowledges that the international dimension is fundamental to the definition of a university or any other institutions of higher learning, and it maintains that, without strong belief and supportive culture, the international dimension of an institution will never be realized (Qiang, 2015).

Lastly, the process approach focuses on the integration or infusion of an international/intercultural dimension into teaching, research and service through a combination of a wide range of activities, policies and procedures (Qiang, 2015).

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IoHE Strategies

According to Khorsandi (2014), the internationalization of higher education consists of establishing international branch campuses and joint research partnerships between institutions in different countries, recruitment of foreign students and faculty members, proliferation of exchange [and study abroad] programs, global competition for talents, and the design of an international curriculum. The process of IoHE is not carried out erratically; rather, it requires a systematic approach with clear learning outcomes and the development of “authentic tasks that are structured in such a way that they cannot be successfully completed without a meaningful exchange of cultural information (Least, 2019).

Knight and De Wit (1995) and Knight (2008) identify some of the fundamental indicators relating to institutional strategies of realizing IoHE. The indicators include -but are not limited to- the creation and coordination of effective communication channels; the planning, implementation, and provision of efficient collaborative access to international research projects; the exchange of experiences among universities; the comparison of existing curricula with other international curricula; the creation of scholarly and cultural cooperation on the part of universities’ student organizations and academic committees; the development of human resources geared toward the implementation of the social, economic, and cultural results of the internationalization of universities; etc. (Kireçci et al., 2016).

Internationalization at Home

Internationalization of higher education is entering a new phase. A shift from internationalization abroad with a strong focus on a small elite of mobile students, faculty, administrators and programs towards internationalization at home (IaH) for all students is even more urgent than ever (De Wit & Deca, 2020). This latter – IaH – was initially defined as “any internationally related activity with the exception of outbound student and staff mobility” (Crowther et al., 2001, p.8), and later redefined as “[…] the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students within domestic learning environments” (Beelen & Jones, 2015, p.76, as cited in Beelen & Jones, 2018).

IaH was inspired by the work of Mestenhauser and Ellingboe (1998) who introduced the concept of an “international mindset” in higher education, and its framework was later developed by Paige and Mestenhauser (1999) (Mudiamu, 2020). Occasionally termed internationalization of the curriculum (IoC) or campus internationalization, though the terms are not synonymous, IaH was introduced responding to the limitations of internationalization abroad -all forms of education across borders- as the majority of higher education (HE) students and staff lacked the economic privilege to take advantage of the latter. This articulates the key difference between IaH, on the one hand, and IoC and campus internationalization on the other – that IaH is limited to the domestic learning environment while IoC may include mobility (Leask, 2015). Given the above, a new, more inclusive approach to “internationalizing” was required so that the majority of HE students and staff who were unlikely to study nor work outside of their home country could develop the international outlook and the intercultural capabilities required for employment and participation in democratic societies (Robson et al., 2017).

In spite of the urgent need to find more economically feasible and academically applicable alternatives for more inclusive activities that address the challenges of internationalization abroad, Nilsson (2003) and Wachter (2003) affirm that the initial touted benefits of IaH did not focus on it as an alternative to study abroad, though it was acknowledged as a factor. Instead, IaH positioned cultural diversity as a general resource and a source of enrichment, at a time when intercultural communication was seen as inadequate to address the problems of societies being transformed by migration (Crowther et al., as cited in Mudiamu, 2020).

The initiatives undertaken as part of IaH take place on campus, in the academic community, in the classroom, as well as in the incorporation of international, intercultural, and global dimensions into the content of the curriculum and teaching methods (Leask, 2015), in conjunction with the welcoming of international student at local campuses, the presence of foreign lecturers, etc. This shift of interest from a general IoHE towards a more specific IaH implies a shift in focus from input and output to outcomes, which are not dependent on location (Aerden, 2014; Leask, 2015).

In addition to the abovementioned enacted activities, IaH makes use of ICTs and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tools, integrated alongside with existing teaching and learning methods, such as collaborative and experiential learning to transcend geographical borders and facilitate not only the enrollment in foreign universities while remaining ‘at home’, but also the virtual exchanges between international institutions in an efficient, cost-effective way. Students are enabled to collaborate beyond the constraints of space and resources and interact with individuals from other cultures without leaving home (Lajoie et al., 2006).

The generic term virtual exchange encapsulates all initiatives through which international mobility is attained not through physical travel, but through digital technology, particularly through globally networked learning environments (GNLEs). Its forms include Telecollaboration (Belz, 2002; Warschauer, 1996), Virtual Mobility (De Wit, 2017), Virtual Exchange (Helm, 2015), Virtual Transnational Education (Teekens, 2015), Global Virtual Teams (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999), Globally Networked Learning (Starke-Meyerring & Wilson, 2008), Online Intercultural Exchange (O’Dowd, 2007; O’Dowd & Lewis, 2016), Collaborative online international learning (Rubin, 2016); etc. These forms and their names were generated independently but can reflect a disciplinary orientation (O’Dowd, 2018, as cited in Mudiamu, 2020).

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Aerden, A. (2014) A Guide to assessing the quality of internationalisation.ECA Occasional Paper. The Hague: European Consortium for Accreditation inHigher Education.

Aigner, J. S., Nelson, P. & Stimpfl, J. R. (1992).Internationalizing the University: making it work. Springfield: CBIS Federa.

Altbach, P. G., & Knight, J. (2007). The internationalizationof higher education: Motivations and realities. Journal of Studies inInternational Education.

Arum, S. & Van de Water, J. (1992) The Need for a definition ofinternational education in US Universities, in C. Klasek (Ed.) Bridges to theFuture: strategies for internationalizing higher education, pp. 191-203.Carbondale: Association of International Education Administrators.

Aydın, B. & Veysel D. (2016), Flipping the drawbacks of flippedclassroom: Effective tools and recommendations, Journal Of Educational AndInstructional Studies In The World, Vol. 6, Iss. 1. Pp.33-40.

Beelen, J., & Jones, E. (2015). Redefining internationalizationat home. In A. Curaj, L. Matei, R. Pricopie, J. Salmi, & P. Scott (Eds.),The European higher education area (Vol. 81, pp. 59–72). Cham, Germany:Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20877-0_5

Belz, J. A. (2002). Social dimensions of telecollaborative foreignlanguage study. Language Learning & Technology, 6(1), 60–81.

Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reachevery student in every class every day. Washington, DC: International Societyfor Technology in Education.

Brandenburg, U., & De Wit, H. (2015). The end ofinternationalization. International Higher Education, 62(62). https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2011.62.8533

Bunnell, T. (2006). The growing momentum and legitimacy behind analliance for international education. Journal of Research in InternationalEducation, 5(2), 155-176.

Chan, W. W., & Dimmock, C. (2008). The internationalization ofuniversities Globalist, internationalist and translocalist models. Journal ofResearch in International Education, 7(2), 184-204.

Crowther, P., Joris, M., Otten, M. Nilsson, B., Teekens, H., &Wächter, B. (2001). Internationalisation at home: A position paper. Amsterdam,the Netherlands: EAIE.

Curaj, A. & Matei, L., & Pricopie,R., & Salmi, J., & Peter, S. (2015). The European higher educationarea: Between critical reflections and future policies. Springer.

De Castro, A. B., Dyba, N., Cortez, E. D., & Pe Benito, G. G.(2018). Collaborative online international learning to prepare students formulticultural work environments. Nurse Educator. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000000609

De Wit, H. (1995) Strategies for internationalisation of higher education:a comparative study of Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States ofAmerica. Amsterdam: European Association for International Education.

De Wit, H. (1999). Changing rationales for the internationalizationof higher education. International Higher Education 15. Retrieved fromhttps://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hans_De_Wit/publication/313407781_Changing_Rationales_for_the_Internationalization_of_Higher_Education/links/58b6d42245851591c5d52baa/Changing-Rationales-for-the-Internationalization-ofHigher-Education.pdf

De Wit, H. (2013). An introduction to higher educationinternationalisation. Milan, Italy: Vita e Pensiero

De Wit, H., & Beelen, J. (2014). Reading between the lines:Global internationalization survey. University World News (318). Retrieved fromwww.universityworldnews.com

De Wit, H., Deca, L. (2020). Internationalization of highereducation : Challenges and opportunities for the next decade. In :Cyraj, A., Deca, L., Pricopie, R. (eds). European Higher Education Area :Challenges for a new decade. Springer, Cham.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56316-5

Garrison, D. R. (2011). E-learning in the 21st century: A frameworkfor research and practice (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Green, W., and Whitsed, C. (2013). Reflections on an alternativeapproach to continuing professional learning for internationalization of thecurriculum across disciplines. Journal of Studies in International Education,17(2), 148–164.

Helm, F. (2015). The practices and challenges of telecollaborationin higher education in Europe. Language Learning & Technology, 19(2),197–217.

Hung, H., T. (2014): Flipping the classroom for English languagelearners to foster active learning, Computer Assisted Language Learning, DOI:10.1080/09588221.2014.967701.

Hung, C., Sun, J., & Liu, J., (2018): Effects of flippedclassrooms integrated with MOOCs and game-based learning on the learningmotivation and outcomes of students from different backgrounds, InteractiveLearning Environments, DOI: 10.1080/10494820.2018.1481103.

Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Leidner, D. E. (1999). Communication andtrust in global virtual teams. Organization Science, 10(6), 791–815.

Khan, S. (2012). The one world schoolhouse: Education reimagined.New York: Hachette Books.

Khorsandi T., A. (2014). A critical policy analysis ofinternationalization in postsecondary education: An Ontario case study.

Killick, D. (2012). Seeing-ourselves-in-the-world: Developingglobal citizenship through international mobility and campus community. Journalof Studies in International Education, 16(4), 372–389.

Kireçci, M., A. , Bacanlı, H., Erişen, Y., Karadağ, E., Çeliköz, N.,Dombaycı, M., A., Toprak, M., & Şahin, M. (2016). The internationalizationof higher education in Turkey: Creating an index. Education and Science,42(121). TedMem.

Knight, J. (1994). Internationalization: Elements and checkpoints.CBIE Research No. 7. Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE)/Bureaucanadien de l’éducation internationale (BCEI). Ottawa, ON: CBIE. Knight, J.(1997). A shared vision? Stakeholders' perspectives on the internationalizationof higher education in Canada. Journal of Studies in International Education,1(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/102831539700100105

Knight, J. (1996) Internationalization of Higher Education: ashared vision. Ottawa: CBIE

Knight, J. (1997) A Shared Vision? Stakeholders’ Perspectives onthe Internationalization of Higher Education in Canada, Journal of Studies inInternational Education, 1, Spring, pp. 27-44.

Knight, J. (2003). Updated definition of internationalization.International Higher Education, 33, 2–3.

Knight, J. (2004). Internationalization remodeled: Definition,approaches, and rationales. Journal of Studies in International Education,8(1), 5–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315303260832

Knight, J. (2007). Internationalization: Concepts, complexities andchallenges. In J. J. F. Forest & P. G. Altbach (Eds.), Internationalhandbook of higher education: Vol.18, (pp. 207–227). Dordrecht, theNetherlands: Springer. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4012-2_11

Knight, J. (2008). Higher education in turmoil: The changing worldof internationalization. Global perspectives on higher education: Vol. 13.Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers

Knight, J. (2012). Concepts, rationales, and interpretiveframeworks in the internationalization of higher education. In The SAGEhandbook of international higher education (pp. 27–42). Thousand Oaks, CA:SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218397.n2

Knight, J., & De Wit, H. (1995). Strategies forinternationalisation of higher education: Historical and conceptualperspectives. In H. De Wit (Ed.), Strategies for internationalisation of highereducation: A Comparative Study of Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA (pp.5-32). Amsterdam: European Association for International Education (EAIE) incooperation with the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education(IMHE) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) andthe AIEA.

Kubi, P., A., & Annan, E. (2020). A review of a collaborativeonline international learning,” International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy(iJEP), vol 10, no 1. https://doi.org/ 10.3991/ijep.v10i1.11678

Laal, M. & Ghodsi, S., M. (2012). Benefits of collaborativelearning," Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 31, pp.486-490, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091.

Labi, A. (2011). Faculty-inspired team-teaching makesinternationalization affordable. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrievedfrom https://www.chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Inspired-Team-Teaching/127266

Larbi, F., O. & Fu, W. (2017). Practices and Challenges ofInternationalization of Higher Education in China; International StudentsPerspective. A Case Study of Beijing Normal University", InternationalJournal of Comparative Education and Development, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCED-12-2016-0025

Leask, B. (2015). Internationalizing the curriculum. London,England: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

Magnier-Watanabe, R., Watanabe, Y., Aba, O., & Herrig, H.(2017). Global virtual teams’ education: Experiential learning in theclassroom. On the Horizon, 25(4), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-02-2017-0007

Marcillo-Gomez, M., & Desilus, B. (2016). Collaborative onlineinternational learning experience in practice opportunities and challenges.Journal of Technology Management & Innovation, 11(1), 30–35. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718- 27242016000100005

Mestenhauser, J. A., & Ellingboe, B. J. (Eds.). (1998).Reforming the higher education curriculum: Internationalizing the campus.Phoenix, AZ: American Council on Education and Oryx Press.

Missildine, K., Fountain, R., Summers, L., & Gosselin, K.(2013). Flipping the Classroom to Improve Student Performance and Satisfaction.Journal of Nursing Education, 52(10), 597-599.

Moore, A., S., & Simon, S. (2015). Globally networked teachingin the humanities: theories and practices. Routledge.

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Much attention has been paid recently to the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in learning (e.g., Daniel, 1995; Ellsworth, 1995; Grint, 1992; Harasim et al., 1995; Hesketh, Gosper, Andrews, & Sabaz, 1996; Paulsen, 1995b; Szabo, 1995). And with the integration of ICTs alongside the inclination towards internationalization, universities began to adopt new technology-enhanced pedagogies and approaches for international experiential learning, most notably, collaborative online international learning (COIL).

