DR Saboor2015 PDF

Patron-in-Chief
Maj. Gen. (R) Zia Uddin Najam HI (M)

Rector, National University of Modern Languages
Patron
Brig. Azam Jamal
DG, National University of Modern Languages
Editor
Dr. Farheen Ahmed Hashmi
Assistant Professor, Quality Enhancement Cell,
National University of Modern Languages
Editorial Board
Dr. Carl Leggo Dr. Masood Ashraf Raja
Professor Associate Professor
Department of Language and Literacy Education, Department of English,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada College of Arts & Sciences,
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
Dr. Dawn Langley
Dean, General Education & Development Studies, Dr. Ryan Skinnell
Piedmont Community College, Roxboro, NC, USA Assistant Professor
Department of English,
Dr. John Gibbons College of Arts & Sciences,
Adjunct Professor University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics,
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Dr. Maria Staton
Assistant Professor
Dr. Bernhard Kelle Department of English,
Professor of Linguistics Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA
University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Dr. Claire Chambers
Dr. Steven Talmy Lecturer in Global Literature
Associate Professor Department of English and Related Literature,
Department of Language & Literacy Education, University of York, Heslington, York, UK
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Dr. Samina Qadir
Dr. James Giles Vice Chancellor
Professor Emeritus Fatima Jinnah Women University,
Department of English, Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA
Dr. Riaz Hassan
Dr. Haj Ross Former Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Professor AIR University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Department of Linguistics and Technical
Communication, College of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Nelofer Halai
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA Professor
Institute for Educational Development,
Dr. Robin Truth Goodman Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan
Professor
The English Department, Dr. Shahid Siddiqui
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA Vice Chancellor
Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Technical Assistance
Muhammad Nawaz
Computer Assistant, Quality Enhancement Cell, NUML
Vol 13 (II), December, 2015 ISSN 2222-5706
CONTENTS
Contents I
Editorial Board II
Contributors IV
Research Papers
Sajid Ahmad & Muhammad Asim Mahmood 1
Comparing Explicit Features of Pakistani Press Reportage with
British Press Reportage: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis
Jamil Asghar 32
The Power Politics of Translation: A Study of Translation-Ideology
Nexus
Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja 50

Relevance of Authentic Materials to the Attention Span of Adult
Learners in English Language Classes in Pakistan
Qaisar Khan, Nighat Sultana & Arab Naz 73

The Linguistic Representation of Gender Identities in Pakhtu
Proverbs
Copyright Statement 88
Disclaimer 89
Call for Papers 90
Subscription Form 91
I
Editorial Board
Patron-in-Chief
Maj. Gen. (R) Zia Uddin Najam HI (M)
Rector, National University of Modern Languages
Patron
Brig. Azam Jamal
DG, National University of Modern Languages
Editor
Assistant Professor, Quality Enhancement Cell,
National University of Modern Languages
Editorial Board
Dr. Carl Leggo
Professor
Department of Language and Literacy Education,
Dr. Dawn Langley
Dean
General Education & Development Studies,
Piedmont Community College, Roxboro, NC, USA
Dr. John Gibbons
Adjunct Professor
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics,
Monash University, Malbourne, Australia
Dr. Bernhard Kelle
Professor of Linguistics
University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Dr. Steven Talmy
Associate Professor
Department of Language & Literacy Education,
Dr. James Giles
Professor Emeritus
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA
Dr. Haj Ross
Professor
Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication,
II
College of Arts & Sciences,
Dr. Robin Truth Goodman
Professor
The English Department,
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Dr. Masood Ashraf Raja
Associate Professor
Dr. Ryan Skinnell
Assistant Professor
Dr. Maria Staton
Assistant Professor
Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA
Dr. Claire Chambers
Lecturer in Global Literature
Department of English and Related Literature,
University of York, Heslington, York, UK
Dr. Samina Qadir
Vice Chancellor
Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Dr. Riaz Hassan
Former Dean
Faculty of Social Sciences,
AIR University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Dr. Nelofer Halai
Professor
Institute for Educational Development,
Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan
Dr. Shahid Siddiqui
Vice Chancellor
Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad, Pakistan
III
Contributors
Sajid Ahmad (Main Author) is serving as Assistant Professor of English at
Government Postgraduate College Samundri, District Faisalabad. He is a
PhD English Linguistics scholar at Government College University
Faisalabad. His doctoral research work focuses on register variation in
Pakistani English and explores linguistic variation across press reportage in
Pakistani print media by compiling the first ever special purpose Pakistani
News Corpus. He has authored a number of research publications in
different national and international journals. He has also participated in
national and international conferences/workshops on Corpus Linguistics.
He is particularly interested in language variation studies, register
variation, Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Stylistics, and Critical Discourse
Analysis.
Email: prof.sajidahmad@gmail.com
Dr. Muhammad Asim Mahmood (Co-Author) is serving as Chairman,
Department of Applied Linguistics, Government College University
Faisalabad. His PhD is in the area of World Englishes. His doctoral research
is acclaimed to have been a pioneering work in the field of Corpus
Linguistics in Pakistan and includes compilation of first ever general
purpose corpora on Pakistani Written English. He has authored more than
sixty research articles in different esteemed national and international
journals. He has also presented and participated in many national and
international conferences and symposia. His research interests include
language variation studies, register variation, Genre Analysis, Corpus
Linguistics, Corpus-based and Corpus-dirven research work in Pakistani
English, and English Language Teaching.
Email: masimrai@gmail.com
Nexus
Dr. Jamil Asghar is currently working as Assistant Professor at the
Department of English, National University of Modern Languages,
Islamabad. He earned his PhD in English from National University of
Modern Languages. He also has master’s degrees in Philosophy and
Political Science. He holds a research fellowship in Linguistics from the
University of North Texas, USA. His teaching and research experience
stretches over fifteen years. He has presented papers at national and
international conferences and has contributed to various renowned
IV
research journals. His areas of interest include Postmodernism, Literary
Theory, Translation Studies, Philosophy of Education, and Postcolonial
Studies.
Email: jamilasgharjami@gmail.com
Dr. Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja is General Coordinator in English
Language Unit at Qassim University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He has a rich
and diversified experience of teaching English at different levels and at
various places like Army Burn Hall College, Abbotabad, Government
Gordon College, Rawalpindi, and National University of Modern Languages,
Islamabad. He has also worked as Assistant Professor at Islamabad Model
College for Boys, H-9 Islamabad. His research interests include
Psycholinguistics, Applied Linguistics, and issues related to Action Research
in ELT (EFL and ESL) domain.
Email: rajasaboor@hotmail.com
Proverbs
Dr. Qaisar Khan (Main Author) is working as Assistant Professor of English
in the Department of English, University of Malakand, Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa. He is also shouldering the responsibility of heading the
department. He has recently completed his PhD degree in English
Linguistics from National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. Dr.
Khan has published several research articles in national and international
journals. His areas of interest include language, gender, curriculum and
education. His recent research endeavors are to understand the working
and operation of madrassas (religious seminaries) and to facilitate English
Language Teaching reforms in their curriculum.
Email: kkaiserkhan@hotmail.com
Dr. Nighat Sultana (Co-Author) is Associate Professor in the Faculty of
Higher Studies, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad. She
obtained her PhD from the same university in 2007 in English. Having a
teaching experience of more than 27 years, she has been engaged in
research and supervision of postgraduate students. She has also been
active in streamlining the syllabus and facilitating research students as a
Graduate Advisor. Besides, she is also a member of PhD Board of Advisory
Committee at the university. Her areas of specialization are Linguistics,
Applied Linguistics, Language and Gender, and Critical Discourse Analysis.
Email: nighatashfaq@gmail.com
V
Dr. Arab Naz (Co-Author) is Associate Professor and Chairman of the
Department of Sociology and Social Work at University of Malakand,
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He completed his PhD from Quaid-e-Azam
University, Islamabad. As a research scholar, he has worked on gender
development and empowerment and has published several research
articles and has contributed to books at national and international level. As
a social scientist, he has facilitated several reputed organizations to
collaborate with the university in improving life standard and educational
prospects of women in Malakand Division that was the worst affected area
in the ongoing War on Terror.
Email: arab_naz@yahoo.com
VI
NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry Vol 13, (II), December, 2015 ISSN 2222-5706
Comparing Explicit Features of Pakistani Press Reportage

