Like the moon that shines through a dark night, Like a river full, its current bright, Like a springtime dressed in blooming grace — So would your mother walk this place.
She labors day and night, no rest, Wishing not for herself, but for her child the best. Hiding her greying hair with care, Still walking proud, with love to spare.
If only you knew, the heart she hides, The tears she swallows, the dreams she bides… She walks not for herself, but for you — Your mother, selfless, pure, and true.
Sevinch Kuvvatova was born on October 19, 2009, in the Qorako‘l district of Bukhara region. She is currently a 10th-grade student at School No. 13 in her district.
1. Tell us about yourself. How did you start writing poetry?
I was born in Ukraine, in the city of Sumy. Many years later, fate brought me to the city of Kazan. During my school years, I started a diary—it was very fashionable at the time—and began writing down my innermost thoughts in it, for some reason, in verse. Over time, independent works began to appear. And on the insistence of my classmates, I sent my poems to the chief editor of the youth magazine “Yunost” (Youth), Andrey Dementyev. He replied to me personally and recommended that I join a literary association, which I did. So, unexpectedly for me, my path into serious literature began.
2. What message do you want to convey with your poetry?
The message is one: to live in love and peace. Only through repentance can peace come, but it is a very long and thorny road. And only those who walk it can master it.
3. Do you believe that the new generation reads and is interested in literature?
Of course, I believe. How can one create without faith? Every book, every work needs its own thoughtful reader.
And in poetry?
I am the creator and director of the International Music and Poetry Festival “Handshake of Republics” (RR-Fest), the International RR-Fest Telebridge, the International Youth Music and Poetry Competition-Festival “On the Fairytale Shore of the Kazanka River” based on the works of Olga Levadnaya, the International Forum-Battle “Tournament of Poets and AI. RR-Fest”, the organizer of the International Scientific and Creative Seminar “Quantum Transition: Artificial Intelligence in Education, Art, and Medicine. RR-Fest”, and the coordinator of the International Literary Festival in Russia “Woman in Literature” (Mexico). A great many young people participate in all these projects. I can state with full responsibility that young people engage in new projects with great enthusiasm. The Tournament of Poets and AI showed amazing results. We can admire and even be proud of our youth.
4. How do you feel when you see your poems published on several foreign websites?
First and foremost, a great sense of responsibility. In these far-from-easy times, I represent Russian culture. I feel a thrill that, despite everything, the mystery of poetry’s birth does not cease… And I am an inseparable part of this miracle!
5. Would you like to share with our readers a phrase that changed your life?
“Live the life of a true Poet!” — that’s what my teacher, the outstanding poet of Tatar and Russian literature, Rustem Kutuy, once told me.
6. What are your future plans?
I have many plans. But I also have dreams: to publish the books “On the Edge of Night” in Russian, English, and Spanish, and “I Sing of the Secret” in Russian, English, and Chinese, as a token of gratitude to my faithful poet friends who lovingly translated my poems. I very much hope that my poems will be translated into Greek someday!
Thank you very much! 🙏
EVA Petropoulou Lianou 🇬🇷
Olga Levadnaya, Russian visionary poet, world-famous public figure, Honored Worker of Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan, laureate of more than 20 republican, all-Russian, international literary awards, member of republican, Russian and international literary unions, author of 17 books of poetry and prose published in Russian, English, Tatar, Turkish, translated into 14 languages, author of more than 500 publications in magazines, anthologies in Russia and abroad, participant in numerous festivals, conferences, readings, member of the Assembly of the Peoples of the World, Ambassador of Peace, European Poetry, poetry of International Literature ACC Shanghai Huifeng (Shanghai, Huifeng), Department of Arts and Cultures.
Plenipotentiary Representative for Culture in Russia of the Republic of Birland (Africa), literary consultant of the Academy of Literature, Science, Technology of Shanxi, the Zhongshan Poets’ Community (China), honorary founding member of the World Day of K. Cavafy (Greece, Egypt), coordinator of the International Literary Festival in Russia “Woman in Literature” (Mexico), creator and director of the International Music and Poetry Festival “Handshake of the Republics”, the Forum-Battle “Tournament of Poets and AI. RR”, the International TeleBridge RR, the International Youth Music and Poetry Competition-Festival “On the Fairytale Shore of Kazanka” based on the works of Olga Levadnaya, artistic director of the Kazan Poetic Theater “Dialogue”.
And eventually to North America and South America,
Australia and Antarctica…
We are ALL from the MOTHERLand of AFRICA!