In the literature, COIL is often discussed as a pedagogy, an approach, or an instructional method depending on the author. De Castro et al. (2018), Magnier-Watanabe et al. (2017), Marcillo-Gomez and Desilus (2016), to mention but few, define COIL as a pedagogy for international experiential learning – as a way to use digital technology to provide experiential international learning without travel abroad (De Castro et al., 2018; Marcillo-Gomez & Desilus, 2016; Soria & Troisi, 2014). Closely, the Global Learning Conference (2017, as cited in Esche, 2008) defines it as “any pedagogical activities that use technology to link classroom and students in geographically distant locations through coursework. Other definition, in spite of resemblance, foreground the act of collaboration in COIL –that students and instructors from at least two different linguacultural backgrounds collaborate virtually on a common project for four or more weeks (Kubi, 2020). This collaboration, since it employs CMC channels, can be carried out through synchronous or asynchronous communication (Garrison, 2011).

According to Saqr and Tedre (2018), COIL [...] is growing in popularity due to [its] convenience and cost-effectiveness. Moore and Simon (2015), on the other hand, assert that COIL garnered initial institutional support because it was developed by faculty in the humanities with limited experience of technology. COIL allowed these institutions to overcome boundaries in the educational community (Saqr & Tedre, 2018) and use simple digital tools and applications to customize how they wished to internationalize their courses (Labi, 2011). What renders COIL distinct from earlier international distance learning initiatives is that the latter, unlike COIL, “relied largely on reproducing established institutionally bound courses in digital environments, lacked cultural sensitivity, and disregarded the need for pedagogical innovation to re-envision learning in a globally networked world (Stark-Meyerring, 2010, p.127).

Since the formation of The State University of New York (SUNY) COIL Center in 2016, the use ICTs to promote international learning experience for students lacking the wherewithal to participate in academic mobility programs has continued to grow in higher education around the world (Esche, 2018). According to Toner (2018), the SUNY COIL Center has assisted in facilitating about 90 teaching partnerships between faculty from 27 universities in New York and 35 international higher education institutions, engaging about 3000 students in online international collaboration. The center, and indeed, COIL, achieves this through emphasizing on student-student and student-teacher engagement (de Wit, 2013, as cited in Moore & Simon, 2015) and focusing on:

Interactive shared coursework, emphasizing experiential learning [,] and giving collaborating students a chance to get to know each other while developing meaningful projects together, This broadens and deepens their understanding of course content while building cross-cultural communicative capacity through academic and personal engagement with the perspectives of global peers. (Coil Center 2013)

A number of studies demonstrate the benefits of adopting COIL as an institutional strategy to internationalize higher education. In addition to imbuing students with refined intercultural competencies and enhancing their business communication skills, COIL courses foster participatory and transformative student learning grounded in critical inquiry, cross-cultural awareness, and discipline-specific and interdisciplinary content (Moore & Simon, 2015).

Furthermore, the learning outcomes from COIL activities are not reserved to students, but rather positively impact instructors through the exchange with colleagues from diverse institutions, backgrounds, pedagogies, and practices. Given that the collaboration is carefully designed and effectively implemented, COIL not only offers instructors the opportunity to develop as global educators, but also allows students to gain digital literacy and motivates them to engage with each other and develop a growth mindset that will help them to learn in a pluralistic setting (Dweck, 2016).

This according to Laal and Ghodsi (2012) contributes to the building of a global community of learners, which leads to more student and faculty involvement in the knowledge generation process (Rivera & Cox, 2016; Schellens et al., 2007; Woo and Reeves, 2006).

While there are yet no studies critiquing COIL (Mudiamu, 2020), the challenges and limitations of the approach can be revealed through the research investigating the challenges of IoHE, IaH, Virtual Exchange, CSCL, or similar approaches such as Telecollaboration -a term mostly used in the context of foreign language learning through Virtual Exchange. The prime critiques of IaH label it as “a movement focusing on means rather than aims” (Brandenburg & De Wit, 2010, p.16); a tendency to focus on “activity and not results as indicators of quality” (Green & Whitsed, 2013); or [a process] pretending to be guided by high moral principles, while not actively pursuing them (De Wit & Beelen, 2014, as cited in Curaj et al., 2015). These critiques, however, are not related to COIL as it does stress on learning outcomes and equality.

Still, since both COIL and Telecollaboration are evidently very close types of Virtual Exchange, challenges of the latter arguably imply challenges of the former. According to Rubin & Guth, (2015), Virtual Exchange has not been widely adopted in the curriculum, even in online courses. O’Dowd and Ritter (2006) summarize the main factors that contribute to “failed communication” within Telecollaboration activities in four levels: the individual level, the classroom level, the socio-institutional level, and the interaction level.

In their inventory, the individual level concerns factors related to the knowledge, motivation, attitude, and perception of students regarding virtual communication with peers from different countries and linguacultural backgrounds. The classroom level includes factors such as the teacher-to-teacher relationship, the task design, the matching of learners, and the local group dynamic (Helm, 2015). The socio-institutional level, which has received the most attention according to the authors, involves the mediating technologies and their design, the general organization of the students’ courses of study, including differences in timetables, contact hours, workload and assessment, or recognition of student participation in telecollaboration activity.

‍

Aerden, A. (2014) A Guide to assessing the quality of internationalisation.ECA Occasional Paper. The Hague: European Consortium for Accreditation inHigher Education.

Aigner, J. S., Nelson, P. & Stimpfl, J. R. (1992).Internationalizing the University: making it work. Springfield: CBIS Federa.

Altbach, P. G., & Knight, J. (2007). The internationalizationof higher education: Motivations and realities. Journal of Studies inInternational Education.

Arum, S. & Van de Water, J. (1992) The Need for a definition ofinternational education in US Universities, in C. Klasek (Ed.) Bridges to theFuture: strategies for internationalizing higher education, pp. 191-203.Carbondale: Association of International Education Administrators.

Aydın, B. & Veysel D. (2016), Flipping the drawbacks of flippedclassroom: Effective tools and recommendations, Journal Of Educational AndInstructional Studies In The World, Vol. 6, Iss. 1. Pp.33-40.

Beelen, J., & Jones, E. (2015). Redefining internationalizationat home. In A. Curaj, L. Matei, R. Pricopie, J. Salmi, & P. Scott (Eds.),The European higher education area (Vol. 81, pp. 59–72). Cham, Germany:Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20877-0_5

Belz, J. A. (2002). Social dimensions of telecollaborative foreignlanguage study. Language Learning & Technology, 6(1), 60–81.

Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reachevery student in every class every day. Washington, DC: International Societyfor Technology in Education.

Brandenburg, U., & De Wit, H. (2015). The end ofinternationalization. International Higher Education, 62(62). https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2011.62.8533

Bunnell, T. (2006). The growing momentum and legitimacy behind analliance for international education. Journal of Research in InternationalEducation, 5(2), 155-176.

Chan, W. W., & Dimmock, C. (2008). The internationalization ofuniversities Globalist, internationalist and translocalist models. Journal ofResearch in International Education, 7(2), 184-204.

Crowther, P., Joris, M., Otten, M. Nilsson, B., Teekens, H., &Wächter, B. (2001). Internationalisation at home: A position paper. Amsterdam,the Netherlands: EAIE.

Curaj, A. & Matei, L., & Pricopie,R., & Salmi, J., & Peter, S. (2015). The European higher educationarea: Between critical reflections and future policies. Springer.

De Castro, A. B., Dyba, N., Cortez, E. D., & Pe Benito, G. G.(2018). Collaborative online international learning to prepare students formulticultural work environments. Nurse Educator. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000000609

De Wit, H. (1995) Strategies for internationalisation of higher education:a comparative study of Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States ofAmerica. Amsterdam: European Association for International Education.

De Wit, H. (1999). Changing rationales for the internationalizationof higher education. International Higher Education 15. Retrieved fromhttps://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hans_De_Wit/publication/313407781_Changing_Rationales_for_the_Internationalization_of_Higher_Education/links/58b6d42245851591c5d52baa/Changing-Rationales-for-the-Internationalization-ofHigher-Education.pdf

De Wit, H. (2013). An introduction to higher educationinternationalisation. Milan, Italy: Vita e Pensiero

De Wit, H., & Beelen, J. (2014). Reading between the lines:Global internationalization survey. University World News (318). Retrieved fromwww.universityworldnews.com

Knight, J. (1997) A Shared Vision? Stakeholders’ Perspectives onthe Internationalization of Higher Education in Canada, Journal of Studies inInternational Education, 1, Spring, pp. 27-44.

Knight, J. (2003). Updated definition of internationalization.International Higher Education, 33, 2–3.

Knight, J. (2004). Internationalization remodeled: Definition,approaches, and rationales. Journal of Studies in International Education,8(1), 5–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315303260832

Knight, J. (2007). Internationalization: Concepts, complexities andchallenges. In J. J. F. Forest & P. G. Altbach (Eds.), Internationalhandbook of higher education: Vol.18, (pp. 207–227). Dordrecht, theNetherlands: Springer. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4012-2_11

Knight, J. (2008). Higher education in turmoil: The changing worldof internationalization. Global perspectives on higher education: Vol. 13.Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers

Knight, J. (2012). Concepts, rationales, and interpretiveframeworks in the internationalization of higher education. In The SAGEhandbook of international higher education (pp. 27–42). Thousand Oaks, CA:SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218397.n2

Knight, J., & De Wit, H. (1995). Strategies forinternationalisation of higher education: Historical and conceptualperspectives. In H. De Wit (Ed.), Strategies for internationalisation of highereducation: A Comparative Study of Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA (pp.5-32). Amsterdam: European Association for International Education (EAIE) incooperation with the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education(IMHE) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) andthe AIEA.

Kubi, P., A., & Annan, E. (2020). A review of a collaborativeonline international learning,” International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy(iJEP), vol 10, no 1. https://doi.org/ 10.3991/ijep.v10i1.11678

Laal, M. & Ghodsi, S., M. (2012). Benefits of collaborativelearning," Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 31, pp.486-490, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.12.091.

Labi, A. (2011). Faculty-inspired team-teaching makesinternationalization affordable. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrievedfrom https://www.chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Inspired-Team-Teaching/127266

Rubin, J., & Guth, S. (2016) Collaborative online internationallearning: An emerging format for internationalizing curricula. In A. Moore,& S. Simon (Eds.), Globally networked teaching in the humanities: Theoriesand practices (pp. 15-27). London, New York: Routledge.

Rumbley, L. E., Altbach, P. G., & Reisberg, L. (2012).Internationalization within the higher education context. In D. Deardorff &H. De Wit (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of international higher education (pp.3–26). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218397.n1

Saqr, M., U. Fors, & M. Tedre (2018). How the study of onlinecollaborative learning can guide teachers and predict students’ performance ina medical course," BMC Medical Education, vol. 18, no. 1, p. 24, doi:10.1186/s12909-018-1126-1.

Schellens, T, H. Keer, V., M., Valcke, & De Wever, B. (2007).Learning in asynchronous discussion groups: a multilevel approach to study theinfluence of student, group and task characteristics," Behaviour &Information Technology, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 55-71, doi:10.1080/01449290600811578.

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Language is the prime means of communication without which human society ceases to exist. It enables individuals to conventionally assign linguistic signs, together with paralinguistic ones, to signify objects, concepts, and all things in order to reflect reality and exchange meaning. But apart from such innocent usage, a critical view reveals how the common-sensical use of language to talk or write about things, whether people, events, social phenomena, etc. is largely determined by ideological thoughts, presumptions, and conventions – those of discourse. Language becomes a site for power exercise; it becomes a tool for disseminating ideologies, constructing realities (instead of reflecting them), affecting perceptions, and subsequently influencing social practices.

Possessing power means having the ability to mold the cognition of individuals and control their behavior. Such control can be carried out overtly through physical, coercive force using repressive state apparatus; i.e., government, courts, law enforcement agencies, etc., but it can also be exercised subtly by manufacturing consent for such power using ideological state apparatus; i.e., education, religion, and more importantly, mass media institutions; as a result, individuals willingly and happily agree to enter a system in which power is exercised over them. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony reveals this hidden form of power by illustrating how the ideas, norms, beliefs and values of a dominant group within society is propagated in such a way that it becomes naturalized as common sense for most members of that society. Based on this, People can be driven to hold certain beliefs or take certain actions by persuading (not convincing) them to think that they want to hold such beliefs and take such actions — that such beliefs are the natural ways of making sense of the world; and that such actions are the obvious ways of acting.

Language has power because it plays a key role in the promotion of ideologies and their eventual “evolution” into common sense. Individuals do not use language in a random, unpredicted way; rather, the way they speak to each other, about each other, and about other “things” is, except in rare cases, predetermined by social conventions set by discourse (in its Foucauldian definition). This discourse, and thus conventions of language use, is not randomly chosen; it is predetermined by certain ideologies. And once such discourse is established as the natural, common-sensical way of language use, its corresponding ideologies are acquired, used, and then spread and reproduced in everyday speak and writing.

One of the major potencies of discourse is that it frames how people perceive themselves, other groups of people, social issues, values, political events, and so many other things and, thus, shapes these people’s attitudes towards these things and subsequently influences how they deal with them. To illustrate this with an example, if the issue of abortion is widely discussed in society as “the crime of killing an unborn child” using a language saturated with heavy words and pejorative connotations, it is likely that members of that society hold, and are driven to hold, negative attitudes towards abortion. As their thinking and daily discussion about the issue draw from the same order of discourse, their opinions, judgments, and feelings about abortion indicate a strong refusal of what they label as a “serious crime”. If, on the other hand, the same issue was discussed through a discourse saturated with clinical language that define abortion as “a choice of terminating pregnancy”, then attitudes towards abortion suddenly start to change. Due to the position of abortion in a certain ideology, the adopted discourse to discuss the issue constructs what meaning people give to what issues and guide their social practices. Given the above, access to discourse evidently grants control over how people make sense not just of social issues, but of their entire experience in the world around them.