with British Press Reportage: A Multi-Dimensional
Analysis
Sajid Ahmad (Main Author)
Muhammad Asim Mahmood (Co-Author)
Abstract
Pakistani English being a non-native variety has its distinct
registers which exhibit variation at different levels of language. Previous
quantitative studies on Pakistani news register have emphasized the
unique linguistic characteristics of Pakistani news register on the basis of
individual linguistic features. These studies prove to be of limited value
due to their reliance on frequency of individual linguistic features,
unrepresentative data and lack of external comparisons. Biber (1988)
established the fact that register variation studies based upon individual
linguistic features instead of co-occurring features are subjective and can
be misleading in nature. He regards multi-dimensional analysis as the most
suitable alternative approach to investigating the linguistic variation which
is corpus-based, quantitative, empirical and comparative in nature. The
multi-dimensional (MD) approach lays emphasis on the co-occurrence of
linguistic features in register variation studies and highlights the fact that
individual linguistic features cannot reliably distinguish among registers.
The current study, being a pioneering research work, explores the
Pakistani press reportage register through multi-dimensional analysis. The
present research investigates sub-categories of Pakistani press reportage
by constructing a special purpose representative corpus of press reportage
in Pakistani print media. Pakistani News Corpus (PNS) has been divided
into four different categories of reportage and each category speaks for its
categorical presence in Pakistani print media. The present study compares
its results with British press reportage on Biber’s five textual dimensions
and explores the significant statistical linguistic differences between
Pakistani press reportage and British press reportage register. Findings of
the study reveal that Pakistani press reportage has been found highly
informational, narrative, explicit, non-abstract and least overt in
expression of persuasion/argumentation.
Keywords: Pakistani English, MD Analysis, register, press reportage
Introduction
The concept of language variation has necessitated analysis of
linguistic patterns across registers for the description of varieties of
1
English. Registers are defined by situational characteristics and therefore
termed as situationally defined varieties. Register variation is widely
considered to be intrinsic to all cultures. Trudgil (1999) being pioneer in
this field, studied variation in the English language and worked on different
dialects of England. He highlighted the fact that a certain part of concern
diverted from phonological, lexical and historical level towards syntactic
level which received less attention from all dialectologists. He also made
clear that English language was undergoing change: “The further you
travel, the more different dialects will be found and the reason is that
English, like all other languages is changing and the change starts from a
specific area and spreads to neighboring areas” (p. 7). It has also been
observed that the number of non-native speakers of English in comparison
with the native speakers of English has been on the rise over the years.
Crystal (1997, p. 54) aptly estimates the speakers of English in terms of
Inner Circle 320-380 million, Outer Circle 150-300 million, Expanding Circle
100-1000 million. The same fact has also been observed by many other
linguists. Kachru (1996) points out that “There are now at least four non-
native speakers of English for every native speaker” (p. 241). Certain
cultural and linguistic differences played their role in the evolution of
different varieties of English all over the world. These varieties were
labeled as “world Englishes.”
The term “world Englishes” was exhaustively explained by Kachru
and Smith (2008) who worked on it. They propounded the real idea of
pluricentricity behind the term which has spread all around the globe with
formal variations. “Englishes symbolize the functional and formal variation
in the language, and its international acculturation. The language now
belongs to those who use it as their first language and to those who use it
as an additional language” (Bolton, 2006, p. 241). The future of the World
Englishes will have to be seen whether these New Englishes could maintain
their status in the World or they get merged into the other native varieties.
Paradigm shift might continue and if this shift is bound to happen, the New
Englishes users should also adapt themselves to the rights as claimed by
the mother-tongue speakers. “I would argue that English as an
international language is not distributed, as a set of established encoded
forms, unchanged into different domains of use, but it is spread as a virtual
language” (Widdowson, 1994, pp. 139-40).
Pakistani English
Pakistani English being a non-native variety has its distinct
registers which exhibit variation at different levels of language. Certain
cultural and linguistic factors along with postcolonial scenario have given
birth to new varieties of English. In Pakistan, the English language has
established its status and has become a Lingua Franca. It has proved a
2
major link language and bridged the country with the whole world. The
English language is not only used for the official purposes but also
beneficially used in Islamic law and Sharia. Platt (1984) put forward four
basic criteria to declare any variety as new English. First, he highlighted the
fact that New English is to be preferred as a subject in the educational
institutions. New English should be taught as the mode of instructions
above all other native languages. Second, New English must have
developed as a non-native variety in the form of pidgin or creole. Third,
New English must be performing various internal functions of the country
and should be used in different departments of that country. For example,
official correspondence, legal proceedings, etc. It should perform the
function of a Lingua Franca. Fourth, it should be localized in the
pronunciation and intonation and form and expressions. English in
Pakistan meets all the four criteria and takes the title of New English.
English language came in the sub-continent when the English needed the
office staff for their work; therefore, they started the teaching of English
language in the 19th century. At present, the English Language is taught in
Pakistani educational arena as a compulsory subject up to graduation level.
English medium educational institutions are preferred and most of the
syllabus of all the subjects is set in English language.
Being a non-native variety, English language in Pakistan has
absorbed different kinds of words, structures, expressions from the native
languages. It exhibits many characteristics of its own norm different from
those of standard British English. These distinctive features signify
independent trend of the Pakistani English. As a non-native variety,
Pakistani English has been researched so far from different approaches.
The approach propounded by Kachru (1983) highlighted the tendencies of
using more complex structures in the South Asian Englishes which made
them overloaded in diction. It focused on the frequent use of interrogative
structures without even shifting the place of subject and verb. This
approach also explored the morpho-syntactic features of South Asian
Englishes.
The influence of Urdu language upon the language of newspapers
in a detailed form has been investigated by Baumgardner (1993). His
research put forward the fact that Pakistani English borrowed frequent
words from Urdu and the regional languages. It was highlighted that words
like atta (flour), baradri (clan), goonda (thug), kabbadi (a sport),
kachiabaadi (shanty town), mela (fair), wadera (Sindi landlord) are found
frequently in Pakistani English (p. 46). It was also proved that on lexical
level, the prefixes and suffixes were found to be very productive and
innovative in the Pakistani English (pp. 88-89). Words in edibles have been
concocted from Urdu and quite frequently being used in Pakistani English
3
e.g., Tandoori roti, naans, pekoras, samosas, chapatti, dal, kebab, pulao,
daal-chawal, roast, charga, tikkas, aaloo-chola, siri-pae, nihari, chutney,
etc. Baumgardner (1993, p. 90) also states the fact that wedding
celebrations are much prolonged in the Pakistani culture and words
related to these functions are much popular and very distinct and
frequently used in Pakistani English. Words like shaadi, dulha, dulhan,
mayun, dholki, luddi, mehndi, baraat, rukhsati, nikah, valima are quite
common. Baumgardner also highlights that Urdu nouns and adjectives are
quite popular in the Pakistani English and used in all the publishing
material in Pakistan on frequent basis.
Another important contribution is of Rahman (1990) who focused
on the phonology, lexis and grammar of the Pakistani English. His approach
highlighted some distinct morphological and syntactic features in the
Pakistani English and pointed out the use of progressive aspect with the
habitual and completed action frequently found in Pakistani English.
Many researchers tried to identify Pakistani English as an
independent variety. Talaat (2002) studied the form and functions of the
English language in Pakistan and pinpointed the impact of Urdu language
upon the English language in Pakistan. She studied text analysis to identify
the ongoing process of change in any non-native language like Pakistani
English. She took the investigation of study away from the item analysis to
text analysis to investigate the process of variation in a comprehensive
manner. She also investigated the form and functions of the English
language in Pakistan and put forward the impact of Urdu language upon
the English language in Pakistan.
Empirical approach towards investigating Pakistani English as an
independent variety which focused on the deviant features of Pakistani
English through corpus-based studies was introduced by Mahmood, A.
(2009) and Mahmood, R. (2009). Mahmood, R. (2009) studied the lexico-
grammatical aspects of the nouns and noun phrases in Pakistani English.
The different patterns of the nouns and noun phrases were studied in
comparison with the British and American Corpus. Mahmood, R. (2009)
also worked on the Collocations, Colligation (grammatical Collocation) and
word-grammar in Pakistani English.
Mahmood, A. (2009) worked on different trends in the Pakistani
English through a corpus-based study and verified the authenticity of
claims made by previous researchers working on Pakistani English.
Majority of exact quoted examples by Talaat (2002), Baumgardner (1993)
and Rahman (1990) were studied and differences were analyzed. Further
investigations were carried on Verb-particles; Verb-complementation,
adverbs, lexical words, and differences were analyzed. 300 lexical words
4
were also studied being chosen on the gender and culture-specific basis
and their pattern of use was observed in the available Pakistani English
Corpus and a comparison was made with the different patterns of use in
Standard British English.
Register Variation
The quantitative sociolinguistics has found variation in language in
different forms: “Variation associated with constraints in the linguistic
environment, variation associated with the social or demographic
characteristics of speakers, and variation associated with situations of use”
(Biber, 1995, p. 316). Other linguists have stressed upon the importance of
register variation studies. Ure (1982) also highlighted the importance of
register variation by saying “Each language community has its own system
of registers, corresponding to the range of activities in which its members
normally engage” (p. 5).
Registers differ from social dialects precisely because they serve
different purposes, topics, and situations. They naturally differ in content
as well as in form. Speakers do not typically "say the same thing" in
conversation as in lectures, reports, academic papers, and complimentary
messages. Thus, variation across registers includes different linguistic
features, rather than semantically neutral variants of a single feature. In
register studies, the linguistic differences are focused and elaborated. The
basic working idea found in sociolinguistic study of register variation is “a
communication situation that recurs regularly in a society (in terms of
participants, setting, communicative functions, and so forth) will tend over
time to develop identifying markers of language structure and language
use, different from the language of other communication situations”
(Biber, 1994, p. 48).
Register analysis always includes three basic features i.e., the
situational background, the linguistic features, and the functional
relationship between situational background and the linguistic features.
Registers are marked with specific lexical and grammatical features and all
these grammatical features are seen in the situational context in which all
these registers are used and described. All these linguistic features in
registers exhibit functional content in general: “Linguistic features are
always functional when considered from a register perspective. That is,
linguistic features tend to occur in a register because they are particularly
well-suited to the purposes and situational context of the register” (Biber
& Conrad, 2009). Language used in a register belongs to different contexts,
different circumstances and motives. Therefore, the register differences
are also important like the sociolinguistic based study of a non-native
variety. “The register perspective differs from the traditional sociolinguistic
5
studies in both regards: it describes the patterns of language use in all
spoken registers, and it describes patterns of language use in terms of the
full inventory of Lexico-grammatical characteristics” (Biber, 2009, p. 825).
Pakistani English being a non-native variety has its distinct registers which
exhibit variation at different levels of language. Register variation is widely
considered to be intrinsic to all cultures. Ferguson (1983, p. 154)
emphasized the fact that “register variation in which language structure
varies in accordance with the occasions of use, is all-pervasive in human
language.” Hymes (1984, p. 44) argues that the analysis of register
variation i.e. “Verbal repertoire” in his terms - should become the major
focus of research within linguistics, “The abilities of individuals and the
composite abilities of communities cannot be understood except by
making Verbal repertoire, not language, the central scientific notion.” The
present study also explores linguistic variation in a register of Pakistani
English and investigates the following research question:
Q. How far is the language of press reportage register in Pakistani print
media different from British press reportage register analyzed in Biber’s
1988 study?
Need of Multi-Dimensional Analysis for Register Variation Studies
The present research uses multi-dimensional (MD) approach for
the register analysis of press reportage in Pakistani print media following
the register variation model presented by Douglas Biber (1998) in his
seminal work Variation across Speech and Writing. MD analysis was
actually developed to indicate the prominent linguistic co-occurrence
patterns in a language in an empirical manner. The basic idea of MD
approach lies in the fact that individual linguistic features cannot
distinguish among registers; rather, sets of co-occurring features work
together towards getting a shared a communicative goal. These are
marked in MD analysis as dimensions. The primary research goal of the
