Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature

Preferences of ESL Teachers and Student Reactions to Corrective Feedback: A Study at Chittagong University, Bangladesh

K. M. Jubair Uddin — 2025-09-26

This mixed-methods study examined ESL teacher preference in corrective feedback strategy and students' reaction towards the feedback demands at Chittagong University, Bangladesh, to address the gap in comprehending the teacher-student interaction during feedback. The data was gathered by means of surveys and focus groups among teachers and students to examine the preferences of the feedback strategy and responses of learners. The study found that the teacher's preferences were highly positive towards the use of an indirect feedback strategy, especially recasting and clarification requests. There was a high alignment related to teacher preferences to the actual classroom practice. The students expressed highly positive responses to the corrective feedback of complex adaptive mechanisms and high receptivity. Teachers managed to use the strategies of their choice even with systematic obstacles such as limited time and large classes. The results disprove the presuppositions regarding implementation differences in language teaching and affirm that good corrective feedback entails compatibility between teacher preparation, student receptivity, and institutional support but cannot be applied universally.

The Impact of Vocabulary Exposure on Students' Ability to Write Cohesively Using Appropriate Lexical Devices: A Discourse Analysis Study

Shebli Y. Idham — 2025-09-30

Numerous studies have demonstrated that lexical cohesion devices are crucial in achieving cohesion within written texts. However, many EFL students often struggle to use these devices effectively, resulting in a lack of cohesion in their writing. A quasi-experimental design was implemented in a classroom to tackle this challenge. The study focused on vocabulary exercises to assess their impact on students' ability to produce cohesive essays that incorporate relevant lexical devices. It involved 30 EFL participants who participated in a structured intervention featuring targeted vocabulary activities designed to enhance their awareness and application of lexical cohesion. Pre-tests were conducted to evaluate the students' initial writing skills before the exercises, followed by post-tests to measure any improvements in their performance after the intervention period. Subsequently, a quantitative method was used to analyze the data, aligning perfectly with the study's primary objective of determining the intervention’s effectiveness. The essays created by participants underwent careful analysis, focusing on the frequency and percentage of lexical cohesive devices utilized. The results indicated a significant enhancement in using these devices in the post-test essays compared to the pre-intervention assessments. These findings prove that the vocabulary-focused intervention had a statistically significant positive effect on students' writing performance. This highlights the vital role of lexical cohesive devices in fostering cohesion in writing and confirms the efficacy of targeted vocabulary instruction in improving EFL students' writing skills. Such insights are invaluable for educators aiming to enhance academic writing among EFL learners, reinforcing the ongoing need to prioritize the teaching of cohesive writing strategies within language curricula.

The Wall of Emotion: Imagery Transmission from East to West in Ezra Pound's Translations

Liyao Zhao — 2025-10-22

When poetry travels across cultures, misunderstanding and mistranslation are almost inevitable due to differences in language, historical context, and cultural traditions. Yet, literary translation simultaneously facilitates the circulation, development, and renewal of culture. Ezra Pound, as both a distinguished poet and translator, assimilated elements from Japanese haiku and classical Chinese poetry to create unprecedented poetic imagery within modernist literature. On the one hand, he rendered a wide range of Chinese texts, including The Book of Songs and poems by Li Bai and Wang Wei. In traditional Chinese discourse, writing emphasizes the expression of “implication”, whereas translation must not only capture textual meaning but also anticipate the reception of unseen readers. On the other hand, Pound transformed poetic images into forms familiar to his cultural environment, thereby reshaping their resonance in English. Focusing on Pound’s translation of terms such as “city”, “wall” and “corner” in Li Bai’s poetry, this paper examines how imagery is transformed and reinterpreted in the process of cross-cultural communication.

From Vorticism to Fascism: An Interplay of Wyndham Lewis’s Aesthetic Sense of Modernism under Fascism

Mohsen Gholami — 2025-10-22

The present paper examines Wyndham Lewis’s pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of modernist aesthetics, particularly through his involvement with the Vorticist movement, and his later alignment with fascist ideas to amalgamate the relationship between art, politics, and ideology under Fascism. Exploring Wyndham Lewis's aesthetic sense of modernism under fascism presents a nuanced and complex narrative that intersects with both artistic innovation and political ideology. Despite his modernist roots, Lewis's aesthetic sense not only underwent a notable shift towards alignment with fascist ideology during the interwar period, but also evolved to accommodate the regime's ideological agenda, and also Fascism, with its emphasis on order, discipline, and national unity, appealed to Lewis as a potential antidote to what he perceived as the chaos and decadence of modern society. While still rooted in modernist principles, Lewis’s work increasingly reflected themes of nationalism, militarism, and authoritarianism, aligning with fascist propaganda and the glorification of the state. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that Lewis's incorporation of his aesthetic sense under fascism was not a wholesale abandonment of modernism but rather a synthesis of modernist techniques with fascist motifs and imagery. To this end, the present paper investigates Wyndham Lewis's aesthetic sense of modernism under fascism as a complex interplay between artistic innovation and political ideology. While Lewis's alignment with fascism marked a departure from his modernist roots, it also underscored the ways in which artistic expression can be influenced by broader social and political forces, raising questions about the relationship between art, ideology, and power.

Tactics of the Excluded: Barabas, Shylock, and the Illusion of Social Mobility

Inshal Uroos — 2025-11-06

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Barabas in The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare who seek to achieve a social mobility in the orders that assign a status of outsiders to them being Christian dominated. Despite both having an extensive capital of the economic type, neither can be transformed into the symbolic capital or social legitimacy, since exclusion is enforced systematically in terms of religious identity. Taking its point of departure in the works of Pierre Bourdieu (capital) and Michel de Certeau (tactics vs. strategies), the discussion compares the highly improvisational and generally destructive actions of Barabas and the largely institution-facing appeals of Shylock. Barabas welcomes the opportunities in periphery, making use of deceit and vengeance; Shylock asserts his right according to the contract, only to be shown that even law is structured according to hegemonic ideology. Close readings of their texts reveal how their narrative arcs mobilize early modern anxieties of money, citizenship and order, wealth-without-status foments volatility, and procedural belief proves ineffective when rules determine who can address the world as an authentic speaker. This paper holds that the two plays explore the boundaries of the promise of meritocracy when it is part of an exclusive system. When convertible symbolic capital does not exist no tactics or strategies are able to provide durable status, and instead both implode under the pressures of the system, which congeals identity and patrols the borders of power.

An Animal Reading of Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Mirroring, Transforming and Witnessing

Huan Xiaoyu — 2025-11-06

This essay approaches Toni Morrison’s Jazz through the lens of animal studies to examine how both nonhuman agency and human animalization shape the novel’s vision of relation. It argues that animal figures are woven into the text’s emotional, social, and memorial fabric, revealing how the boundaries between species sustain and unsettle human meaning. The parrot’s fractured refrain, “I love you,” and the rooftop bird’s responsive flight render intimacy as echo and persistence rather than possession, opening a form of relation grounded in vulnerability and repetition. The narrative’s focus on Wild and Joe exposes identity as a process negotiated at the threshold of the human and the animal, where language, desire, and social recognition falter. While he recurring red-winged blackbirds serve as witnesses that carry grief into collective memory, suggesting an ethics of remembrance sustained across species. Drawing on Haraway’s notions about companion species, Derrida’s definition of the animot and Wolfe’s redefinition of the human–animal divide, the essay contends that Jazz transforms animal presence into a mode of thought: it imagines relation as interspecies and ongoing, where intimacy, identity, and memory endure through shared acts of response and care.