While it is possible to gain it through few other ways, access to discourse in present-day society is primarily achieved through controlling mass media institutions because of the one-sidedness and wide-reaching effects of the latter. Given its role as a significant source of information and knowledge, mass media producers, since they possess sole-producing rights, have the ability to decide how people, ideas, topics, events, etc. are described and represented. Such representation, when carried out in a systematic, “predictably similar ways” first frames how the people and events are perceived and judged; and second, sets the conventions of how they are to be talked about, written about, and, once again, represented; Put differently, once something has been represented in a particular way, it becomes more difficult to talk ‘around’, or ‘outside’, that representation (Thornborrow, 1999, p. 50). These representations consequently guide how the people, ideas, topics, events, etc. are dealt with by audience.

The problem with representations is that they are heavily affected by media discourse which is often – if not always – employed to achieve political ends and ideological functions. Instead of objective mirroring of reality, the portrayal of almost anything in media is carried out from a particular ideological perspective which ends up constructing and propagating new realities that are infused with such ideologies. Mass media go about this representation by deciding what should be represented, and how they are to be represented. Concerning the first, the more emphasis mass media place on certain events, for instance, the more significance audiences attribute to such events. Taking the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as an example, Israeli forces can kill as many Palestinians as they want, as long as media do not cover the event, no one seems to care. By contrast, once few Israeli soldiers are murdered, and the event hits the headlines of most news outlets, people start talking about terrorism and human rights. The degree of seriousness of events, and even crimes, is vastly determined by the degree of importance mass media institutions give to these events.

Besides the overrepresentation and underrepresentation of topics and events, media discourse also determines the conventions for “appropriate” language use when these topics – or anything else – is represented. Mass media producers do this by intentionally highlighting and lowlighting certain aspects of what is being represented to control people’s attention and lead them to follow a particular line of interpretation upon decoding media messages. Returning to the prior example, even if mainstream media broadcast the news of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians civilians, strategic syntactic structures are employed to report the event with no reference to responsibility. Headlines can be something like “Arabian People Killed Today in Gaza”, employing a passive voice to remove the subject who carried out the act of killing; removing the number of victims, usually when the number is high; and sometimes without even mentioning the citizenship of the victims.

Furthermore, style, register, tone and lexical choices can also affect how things are represented. In the former example, the very act of including the word “Israeli” in the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” facilitates the construction of an Israeli state in the minds of readers. Examples of lexical choices include replacing struggle by conflict; forced expulsions by evictions; from their homes by from their neighbourhoods; the use of pronouns; etc. Scrutinizing media coverage of one event reveals meticulous linguistic strategies and rhetorical devices such as euphemisms, dysphemisms, hyperboles, cacophony, misleading analogies and the like, in addition to non-linguistic strategies such as photojournalism employed by reporters to distort facts and events in order to mould the cognition and perception of audience. The result in this case is anti-Palestinian bias.

Aside from geopolitical events, media representation is also affected by power relations of those who represent and those who are represented. These can be the whites vs. the blacks; the non-Muslims vs. the Muslims; the capitalist class and the working class; the West vs. the East; and even males vs. females. A plethora of research from media studies and cultural studies has been dedicated to demonstrate the stereotypical bias in their representation within movies, documentaries, advertisements, news and other media, which not only gives rise to racism and ethnic discrimination –examples of social practice- against those represented, but also moulds their identity – they start to perceive themselves in the way they are represented.

The establishment of a certain discourse as the dominant, common-sensical discourse of language use is, as Fairclough (1989) asserts, the result of power struggle. Postcolonial discourse, for instance, having criticized the European monopoly of discourse, showed how colonial discourse was largely affected by colonial ideology – that of the superiority of the west and of the civilizing mission. Postcolonial studies deconstructed colonial ethnographies, novels, narratives and other texts to shed light on the effects of such discourse on the minds and behavior of individuals of the colonizing countries as well as the subjects of the countries that have been colonized. Similarly, Marxist discourse aims to deconstruct the discourse disseminated by the dominant group in society; feminist discourse stands against the “patriarchal” representations of gender; and postmodern discourse, in general, criticizes modern discourse.

Focusing on its effects on social practices, besides the aforementioned promotion of racism and discrimination, discourse determines how language is used even in daily interactions and interpersonal communication. This can vary from the language variety used to communicate to the accent, style, register, tone, and words people chose based on the social situation and power relations between. No language is inherently better than the other; nonetheless, varying degrees of prestige are ascribed to certain language varieties and accents based on how these languages are represented in the dominant discourse. A person speaking French in Morocco, for instance, is not looked at the same way as a person speaking Moroccan Arabic. In the words of Bourdieu, the French speaker has high cultural capital than all other speakers; so, when an individual intentionally choses to converse through French, he or she seeks to exercise power, either consciously or unconsciously, over his/ her interlocutor. It is then up to the other interlocutor to either acquiescence to this exercise of power or stand against such exercise of power by employing French himself/herself, or by simply realizing that power is, in fact, in the relations, not somewhere else. The individual can accordingly “step outside the entire system” and, again, exercise power just by remaining silent. Either way, the individual’s behavior and social practice is determined by discourse; he/she either acts according to discourse or against it.

The exercise of power through discourse is also carried out through the speech acts adopted by people during daily interactions; the appropriateness of such speech acts is determined by the degree of social power participants have over each other. A straightforward speech act such as making a request varies based on who is making the request to whom. Whether men to men; men to women or women to men; whether rich to poor or vice versa; whether adults to children or vice versa; whether teachers to students or vice versa; etc. Generally speaking, the ones with high social power –high economic, social, cultural, or symbolic capital- often use direct commands while the less powerful are obliged –through habits and conventions- to employ indirect speech acts.

Clearly, the social conventions that govern language use in representation and daily interactions as well as the beliefs, attitudes, opinions, actions and habits of individuals within society are, to a large extent, shaped by ideology and power relations. Since discourse reflects these verbal and non-verbal practices, adopting a post-structural critical discourse analysis perspective when dealing with language, results in more insight into the intricate relationship between discourse, power and language and more understanding into the true place of language in human society and culture.

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 Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power.London: Longman.

Thornborrow, J. (1999). Language and themedia. In Thomas, L., & Wareing, S. (Eds.) Language,society and power: An introduction (p. 50). London: Routledge.

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In the past, leadership was predominantly associated with command and control. The lifestyle of ancient tribes and communities required the leader to be physically stronger than all other members. Later on, other competences and personality traits such as age, wisdom, and lineage were taken into consideration. With very rare exceptions (Cleopatra, Empress Theodora, Elizabeth I of England, and others), females were common-sensically excluded from ruling positions. Present-day leadership, however, refers to none of this. It signifies the process of articulating a vision to a group of followers and motivating, influencing, and directing them towards the achievement of such vision, be it within political, military, organizational, educational, or other settings. So while the aforementioned historical view of females-as-leaders is, to some extent, understandable, why is it that the term “leader” itself—in all contexts—still often brings to mind a picture of a male, not a female? B. Morgan in “Gender Differences in Leadership” specifically focuses on gender differences in organizational leadership, highlighting the sex-related stereotypes that inhibit women from moving up the organizational ladder, and recounting a brief history of how thinking about gender differences has changed over the past century. She examines the organizational effects of leadership styles employed by men and women and argues for the acceptance of non-gender-linked leadership styles.

According to the writer, even though women are, nowadays, assuming more leadership positions than before (though more often only middle and low ones), the picture of a leader in our collective consciousness, or at least, in many people’s implicit leadership theories, is still associated with maleness. Many people when asked to describe the characteristics of a leader tend to use masculine adjectives such as competitive, assertive, aggressive, and the like. Conversely, women are, for the most part, described with “feminine” adjectives such as warm, expressive, dependent, conforming, and submissive. Based on these definitions, women—since they are not men—are unquestionably excluded from leadership positions. These associations and somewhat tacit prejudices which result in gender discrimination within the field of leadership are not fact-based or empirically proven (as the writer will prove later). Rather, they are socially and culturally constructed stereotypes that perceive women as less competent than men. The customary, thus, is a man being a leader; the aberration is a woman being a leader, and even in this case, she is supposed to fit into the stereotypical leadership mold by neglecting her feminine characteristics and adopting masculine characteristics. The women might be a leader as long as she can act like a man.

Research has shown that women assume far fewer leadership positions than their male counterpart. Contemporary leadership scholars and researchers no longer view these disparities as the result of innate, sex-linked, genetically determined psychological and cognitive factors which make males more competent than females and thus worthy of leadership positions. Nonetheless, this has not always been the case. In the 1940s, trait leadership theorists held that certain “exceptional” individuals were born with specific universal characteristics and attributes which distinguish them as leaders from the rest of non-leaders. The name alone of The Great Man theory, the most prominent trait theory, is enough to conclude that masculinity was one of the prerequisites.

By the 1950s and 1960s, trait theory was proven invalid, and new situational and contingency theories began to emerge. It was noticed, however, that women still assumed low job status than men; so psychologists carried on research to investigate the person-centered variables (neglecting situational and environmental factors) as an attempt to explain why women generally performed less than men within organizational contexts. In this regard, Henning and Jardim (1977) and Harrang (1977), for instance, advised women to learn the language and customs of men if they wanted to succeed. Later on, with Kanter’s (1977) In Men and Women of the Corporation, attention was shifted to external situational variables. The lower status of women was considered to be the result of, not innate gender differences, but the unequal distribution of power and opportunities.

Another factor that drove leadership scholars to empirically investigate gender-related differences was, according to the writer, the contradictions in the literature between leadership studies and other social sciences. While most leadership scholars acknowledge dissimilarities between men and women who occupy leadership positions in organizations, Social sciences have generally maintained that there are no reliable differences. Eagly and Johnson located 162 studies about gender and leadership and conducted a meta-analysis to provide a systematic quantitative integration of the available research in which leadership styles of men and women were compared and statistical analyses were performed on the resulting data (Morgan, 1992). The results are as follows: men and women, indeed, exhibit some differences in their leadership styles. Female leaders were more people-oriented, established more connections with their followers, and employed a democratic leadership style. Male leaders, on the other hand, were more inclined to authoritative leadership styles and built fewer relationships with their followers. The authors speculate that these differences are due to personal as well as social skills. Women had highly developed interpersonal skills than men; they were also not as readily accepted so they had to allow input into their decision making.

Research has proven that women and men differ in their leadership styles. As mentioned before, women are more participative and people-oriented than men. For this reason, men are typically associated with Bass’ transactional leadership style; they rely on their legitimate power (that comes from their organizational position) and employ contingent rewards and punishments to push their subordinates to carry on their work and complete tasks. Typically, they are competitive, though, decisive, and in control. Contrarily, women are characterized as transformational leaders, ascribing their power not to their position but to their personal characteristics. Compared with men, they are more cooperative, emotional, supportive, and compassionate. Nonetheless, as the writer asserts in the beginning of the article, these are typical overgeneralizations. Many differences exist between the same gender just as they exist across-gender. A third style of leadership is the androgynous style. Individuals who adopt this style combine both feminine traits (cooperativeness, concern for people…) and masculine traits (dominance, assertiveness, competitiveness…).

Though the female leadership style has been proven to be effective in many contexts, not all organizations—according to the writer—adopted it. Eisler (1991) distinguishes between two types of social organization models: the first one—dominator model—is marked by patriarchy (i.e., male dominance), hierarchy and authoritarianism, and use of institutionalized violence. The second, partnership model, is marked by equal power relations between women and men, less institutionalized violence, and democracy and egalitarianism.

Clearly, with countless contemporary examples of successful female leaders in all leadership contexts (educational, organizational, and even military and political), women, just like men, can be effective leaders. In terms of leadership style, though situational leadership theories assert that each style is suitable for a certain situation—that is, men’s typical style is appropriate for certain situations and the same for women’s style—, research has proven that transformational leadership (associated with females) can be effective in far more situations than transactional leadership (associated with males). As long as erroneous, groundless stereotypes about leadership and about women are eradicated, being an effective or a non-effective leader will no longer be conditional on inherent gender-linked characteristics. With the proper character traits and competence suitable for the situation, any woman

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Eisler, R. (1991). Women, men, and management: Redesigning ourfuture.

Hennig, M., & Jardim, A. (1977). The managerial woman. GardenCity, NY: Anchor Press

Harragan, B. L. (1977). Games mother never taught you: Corporategamesmanship for women. New York: Rawson Assoc.

Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. New York:Basic Books.

Moran,Barbara. (1992). Gender Differences in Leadership. Library Trends.

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Outside the context of leadership, a person might imagine leaders as an individuals guiding a group of followers who obey orders. How exactly can this individual make them do what he wants? The story, recounted in the beginning of the article, of Captain Scott and the merchant navy officer Shackleton, illustrate how it often used to be through coercive power: either by physical force using violence or by legitimate power. Of course, this is a very superficial, shallow definition that mistakes leadership with other things. The Leader has been defined as an individual who fulfills at least three criteria: having a vision, communicating it to followers, and motivating them into the achievement of this vision. Based on this definition, different individuals have been called ‘leaders’ though they were very distinct from each other in terms of their leadership style, relationship with followers, and personal characteristics. It is noteworthy that though leadership have existed in all times, in every places, and in countless contexts, the article by B. Bass specifically focuses on organizational leadership and identifies the two approaches—or styles as some call them—of leadership; namely, transformational and transactional. Still, these two approaches can also be generalized to other contexts to better understand the difference between task-oriented leaders and people-then-task-oriented ones.