approach is to focus on the linguistic analysis of texts and text types and it
undermines the analysis of individual linguistic features.
MD approach lays stress on the fact that different kinds of text
differ linguistically and functionally, so it is not proper to make conclusions
about any discourse after analyzing one or two text-varieties. Biber (2009)
emphasizes upon the need of sets of co-occurring features in a register
analysis of any genre:
It turns out, though, that the relative distribution of
common linguistic features, considered individually,
cannot reliably distinguish among registers. There are
simply too many different linguistic characteristics to
consider, and individual features often have idiosyncratic
6
distributions. However, when analyses are based on the
co-occurrence and alternation patterns for groups of
linguistic features, important differences across registers
are revealed. (p. 824)
Linguists like Hymes (1964), Firth (1966), Trippe (1972), Brown and Fraser
(1979), and Halliday (1985) also emphasized the need of analysis of co-
occurrence of features. In addition, Conrad stated “it can be misleading to
concentrate on specific, isolated (linguistic) markers without taking into
account systematic variations which involve the sets of co-occurrence of
markers” (2009, p. 5). The MD approach is multi-dimensional which
indicates the fact that no single dimension or parameter is sufficient
enough to highlight the differences among registers.
Three major theoretical differences have been found between
earlier studies on register variation and the MD approach. Most
investigations have proved that a single parameter/dimension is not
proper to explore the situational differences among registers; whereas,
MD approach focused upon the idea that different sets of co-occurring
linguistic features highlight the different functional interpretations e.g.
interactiveness, planning, informational focus, etc. Second, previous
studies revealed the fact that register variation can be analyzed in the form
of dichotomous distinctions. On the contrary, MD approach reveals that
there is no continuous range of linguistic variation linked with each of
these dimensions. Therefore, MD investigations are quantitative and
continuous parameters of variation which unfold the differences among
the continuous range of texts or registers. That’s why; dimensions may be
used as a parameter to evaluate the extent to which registers are found
similar or different. Third, it is not certain that groupings of linguistic
features selected on intuitive level co-occur for certain in the texts;
whereas, MD approach uses quantitative statistical techniques and
provides the identification of the prominent co-occurrence patterns in a
language.
Multi-dimensional approach of register variation synthesizes
quantitative and qualitative functional methodological techniques. The
basic part of MD approach is that the statistical analyses are interpreted in
functional ways to evaluate the underlying communicative functions
related with each distributional pattern. Thus, MD approach focuses on
the notion that statistical co-occurrence patterns explore the underlying
shared communicative functions.
Biber (1988) made it clear that no single dimension can
differentiate between spoken and written form of texts. Previous studies
upon the language of press reportage are marked with one feature: those
7
studies try to distinguish press reportage from other register on one
dimension. Past studies (Anwar, 2011; Mahmood 2012; Uzair, 2012)
investigated the language of press reportage and emphasized the
individual features of Pakistani press reportage but these studies prove to
be unreliable and face validity threats on only one point, that is, they did
not discuss the functional interpretation of linguistic differences found in
Pakistani journalistic register. Biber (1988) has proved through MD
approach that studies of press reportage register based upon one
parameter are not valid and emphasized the fact that language of press
reportage should be studied in MD parameters to explore the functional
interpretations for the variation found among the sub-categories of British
press reportage register.
Biber (1988) also made clear that textual dimensions in multi-
dimensional studies are investigated through the process of factor analysis
in which the co-related linguistic features are further explored for their
shared communicative function. Biber (1988) discussed the concept of
factor analysis in MD analysis, “Factor analysis enables quantitative
identification of underlying dimensions within set of texts. Factor analysis
provides primary analysis, but it is dependent on the theoretical
foundation provided by an adequate data base of texts and inclusion of
multiple linguistic features” (p. 65). In MD analysis, factor analysis is a
major statistical procedure used to identify the systematic co-occurrence
patterns in a set of variables. The use of factor analysis here is purposeful
in a way because it explores the register differences involving underlying
linguistic co-occurrence patterns, that is, “When applied to linguistic data,
factor analysis can therefore be used to identify sets of linguistic features
that tend to co-occur across the texts of a corpus” (Grieve, 2010, p. 5).
It is also a notable fact in multi-dimensional analysis, although the
sets of co-occurring features or dimensions are not only quantitatively
calculated but also their functional content is interpreted accordingly. So,
MD analysis includes both linguistic and functional content. Once, the sets
of co-occurring features are derived through statistical factor analysis, the
co-occurring features are given names as dimensions in a functional way.
In Biber’s (1988) study, five textual dimensions were recognized:
1. Involved versus Informational Discourse
2. Narrative versus Non-Narrative Concerns
3. Explicit versus Situation-Dependent Discourse
4. Overt Expression of Persuasion/Argumentation
5. Abstract versus Non-Abstract Information
8
No study has been conducted so far on the press reportage in
Pakistani media using Biber’s (1988) multi-dimensional analysis. The
current research work has explored variation across different sub-
categories press reportage along five textual dimensions.
Previous Register-Based Studies in Pakistani English
Very few people have worked on register variation of Pakistani
English. All the research work so far has been conducted to prove Pakistani
English on individual linguistic differences but the functional interpretation
of linguistic differences have not been explored which is a marked feature
of register studies. There is only one study conducted on advertising
register in Pakistani print media by Shakir (2013) that used MD approach
which investigated the linguistic variation based on internal and external
comparisons. This study is pioneering in its nature and lays stress on the
fact that other registers of Pakistani English should also be explored to
highlight the linguistic variation and linguistic identity of Pakistani English
as a non-native variety. This study disregarded already conducted
researches on advertising due to their reliance on frequency of individual
linguistic features and being based upon unrepresentative data. Drawing
on data from 137 magazines and 37 newspapers, his research work
investigated how far Pakistani print advertisements varied with reference
to source, audience and product category on five textual dimensions
propounded by Biber (1988). His study proved that Pakistani print
advertisements showed significant variance in accordance with source and
product category. The present study has also explored another register i.e.,
press reportage register of Pakistani print media.
Language of Pakistani Press Reportage & Previous Studies
Pakistani print media exhibits local cultural influences which have
been arousing interests for researchers over a certain period of time. The
print news media has gained its strength in Pakistan over the years and its
language has become the key area for the researchers. News is
determined by values and the kind of language in which that news is told
reflects and expresses those values. Audience feel that the way in which
language is used by media. Bell (1991, p. 4) also emphasized upon the
importance of language of news media, “The uses in which language is put
in the mass media are intrinsically important to us as language users and
receivers. The linguistic means are adopted purposefully. How does the
media use language, is often larger than life.”
Within the media, news is the primary language genre. Daily
newspapers are filled with news of all kinds. In Pakistan, language of print
media has gained importance over the years. It reflects the frequent public
opinion about how the language is used purposefully by Pakistani media.
9
Language is the most important part of the content of what Pakistani
media communicates to public at large. Thus, language is a tool and
expression of Pakistani media messages. That’s why; the language of
media is always of high importance for researchers due to its valuable
content. It is always easy for the researchers working on Pakistani media
language because of its availability. It is easier to collect data of language
of Pakistani print media than that of conversation. Moreover, it is always
available in large quantities. On average, each newspaper contains 100,000
or more words of text and the real problem faced by researchers how
much data should be enough for the analysis (Cotter, 2010, p. 21).
The news stories that we read or hear are structured in a
certain way, following a set of reporting, writing, and
editing rules. News is embodied in stylistic consistency,
rhetorical accessibility, and brevity as well as story
structure, use of quotes and a well-wrought lead. (Cotter,
2010, p. 27)
As compared to foreign researches, the language of Pakistani print media
has not been explored so much. Most of the studies have been conducted
from the content analysis framework in Pakistani print media. Sadaf (2011)
investigated the language of Pakistani English and Urdu newspapers.
Focusing on the content analysis approach of studying Pakistani print
media, she conducted a comparative content analysis of the coverage of
English and Urdu dailies of Pakistan on the issue of judicial restoration.
Similarly, Mansoor (2013) investigated the language of Pakistani print
media from gender-based perspective and explored the gender
stereotypes and gender prejudices in the print media.
From variationist’s perspective, Uzair, Mahmood & Raja (2012)
studied the role of Pakistani English newspapers in promoting the lexical
deviations. Their study investigated how the language of newspapers
reflected the mindset of people of that particular society. It was made
clear how writers borrowed words, used hybridization or exploited words
according to their convenience in such a way as to remove the social
barriers. Their study proved the impact of lexical deviations and
indigenization on the language of newspapers to validate the individual
morpho-syntactic features of Pakistani English.
In Pakistan, the English language has established its status and has
become a Lingua Franca. It has proved a major link language and bridged
the country with the whole world. The English language is not only used
for the official purposes but also in Islamic law and Sharia. Platt (1984) put
forward four basic criteria to declare any variety as New English. First, he
highlighted that New English is to be preferred as a subject in the
10
educational institutions. New English should be taught as the mode of
instructions above all other native languages. Second, New English must
have developed as a non-native variety in the form of pidgin or creole.
Third, New English must perform various country internal functions and
should be used in different departments of that country. It should be
performing the function of a Lingua Franca. Fourth, it should be localized in
the pronunciation and intonation and form and expressions. English in
Pakistan meets all the four criteria and takes the title of New English.
English language came in the sub-continent when the English needed the
office staff for their work; therefore, they started the teaching of English
language in the 19th century. At present, the English Language is taught in
Pakistani educational arena as a compulsory subject up to graduation.
English-medium educational institutions are preferred and most of the
syllabus of all the subjects is set in English language.
The study conducted by Anwar (2011) on the register of Pakistani
newspaper English is the prominent work which studied the individual
linguistic characteristics of Pakistani Journalistic English. Drawing on the
data from Pakistani English newspapers, he investigated the different
grammatical and syntactic features of Pakistani journalistic English.
Exploring the grammatical features like plural marking, quantifiers,
adjectives, use of genitives and omission/addition of particle, it was made
clear that Pakistani Journalistic English exhibits deviant linguistic
characteristics in comparison with British English. He also studied the
syntactic features of Pakistani journalistic English like word order, WH-
clauses, tense & aspect, conditional clauses and the use of connectives and
double intensifiers. In this way, he explored the Pakistani press reportage
register and validated Pakistani English as a non-native independent
variety with reference to news register. This study faces validity threat due
to its reliance on analysis of individual linguistic features of Pakistani
journalistic register and excited the present research work to study the
Pakistani press reportage register by using multi-dimensional approach of
register variation which has categorically highlighted the distinct linguistic
identity of news register of Pakistani English. Muhabat, Noor & Iqbal
(2015) also claimed Pakistani journalistic register as independent register
in comparison with British English and worked on the divergence in
hyphenated lexemes in Pakistani Journalistic English. Drawing on data
from Pakistani newspapers, they proved that hyphens in Pakistani
Journalistic English are used for emphasis. The deviant use of hyphens was
found productive in forming new prefixes, adjective-compounds, noun
compounds and compound adjectives. But, this study just focused on the
individual linguistic features of Journalistic English and does not meet the
requirements of register variation studies.
11
Douglas Biber in his well-acclaimed work (1988) established the
fact that any effort to study linguistic variation based upon individual
linguistic features instead of co-occurring linguistic features is misleading
and cannot produce correct results. He suggested a multi-dimensional
approach which is corpus-based, empirical, quantitative and comparative
in nature. The present study investigates the press reportage in Pakistani
print media based on multi-dimensional analysis and compares its findings
with the results of British press reportage analyzed in Biber’s 1988 study.
Corpus Construction Process and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
The present research uses multi-dimensional approach to study
the sub-categories of Pakistani press reportage by constructing a
representative corpus of press reportage in Pakistani print media. The
following table describes the sub-categories of press reportage in Pakistani
print media included in the current study.
Table 1: Sub-Categories of Press Reportage in Pakistani Print Media
along with Abbreviations
S. No. Sub-Categories of Press Abbreviations
1 Business Press Reportage BU.PR