THAT is truth!
I am that TRUTH!
But you choose NOT to see me!
So you don’t get to define me based on a falsity!
Afro-Ancestral DNA already told you OUR story…
So Down with your Pseudo ideology of Supremacy!
I refuse to give you the soot!
For in the words of Gordon Lightfoot:
“I will never be set free as long as I’m the ghost you can’t see…”
Jacques Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey Towards Understanding Your Authentic Self
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc… He has been published in prestigious publications such as Spirit of Change Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Litterateur Redefining World anthologies out of India, Poets Reading the News, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at: http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.–
Abstract: This article discusses the issues of speech culture and communicative competence in English. Speech culture is defined as the combination of correctness, clarity, politeness, and expressiveness in communication.
Cultural competence in ESL refers to the ability to understand, communicate with, and effectively interact with people across cultures. It involves being aware of one’s own world view, developing positive attitudes towards cultural differences, and gaining knowledge of different cultural practices and world views. Language and culture are inextricably linked. The nuances, idioms, and colloquialisms of a language can provide insights into its subtleties and complexities, which are crucial for effective communication.
Today’s increasing globalization and English use as a global language, people’s need of teaching and learning English is really important. Education around the world prioritizes English as a mandatory subject in schools and universities. Most parents, for example, want their children to learn and communicate in English. These parents would be proud if their children were competent and excellent in English. From the mid to late 1970 to nowadays, experts introduced and developed kinds of methods and approaches in teaching and learning English. Some of them are Grammar-Translation, Direct Method, and Audiolingualism.
These methods mainly focused on grammatical knowledge and rules, translation, and repetition. The purpose of these classical methods was to reinforce constant repetition and positive reinforcement through continuous process of drills and practices. Students’ accuracy was the main purpose of these methods. However, other experts criticized the previous methods as focusing solely on grammatical competence and repetition through positive reinforcement. Demonstrating a clear shift of emphasis among scholars who work on language, Hymes (1972) coined and defined the term communicative competence as the knowledge of both the rules of grammar and the rules of language use appropriate to a given context.
As reported in Alptekin (2002) and Uso-Juan and Martinez-Flor (2008, 158), Hymes’s conceptualization of communicative competence has been further developed by several researchers who attempted to define the specific components of the model as grammatical competence (i.e. knowledge of the language code in a way that refers to Chomsky’s linguistic competence); sociolinguistic competence (i.e. knowledge of the sociocultural rules of use in a particular context); strategic competence (i.e. knowledge of how to use communication strategies to handle breakdowns in communication) and discourse competence (i.e. knowledge of achieving coherence and cohesion in a spoken or written text). Pragmatic competence is essentially included in this model under sociolinguistic competence, which Canale and Swain (1980, 30) described as ‘sociocultural rules of use’. Being grounded on this taxonomy, communicative competence was repeatedly divided into some lesser known sub-competences like physiological mechanisms (Bachman, 1990) and actional competences.
Following the emergence of the nation of intercultural communicative competence and its relations to (foreign language) education, many studies have been produced concerning different scopes and focal points. Questioning what makes a learner’s communicative competence in English and hypothesizing that it cannot be accomplished without having an orientation towards the other’s culture, Akalın (2004) examined with an intercultural eye the textbooks used in Turkey to teach English.
Based upon her findings, she suggests that textbooks for especially young learners should firstly be predicated on characters, pictures, illustrations, texts and subjects from Turkish and even local culture and move slowly to the target culture and to crosscultural experiences so that students would not feel inhibited and strange as we proceed from the simple to the more complex and from known to the unknown in any educational process. In order for this to happen, she proposes as a solution that large foreign publishing companies should communicate with each target nation’s English teachers and educationalists.
Emphasizing the fact that the objective of language learning is no longer defined in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence in a foreign language but rather in terms of intercultural competence, which is “the ability of a person to behave adequately in a flexible manner when confronted with the actions, the attitudes and the expectations of the representatives of foreign cultures” (Meyer, 1991, 138). Similarly, teachers are now expected not only to teach the foreign linguistic code but also to “contextualize that code against the socio-cultural background associated with the foreign language and to promote the acquisitions of intercultural communicative competence” (Castro, 1999, 92). Atay, Kurt, Çamlıbel, Kaşlıoğlu and Ersin (2009) investigated the opinions and attitudes of Turkish teachers of English on intercultural competence teaching to see how, and to what extent, these opinions and attitudes are reflected in their classroom applications.