Bass noticed that, inside organizations, most relationships between supervisors and their employees depend mainly on ‘transactions’; hence the name transactional (or managerial) leadership. These transactional leaders are task-oriented managers who get things done using rewards and punishments. The contingent rewards are used to extrinsically motivate employees and bring their compliance. They are given for good performance, when the set goals or assigned-tasks are accomplished; and they can be financial, such as praises, pay increases, promotions, bonuses, office perks…, or non-financial using other incentives, such as promises of recognition...etc. On the other hand, contingent punishments are used as forms of discipline to penalize employees when performance quality or quantity falls below production standards or when goals and tasks are not met at the expected level. These can range from simple verbal warnings and pay decreases to suspensions or threats of termination.

These traditional managers usually rely on one of the two routes/paths of the management by exception style (MBE). The first one—Active MBE is when the managers constantly check each employee’s performance, continually make changes to their work to make corrections throughout the process, proactive in assisting with issues, and actively participate and direct followers to prevent mistakes. By contrast, passive MBE—the second style—is when the managers only intervene after something goes unexpectedly, when standards are not being met. Managers adopting this style wait for issues to come up before fixing them. Besides these two MBE styles, Bass says that these managers can also be laissez-faire managers, i.e., abdicating their responsibilities, delegating all the work to employees without interfering, and avoiding decision-making. Still, regardless of their style, these managers have little to no concern for the well-being of their subordinates and their prime focus is to plan, direct, organize, supervise, and maintain the status quo and organizational culture under which they function.

Bass, based on his research with colleagues, argues that though transactional leadership can be effective in some situations and with some employees, especially in the achievement of short-term goals, it is not the ‘optimum’ approach to leadership for many reasons: the contingent punishments, for instance, can be ineffective and counterproductive (in the long run); and the contingent rewards require the leader/manager to be in control of such rewards. He considers the most effective (superior in his words) leadership performance to be of the people-oriented leaders who create and stimulate a positive change (transformation) in their followers, broaden and elevate their interests, and motivate them to work beyond their self-interests; hence the name transformational leadership. The transformational leader focuses on the growth and prosperity of followers and aims to enhance their motivation, morale, values, and performance. These leaders usually make fundamental changes in their followers as well as in the organizational culture; they draw followers’ attention to superior needs (the fourth and fifth higher needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs); convert their followers’ self-interest into a collective-interest for the benefit of the group, the organization, and society by generating awareness and acceptance of the vision; trigger passion and loyalty among their followers; and relate to them on a deep emotional level.

According to Bass, transformational leadership makes more of a contribution to organizations—and other contexts as well—than its counterpart transactional leadership based on several things. First, transformational leaders are considered more effective by their colleagues, supervisors, and employees (they meet their implicit leadership theories more than transactional leaders). He concluded this based on his study as well as other reports from different organizations across different countries (e.g., USA, Japan, Canada…) which indicate a high correlation between transformational behavior and high ratings. Second, employees also assert that they work harder and exert more effort for these leaders as opposed to transactional ones, particularly the ones who adopt passive management by exception style. This claim is supported by the results of his mentioned study, in which the efforts employees from a large engineering firm are measured in correlation with transformational and transactional leaders.

Though transformational leaders vary widely in their personal styles (some are spiritual, some are not…), Bass identifies four essential behaviors/components/dimensions/elements that characterize them: Individualized consideration, Intellectual stimulation, Idealized influence, and Inspirational motivation. The first element—Individualized consideration indicates that transformational leaders establish strong connections and relationships with each of their followers. They listen to their (followers’) personal and professional concerns and needs, appreciate their interests, and give personal attention to each employee individually. They support followers, advise and support them, and allocate their time to coach, guide, and mentor whoever is in need of training. The second—Intellectual stimulation, refers to the fact that transformational leaders are not only concerned with relating with and helping their followers, they also aim to increase their cognitive and affective abilities and capabilities, promote their intelligence, rationality, and critical thinking skills, empower and encourage them to challenge assumptions, take risks, address and solve problems on their own, and maximize their potential to achieve their personal goals along with the organizational vision.

The third element—Idealized influence—signifies the charismatic aspect of transformational leaders. It denotes that these leaders are highly admired and deeply trusted and respected by their followers not because of the power position they hold but because of who they are. Because they usually set themselves as exemplary role models, working harder than most followers and having high pride-instilling ethical and moral values, followers often try to identify with these leaders and attempt to emulate them. The final element—Inspirational motivation points to the visionary aspect of these leaders. They are able to successfully articulate their clear vision to their followers, and manage to intrinsically motivate them towards achieving the vision by triggering emotional influences, showing optimism and enthusiasm, and providing a sense of meaning for the tasks at hand and purpose for the general vision of the organization.

For all the aforementioned characteristics and behaviors of such leaders, transformational leadership can lead to several outcomes and benefits. Within organizational settings, knowing that a certain company is led by transformational leaders conveys good messages about the nature of the company, how employees and their supervisors treat and communicate with each other, and generally improve the company image in the eyes of its own personnel as well as to the outside world. This also results in recruitment as candidates are most likely attracted to such companies which view the development of its employees as one of its priorities. This latter alone, in fact, can have a tremendous impact on the development of the overall development of the company. Bass suggests that companies should identify, select, promote and transfer these types of leaders, and also work on training its managers to learn to be transformational. Some of the strategies or approaches to learning so include being aware of the employees’ view on the leader’s performance, working individually with a counselor or participating in a workshop in which the behavior of other transformational leaders is observed and emulated. Other implications include incorporating this approach into leadership education to raise awareness towards it and taking it into account -particularly the individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation- when designing and assigning jobs and tasks to employees.

Having said that, Bass asserts that though transformational leadership is generally more effective than its counterpart transactional leadership, especially in a turbulent market when problems, rapid changes, and uncertainties call for a flexible organization with determined leaders who can inspire employees to participate enthusiastically in team efforts and share in organizational goals (Bass, 1990), transactional leadership can also be effective in certain situations,  particularly in stable markets. Later on, he has also suggested –unlike M. Burns- that a leader can simultaneously adopt both transformational and (mostly the contingent reward and rarely the contingent punishment of) transactional leadership.

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Bass, B. M.(1990).From Transactional to Transformational Leadership:Learning to SharetheVision. Organizational Dynamics. Elsevier Science Publishers.

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Humans are social creatures. For the most part, we cannot survive and thrive in the absence of contact with others of our kind; whenever there are humans, there are groups…and there are societies. ‘Society’ is often used to refer to a specific group of people living together in particular ways, interacting with one another within one geographical –or social- territory, and sharing one common distinct culture. The term, however, can also be used in its abstract sense to refer to the relationships between these people or to their culture and ideology. Society integrates because it organizes behavior; this organization operates on a variety of levels, the largest of which is that of social institutions. Each institution refers to a specific domain of social interaction and signifies all the mechanisms or patterns of social order focused on meeting social needs and attaining certain ends; the government, for instance, is concerned with group decision-making; other institutions include, education, healthcare, religion….and what interests us most in this article: family.

A typical sociological definition of family is a group of people united by consanguinity (blood) or affinity, constituting a single household and interacting with each other in their respective social positions. The family members are either born into the family (the biological children of parents for instance) or linked through –usually- legal bonds such as marriage or adoption. Nowadays, Because of globalization, and (western) media discourse regarding families, a person might associate the term with a nuclear family consisting of two parents and their children; however, anthropologically speaking, the term goes hand in hand with kinship, and different congregations of kin have been labelled as specific types of family. The aforementioned nuclear/ immediate family is most common, but its members can still live nearby and/or visit their extended families -siblings, grandparents…-; other types of family include matrifocal—mother and children—, patrifocal—father and children—, and avuncular –mother, her children, and her brother.

Family is a cultural universal common to all human cultures worldwide; nevertheless, different past and present cultures have had different norms, traditions, and generally ‘way of life’ which can be typologically classified depending on their similarities and differences. In terms of marriage—the culturally recognized union between people—some people are marked within certain cultures as acceptable spouses or not. Some cultures promote endogamy—marriage between people of same social strata—, others encourage exogamy –individuals (mostly women of low economic status) marrying someone from a high status to move up the socioeconomic ladder, interracial marriages…etc. Also, the forms of marriage can be monogamy—between two people—, polygamy—one man and many spouses—or, in rare cases, polyandry when more than one man share a spouse. People can also marry for different legal, social, libidinal, emotional, financial, spiritual, or religious purposes but these differences are often noticed within the same culture as well. Families can also differentiate cross-culturally in terms of post-marital residence: patrilocal when the wife moves to live with her husband who continues to live in (or near) his father’s house, matrilocal (the opposite), neolocal when both live in an independent household; in terms gender-related power positions depending on the social system to which they belong (whether patriarchal or matriarchal); or (especially in the past) in terms of subsistence— hunters, farmers…etc.

Cross-cultural families -and societies in general- also differ in how they perceive and treat age. Just like gender, people from different ages tend to differ in many aspects, such as legal, political and social responsibilities, the degree of respect, the ‘symbolic capital’ –given that older people often have more social power—, and other things. In fact, even how age is measured tends to differ in some cultures. In most cultures, age is measured by years since birth, but Chinese, for instance, see people as born at age one, not zero; others count age with seasons and others do not measure it at all. Besides, they can differ in how they celebrate age, with some cultures, for instance, celebrating their birthday; others (mentioned in V. Gennep’s rites of passage) celebrate transitions from one age-related status to another with specific rituals or ceremonies…etc.

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Bachmann-Medick, D. (2016). Cultural turns: New orientations in thestudy of culture. Walter de GruyterGmbH & Co KG.

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The assertion that "Great leaders are born, not made!" encapsulates the fundamental principle of the Great Man theory, a 19th-century perspective on leadership that posits leadership as an innate, genetically determined trait. However, this theory, along with other similar trait-based theories, has been debunked over time. Today, the focus of leadership studies has shifted towards understanding how individuals can learn to become effective leaders rather than being born with inherent leadership qualities.

Warren G. Bennis, a pioneering figure in leadership studies, argues in his book "On Becoming a Leader" that leaders are made, not born. Drawing from his observations and interviews with numerous leaders, Bennis outlines practical advice for individuals aspiring to become leaders, emphasizing the importance of certain attributes and behaviors.

Bennis identifies several key attributes shared by effective leaders, including vision, passion, integrity, curiosity, and daring. These attributes are essential for guiding a clear vision, inspiring others, and navigating challenges with honesty, enthusiasm, and courage. Effective communication skills are also highlighted as crucial for leaders to articulate their vision and motivate their followers.

Moreover, Bennis distinguishes between leaders and managers, emphasizing that while managers focus on maintaining the status quo and adhering to established procedures, leaders are visionaries who challenge norms, inspire change, and prioritize people over processes. Leaders lead by example and rely on personal qualities and charisma to motivate and inspire their followers.

One of the central themes in Bennis's work is the concept of self-invention, which involves continual self-reflection, growth, and adaptation. Bennis argues that effective leaders are "twice-born," individuals who continually reinvent themselves and embrace change and uncertainty. Self-invention requires individuals to take ownership of their personal and professional development, accepting responsibility for their actions and learning from their experiences.

Furthermore, Bennis challenges traditional gender roles and encourages women to pursue leadership roles, advocating for self-invention regardless of gender or marital status. He emphasizes that leadership is not restricted by gender and that anyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, can aspire to become an effective leader through self-awareness, growth, and perseverance.

In conclusion, Bennis's work underscores the notion that leadership is a learned skill rather than an innate trait. By cultivating essential attributes such as vision, passion, integrity, curiosity, and daring, individuals can embark on a journey of self-invention and develop into effective leaders capable of inspiring positive change and making a lasting impact on their organizations and communities.

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MLA. Bennis, Warren G. On Becoming a Leader. Reading, Mass. :Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1989.

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During second-language acquisition (SLA), it is not possible that learners start speaking the target language (TL) fluently and accurately without facing certain problems and committing countless lexical, syntactic and pronunciation errors.

Though these errors are often considered nuisance to be eradicated by many people, linguists — applied linguists that focus on language acquisition in particular — have, and are still attempting to study these errors to effectively treat them. They perceive the errors as traces of the learner’s progress in language learning and cues into how language is actually learned or acquired.

For this reason, three major approaches to the study of learner’s errors have been presented, namely contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theory. An error is defined as any systematic deviation from the imminent rules of the TL. It cannot be self-corrected since it is the result of incomplete learning and linguistic incompetency as the learner is not aware of what is presumed to be correct; therefore it reflects the gap in the competence of the learner.

Errors are generally classified into local errors, which do not hinder communication, and global ones, which do interfere with communication and disrupt the meaning of utterances. Within SLA, errors are distinguished from mistakes (also called performance errors). The latter are random deviations and unrelated to any system; they are related to performance and usually take place because of the speaker’s failure to utilize a known system correctly due to non-linguistic factors such as fatigue, strong feeling, memory limitations, lack of concentration, and the like.

The first approach to the study of these errors is Contrastive Analysis (CA). It found its theoretical foundations in Lado’s book Linguistics across Culture. At that time, language learning was considered –by behaviourists - as a set of mechanical habits which are formed through a process of imitation and repetition, and so Lado (1957), influenced by them, argued that the linguistic errors and the difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language arise from the differences between the mother language and the TL, which lead to interference (negative transfer). For this reason, CA hypothesis claimed that a structural comparison the two languages in question would enable us to predict and describe the learning problems that are likely to be faced by learners/ students.

Although many errors are indeed interlingual errors caused by a negative transfer from the learner’s L1 to TL, CA was criticized for two main reasons: first, many predicted errors – which were supposed to be committed – were inexplicably not apparent in learner’s performance; and second, other observable errors were, in fact, irrespective of their mother language.