2 Metropolitan Press Reportage ME.PR
3 Political Press Reportage PO.PR
4 Sports Press Reportage SP.PR
It is also a notable fact that the comparison of Pakistani press reportage

has been made only with four categories of press reportage and found
similar to the categories in Biber’s 1988 study. Pakistani print media has
fixed special pages to these categories in Pakistani newspapers and these
categories are apparent in Pakistani newspapers. Most of the newspapers
fix more than one page to business category and a few newspapers publish
business survey on weekly basis by publishing additional pages to the
newspaper. Similarly, metropolitan news reportage is quite apparent
section in Pakistani print media and most of the newspapers have fixed
more than two pages to this kind of reportage.
As regards political category, this section is also a key part of
Pakistani print media and a proper section of newspaper reportage is
dedicated to this category by all newspapers. This category is deemed to
be well read and liked by readers; therefore, few key political news items
are also given space to 1/8 page as well. As far as, sports reportage in
Pakistani media is concerned, this category is also most prominently found
12
in all newspapers and enough space is dedicated to this category as well.
Like all other categories, more than two pages are fixed to this category
and even special editions are also published based upon this category on
weekly or fortnightly basis. There is hardly any corpus available so far
based upon the categories of press reportage and special purpose corpora
based upon sub-categories has always been a need to explore the press
reportage register of Pakistani English. Anwar (2011) collected only general
news items in his study without taking into account the apparent
categories found in Pakistani press reportage, so the proposed model in
the current study based upon sub-categories in press reportage of
Pakistani print media is pioneering in nature for the exploration of register
based studies related to press reportage.
Pakistani News Corpus was constructed based on four sub-
categories of press reportage in Pakistani print media. The data was
collected from five leading newspapers in Pakistani print media according
to the list provided by ministry of information, Islamabad, Pakistan. The
representativeness of the newspapers (sample) was taken care of by
selecting editions from the five provinces of Pakistan. The editions of the
newspapers included in PNC were selected in the following way: Daily
Dawn newspaper (Quetta edition representing Baluchistan province of
Pakistan), The Daily Times newspaper (Karachi edition representing Sindh
province of Pakistan), The Frontier Post (Peshawar edition representing
KPK province of Pakistan), The Daily Newspaper (Lahore edition
representing Punjab province of Pakistan), and The Daily Nation
newspaper (Islamabad edition representing capital of Pakistan). The data
was collected from 1st March to 30th April, 2014.
The number of words for each sample of the text was the issue to
be sorted out in the process of collection of the texts. All newspapers
having been available online were accessed easily and therefore, full texts
of news items were collected. We decided to collect 50 texts per category
of press reportage in Pakistani print media. Thus, 200 texts were collected
per category of each newspaper. During the data collection process, it was
also kept in view to take consecutive readings of each newspaper so that
the linguistic characteristics used in each category by every newspaper
may not be missed and total representation of each category of each
newspaper may become part of the Pakistani News Corpus. The collected
corpus comprising 1000 texts of sub-categories of five leading newspapers
was reviewed for any formatting errors. The following table displays
complete information about collected Pakistani News Corpus.
13
Table 2: Details of Pakistani News Corpus
Total number of newspapers 5
Total number of sub-categories 4
Total number of texts per category 50
Average number of words per category 57,786
Total number of words in PNC 11,55,705
Once the corpus was compiled, the corpus was sent to Douglas
Biber at Northern Arizona University, America. Using the Biber Tagger and
additional program called Tag Count, the corpus was tagged for parts of
speech and the multi-dimensional analysis was carried out on press
reportage register of Pakistani print media. The data of British press
reportage has been taken from Biber’s 1988 study and all the frequencies
of linguistic features of Brit.PR have been analyzed in that study in detail.
The data analysis in the current study includes three basic steps:
tagging for different linguistic features of press reportage, taking raw
counts of linguistic features, turning the raw counts into normalized
frequencies and counting of dimension scores.
Step 1: Tagging of Pakistani News Corpus
Pakistani News Corpus was tagged by using Biber’s tagger. First, the tagger
tagged the PNC using all linguistic features on different textual dimensions
of 1988 MD analysis. The list of linguistic features relevant in 1988 study is
given in (Appendix II). Detailed explanation of these features is available in
Biber (1988) and Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber
et al., 1999).
Step 2: Computation of Raw Counts and Turning them into
Normalized and Standardized Frequencies
Using Biber’s tagger and tag counts program, the data was tagged for
different linguistic features; the raw counts of the frequencies of different
linguistic features were counted and were later turned into normalized
frequencies. Normalizing of the data is also necessary to avoid any error
due to varying length of texts and that is why, the raw counts of linguistic
features were computed out of 1000 words, a standard set by Biber (1988)
and was followed in all other researches conducted using this model. The
process is quite useful as has been discussed in Biber (1988) and is very
easy to use, that is, actual frequency divided by total number of words in a
text multiplied by 1000.
14
After the normalization of frequencies, the data goes through the
process of Standardization. The normalized frequencies were standardized
to the mean of 0.0 and a standard deviation of 1.0 and in this way; all
features on a dimension carries equal weights in computing dimension
scores. For standardization process, the individualized normalized score
were subtracted from the mean normalized scores and the resulting score
was divided by the standard deviation.
Step 3: Calculations of Dimension Scores
Each dimension score of each text in the 1988 MD analysis was calculated
by subtracting the standardized scores of negative features from the sum
of standardized scores of positive features. The dimensions with no
negative features include only sum of positive scores of linguistic features.
In this way, dimension score of each text in 1988 MD analysis was
calculated. The co-occurring linguistic features on five textual dimensions
of 1988 MD analysis of press reportage are given in (Appendix III).
Results of Multidimensional Analysis
Previous researchers like Anwar (2011), Muhabat, Noor & Iqbal
(2015) claimed that Pakistani English is an independent variety and its
news register is also different from British news register with norms of its
own. The present study has analyzed its results by making a comparison
between British Press reportage (Brit.PR) and Pakistani Press reportage
(Paki.PR) in Biber’s (1988) study and evaluated these claims.
Figure 1 given below compares the mean dimension scores of
Pakistani press reportage register with British press reportage register on
Biber’s 1988 five textual dimensions. Biber (1988) made it clear in his study
that British press reportage exhibited high positive score and showed more
informational and spoken discourse production. It is quite clear on
dimension 1 that both Pakistani and British news registers have been
found informational in discourse production which seems quite obvious
norm in press reportage register to provide maximum information to its
readers. Pakistani press reportage register has been found highly
informational as compared to British press reportage register which calls
for detailed analysis of grammatical features on this dimension. On
dimension 2, it is quite interesting to observe that both registers exhibit
different trends as Pakistani press reportage shows narrative trend;
whereas, British press reportage exhibits least narrative nature .
15
10
5
Dimension Score
0
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
Brit.PR -15.1 0.4 -0.3 -0.7 0.6
Pak.PR -20.59 1.4367 4.8259 -2.503 2.0063
Figure 1: Comparison of Brit.PR with Pak.PR on Five Textual

Dimensions
Language of press reportage register has to be studied taking into
account that the cross-cultural factors that have resulted in the birth of
different varieties of English. Pakistani English being a non-native variety
has its registers whose language has to be seen keeping in view the
context of its non-native culture. On dimension 3, the comparison
between British press reportage and Pakistani press reportage seems to be
interesting as the trend between both registers has been found quite
opposite. British press reportage register has been found situation
dependent whereas, Pakistani press reportage register has been found
explicit. Therefore, both these two dimensions call for detailed analysis. On
dimension 4, both registers have been found similar in producing least
overt expression of persuasion/argumentation and both registers seem to
imply that features in other dimensions seem to be working to produce
argumentation/persuasion in press reportage register. On dimension 5,
both Pakistani and British press reportage register speak of their similar
trend towards producing impersonal and objective press reportage which
is again to be the norm of press reportage genre.
16
Normalized Freuencies
500
400
300
200
100
0
Brit.PR Pak.PR
Nouns 220.5 385.726
Prepositions 116.6 126.112
Attributive Adjectives 64.5 51.712
Figure 2: Informational Features in Brit.PR and Pak.PR