In specific reference to and support of Alptekin (2002) based upon direct experience and observation from Japan, Samimy and Kobayashi (2004) strongly object to the current implementations of communicative English teaching in the country claiming that they were imposed upon with a top-down approach by political and bureaucratic authorities on the assumption that any idea that seems to work in the U.S. and the U.K. and/or EFL contexts should work equally well in countries like Japan and/or any ESL context.
While the Japanese education system like the one in Turkey is characterized by crowded classrooms and masses of students associating the study of English with the university entrance exams, which emphasizes grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension, the authors question how reasonable it is to recruit native speaker English teachers (which is a hot controversial issue at present in Turkey too) and force Japanese English teachers to fill students with Western values embedded in Communicative Language Teaching.
As a study with a fairly different perspective, Garcia and Biscu (2006) can be cited here. It is about the introduction of a new course called “Language Mediation” at the School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Bologna, which is a project to teach intercultural communicative competence through theatre. The idea emerged from the Council of Europe’s definition of “mediation” as a communicative activity of the language user/learner, thus the undergraduate interpreter/translator as well, in which s/he acts as an intermediary between interlocutors who are not able to understand each other. In pursuit of what constitute a language mediator’s competences and skills, the authors found that he/she, besides language competence, should also possess sociolinguistic, discursive, strategic and sociocultural competence (Oliveras, 2000, 24) and intercultural communicative competence (Rodrigo, 1999, 235) comprising verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication, intercultural awareness and the mastery of pragmatics, behavioral patterns and negotiation (Oliveras, 2000).
In this context, the authors were inspired by the belief that theatre is a means to achieve the awareness and knowledge necessary to experiment intercultural exchanges, since the re-expression of a dramatic text in a foreign language -in with other space and another time- leads to dialogue with the mental context of the other culture.
References:
1.Alred, G., & Byram, M. (2002). Becoming an intercultural mediator: A longitudinal study of residence abroad. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
2.Alptekin, C. (2002). Towards intercultural communicative competence in ELT. ELT Journal Oxford.
3.Atay, D., Kurt, G., Çamlıbel, Z., Kaşlıoğlu, Ö., & Ersin, P. (2009). The role of intercultural competence in foreign language teaching. Inonu University Journal of the Faculty of Education, Special Issue, Malatya.
4. Balboni, P. E. (1999). Parole comuni, culture diverse. Guida alla comunicazione interculturale. Venezia: Marsilio.
5.Ball, J. C., & Lau, M. P. (1966). The Chinese narcotic addict in the United States. Social Forces, Chapel Hill.
6.Byram.M. Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Great Britain: WBC Book Manufactures, Ltd.
Each time I look at the headlines, I see thick dark clouds condensing into a pool of vague bloody rain, with each drop piercing deeply into this world’s melanin. Altering its colours from green to purple, boring into the deep depths ocean of this spaceship.
This ocean I say, isn’t just a billion water drops, it is not even a thousand sea fully converged to form the Atlantic this accursed world has ever seen. It is the waters of original sin sinking into the skin of dry land.
This is to say our bodies has become a vessel of transmutation, decaying into a Tabernacle caving original sin, because grief lives in us. It becomes a synonymous hyperbole of who we are.
A pillar of broken stones shattered due to Earth’s rotation, colliding like a planet that chewed itself due its body has indeed become a mechanism of digestion. Breaking flames down into minute pieces of hatred.
This world has become a filament of dead songs, composed by the torn face of wind. Floating in fireballs that even the numbers in this world lacks the vocabulary to number.
She carries this world’s flesh, she nurtures them in her womb while she patiently awaits the rise of a bloody moon.
Only then can we know the true definition of pain, because metaphors itself cannot define it, poetry can only feel it using crooked lines.
But the truth can only be seen by telescoping into torture knowing its colour, its genetic material. Untill then this is reality in a fantasy of a broken world.
Anthony Chidi Uzoechi, an obsessed Sci-fi writer whose imagination Journeys beyond the heavens of creativity. He is a bonafide member of the Hill Top Creative Art Foundation Minna, a Short story writer, a Poet, Pen artist and a Theologian. He’s an Indigen of Imo State Nigeria. Asides studying and being a Shakespeare Anthony Chidi Uzoechi is an addictive studier, he studies anything significant that comes his way.
Just like how the universe is without bound in suspense, Anthony Journeys into unraveling the deep depth of creativity through writing.