By contrast, the second approach — Error Analysis (EA) — provided a better explanation for the causes of such errors. EA in SLA was established in the sixties by Corder and colleagues. Instead of comparing L1 and L2 to predict errors, EA focuses on the errors that actually occur among language learners and studies them in the broader framework of their sources and significance.

EA, while affirming that one source of learner’s error is interlingual as in CA, also distinguishes a second type of errors that are deemed to be of intralingual interference. In EA, the first step in studying errors is to collect data from the learners, followed by the identification of errors that are committed when the learners misuse some TL rules (as opposed to mistakes); then describing the errors by classifying them into sub-categorizations: overgeneralizations - applying rules in cases where they do not apply - incomplete rule applications such as simplifications – omission, addition… -, and the hypothesizing of false concepts - deriving from faulty comprehension of distinctions in the TL; and stating the frequency of each error type.

After that, the area of difficulty in the TL is identified (explanation) to, finally, evaluate and correct the errors. However, this approach has also been criticized, mainly because it does not take into account the avoidance phenomena by which language learners employ the strategy of avoiding certain difficult TL elements.

Because of this, another approach — interlanguage theory — was presented. The theory is often credited to Selinker, who coined the term, and it draws attention to the possibility that the learner’s language can be regarded as an independent, self-made linguistic system incorporating numerous variations and deviances which result from his/her attempted production of a TL. The learner does this using certain strategies such as: language transfer, transfer of training, communication strategies, learning strategies including the preservation of some features of his/her first language and the overgeneralization of some TL rules… etc.

The problem with this technique, however, is that, in some cases, it can lead to what Selinker calls fossilization, i.e., the permanent cessation of progress toward the TL (the items, rules, and sub-systems that L2 learners tend to retain in their IL). In this approach, the errors made by the learners are routes that must be passed, and they are considered as proof of hypothesis testing - the learner’s testing of his hypotheses regarding the TL by uttering something and receiving feedback from an interlocutor.

When teaching a foreign language, there are many ways the teacher can respond to, and treat the errors of students in a constructive way. These include, - but are not limited to - creating an autonomous ability in learners to correct themselves given that their discovery of patterns of error is more effective. Also, in some cases, the teacher should not let the errors go uncorrected because they may lead to the persistence and perhaps the eventual fossilization of such errors; in this case, a post-lesson cognitive or affective feedback said in private are advisable to prevent the student from embracement or potential feeling of devaluing which might ensue if they are corrected – negatively - in front of their classmates.

The teacher should also focus on the most frequent, serious errors without too much attention on every small one; otherwise, the treatment is likely to be inefficient and lead to demotivation.

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In Cultural anthropology, the goal is to study and understand human culture; but how can we do that exactly? In the past, people might consider a quick visit to the place (tourism, for instance) sufficient to learn about the culture, then we learned that it is really not possible for an outsider to fully comprehend a specific culture without living with its members for months and years, adopting a cultural relativistic perspective, and then objectively conducting heavy ethnographic works (through participant observation) that describe the beliefs and behaviours of the targeted culture, the results of which are to be then used in ethnological studies to compare and contrast the culture with other cultures. But are these methods and approaches really sufficient for an outsider to accurately understand a culture and get into the minds of its members? After all, the linguistic turn in philosophy has made us question to what extent our language – let alone our culture - has an influence on how we see the world and thus other people and cultures. Since research always begins with preconceptions, tools, and language molded through our own culture and societal ideas, how is it that we can avoid this difference of perspective?

Clifford Geertz, the father of modern interpretive cultural anthropology, had an influential answer. Contrary to the approaches that viewed laws, structures, and functions as bases of social-scientific and cultural explanation, Geertz gave importance to the symbolic aspect of cultures, believing that symbols are a direct reflection of a culture. So to understand the meaning of human behaviour, the anthropologist, he says, must unravel, decode, and interpret the meanings that are encoded within cultural symbols in their particular cultural context. He suggests that a culture is a complex assemblage of texts that constitute a web of meanings which are understood by actors themselves – and actors alone; for this reason, the anthropologist can only interpret the meaning of the culture through the eyes of its members by understanding how they are interpreting themselves and their own experiences.

When studying cultures through the lens of interpretive anthropology, the goal is not just observing cultural forms or superficially describing physical behaviors as they appear to the anthropologist (what Geertz calls thin description) but rather adding details about their context—including the subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behavior—to provide her and the reader of the ethnographic work with an ‘emic view’ and enable them to understand the significant and complex cultural meanings underpinning these behaviors (what he calls thick description). What this means is that just like a piece of a text cannot be understood correctly and accurately relying on its semantic meaning alone without paying attention to the context in which it appears (pragmatic meaning), the actions of the members of a culture, similarly, can only be understood when it is described within the context in which it takes place. Starting from this, Geertz sees doing ethnography as similar to reading a text, which later gave rise to the metaphor of “culture as text”.

Geertz’s influence is connected with a “massive cultural shift” in the social sciences referred to as the interpretive turn. Before this turn, social sciences were seen within positivist paradigms (in the words of Durkheim) as logical continuation of the natural sciences and thus should maintain the same objectivity, rationalism, and study of cause and effect to discover theories and laws governing human behavior; but later on - through the interpretive turn (with Weber’s interpretive sociology – verstehen) - social scientists started to study social actions in their specific contexts and attempted to decode the cultural meanings behind norms, values, and symbols, and interpret social reality and particular behavior of a community through the subjective viewpoints of its actors. Actors were no longer treated as objects of observation but rather as subjects.

Now, having talked about how we can better understand the behavior of a particular community, it is crucial - particularly with the aforementioned metaphor of “culture as text” - that I mention Foucault’s contribution (though not directly related to the field of cultural anthropology). We, individuals, behave in a certain way within society, but what is more important is that this behavior is the result of many conscious thoughts and choices we constantly make; what we forget to take into account is that though a person makes the choice of wearing a green shirt or red shirt, for instance, the idea of him making a choice between wearing a shirt and not wearing a shirt at all is not even considered, it is unconsciously dismissed. This is a very simple example of how this individual’s culture—more specifically the episteme above her culture which grounds all discourses and thus most sources of knowledge—has made her make certain choices and subsequently behave in a certain ‘predictable’ way.

The second idea regarding our actions, according to Foucault, is how they are also highly affected by society – and culture- through a subtle and invisible ‘power’—the normalizing power as he calls it in ‘Discipline and Punish’- which determines what we see as normal, which constructs our view of the world and ourselves, and accordingly shapes our desires,

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Bachmann-Medick, D. (2016). Cultural turns: New orientations in thestudy of culture. Walter de GruyterGmbH & Co KG.

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We humans think all the time. Thinking impacts every decision we make, and yet, we rarely think about how we think. Critical thinking is a self-directed, clear, and careful way of thinking by which we take deliberate steps to think at the highest level of quality. It involves identifying the key points and false assumptions, recognizing the sources of information, evaluating evidence, and weighing up different types of arguments through structured reflection to draw justified, evidence-based conclusions.

Critical thinking is not about being skeptical, attempting to find flaws in others’ claims only, and negatively doubting everything but ourselves. Rather, it means tripping all the apples (Descartes’ analogy for our ideas, beliefs, opinions, and other forms of knowledge), ours and others, out of the basket and casting our eyes over each apple, putting back those we see after close, careful and logical examination as sound and leaving the others. Critical thinking is crucial when dealing with arguments that are either presented by others to persuade us or we formulate to persuade others

Before proceeding with the scrutiny and analysis of arguments, it is important to first pin down all sources of obscurity that may affect our clear thinking and lead to confusion or misunderstanding. This review summarizes 1) the three paramount sources of obscurity in speaking and writing: excessive vagueness, ambiguity, and generality, and 2) how definitions are used to reduce or eliminate these sources and for other purposes

To think critically, we must first think clearly. To achieve this, it is necessary to bear in mind the three major features of imprecise language that add confusion to claims and arguments. The first one is excessive vagueness, and it results when the scope of a concept is not clear. Vague terms are extremely common in natural language, and they admit to borderline cases, a completely determinate situation in which there is no correct answer as to whether the term applies to a certain object or not. The term ‘bald’, for instance, is vague because there is no precise number of hairs that mark the boundary between ‘bald’ and ‘not bald’. Similarly, the term ‘hot’ is also vague because there is no precise temperature that something must reach to count as hot. An example of vague claims is the statement ‘there are many people in the concert’ which does not give an image of the number of people that attended the concert.

The problem with the use of vague terms is that the receiver of the message, whether a listener or a reader, is not sure whether some particular things fall under them. They, therefore, render it impossible to establish the truth and falsity of the claims in which they appear. A typical example is that of sorites paradox: as grains of sand are removed from a heap, at what point does it cease to be a heap? It seems that the removal of a single grain of sand can never, by itself, transform a heap into a non-heap, but applying that idea consistently would entail that a heap is still a heap even when reduced to only a single grain.

It is important to know that vagueness occurs to varying degrees, and it is difficult to the point of impossibility to get rid of it entirely. As stated by Russell (1918), “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise”. Therefore, when a claim is not too vague to convey appropriately everything the speaker intends it to (though sometimes vagueness is used intentionally), its level of vagueness is acceptable, but when it is not, vagueness becomes a problem. If a politician claims that he will raise taxes on the wealthy, then he must pin down just what he means by ‘wealthy’ since where the borders fall here makes a huge difference. On the contrary, if a person says that his brother is cold, then it is advisable to take his statement with a grain of salt without investigating where cold starts and where it ends.

Speaking of cold, the second linguistic phenomenon that can cause confusion and obscurity is ambiguity. Interestingly, the word ‘ambiguity’ itself, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ambiguous between two meanings: uncertainty or dubiousness on the one hand and a sign bearing multiple meanings on the other. Our concern is with the latter definition, the property enjoyed by linguistic signs, be it words, phrases, or sentences, that bear multiple (legitimate) interpretations (i.e., more than one meaning. The previous word ‘cold’, for example, can semantically mean both cold in temperature and feelings or personality. Likewise, the word ‘light’ is also ambiguous because it can mean ‘not-heavy’ or ‘not-very-dark’, etc. Words like ‘cold’, ‘light’, ‘saw, ‘bank’ ‘bat and ‘over’ are semantically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur.

Nevertheless, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The sentence ‘he saw a man on the hill with a telescope’, for instance, is structurally/ syntactically/ grammatically ambiguous - also known as amphiboly- as is the journal head title ‘actor sent to jail for not finishing the sentence’ or G. Marx’s famous joke “One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas; how he got in my pajamas I don’t know”. This type of ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence and the sentence structure underlying the word order therein (the sequencing).

Claims that are not properly constructed often create confusion and obscurity for readers or listeners. To illustrate this, the sentence ‘the professor said on Monday he will give an exam’, without punctuation, is subject to two interpretations: the professor talked to the class on Monday, and the exam will be given on Monday. Ambiguity can still have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like ‘He saw a bat’ (cut a wooden bat with a saw, saw the chiropteran animal, or cut the animal with the saw, etc.) or ‘time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana’, and the like.

Other types of ambiguity include grouping ambiguity, a type of semantic ambiguity that results when it is not clear whether a word is being used to refer to a group collectively or to members of the group individually. A typical example is ‘Nurses make more money than doctors’. This type of ambiguity can lead to two venerable fallacies. the first is the fallacy of division which occurs when someone assumes that what is true of a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts. Another fallacy associated with this type is the ecological/population fallacy, the interpretation of statistical data that occurs when inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inferences about the group to which those individuals belong. Going the other direction, the fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part(s) of the whole.

Another type of ambiguity is the ambiguous pronoun reference, a type of syntactic ambiguity. It occurs when a pronoun could refer to two or sometimes more possible antecedents. As a result, it is not clear to what or to whom the pronoun is supposed to refer. The presence of two or more distinct meanings for a single word or expression is a common, harmless, and often amusing feature of ordinary language that has been the source of much frustration and amusement for everyone who considers the interpretation(s) of linguistic signs. Yet, when unnoticed in the context of otherwise careful reasoning, it can lead to one of several informal fallacies.

Another notion that is closely related to vagueness and ambiguity is Generality. Overly general statements or claims are those that include words or phrases that are not specific enough to properly understand what they refer to and what they do not. The word ‘child’ is vague since it is not clear where the line is drawn between children and non-children. It can also be ambiguous (lexically) because it refers to both immature years and offspring. Besides, it is also general because it applies to both boys and girls. Similarly, the word ‘friend’ is general because it could mean a female friend and a male friend. Generality is a matter of “unspecification”: the fewer details a claim provides, the more general it becomes (Moore and Parker, 2009).

It is suggested that with all these potential pitfalls to clear thinking and clear communication, the best we can do is be clear about what our words mean. To achieve this, three types of definitions can be used. The first, definition by example (also called ostensive definition) specifies the meaning of an expression by pointing to examples of things to which the expression applies (e.g., by green I mean the color of grass, limes, lily pads, and emeralds). Ostensive definitions rely on analogical or case-based reasoning by the subject they are intended for, and they are often used when the term is difficult to define verbally, either because the words will not be understood or because of the nature of the term. It is usually accompanied by a gesture pointing out the object serving as an example. The second, definition by synonym refers to providing another word or phrase that has the same meaning as the term being defined. In this type of definition, the speaker uses a definiens- a linguistic expression that shares the same meaning- to clarify a definiendum- the word being defined. The third, the analytical definition, states the necessary and sufficient conditions for the definiendum and specifies the features that something must possess for it to be defined as such.