Figure 2 given above shows the grammatical features of both
Pakistani press reportage and British press reportage on dimension 1. The
grammatical features like nouns with mean score (220.5), prepositions
(116.6) and attributive adjectives (64.5) being used by the Pakistani press
reportage speak of high informational as compared to low values of
grammatical features being used by British press reportage register. The
following words in bold in Pak.PR exhibit the high informational focus of
Pak.PR as the text has dense pattern of nominal information through
prepositions and attributive adjectives.
Example: At least four people, including a girl and an assistant sub-
inspector (ASI), were gunned down in three separate violence incidents in
Quetta on Saturday. The first incident took place at Sariab Road near
Bamra hotel, where ASI Qudratullah was mowed down by unidentified
gunmen and his son wounded, according to Superintendent of Police
Imran Qureshi. “Qudratullah and his son Najeebullah were heading
towards a market when they came under an attack,” the official added.
(See appendix for more examples).
Figure 3 given below discusses the dimension 2 between Pakistani
press reportage and British press reportage and the narrative grammatical
features have been compared. Pakistani press reportage has high ratio of
past tense whereas, the British press reportage has low ratio of past tense
which indicates the differences between both registers due to their cross-
cultural background differences among their readership of press
reportage. Among other features, British press reportage register exhibits
high ratio of third person narration as compared to low ratio of third
person narration in Pakistani press reportage register.
17
Normalized Frequencies
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Brit.PR Pak.PR
Past Tense 45.1 69.622
Perfect Aspect Verbs 8 10.832
Third Person Pronouns 28.1 18.948
Public Verbs 12 16.004
Figure 3: Narrative Features in Brit.PR and Pak.PR

The following example of Pak.PR speaks for high presence of narrative
focus to grab the attention of readership. Past tense and wh-relative
pronoun and phrasal connectors being the key narrative linguistic features
can be seen in dense use.
Example: At least two people were gunned down and three others
sustained injuries in a firing incident in Pedarak area of Kech, on Tuesday.
Balochistan Levies official Abdul Qadeer told the Daily Times that a convoy
of three vehicles was on its way from Civil-Kor to Pedarak when
unidentified people, riding a motorcycle, opened fire. As a result, two
people were killed on the spot and three others sustained injuries.
Balochistan Levies officials rushed to the spot soon after the incident and
cordoned off the area. The deceased and the injured were taken to the
district headquarters hospital for autopsy. “The victims went to Civil-Kor
for a meeting and they were returning to Pedarak when they were
targeted,” Qadeer Said. The deceased were identified as Shahmeer, a
resident of Aabsar, and Jamal, a resident of Shahi Tump. The local
administration registered a case and opened investigation.
Figure 4 discusses both Pakistani and British press register on
dimension 3 and analyzes the differences between grammatical features of
explicitness and their usage in both respective registers. The categorical
difference may be seen in the use of nominalizations in both registers as
Pakistani press register shows high value of nominalizations (70.2) which
lend explicitness to discourse of Pakistani press reportage register as
compared to much low value of nominalizations (19.2) in British press
18
reportage register that marks its trend towards situation dependent
discourse according to needs of readership in British culture.
80
70
Normalized Frequencies
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Brit.PR Pak.PR
Adverbs 52.8 21.128
Time Adverbials 6.5 2.436
Place Adverbials 4.7 7.45
Nominalizations 19.2 70.276
Figure 4: Features of Explicitness in Brit.PR and Pak.PR

The results of the current study on dimension 1 and dimension 3 in
comparison with British Press reportage seem to endorse the claims made
by previous researchers (Jan et al., 2013; Rosas-Moreno & Bachmann,
2012) that language of Pakistani press reportage has become highly
informational and explicit over the years. British press reportage exhibits
high value of adverbs with mean score (58.2) on this dimension as
compared to low use of adverbs with mean score (21.12) in Pakistani press
reportage register which accounts for the cross-cultural differences
between Pakistani and British press reportage register. The following text
manifests high frequency of wh-pronouns and nominalizations of Pak.PR
and exhibits explicit discourse in Pakistani print media.
Example: Bhutto was born to accomplish great deeds. His finest hour came
when he saved his war-weary and famished country from a total collapse
and utter ruination. Pakistan, politically shattered and economically
doomed, entered 1972 under the wise and dynamic leadership of Bhutto.
The frustrated and defeated nation of the 1971 war with India slowly
gained momentum, power and prestige while he brought 90,000 prisoners
of war with honor from Indian military camps and won back 5,000 square
miles of territory lost in war (Daily Times newspaper).
Comparison of British BU.PR with Pakistani BU.PR Category
The comparison on the first sub-category of business has also been
carried out which describes differences between both registers due to
their cross-cultural differences. On D1, both Pak.BU.PR and Brit.BU.PR
19
have been found highly informational in nature. On D2, Pak.BU.PR has
been found narrative in nature; whereas, Brit.BU.PR has been found non-
narrative in nature. On D3, Pak.BU.PR has been found explicit in nature;
whereas, Brit.BU.PR has been found situation dependent in business
discourse production. On D4, both registers have been found least overt in
expression of argumentation/persuasion; whereas, on D5, both registers
have been found impersonal in business discourse production. Significant
differences can be seen on D2 and D3 and cross-cultural variation factors
seem be quite obvious as Brit.PR has been found non-narrative and
situation-dependent in comparison with explicit and narrative Pak.BU.PR.
Figure 5 below displays the comparison of Pakistani Business press
reportage and British press reportage on five textual dimensions. It seems
quite obvious that Pak.BU.PR shows consistent non-narrative nature due
to the technical lexicon of this press reportage. The non-narrative nature
of BU.PR shows that it focuses on the informational purpose of this
reportage. Barnhurst (2005, p. 1) speaks about the same notion in media,
“Competition among news media pushes media organizations to focus
more on people, on informational focus, and on local angles.”
Mean Dimension Scores
5
0
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
Brit.BU.PR -17.6 -2 -0.2 -1.1 2.7
Pak.BU.PR -23 0.01 2.63 -3.14 0.71
Figure 5: Comparison of British BU.PR with Pakistani BU.PR

Comparison of British ME.PR with Pakistani ME.PR Category
The comparison on the second category of metropolitan has also
been carried out. It presents differences between both registers due to
their cross-cultural differences. On D1, both Pak.ME.PR and Brit.ME.PR
have been found highly informational in nature. On D2, Pakistani
Metropolitan press reportage has been found narrative in nature;
whereas, British Metropolitan press reportage has been found non-
narrative in nature. On D3, Pak.ME.PR has been found explicit in nature.
20
This trend is found similar in Brit.ME.PR as it has also been found explicit in
metropolitan discourse production.
On D4, both registers have been found least overt in expression of
argumentation/persuasion; whereas, on D5, both registers have been
found impersonal in metropolitan discourse production. In this category, it
becomes evident that Pakistani and British press reportage registers show
differences in metropolitan discourse production on D2 and D5. Language
of metropolitan press reportage has been found non-impersonal and non-
narrative which seems to be evident of the cross-cultural differences
between Pak.PR and Brit.PR. Pakistani metropolitan press reportage has
shown marked variation on D3 which also speaks for the non-native
background of Pakistani press reportage and its demands for their
readership. Figure 6 given below compares the mean dimension scores of
Pakistani metropolitan press reportage with British metropolitan press
reportage on five textual dimensions.
Mean Dimension Scores
10
5
0
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
-30
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
Brit.ME.PR -16.1 -0.4 1 -2.1 -0.9
Pak.ME.PR -25.61 2.92 5.17 -1.97 2.83
Figure 6: Comparison of British ME.PR with Pakistani ME.PR

Comparison of British PO.PR with Pakistani PO.RP Category
The data in Pakistani press reportage register reveals the fact that
four categories in Pakistani press reportage are found similar to categories
of British press reportage register results found in 1988 study of Biber and
the current study compares the results of four categories to further
analyze the variation between Pakistani and British press reportage
register.
Figure 7 displays the differences on political (PO) reportage
between Pakistani and British press reportage registers. On D1, both
Pak.PO.PR and Brit.PO.PR have been found informational with negative
21
dimension scores which certainly is the norm of press reportage register.
On D2, Pak.PO.PR shows trend towards non-narrative discourse
production with negative scores in comparison with Brit.SP.PR positive
score and this difference certainly accounts for the cross-cultural
background differences between Pakistani and British press reportage
readership. On D3, the results have been found opposite in both Pakistani
and British press reportage. Pak.PO.PR speaks for situation dependent
discourse as compared to the explicit discourse of Brit.PO.PR. In the
political reportage category, Pakistani political press reportage presents
facts according to situational realities of Pakistani politics and the
opinionated discourse in Pakistani press reportage seems to be in
prevalent use which has made Pakistani press reportage situation-
dependent. Whereas, British press reportage has been found explicit in
nature. On D4, Pak.PO.PR has been found least overt in expression of
persuasion/argumentation whereas, Brit.PO.PR has been found overt in
expression of argument and these differences speak for the cross-cultural
background differences between readership of both registers. On D5, both
registers have been found impersonal in discourse production which is
norm of press reportage register.
0
Mean Diemsnion Score
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
Pak.PO.PR -17.8 0.8 -0.9 0.6 0.6
Brit.PO.PR -23.01 0.01 2.63 -3.4 0.71
Figure 7: Comparison of British PO.PR with Pakistani PO.PR