Each of these types of definitions can be used in a specific context to better illustrate and illuminate an obscure term. A person must be wise enough to determine which type is suited for each context. For example, if a person defined a horse as “quadruped, graminivorous, Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive, sheds coat in the spring, in marshy countries, sheds hoofs,…” (Bitzer’s definition in Hard Times), then he is likely to create more obscurity and confusion for his listener.

Besides their general purpose: telling what a word generally means (lexical definitions), three other functions can be fulfilled by definitions: Stipulative definitions are those that are used to amount to coinage of new words (neologisms) or define familiar words that are used in ways different from ordinary usage. Precision definitions are used to reduce vagueness or generality or to eliminate ambiguity. These definitions are common in law books (e.g. In this contract, the word ‘dollars’ will refer only to Canadian dollars, even if one party normally deals in U.S or Australian dollars). Finally, definitions can be used to persuade. These troublesome items are known as persuasive or rhetorical definitions and they are primarily designed to influence beliefs or attitudes using the emotive meaning of terms (the rhetorical force) instead of simply conveying linguistic information.

When a person employs these definitions, he or she uses the emotional connotation of a word or expression instead of one having a similar meaning but with less affective quality. Euphemisms, dysphemisms, hyperboles, cacophony, misleading analogies, and other rhetorical devices are the best examples (e.g. ‘murder’ when used instead of ‘homicide’ or ‘drunk’ instead of ‘inebriated’). Whether we define ‘abortion’ as ‘the murder of an unborn child’ or with abstract, clinical language that deflects our attention, or by saying that the woman is exercising her ‘choice’ to ‘terminate’ the pregnancy plays a crucial role in framing and influencing how we think about abortion far before we present arguments for or against it.

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Moore, Noel Brooke and Parker, Richard(2008). Critical Thinking. McGraw HillEducation.

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What exactly is a syllable? Etymologically speaking, the term descended from the Anglo-French "sillabe", from the Latin "syllaba", from the Greek syllable meaning “that which is held together”, referring to individual sounds that are combined and grouped in a sequence together to make a single unit. The syllable is a basic unit of speech and is studied on both the phonetic and phonological levels of analysis. Yet, since it is an abstract phonological constituent without clear phonetic correlates, it can be quite difficult to reach a consensual, unified definition that truly represents, and accurately identifies what a syllable is and what it is not.

Definitions such as a part of a word pronounced with a single uninterrupted sounding’, for example, can be quite vague if not general as they do not pin down the nature of the syllable nor do they specify what exactly is ‘uninterrupted’. For our purposes, a syllable is a prosodic unit larger than the segment and smaller than the word having one vowel sound -or sometimes a syllabic consonant- (the nucleus of the syllabus), with or without surrounding consonantal margins (the onset & coda of the syllabus). This article is organized as follows:

1) The syllable as a domain of sequencing.

2) the syllable as a substantive universal: basic cross-linguistic syllable shapes.

3) General overview of optimality theory; iv) optimality theoretical analysis of syllable shapes and inventories.

4) representations of the syllable.

5) The role of sonority in the organization of the syllable.

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The analysis of languages from different families reveals how only certain segment sequences are allowed whereas others are banned. In English, for example: /en/, /gl/, /str/, and others are allowed to occur word-initially while their reverse /gl/, /ng/,/rts/ are only allowed word-finally. The same thing is noticed with other languages, each with its phonotactics. The linguists trying to uncover the unconsciously internalized set of rules behind human language noticed how the occurring sequences present only a fraction of the much larger set that would result from a free concatenation of members of its segment inventory.

To pin down the restrictions on segment distribution, an obvious move is to first posit a constituent that serves as a domain of phonotactics (Zec, 2007). While more than one candidate has been proposed for this role, strong evidence points to the syllable (Kahn, 1976) particularly since many phonological patterns can be better understood by explicitly identifying it as such. Before, in Chomsky and Halle’s SPE, the domain of sequencing generalizations initially assumed was the morpheme, with the phonological representations reduced to feature matrices and morphological boundaries.

Generalizations about segment sequencing could refer to morphological constituents alone (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) with no other types of entities larger than the segment admitted into the grammar (Zec, 2007). The dominant view surrounding syllables in the literature draws upon Kahn’s(1976) analysis of syllable-based generalizations in English, which has established the important role of the syllable as a core unit in generative theory. Many studies on the role of the syllable in phonological theory have taken native intuitions about the existence of the syllable (native speakers of a language can easily identify how many syllables are in words as a plausible piece of evidence to support the status of the syllable as a phonological unit, especially in a theory that seeks to account for the phonological knowledge of native speakers (Al Motairi, 2015).

Bringing our attention to structure, the principal subparts of the syllable are the nucleus (ν) and the two margins, the onset (ω) and the coda (κ). The margins henceforth will be referred to with the symbol C denoting ‘consonant’ (later on when clusters are taken under consideration CC will be used). Based on this, and on the fact the syllable can sometimes be a single nucleus without surrounding segments, four basic shapes can be distinguished:

a) CVC—corresponds to a syllable with all three principal subparts.

b) CV—contains only the onset and the nucleus.

c) VC—contains the nucleus and the coda.

d) V which contains only the nucleus.

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Note that segments typically occurring in the nucleus are represented as V indicating a vowel – be it a long vowel, a monophthong, a diphthong, or a triphthong. However, in some languages, the nucleus can also be copied by a syllabic (also called vocalic) consonant, like the rhotic [r], the lateral [l], and the nasals [m] and[n] in the English words rhythm’, tton’, and ‘bottle’ . In this case, the language-specifically permissible syllable shapes the consonant is transcribed with an understroke acritic. Typologists noticed that based on this, we can group language systems into two major types considering the syllable shapes that are language-specifically permissible: systems without codas (Onsets are either required-CV, r optional –CV, V), and systems with codas (onsets are either required-CV, CVC-, or optional-CV, V, CVC, VC)

One thing to notice here which will be referred to later through optimality theory constraints is the asymmetry between the onset and coda. The desirability of onsets is shown by the fact that every language allows syllables with onsets. No language known thus far has only onsetless syllables. In contrast, codas are avoided in many languages, and they are never required in all environments. Put simply, onsets are highly desirable, and codas are dispreferred (Zec, 2007). The number of types (of language systems) is further proliferated by the number of segments allowed in either of the margins. Namely, systems that allow complex onsets-CC stands for cluster- (codas are either banned-CV, CCV-or optional-CV, CCV, CVC, CCVC), and systems that do not. With this in mind,  Zec (2007) presents a linguistic typology that classifies all languages into twelve basic inventories based on their allowed syllables’ shapes depending on whether onsets are either optional or required , and codas, onset clusters, and coda clusters are either optional or banned. These are summarized as follows: (C)CV(CC), (C)CV(C), CV(CC), CV(C), (C)CV, CV, (CC)V(CC) like English,(CC)V(C), (C)V(CC), (C)V(C), (CC)V, and (C)V (parentheses indicate ‘optional’).

Before analyzing this range of possible syllable shapes and inventories in light of optimality theory and showing how it is characterized by a set of output constraints, let’s first talk about the theory itself. Chomsky argues that our ability to learn languages (internalize the grammar and build the lexicon) roughly at the same time and generate an infinite number of grammatically well-formed utterances (outputs) despite the bad quantity and quality of the input (poverty and imperfection) is because we have a ‘mental organ or structure’ he called ‘language faculty’. Just as the optic apparatus helps us see things, language faculty enable us to acquire language.

Of course, other factors that also contribute to our knowledge of language, but this is outside the scope of this article. Based on this argument and the premise that we must be equipped with the same ‘genetically determined’ biological language acquisition device, he concludes that all natural languages must be just superficially, or seemingly different from each other and that they somehow share the same characteristics. After all, if we had a key that opens all locks, then it is plausible to assume that all locks are inherently similar despite their different shapes and colors. After this assumption, several linguistic theories have tried to delve into human languages aiming to find the ‘thing’ in which they are all similar. Optimality theory is one of these theories.

The idea behind optimality theory (henceforth OT) is very simple but quite interesting. It states that the observed forms of language are only the result of constraints interaction . According to the theory, there are universal constraints (limitations and restrictions) that are shared by all natural languages. The only difference is that each language has its own language-specific ranking of these constraints which determines the ones that are “OK” to be violated and the ones that are not. However, it is very important to bear in mind that we are solely focusing on the grammar of languages to understand how they are similar. Languages can still be different in terms of their lexicon since most linguistic signs – apart from those that are morphologically derived from others – are arguably just arbitrary combinations of sounds with no intrinsic meaning (the signifier) that are conventionally assigned to certain concepts (the signified). For this reason, two languages can have the same rules (or ranking of constraints) but still refer to the same object with different linguistic signs.

The previously mentioned syllable inventories are considered among the substantive linguistic universals of human language, and analyzing them using the framework of OT reveals the essential constraints that capture all possible syllable shapes. These are: the markedness constraints on the syllable form (the structure of the output): *NUC (syllables must have a nucleus), *ONS (syllables must have an onset), *-COD (syllables must not have a coda),*COMPLEXION (syllables must not have more than one onset segment), and *COMPLEXCOD (syllables must not have more than one coda segment) (* indicates constraint). These constraints are combined with the faithfulness constraints which require the output (the syllable structure in this context) to match the underlying or lexical form (the input), MAX which prohibits segment deletion from the input, and DEP which prohibits epenthesis (addition of segments) to give their specific ranking in each language depending on the syllable inventory of the language. Going back to the four basic syllable shapes, OT gives the constraints ranking for each shape:

a) CV— *ONS » *-COD » (MAX DEP);

b) CV, V—*COD » (MAX DEP) » *ONS;

c) CV,CVC—*ONS » (MAX DEP) » *-COD;

d) CV, CVC, V, VC—(MAX DEP) » *ONS » *COD (*NUC is omitted from this ranking because the syllable cannot exist without it, so instead of repeating it every time we can just imagine that exist as the first constrain that must not be violated; and (MAX and DEP) indicate that at least one of them must be in the ranking position indicated).

Of course, a person might ask ‘Why to bother with all this’, and the answer is that this ranking will help us understand why languages like Japanese, for instance, pronounce tables ‘teeburu’, or why Hindi speakers utter the words starting with the cluster [sp] with an epenthesis of the schwa (prosthesis in this case since the addition of the vowel is at the beginning of the word). In other words, it helps us understand how and why the output in a language sometimes differs from the input. For example, a language system in which onsets are optional while codas are banned (permits CV, V) can transform words like ‘pan’ into ‘panu’ or ‘pani’ or ‘pane’, etc. (CVC becomes CV.CV). How optimality theory will explain this phenomenon is better illustrated using this table:

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The table indicates that the input /CVC/ has three possible outputs (there is actually an infinite number of possible outputs but these are the ones that violate fewer constraints), and the ranking of the constraints shows that the prohibition of codas overrides faithfulness, but the demand for onsets does not. Therefore, unlike the first and second output candidates that violate the constraints 'of the first order’(serious crimes), the third candidate is the one violating the least important constraints (a misdemeanor, not a felony) when compared with others. Thus, it is the ‘optimal candidate’ and the language system will favor it over the others. The same table can be applied to all other systems to predict certain phonological processes such as deletion and insertion of segments.

Moving to how syllables are represented, Zec (2007) insists that in the structural characterization of the syllable, both its principal subparts – the nucleus, the onset, and the coda – and the syllable weight need to be properly delimited. The syllable weight(symbolized by the Greek letter μ) is important because it is relevant to many other areas of phonology, most notably stress. In this regard, syllables are bifurcated into two types: a light syllable – 1 more – includes one peak, and a heavy syllable includes two peaks (for some reason, the author did not mention ‘super heavy syllables’ probably because she only deals with basic syllable shapes without counting complex codas); the segment that gravitates to each syllabic position will be later discussed in the last part of this article (sonority of segments). So words like /kaet/, /neko/, and /bili:/ will be represented as follows:

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In these moraic representations, the syllables with one nucleus without a coda are light syllables, whereas the others with a coda or branched nucleus -diphthong or long vowels are considered heavy syllables.

Another way of representing the syllable includes structural positions for each relevant subpart of the syllable: the syllable node branches into the onset and the rime, and the latter further branches into the nucleus and the coda. This constituency captures syllable weight in structural terms by designating the rime as the weight domain. A heavy syllable has a branching rime, as distinct from a light syllable whose rime does not branch. However, because the rime is the domain of weight, it needs to be stipulated that onsets are weightless. That is, branching under the syllable node is not relevant for the computation of weight (Zec, 2007).

Coming back to our very first question: why certain segments and sequences of segments are permissible in certain positions within the syllable and others are not? Good evidence points out that the sonority of segments (the loudness, amplitude, or resonance of speech sounds)is thus far the best explanation. The sonority of segments is commonly represented using a scale like ‘the sonority hierarchy’ which corresponds to an ordering of segments ranging from those highest in sonority to those lowest in sonority though the values of segments can differ to some extent from language to language.Typically, the values are V(owels) > G(lides) > L(iquids) > N(asals) > O(obstruents). A more detailed hierarchy is : low vowels > mid vowels > high vowels > glides > rhotics > laterals >nasals > voiced fricatives > voiced affricates > voiced stops > voiceless fricatives > voiceless affricates > voiceless stops > (glides and affricates were not mentioned in the chapter). With these in mind, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP) states that the syllable nucleus constitutes a sonority peak that is preceded and/or followed by a segment or sequence of segments with progressively decreasing sonority values (i.e., the sonority has to fall toward both edges of the syllable). In other words, the sonority profile of the syllable must rise until it peaks, and then falls (Roca and Johnson, 1999).