Comparison of British SP.PR with Pakistani SP.PR
Figure 8 displays the comparison on the category of sports which
accounts for the differences between both registers due to their cross-
cultural differences. On D1, both Pakistani and British Sports reportage
have been found highly informational in nature. On D2, Pak.SP.PR has
been found narrative in nature; whereas, Brit.SP.PR has been found non-
narrative in nature. On D3, Pakistani press reportage has been found
22
explicit in nature; whereas, British press reportage has been found
situation dependent in sports discourse production. Pakistani press
reportage register seems to exhibit maximum ratio of nominalizations
which emphasizes explicitness of Pakistani press reportage. On D4, both
registers have been found least overt in expression of argumentation/
persuasion; whereas, on D5, both registers have been found impersonal in
sports discourse production.
Mean Dimension Score
5
0
-5
-10
-15
-20
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
Brit.SP.PR -14.7 -0.4 -1.2 -0.5 0.1
Pak.SP.PR -15.99 0.32 2.45 -2.69 0.7
Figure 8: Comparison of British SP.PR with Pakistani SP.PR

Conclusion & Future Directions
The current study has compared the Pakistani press reportage
register with British press reportage register on 1988 five textual
dimensions and has found out differences on different dimensions. On
dimension 1, both Pakistani press reportage register and British press
reportage register have been found highly informational as it justifies the
norm of press reportage register. On D2, Pakistani press reportage register
has been found highly narrative in nature; whereas, British press reportage
register has been found non-narrative in press discourse production which
certainly speaks for the cross-cultural differences between both varieties
of English. On D3, British press reportage has been found situation
dependent in discourse production of press reportage in comparison to
Pakistani press reportage register which has been found highly explicit in
nature. On D4 and D5, no differences have been observed between both
varieties of English.
On further exploration of grammatical features on D2 and D3, it
has been found that Pakistani press reportage uses adverbs; past tense
and third person in great number as compared to low ratio of British press
reportage register which also accounts for the cross-cultural needs of
23
readership of respective varieties. On further comparison of four similar
sub-categories between Pakistani press reportage register and British
press reportage register, differences seem to have been found on D2 and
D3 as well. On business, metropolitan, political and sports press reportage,
Pak.PR has shown preference for narrative and explicit news discourse
production; whereas, Brit.PR has shown trend towards usage of non-
narrative and situation-dependent news discourse and certainly these
differences speak of the cross-cultural factors of both British and Pakistani
English. Categorically speaking, the findings of the current study prove the
fact that Pakistani Journalistic English has been found highly informational,
narrative, explicit and non-abstract and least overt in expression of
persuasion/argumentation. Moreover, it emphasizes the distinct linguistic
characteristics of Pakistani Journalistic register which speaks of its
categorical independent existence with its own independent norms.
The results of current study have been compared with British press
reportage register analyzed in Biber’s 1988 study and only a general
comparison has been made between Pakistani press reportage register
and British press reportage register due to non-availability of any research
work on British press reportage based upon its sub-categories. The results
of the present research could be a useful resource to researchers working
in the area of identification of Pakistani English as an independent variety.
One of the significant uses to which MD studies have been put in many
earlier studies is to observe the historical change in the registers of
Pakistani English as being a non-native variety. Future researchers might
observe language change in the Pakistani press reportage register by
conducting a diachronic study of press reportage of Pakistani print media
after collecting the last ten years press reportage corpus and comparing its
results with the present study to evaluate the language change in the press
reportage register. So far, one Pakistani register of print ads has been
studied through MD analysis. The results of press reportage in Pakistani
print media can be compared with results of print advertisements register
and the comparison may be valuable one as it will evaluate the linguistic
differences and similarities between two distinct non-native registers of
Pakistani English.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to Prof. Douglas Biber, US and Dr. Jack Grieve, UK
for valuable insight in the research work. We owe special thanks to Dr.
Jesse Egbert, US for tagging and running Multi-Dimensional Analysis on
Pakistani News Corpus.
24
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Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Appendix I
Mean Dimension Scores of Sub-Categories of Five Newspapers
BU.PR Mean Min. Max. SD

D1 -25.26 -24.48 -8.23 3.5973
D2 -0.13432 -2.974 3.57 1.51698
D3 4.56772 -2.64 7.21564 2.48024
D4 -2.532 -6.062 0.8264 1.98778
D5 1.65424 -2.1 10.03 2.88518
ME.PR Mean Min. Max. SD
D1 -24.61 -24.238 -16.144 4.74804
D2 2.21268 0.012 7.3736 2.21598
D3 6.24444 4.138 9.13504 2.31322
D4 -2.5594 -3.062 0.732 2.14106
D5 2.1804 -0.62 7.11 2.0118
PO.PR Mean Min. Max. SD
D1 -22.198 -25.31 -14.074 3.57666
D2 -22.447 -27.8125 -14.836 3.573915
D3 1.92416 0.0184 6.1372 1.947596
D4 6.63325 2.3395 11.2225 2.197365
D5 2.0583 0.078 6.67 1.96932
SP.PR Mean Min. Max. SD
D1 -15.766 -24.346 0.9 6.24142
D2 0.27036 -2.246 3.592 1.39194
D3 2.03636 -4.33 9.278 3.20428
D4 -2.723 -5.914 1.952 1.89398
D5 0.81588 -2.5 6 2.06476
27
Appendix II
Linguistic Features Relevant to 1988 MD Analysis of Press Reportage
Private verb (e.g., believe, feel, think)
‘That’ deletion (e.g., I think[that] he did it)
Present tense verb (uninflected present, imperative and third person)
Pro-verb ‘do’
Demonstrative pronoun (that, this, those, these)
Adverb/Qualifier-emphatic (e.g., just, really, so)
First person pronoun (e.g., we, our)
Pronoun it/its
Verb ‘Be’ (uninflected present tense, verb and auxiliary
Subordinating conjunction-causative (e.g., because)
Discourse particles (sentence initial, well, now)
Nominal pronoun (e.g., someone, everything)
Adverbial-Hedge (e.g., almost, may be)
Adverb/ Qualifier, amplifier (e.g., absolutely, entirely)
Wh-question
Modals of possibility (can, may, could, might)
Coordinating conjunction-clausal connector
Wh-clause (e.g., he believed what I told him)
Stranded preposition (appearing at sentence end)
Noun (excluding nominalization and gerund)
Preposition
Attributive adjective (e.g., national interest, annual return)
Past tense verbs
Third person pronoun (except ‘it’)
Verb-perfect aspect
Public verb (e.g., assert, complain)
Wh-pronoun- relative clause-object position ( the person who he likes)
Wh-relative clause-subject position (e.g., the participants who like to join…)
Wh-relative clause-object position with prepositional fronting (‘pied piping’)
Co-ordinating conjunction-phrasal connector
Nominalization (e.g., organization, development)
Adverb-time (e.g., instantly, soon)
Adverb-place (e.g., above, beside)
Adverb other (excluding adverb/Qualifier, Hedge, Emphatic, Time, Place, Amplifier
Infinitive verb
way
Modals of prediction (will, would.)
Suasive verb (e.g., ask, command)
way way , he was trained
Subordinating conjunction-conditional (if, unless)
28
Modal of necessity (ought, should, must)
Adverb within auxiliary (splitting aux-verb)( e.g., the product is specifically meant)
Adverbial-conjuncts (however, therefore, thus)
Agentless passive verb (e.g., however, therefore, thus)
Agentless passive verb (e.g., the scheme was introduced)
Passive verb+ by (e.g., the plan was introduced by principal)
Passive post nominal modifier (e.g., the message conveyed by)
Subordinating conjunction-other (e.g., as, excepts, until)
Present tense verbs (uninflected present, imperative and third person)
nd
2 Person Pronoun
st
I Person Pronoun
Verb ‘Be’
Noun (excluding nominalization and Gerund)
Preposition
Verb perfect aspect
Predictive adjectives
Passives all
That-complement clause controlled by stance verb
To-complement clause controlled by stance verb
To-complement clause controlled by stance adjective
Process nouns, (isolation)
Other abstract nouns (e.g., idea)
Activity verb (e.g., give, take)
Mental verb (e.g., believe, enjoy)
Seem
Contractions
Split infinitives
NOT neg.
P-and
O_AND
FINAL PREP.
29
Appendix III
Co-occurring Linguistic Features on Five Textual Dimensions of
1988 MD Analysis of Press Reportage
Dimension 1: Involved vs. Informational Discourse
Positive Feature Negative Features
Private verbs Nouns (excluding gerund)
Nominalization Preposition
‘That’ deletion Attributive Adjective
Verb (uninflected present, imperative & third
person)
Second person pronoun/possessive
Verb ‘do’
Demonstrative pronoun
Adverb/Qualifier-emphatic (e.g., just, really)
First person pronoun/possessive
Pronoun ‘it’
Verb ‘Be’ (uninflected present tense, verb, and
auxiliary)
Sub-ordinating conjunction-causative
Discourse particle
Nominal pronoun
Adverbial-Hedge
Adverbial/Qualifier-amplifier
Wh-question
Modals of possibility
Co-ordinating conjunction-clausal connector
Wh-clause
Stranded preposition
Dimension 2: Narrative vs. Non-narrative Concerns

Past tense verb (No negative Features)
Third person pronoun (except ‘it’)
Verb-perfect Aspect
Public verbs
Dimension 3: Explicit vs. Situation-Dependent Discourse

Wh-pronoun-relative clause-object position Adverb of time
Wh-pronoun-relative clause-subject- position Adverb of Place
Wh-pronoun-relative clause-object position Adverb Other
With prepositional fronting (pied-piping)
Coordinating conjunction–phrasal connector
Singular noun-nominalization
30
Dimension 4: Overt Expression of Persuasion/Argumentative
Positive Features Negative Features
Infinitive verb (no negative features)
Modal of prediction
Suasive verb
Subordinating conjunction-conditional
Modal of necessity
Adverb within auxiliary
Dimension 5: Impersonal (Abstract vs. Non-Abstract Style)

Positive Features Negative Features
Adverbial-conjuncts (no negative features)
Agentless passive verb
Passive verb + by
Passive post nominal modifier
Subordinating conjunction-other
Example: Highly Informational Discourse in Pak.PR

The provincial governments all over the country, including Punjab administration,
are not serious to provide security to Fruit & Vegetable Markets across Pakistan
despite deadly incident of terrorism in federal capital, leaving more than two
dozen fruit vendors dead. All Pakistan Fruit & Vegetable Market Ittehad
president Ch Zaheer stated that Fruit & Vegetable Markets are not being
provided security after the blast incident in Islamabad (The Nation newspaper).
Example: Explicit Vs Situation-Dependent Discourse in Pak.PR

Americans used more health services and spent more on prescription drugs in
2013, reversing a recent trend, though greater use of cheaper generic drugs
helped control spending, according to a report issued on Tuesday by a leading
healthcare information company. Spending on medicines rose 3.2 percent in the
United States last year to $329.2 billion. While that was far less than the double-
digit increases seen in previous decades, it was a rebound from a 1 percent
decline in 2012, the report by IMS Health Holdings Inc found. Among factors
driving the increased spending were the cost of new medicines, price increases on
some branded drugs, a $10 billion reduced impact of patent expirations (The
Nation newspaper).
Example: Highly Narrative Discourse in Pak.PR

Some unknown people gunned down two persons and injured three at Pedak in
the outskirts on Tuesday morning here, Local TV reported. Levies Force confirmed
that some unidentified people abruptly opened fire on five passers-by in Pedak
town, killing Shah Mir and Jamal on the spot, while the other three sustained
injuries. The injured were shifted to Turbat Civil Hospital for medical aid. The
motive behind the firing could not be immediately known (The Nation
newspaper).
31
NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry Vol 13 (II), December, 2015 ISSN 2222-5706
The Power Politics of Translation: A Study of Translation-