Linguists have noticed that certain languages allow only V to occupy the nucleic position of the syllable (e.g., Bulgarian), others permit both V and L (e.g., Slovak), and other languages such as English allow V, L, and N whereas in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt, for example, all segments are allowed. /tskrkst/ meaning ‘you lied’, for example, has no vowel. Each language has its own syllabicity threshold (i.e., the point or boundary of sonority that can be exceeded. In English , for instance, the threshold is N, meaning that all segments equal to or higher in sonority than nasal sounds are admissible in the nucleus as long as the SSP is abided. The sonority hierarchy of syllable peaks is incorporated into the grammar as a set of markedness constraints with a universally fixed ranking.

The constraints on syllabicity are “*μh/O »*μh/N » *μh/L » *μh/V “(μh stands for the head mora – the mora of the nucleus). This set of constraints, while banning all segments from the nuclear position, places the strongest ban on the least sonorous segments, that is, obstruents (Zec, 2007). With this in mind, the syllabicity thresholds of the previous languages can be seen as merely a different ranking of such constraints. In Slovak, for instance, the threshold C is represented as “*μh/O » *μh/N » C »*μh/L » *μh/V”, whereas in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt, it is represented as “C » *μh/O » *μh/N » *μh/L »*μh/V”. These constraints, when correctly combined with the faithfulness constraints (MAX and DEP) will be of use in determining how certain words will be pronounced in these languages based on the output candidate they will consider as ‘optimal’ according to their syllabic constraints (more examples about this are to be found in the chapter).

Still, this principle alone cannot explain why [pn] and [ml] are not possible onset sequences in Spanish while clusters like [pl] and [pr] are, even though the second member of the cluster is more sonorous than the first. Cases like this are justified in terms of Minimal Sonority Distance (MSD) imposed on a pair of onset segments (Zec, 2007). Counting the space in between as intervals O, N, L, V (2 intervals between OL, 3 between OL, 1 between, etc.), [p] is separated from [l] by two intervals, and only one interval separates [p] from[n], and [m] from [l]. Because the minimal sonority distance in Spanish is at least two intervals, [pl] and [pr] are possible onset clusters, while [pn] and [ml] are not. (Zec, 2007).

The two principles, however, still do not explain why the following clusters [pw], [bw], [fw],[tl], [dl], [Dl] are unacceptable in English even though their sonority rises. These are explained by the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) which states that two adjacent segments must not be similar . The pairs of syllables that emerge as optimal under constraints on syllable shapes are further subject to the requirements of Syllable Contact (SC). Certain phonological alternations some words are subject to when borrowed from one language to another may be driven by syllable contact which favours a sonority fall across boundaries.

Al Motairi, Sarah Soror. (2015).  "Anoptimality-theoretic analysis of syllable structure in QassimiArabic". Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations.Retrieved from :https://commons.emich.edu/theses/612.

Chomsky, N. & M.Halle, 1968. The Sound Pattern ofEnglish. New York: Harper and Row.

Kahn,D. (1976). Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology (Doctoral dissertation). MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Zec, Graga.(2007). The Syllable. Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology.Ed. Paul de Lacy.

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What is communication? Etymologically speaking, the word descended from the Latin root ‘communicate’ meaning ‘to share’ and ‘make common’. The term refers to the ongoing symbolic process by which information are transmitted, interpreted, and exchanged by individuals and groups through mutually understood symbols, behavior, and semiotic conventions. This article summarizes

1) The characteristics and models of communication;

2) Types of communication .

3) History of communication and how it relates to technology.

4) The two channels of communication.

5) The functions of communication.

6) Developing effective communication skills.

6) Common misconceptions about communication.

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Since communication is a general term that essentially denotes the sharing and exchange of meaning, every process, be it verbal or non-verbal, that conveys a type of information can be considered a form of communication. In this article, however, animals'and plants communication systems are not taken under consideration, nor are other living organisms. Communication, henceforth, refers solely to ‘interhuman’ communication. That been said, before talking about the two models of communication–which are usually combined in one ‘classical theory’- in which meanings are exchanged, it is important to understand how we, human beings, get to encode and decode these meanings in the first place. According to De Saussure (1916), the meaning an arbitrary sign acquires is primarily established through social convention or agreement. That is to say, linguistic and other semiotic signs do not have intrinsic meaning but we agree to associate certain ‘signifiers’ with certain ‘signifieds’. Sanders Pierce further developed this model by distinguishing the three types of signs we use to exchange meanings—symbolic, indexical, and iconic signs based on the relationship between the signifier and signified. Pearce B. and Cronen (2004)- through their coordinated management of meaning(CMM)- provide us with an understanding of how individuals create and coordinate these meanings (of signs), and G. H. Mead (1934) in his Symbolic Interactionism (SI) explains how people (other than the ones who created the meanings) learn the meanings through communication. From this perspective, Alder and Rodman (1982) define communication as “the process of creating meaning through symbolic interaction” instead of a mere exchange of meanings. Of course, as Mead (1934) mentions in the third premise of his SI, these meanings are not fixed or unchanging but instead are prone to modifications over time; Barthes (1972) takes this a step further with his denotation/connotation –illustrated in his Mythologies- by explaining how signs can even acquire new meanings and relinquish old ones.

Until about fifty years ago, researchers viewed the process of communication as something that one person does to another (Alder & Rodman, (1982). In this linear model, communication is like giving an injection: a sender encodes a message by putting it into signs, either linguistic—spoken or written- or nonlinguistic—haptic and chronemic communication, gestures, body language, facial expressions, eye contact, and others—and conveys them to a receiver, who decodes (attaches meaning to) them. The remaining three elements in this model are: first, the channel—the method by which a message is conveyed between people. Face-to-face contact is the most obvious one, followed by writing; but the emergence of new technologies has given rise to a new channel of communication known as computer-mediated-communication (CMC). This channel includes textual, auditory an

d audio-visual mediums such as emails, instant messages, faxes, telephone, voice mail video chats…etc; the chosen channel can make a big difference in the transmission as well as the interpretation of the message (more on this later with media richness theory). Next, the noise—a broad category that includes any force that interferes with the accurate reception of a message. Noise can occur at every state of the communication process and it can be external (also called environmental or physical) factors—the factors outside the receiver that make hearing, or seeing, difficult, as well as many other kinds of distractions; physiological factors—the biological factors such as illness, fatigue, and so on; and psychological factors—prejudice, defensive feelings, stereotypes, reputations, biases… etc. Another type of noise, not mentioned in the book, is semantic noise which takes place when the sender uses a linguistic system (words, phrases, sentences, or large units of discourse) that the receiver cannot understand. The last element in this model is environment –referred to in classical theory as context—both the physical setting in which communication takes place and the personal experiences and cultural backgrounds that participants bring to a conversation (Alder & Rodman, 1982).

Because of its simplicity, the linear model does not effectively represent the way most communication operates. The transactional communication model, on the other hand, presents a more accurate picture in several respects (Alder & Rodman, 1982). Though it also incorporates the aforementioned six elements, this model shows that sending and receiving are simultaneous. Except for most old-media (mass communication) and, in some aspects, public speaking that involves a huge audience-organizational-, which flows in a one-way linear manner, most types of personal communication- interpersonal and group- are two-way exchanges. The discernible response verbal and nonverbal- of a receiver to a sender’s message is called feedback. These seven elements are the major elements of communication in classical theory; nonetheless, other authors and theorists view the psychological noise as a separate element named filter, others distinguish between environment and context, and others argue that the sender is neither the source nor the encoder and that the receiver is not the decoder, all of which shed light on the disagreement and non-consensus on the elements (apart from the essential ones) of communication.

Within the domain of ‘interhuman’ interaction, scholars distinguish several types of communication based on scope. Despite the common features they all share, each occurs in a distinct context and has its characteristics. Although the communication process commonly refers to the exchange of meanings between two or more individuals, Alder and Rodman (1982) consider intrapersonal communication to be the first type. This is the internal use of language or thoughts through self-talk, acts of imagination and visualization, and even re-call and memory (McLean, 2005) to communicate with one’s self. Intrapersonal communication can involve: the additional activities of speaking and hearing what one thinks, reads, or hears, planning, problem solving, internal conflict resolution, evaluations and judgments of self and others…etc. Communication expert Leonard Shedletsky examined intrapersonal communication through the eight basic components of the communication process (i.e., source, receiver, message, channel, feedback, environment, context, and noise/interference-including filter) as transactional, but all the interaction occurs within the individual (Shedletsky, 1989). Nevertheless, as Ruesch and Bateson argue, this type can be seen as a special case of interpersonal communication.

Dyadic/interpersonal communication –the second type- in simple terms, refers to the communication between one person and another (or others as long as the number of communicators does not turn it into group communication). This field is further subdivided into distinct areas of inquiry each of which brings together countless theories that either delve into one of the communication elements or highlight new aspects of communication. Regarding the third element ‘message’ for instance, besides the aforementioned SI and CMM, Delia’s (1995) constructivism explains how individuals with high cognitive complexity can take the role of the other, anticipate his/her response and tailor their message to be a person-centered-message; social exchange theory describes and predicts why people reveal certain messages (private information) about themselves to others; and Burgoon’s (1976) expectancy violations theory analyzes the relationship between the encoded messages and the personal distance (proxemics). Other theories focus more on relationship maintenance and development: Bergers’s (1975) uncertainty reductions theory addresses the process of how we seek information and knowledge about other people before the initial meeting; Altman and Dalmas’s (1973) social penetration theory sheds light on the role of self-disclosure in relationship development; Petronio’s (2002) communication privacy management theory further scrutinizes how individuals manage private information through boundaries; and Baxter’s (1996) relational dialectics explores the tension of opposing arguments within relationships…etc. Other theories, mainly Sherif’s (1965) social judgment theory and Cacioppo’s (1986) elaboration likelihood model inquire into how individuals are influenced, convinced, and persuaded through communication. In addition, Tannen (1990) through her Genderlect styles studies male-female conversations; Watzlawick (1967)-the interactional view- focuses on families; and Gils (1987) through Communication accommodation theory studies cross-cultural interactions between individuals and points to how they (individuals) adjust their style of speech to one another.

The third and fourth types are group communication and organizational communication.  When we meet together, face-to-face or online, in small –or medium-sized assemblies, associations, bands, clubs, cliques, and the like, we engage in group communication. As members of groups, we permit a part of our identity and goals to exist as part of a small collective, and the convergence of these parts of our individual lives gives the group a coherent meaning, boundary, purpose, structure, and norms (Foss, 2010). Group communication examines the formation, dynamics, and dissolution of small groups of people, explores the mutual influence that occurs between the individual and the group, and aims to develop practical knowledge about group behavior that can aid us as group participants and facilitators (Foss, 2010). Group communication theorists have sought to develop general propositions about group behavior, or at least context-dependent statements about how and why groups behave the way they do. By contrast, relatively few group communication theories have concerned themselves principally with the interpretation of action—i.e., the hermeneutic investigation of the subjective experience and meaning of group life (Foss, 2010). On the other hand, the larger, more permanent collection of people engage in organizational communication when they work collectively to achieve goals. Organizations operate for a variety of reasons: commercial (e.g. corporations). Nonprofit (e.g. charities and religious groups), political (e.g. governmental or political action groups), health-related (e.g. hospitals and doctors’ offices), and even recreational (e.g. sports leagues) Alder and Rodman (1982). The theories within this field have developed from narrow conduit models aimed solely at improving the bottom line of corporations to more diverse formulations that emphasize the importance of participation by multiple stakeholders in the development of public, private, and nonprofit institutions (Foss, 2010).

Public communication—the fifth type—occurs when a group becomes too large for all members to contribute. It happens specifically when a person stands in front of the audience-whether a crowd, congregation, legislative assembly, or jury…- and engages in dialogue to either inform (deliver a message), entertain, or –most likely- persuade. Other authors substitute this type with public rhetoric—studying the capacities of writers or speakers needed to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. The classical work in this field is Aristotle’s rhetoric which identifies three artistic proofs a speaker can create to persuade an audience: logos—appeal based on logic or logic—, ethos—appeal based on the character of the speaker—, and pathos—appeal based on emotions. Other common theories include Burke’s (1968) Dramatism which asserts that unless the speaker identifies with the audience, persuasion is not possible; and Fisher’s (1987) Narrative Paradigm which states that a person’s stories are effective when they appeal to a listener’s values (West & Turner, 2000).

Finally, mass communication studies the process of imparting, disseminating, and exchanging information (messages) through mass media outlets-radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, digital media, films, and the internet…- to large segments of the population beyond time and space, which generally stay far away from the sources of information. Mass communication is multi-disciplinary, incorporating elements of related fields such as strategic communication, health communication, political communication, integrated marketing communication, journalism, and more; it is chiefly concerned with how the mass communication messages persuade or otherwise affect the behavior, the attitude, opinion, or emotion of the people receiving the messages. That is to say, Scholars in the field study and research subjects such as how media is used and its corresponding effects; the processes behind media production; regulatory, ethical, and legal issues in mass communication; mass media theory; and related cultural and gender issues.

There are countless theories in this field alone: for instance, Hall’s (1989) Cultural Studies demonstrate the role TV discourse plays in indoctrinating people with certain semiotic meanings- created by people in positions of power through encoded messages- to manufacture consent for dominant ideologies and preserve the status quo (Griffin, 1996), and his encoding/decoding model which proposed that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their social contexts, and might be capable of changing the messages themselves through collective action; also, McLuhan in his Media Ecology who argues that the “medium is the message” bridging the gap between the two classical elements ‘message’ and ‘channel’. Katz’s (1994) Uses and Grats explains how people use the media for their own needs and thus concludes that, unlike the prior belief that audiences were passive targets waiting to be hit by a magic bullet (the media message) that would affect everyone in the same way, the audience decide which media they want to use and what effects they want the media to have (Griffin, 1996). Gerbner’s (1998) Cultivation analysis investigates the relationship between exposure to television and the beliefs and attitudes audiences develop about the world. McComb and Shaw (1972) in their Agenda-Setting Theory describe the ability of the news media to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda.

Human communication was initiated with the origin of speech. It started with the early human beings who used primitive forms of spoken language (arbitrary auditory signs with assigned meanings) to exchange ideas with each other. After that, as an attempt to convey messages to other people, symbols were developed; petroglyphs—carving into a rock surface- using pictographs, logographs, and ideographs were forms of proto-writing through which ideas were transmitted through drawing. Later on, more sophisticated writing systems which enabled us to note down messages in papers, scripts, and books and transmit them beyond time and space were developed. However, it was not until the invention of the printing press in the 14th century, and the telegraph, radio, and television in the 19th century that we started to see real changes in the way we communicate with each other; this was the beginning of mass communication. People at the time might have thought that it was the apex of what humanity could reach in the field of communication but the digitization-converting data (texts, pictures, sounds) to a digital form- and computerization -controlling, storing, and processing of these data using electronic computers-of old forms of media as well as the application of the internet in the dissemination of such messages announced the aberration of a new age of communication— New Media. Online newspapers, social media, computer games, websites, and other Web 2.0 platforms that enable user-generated content all have changed the traditional one-way communication of mass media into a two-way communication by which everyone gets to interact and communicate with everyone whenever and wherever he/she wants and on whatever device he/she has.

The effects of these technological advancements have not been limited to mass communication alone but also to other types of communication. One example is the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a second channel of communication either as complementary or –in some cases- as a substitution for face-to-face communication. CMC is an umbrella term that encompasses various forms of human communication through networked computers, which can be synchronous or asynchronous and involve one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many exchanges of text, audio, and/or video messages. Scholars who studied new electronic media have already offered a variety of theories to explain the inherent differences between CMC and face-to-face communication (Griffin, 1996). For example, social presence theory suggests that text-based messages deprive CMC users of the sense that other warm bodies are jointly involved in the interaction. Similarly, media richness theory classifies each communication channel according to the complexity of the messages it can handle efficiently. The theory suggests that face-to-face communication provides a rich mix of verbal and nonverbal cue systems that can convey highly nuanced emotions, and even double meanings; by contrast, the limited bandwidth of CMC makes it rather lean—appropriate for transacting everyday business, but not for negotiating social relations (Griffin, 1996). On the other hand, Walther through his social information processing theory affirms that online interpersonal relationships can still demonstrate the same or even greater relational dimensions and qualities (intimacy) as traditional face-to-face relationships.

Yet, most of these theories were presented in the nineties when CMC solely referred to the exchange of online texts and emails. Nowadays, as modern social media has incorporated advanced video calling technologies that allow users to exchange audio-visual messages instantaneously,  social media does fulfill the theory’s (media richness theory) four criteria—capacity to include personal focus, immediacy of feedback, conveyance of multiple cues, and variety of language carried— which render it one of the richest mediums of communication in contemporary society. In addition, because of this adoption of video calling technologies, a person might also argue that modern social media has a high level of social presence (social presence theory by Short and Williams (1976)) as it offers its users a high degree of awareness of each other. Furthermore, face-to-face communication has also been described as less preferable to mediated communication in some situations, particularly where time and geographical distance are an issue.

Regarding the functions of communication, Alder and Rodman (1982) state four needs communication helps us satisfy and fulfill: physical needs— the needs that keep our bodies and minds functioning. Communication which we most often associate with our brain, mouth, eyes, and ears, actually has many more connections to and effects on our physical body and well-being. People who feel socially isolated typically experience abnormally high levels of pain, depression, and fatigue; identity needs—communication helps us build and maintain our self-concept. We form an understanding of who we are based on how other people communicate with us and how we process that communication intrapersonally; social needs—communication provides a vital link with others. All people need emotional and interpersonal relationships with other people (romantic relationships, friendships, and family…); and practical needs—communication helps us ‘get things done with words’ in our day-to-day lives and achieve short- and long-term goals.

Still, the authors assert that to fully meet these needs, communication competence is required. Communication competence refers to the knowledge of effective and appropriate communication patterns and the ability to use and adapt that knowledge in various contexts (Cooley & Roach, 1984). Although scholars are still working to clarify the nature of communication competence, most would agree that effective communication involves achieving one’s goals in a manner that, ideally, maintains or enhances the relationship in which it occurs (Alder & Rodman, 1982). This definition suggests several important characteristics of communication competence: the ability to choose the most appropriate behavior, the skill at performing behaviors, the ability to construct variety of frameworks for viewing an issue (cognitive complexity), paying close attention to one’s behavior and using these observations to shape the way one behaves (self-monitoring), attentive listening, commitment to the relationship, selection of the most appropriate medium of communication, identifying and managing misunderstanding, being open-minded to other people’s points of view…etc.

In conclusion, the authors end the chapter by clarifying some misconceptions about communication. According to them, recognizing these misconceptions is crucial not only because they ought to be avoided but also because following them can lead to unbidden troubles. Firstly, communication does not always require complete understanding. Although some understanding is necessary for us to comprehend one another’s thoughts, there are some types of communication in which understanding as we usually conceive it isn’t the primary goal (e.g. social rituals, attempts to influence and persuade others, deliberate ambiguity, and deception, coordinated action, and the like). Besides, communication is not always a good thing: like many other instruments, communication is neither good nor bad in itself, rather, its value comes from the way it is used; it can be a tool for expressing warm feelings and useful facts, but under different circumstances, the same words and actions can cause both physical and emotional pain (Alder & Rodman, 1982). Thirdly, Meanings rest in people, not words (as mentioned before in De Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign). Also, communication–unlike most people think-  is not simple. Lastly, more communication is not always better—there are situations when too much communication is ill-advised.

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Experimental research (ER) is a type of research designed to test hypotheses under controlled conditions using experimental methods. In this type of research, one or more independent variables (IV) are manipulated by the researcher (as treatments), subjects are randomly chosen and assigned to different treatment levels, and the results of the treatments on the dependent variables (DV) are observed to examine a cause-effect relationship between the two variables.

ER has been defined in various ways, but there are several obligatory features that all definitions share in common. First, it involves a DV and an IV. A variable, as the term itself suggests, is anything that does not remain constant; it can be defined as an attribute of a person, a piece of text, or an object that “varies” from person to person, text to text, object to object, or from time to time (Lazaraton, 1991). To understand how the variables in a study relate to one another, researchers first identify their functions and label them as dependent or independent (Lazaraton, 1991). The IV refers to the variable that the experimenter expects to influence the other variable—the dependent variable. After completing experimental research, a correlation between the two variables being studied is either supported or rejected. Researchers conclude this correlation by manipulating the IV (the treatment) in one group (the experimental group) and keeping it constant in another group (the control group); this way, any change in the DV can be attributed to the IV. Still, before examining this cause-effect relationship, the researcher first needs to completely eliminate all other sources of variation or influence (confounding variables), randomly select subjects from the population (random sampling), and- again-randomly assign these subjects to different comparison groups (random assignment).

There are three types of ER determined by the way the researcher assigns subjects to different conditions and groups. True experimental research—the first type—is the most accurate type of experimental design and may be carried out with or without a pretest on at least two randomly assigned groups. It can be classified into three designs: the posttest-only design in which the subjects of the two groups (experimental and control) are observed and post-tested after the experimental group (EG) receives the treatment, then a conclusion is drawn from the difference between these groups; the pretest-posttest design which involves pre-testing and post-testing measurements in both groups before and after the treatment of the EG; the Solomon four-group design which combines the previous two designs. The second type of ER—quasi-experimental research—is used in settings where randomization is difficult or impossible (most frequently in applied research). This type allows more control over IV(s) and involves manipulation but lacks randomness in subject selection. The third—the non-experimental research allows the least amount of control because they deal with phenomena occurring in natural environment. This type tries to determine correlations among variables without manipulating them (Ball, 2019), and it can be further classified into descriptive/exploratory survey studies and inter-relationship/difference studies (Ball, 2019).

The credibility of the ER is evaluated in terms of two criteria: the research must be both reliable and valid. Reliability refers to the consistency of results, and it can be estimated by comparing different versions of the same measurement across time- variation in measurements of the same person on the same test on different occasions but under identical conditions (test-retest reliability); across researchers- variation in measurement across different raters or observers (interrater reliability); across items- variation in measurements from different items of a test that are designed to measure the same thing (internal consistency reliability); and across methods- variation in measurements obtained by different methods or instruments (intermethod/parallel forms reliability).

Validity on the other hand corresponds to truthfulness or appropriateness; research that satisfies this requirement will yield results that are comparable to similar samples and will eventually lead to interpretations that can be applied to similar populations or situations (Ball, 2019). Researchers assess the validity of a study in two ways. The first one is the test validity and it includes questions about face validity (do the items of a test appear to measure what the study claims to measure), construct validity (do the items measure the concept they intend to measure), content validity (are the items fully representative of the concept being measured), and criterion validity (do the results of a test correspond to other valid measures of the same concept). Besides, the validity of a study is also assessed through experimental validity which is concerned with the procedure itself and interpretation of results, (Ball, 2019). It is split into two types: internal validity and external validity. The former refers to the degree of confidence that the causal relationship being tested is trustworthy and not influenced by other factors or variables; the threats that jeopardize this type of validity include history, maturation, instrumentation, attrition (mortality), diffusion, and others. The latter—external validity—refers to the extent to which results from a study can be applied (generalized) to other situations, groups or events.

In conclusion, despite its numerous advantages- straightforward determination of causal relationships, possibility of verifying results through repeatability, and the opportunity to create conditions that are not easily observed in natural settings (Ball, 2019); ER, like any other research design, has its limitations. These include its unnaturalness, ethical considerations, difficulty of generalization, and impracticality to all types of research problems (Ball, 2019).

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References:

Corey, M. Stephen (1953). Action Research to Improve School Practices. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Fraenkel, J. R., Wallen, N. E., & Hyun, H. H. (2011). How to Design and Evaluate Research in Education. 8th edition. Boston: McGraw – Hill.

Henson, K. T. (1996). Teachers as Researchers. In J. Sikula (ED.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. New York: Macmillan.

Lewin, Kurt (1946). Action Research and Minority Problems. Journal of Social Issues.

Sagor, R. (2004). The Action Research Guidebook: A Four Step Process For Educators and School Teams. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Conflict is a characteristic of modern society. Whether interstate or intra-state, political or social, physical or “cold”, it remains a major factor of human suffering across a large number of places around the world. Since cognizing such conflicts is necessarily achieved through mass media, and since how something is represented inextricably affects how the thing is perceived, mass media’s coverage of conflict can either increase or resolve it. Media’s contribution in today’s conflict is remarkable to the extent that they determine which conflicts are given the salience of importance and in which fields of meaning these conflicts are represented, which subsequently determines how individuals interpret such conflicts.

Understanding media’s role in conflict, however, calls for more than one reductionist hypodermic needle model, solely emphasizing how media producers inject passive consumers with ideas and attitudes to hold regarding particular conflicts. Instead, scholars and researchers bring together different perspectives and theoretical frameworks from Media Studies, Cultural Studies, political science, and communication theory, “each help sensitize us to important dimensions of mediatized conflict. But each exhibits deficiencies and blind-spots that limit our field of vision and capacity to engage with the multidimensional complexities involved” (Cottle, 2006).

Cottle (2006) argues that current research practice and the theorization of media and conflicts is directed by three overarching paradigms: the manufacturing consent paradigm; media contest paradigm; and media culture paradigm. These paradigms “condition the kinds of questions asked, the conceptual and the theoretical frameworks guiding research, the methodological approaches deployed, the epistemological assumptions made about what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and the role of political values and commitments in academic enquiry” (p.13).

The manufacturing consent paradigm, manifested in Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, expose the subtle, hidden power of media as (in Althusser’s words) an ideological state apparatus functioning to disseminate certain ideologies through certain discourses with the ultimate goal of “positioning or interpellating subjects within such ideologies (Althusser, 1971), manipulating them (the subjects), and persuading (not convincing) them to unquestionably accept such ideologies as commonsense. Though Chomsky’s work is more concerned with (the ideology of) capitalism, it illustrates the foregoing paradigm by considering media as operating through five filters: ownership, advertising, media elite (official sources), flak, and the common enemy.

Within media contest paradigm, media discourse is scrutinized under the frameworks of critical theory, and it is concerned with contest and contention within media representations. Media are typically approached as sites of powered struggle and unequal contestation, rather than as a foregone ideological conclusion or as a mouthpiece for dominant interests (Cottle, 2006).

Though the third paradigm, media culture paradigm, is also associated with some of the aforementioned concepts, it draws from research within the field of Cultural Studies, considering media as part and parcel of everyday life and as inextricably fused with late modern forms of existence. As Kellner (1995) puts it, “media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, sharing political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities.

While these perspectives do indeed provide researchers with solid, diverse, and multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks, with the help of which media discourse is analyzed, it is not to neglect other related theories -e.g., McComb and Shaw’s (1972) agenda setting theory which can explain why some conflicts are more salient than others; Priming and Framing which can explain how the adopted discourse influences its interpretation; Cultivation theory; Uses and Gratifications theory; etc., to better deconstruct the complex media discourse related to world conflicts and construct the hidden ideologies behind it.

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Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology andideological state apparatuses. In L. Althusser (Ed.), Lenin and philosophy and other essays. NewYork: Monthly Review Press.

Cottle, Simon (2006), Mediatized Conflict:Developments in Media and Conflict Studies,

Open University Press.

Entman, M. Robert (1993). Framing :Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication.

Keller, D. (1995). Mediacommunication vs. Cultural Studies : Overcoming the divide. Communication Theory 5(2):162 – 177.

McCombs, Maxwell and Shaw, Donald (1972).The Agenda-Setting Function of the Mass Media. Public Opinion Quarterly.

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