Ideology Nexus
Jamil Asghar
Abstract
The paper, situated at the intersection of translation studies,
cultural studies and postcolonialism, seeks to contribute to the theory of
translation with reference to the power politics of the target texts. The
possibility and inevitability of translation is one of the most evident
characteristics of our communication. This possibility and inevitability is
hardwired into our communal and cognitive structure and it features
prominently into our inter-cultural sensibilities. It is widely admitted,
thanks to the “cultural turn” of the late 1970s, that translation is a site of
contact as well as conflict. It is in the light of these considerations that the
present study has been conceived which is a plea to re-envision translation
in a broader politico-cultural perspective. Today, as humankind has just
crossed the threshold of a new millennium, our first-hand understanding
of other cultures and nations remains appallingly low. One major step to
alleviate this problem is to accord greater and more nuanced recognition
to the source texts emanating from cultures light years from our own. The
present research subscribes to the view which posits translation as a
rewriting of the source texts. This rewriting is said to have ideological
considerations of its own and is, more often than not, manipulative in its
practice. The researcher maintains that there is an urgent need to
appreciate adequately the power relations inherent in the process of
translation and to recognize the bearings they have on the practice of
translation per se. It is largely due to these power relations that a new
conceptualization of translation is required which could help us bear in
mind its ideological and value-driven nature. This is what this paper
intends to bring about.
Keywords: translation, rewriting, postcolonialism, domestication
Translation Distrusted and for Good Reasons
Language is the principal and arguably the most apparent means
employed by humans to make their social existence possible. Humans
express their deepest sentiments, talk about their likes, communicate their
apprehensions and share their optimisms in and through language. It is
language which not only makes our shared existence possible but also
sustains it throws all the mutations of time and clime. If language grants
the possibility of our collective existence and ensures the perpetuity of our
social relations, it also poses a formidable challenge in the form of
32
translation. The problem is that translation, most of the time, is taken
merely as a linguistic and theoretical challenge as the “rendering of words
from one language to another” is the typical way of putting it (Crystal,
1995, p. 123).
However, the present study seeks to problematize this traditional
and facile understanding of translation and aims at illustrating the
immensity of its political and ideological intricacies. Traditionally what we
do not seem to appreciate is the fact that translation obstructs our
understanding not just because of linguistic reasons but also because of a
vast array of non-linguistic factors. True, the usual discussions of
translation routinely take into account the relevance of such notions as
context, co-text or culture, but the perspective these discussions take on
such notions is extremely narrow. Moreover, this danger becomes all the
more real when we take into consideration the bafflingly vast range of
languages and cultures in the ambit of which translation, of necessity, has
to operate.
Historically, the idea of translation coupled with the mystique to
know the foreign has always fascinated the theorists and scholars of
language. From this historical perspective, it can be affirmed that, at the
broadest level, all human communication is centered upon the very notion
of translation. Primarily translation aims at actuating some inter-lingual
communicative patterns along with effecting some intercultural dialogic
engagements. However, in these intercultural and inter-lingual
engagements, the complex notions of politics, manipulation, control and
dominance inevitably emerge and complicate the relations between the
source text (the original text that is to be translated into another language)
and the target text (the finished product of a translated text).
Furthermore, the inherently subjective and culture-sensitive character of
language adds to the complexity of the power politics so closely associated
with translation. Therefore the ubiquitous risk of miscommunication in
translation ranges from the unintentional semantic misidentifications to a
systematic and intentional propaganda (Crumbley, 2008, p. 4).The “mist
and veil of words,” as the Irish philosopher George Berkeley put it, is still a
frequently debated issue in the discipline of translation studies (Daniel,
2007, p. 145).
However, George Berkeley is not alone in doubting the capability
of language to communicate. A large number of philosophers and
translation theorists harbor a considerable distrust of language and have
been questioning its authenticity as a clear windowpane which could
reveal facts with objectivity and total neutrality (Baker, 2006, p. 98). We
have novelists like George Orwell who disputed our linguistic capacity to
communicate and, at the same time, we have iconoclasts like Friedrich
33
Nietzsche who terms language utterly incapable of objective description
because of its thoroughly metonymic nature (Emden, 2005, pp. 86, 140,
159).
Notwithstanding this distrust expressed by philosophers,
semanticists and scholars, translation has been playing an extremely
significant role all through human history whenever there has been a
conjunction of cultures and/or languages. Nevertheless, it is also true that
for a considerable part of history, the act of translation has been viewed as
subversive, controversial and perilous — an act of betrayal necessitating
suspicion, distrust and even executions:
There is an Italian proverb that says, “Translators are
traitors” (Traddutore, traditore), and it’s true. All
translation loses meaning. All translators are traitors to the
actual meaning. There is no such thing as a noninterpretive
translation. Anyone who says otherwise probably has
limited exposure to translation theory and it may not be
worth discussing the point with them. (Mounce, 2003, p.
73)
Some of the translation theorists attribute this distrust of translation to
the fact that, by and large, the act of translation amounts to a rewriting of
the source text. The dominant socio-political institutions play a major role
in these acts of rewriting accomplished in the name of translation. This
rewriting emerges after an elaborate process. The discourses based upon
such themes as racism, gender inequality, minority rights or unipolarism
become a mouthpiece for entire social institutions. These institutions, by
virtue of their power, exercise huge influence and as a result of this
influence ideologies emerge. These ideologies in turn shape the visions of
reality in their own images. Once sufficiently shaped, these visions of
reality guide the trajectories of the translation practices (Hatim & Munday,
2004, p. 93).
The act of rewriting operates on the politics of inclusions/
exclusions as well. Which readers/writers, systems of values and sets of
beliefs are to be privileged and which ones are to be deprived? This is a
fundamental question and plays a critical role in the politics of
inclusions/exclusions. It is also interesting to note that how a large body of
foreign literatures translated into English mostly tend to look similar. This
can largely be accounted for by appreciating the tendency of the target
text to enforce its own constraints on the source text during the process of
translation. However, in the context of the power politics of translation,
this implies some sort of inclusions/exclusions somewhere—either denying
a certain constituency of readers the access to a certain text or forcing
34
them to read it in a particular way. It also implies somewhere “an author
committed to oblivion or a translator doomed to be invisible” (Hatim &
Munday, 2004, p. 94).
The Anglo-American translation tradition is particularly noted for
its tendency to practice these exclusions/inclusions. This is usually done
through selectively adopting such apparently apolitical and innocent-
sounding strategies as gisting, free translation, compensation, heavy
glossing, or ennoblement. At the same time, the so-called translation
norms also come into play and effectively transform translation into an
ideological weapon with power to exclude/mute a writer by engaging in
such seemingly innocuous techniques as normalization, clarification or
rationalization. This is usually done to achieve such edifying goals as
bringing fluency and preventing boredom. Eventually, the translators
themselves fall prey to the same politics of exclusions by the hard-nosed
editors and money-minded publishers (p. 95).
All this elaborately structured politics of exclusions/inclusions
paves the way to what we have just discussed as the rewriting of the
source text. The notable French translation scholar André Lefevere aptly
describes the damaging and culturally alienating effects of this practice of
rewriting not only on literature but also on society:
Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All
rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain
ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to
function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is
manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and in
its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature
and a society . . . But rewriting can also repress innovation,
distort and contain, and in an age of ever increasing
manipulation of all kinds, the study of the manipulative
processes of literature as exemplified by translation can
help us towards a greater awareness of the world in which
we live. (Lefevere, 1992, p. 67)
Obviously when translation becomes a rewriting, it is bound to depart
from the cultural and linguistic specificities of the source texts. All
rewritings, regardless of their motives, have firm ideological underpinnings
(p. 68). To Lefevere, ideology is one of the “very concrete factors” which
steadily govern the course of translation and eventually help it turn into a
rewriting (p. 2).
35
The 20th Century Indictment of Translation
In spite of all the previous problematizations of the practice of
translation, it is its 20th century indictment by such scholars as André
Lefevere, Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, Philip Lewis, Tejaswini
Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak which helped lay bare the real nexus
between translation and ideology (Munday, 2013, p. 156). These scholars
and theorists also successfully brought the inner workings of politics of
translation to the fore. The deep-rootedness of the discursive and highly
institutionalized power operative behind and through translation came in
the lime light and powerful pleas were made for a self-critical reflection on
the part of the translators. Translation was perceived as a discursive
construct which essentially deals with two distinct linguistic codes
underwritten by two distinct cultural patterns (Munday, 2007, p. 96). In
short, a move was made from the appreciation of translation as text to
translation as culture and politics and Mary Snell-Hornby named this trend
as the cultural turn. This was subsequently taken up by other translation
theorists as a metaphor for the politico-cultural characterization of
translation. The cultural turn, over time, came to denote a conglomeration
of influence semanating from the power of publishing industry, pursuits of
ideologies, feminist writing, cultural appropriation and colonialism
(Munday, 2001, p. 125). This cultural turn, in this way, proved to be a
paradigm shift in the conceptualization of translation and some really
unprecedented questions were raised such as:
 WHO is translation?
 For WHOM is he or she translating?
 WHY is this translation being made?
 WHOM does this translation benefit?
 WHOM does this translation harm?
In fact, it was largely due to the raising of such radical questions
that the cultural complexity and the ethico-political role of translation
were adequately recognized. Furthermore, the translation theorists and
the postcolonial critics also began to appreciate the fact that it is not
enough to approach translation merely from the perspectives of literature
and humanities. Instead, such disciplines as media studies, international
relations, cultural studies, corpus analysis, feminism and post-colonialism
should also be taken into account.
This radically new conceptualization took translation as a site of
ideological conflicts marked by struggle for power and supremacy
underpinned by a variety of socio-historical and political factors. It was
36
largely for this reason that the translation theorists maintained that
meanings are not just carried by texts as such; rather, they are constantly
constructed and reconstructed by an intersection of situational, ideological
and linguistic variables. It was in this perspective that Hermans saw
translation as a patent form of manipulation in which the text coming from
a dominant culture invariably triumphs (1995, p. 67).This conceptualization
of translation formed an extremely important benchmark in the modern
history of translation.
In this new conceptualization of translation, the discipline of
cultural studies (in line with the trend set by the cultural turn) played a
very important role. Arguably, cultural studies has done more than any
other discipline to make translation studies a truly multidisciplinary subject
and to bring it in tandem with the contemporary debates and issues.
Sherry Simon illustrates the importance of cultural studies in these words:
“Cultural studies brings to translation an understanding of the complexities
of gender and culture. It allows us to situate linguistic transfer within the
multiple ‘post’ realities of today: poststructuralism, postcolonialism and
postmodernism” (Simon, 1996, p. 100).
As the act of translation does not take place in a vacuum,
therefore, it is inevitably complicit with the larger questions of power,
transformation, authority and marginalization. Moreover, translation has
also been playing a foundational part in the creation, perpetuation and
distribution of differential and asymmetrical power relations across
cultures and nations. Moreover, as translation invariably involves the
socio-cultural imperatives, it appears to be more like a political and
narrative scheme which results not only in social convergence but also in
social antagonism. In this context, it is not difficult to see how the
repercussions of translation go well beyond the syntactic and semantic
bounds of the text and create and socio-political network in which
individuals as well as cultures situate themselves in relations to one
another as well as the society at large (Meschonnic, 2011, pp. 77, 110).
However, this broader politics of power, manipulation and control
also operates at a micro level, i.e. at the level of equivalence and sentence.
It is at this level that we come across such problems as distortions,
misidentification of meanings, false friends, inadequate equivalents,
lacunae, etc. All this partly results from a translator’s inability (or perhaps
unwillingness) to communicate the delicate semantics of the source text.
One example of this subtle mistranslation is the English equivalent demand
for the French word demande. Here the problem is that
the French demande simply means a request, which is similar to but also
very different from a demand in English and demandar in Spanish.
Sometimes, when a word is borrowed from another language, it undergoes
37
a thorough semantic transformation. For example, angst means fear in a
general sense (as well as anxiety) in German, but when it was borrowed
into English in the context of psychology, its meaning was usually taken as
a neurotic feeling of anxiety and depression.
We run into the similar difficulties when we translate the Arabic
word ‫( فکر‬fikr) into English as thought. The Arabic word fikr is not exactly
thought. Rather the word thought with its contemporary meaning hardly
occurs in the traditional Islamic texts. In fact, what would better
correspond to the proper meaning of fikr would be something more like
the French word pensée as used by Blaise Pascal which could be translated
into English as meditation rather than thought. In this sense, the Arabic
word fikr exactly correspond to the Persian word ‫( اندیشہ‬andíshah). In the
traditional Islamic philosophy, both fikr and andíshah are associated with
meditation and contemplation (See Nasr, 1987, p. 99).
However, with the increasing awareness of the power politics of
translation, such issues as gender, identity, ethics, hegemony, power, and
cultural relativism were brought into sharp focus by the researchers and
the students of translation alike (Venuti, 2013, pp. 78-83). André
Lefevere’s notion of rewriting and Lawrence Venuti’s idea of domestication
and foreignization have considerably helped bring the questions of
ideology and politics to the fore. As a result, not only the scope but also
the definition of translation studies has been broadened. This shift
increasingly conceptualizes translation in metalinguistic terms — an
intercultural communication embedded in numerous discursive practices
and underwritten by politico-ideological considerations. How these
metalinguistic terms influence translation can be seen by the following
statement of Amitav Ghosh, a modern Bengali writer, who bemoans the
fate of a South Asian writer, “To make ourselves understood, we had both
resorted [. . .] to the very terms that world leaders and statesmen use at
great, global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern
meaning” (1993, p. 237).
The statement characteristically describes the power politics which
typifies the translation practices in the contemporary global world. What
Ghosh means by irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning is a complex
combination of geopolitical and economic factors which privileges certain
nations and the discourses emanating therefrom. The ascendancy of this
metaphysic of modern meaning is more cultural than textual and it is
primarily underpinned by the scientific and economic supremacy. This
ascendency affects the entire process of translation right from the
selection of the works and their interpretation to their publication and
circulation. Aijaz Ahmad, a well-known Marxist literary theorist and
38
political commentator, describes the far-reaching outcome of this
ascendency:
By the time a Latin American novel arrives in Delhi, it has
been selected, translated, published, reviewed, explicated
and allotted a place in the burgeoning archive of “Third
World Literature” through a complex set of metropolitan
mediations. That is to say, it arrives here with those
processes of circulation and classification already inscribed
in its very texture. (1994, p. 45)
This means that the act of translation is situated on a continuum with
hosts of factors, each having politics of its own. All translations are
embedded not just in language but also in institutions, practices,
marketing dynamics and varied cultural and social economic
configurations. Therefore, a translation is inevitably interwoven,
intertwined and implicated with so many things besides language.
Translation: From Subjugation to Conquest
For millenniums the study of translation just focused on the purely
literary and linguistic aspects of the texts and the questions of power and
ideology were not accorded due recognition. Too much attention was paid
to the aesthetic and stylistic features of language to the virtual exclusion of
the issues of politics and power embedded in the practice of translation
(Asghar, 2014). The attention of the translation scholars has been
appallingly limited to such issues as comparisons, contrasts, thematic
analysis and textual criticism. A cursory look at the European tradition of
literary translation makes it abundantly clear that it has been more of a
norm than an exception with the European translators to subjugate and
domesticate the non-European texts while translating them. Lawrence
Venuti’s book The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995) is
a landmark study of this phenomenon. In this book, Venuti cogently
contends that the European translators routinely sought to adapt the
Oriental source texts to the Western norms and canons of translation
(2013, p. 127).
In this magnum opus, Venuti shows how the Oriental texts were
usually treated by the European translators as ‘raw material’ which it was
their duty to turn into elegant and edifying target texts. Therefore, it was
not uncommon with the European translators to remove all the supposed
coarseness and inappropriateness from the Oriental texts and make them
acceptable to the urbane and cultured readership at home. The translators
felt no qualms in going to great length in improving and refining the source
texts. Scholars like Edward Said, Philip Lewis, Venuti and Niranjana
consistently censured this condescending attitude of the European
39
translators and dismissed it as mere euphemism and apology for
geographical or cultural imperialism (Venuti, 1995).
Venuti is obviously not alone in problematizing and questing the
European translation tradition. A prominent postcolonial critic and theorist
Gayatri Spivak has also discussed this ideological aspect of the European
translation tradition at length in her works. To her, the Third World
literature is not rendered proper justice when it is translated into English.
Spivak has addressed this issue in her seminal essay The Politics of
Translation:
In the act of wholesale translation into English there can
be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the
strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third
World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so
that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to
resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in
Taiwan. (2000, p. 338)
Lefevere also bears Venuti and Spivak outand maintains that the European
and the non-European literary traditions are at such a great variance from
oneanother that a translator while dealing with these traditions has to
engage in a process of cultural mapping. It is only through this cultural
mapping that a bi-culturalism can emerge and which can assist a translator
in rendering greater justice to the autonomy and distinctiveness of the
source text. To Lefevere, the non-European texts have been usually
conceived, constructed and situated in the categories, thought-patterns
and genres derived from the European translation tradition (see Bassnett,
2011, p. 158). However, it remains to the credit of Venuti to bring all these
varied concerns together and give them a systematic and disciplinary
expression. To Venuti, the European translation traditions have their own
well-defined canons of acceptability, notions of correctness and highly
institutionalized conventions which inevitably come to bear upon the
practice of translation. It is not uncommon for the target text to
domesticate the source text and to recast it in its own image. In this
domestication, the patterns of variations along with the linguistic and
cultural distinctiveness of the source text are usually obliterated by the
target text. This subjugation, so to speak, of the source text leads to its
ultimate conquest:
Translation is often regarded with suspicion because it
inevitably domesticates foreign texts, inscribing them with
linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific
domestic constituencies. This process of inscription
40
operates at every stage in the production, circulation, and
reception of the translation. (Venuti, 1998, p. 209)
The first step to subjugate a source text is to familiarize it to the reading
constituencies at home. A source text is uprooted from its original
historico-cultural setting and is re-planted into an altogether different
milieu where the foremost task of the translator is to familiarizeit to the
readers at home. It is certainly in this act of familiarization that a source
text goes through a systematic and extensive process of trimming and
accretion which results in a huge linguistic and cultural loss. The translator
situates the foreign outside the cultural comprehension and the literary
imagination of his domestic readers. The utmost care is taken by the
translator not to perturb the urbane sensibilities of the readers at home,
no matter how much linguistic and cultural loss is caused to the
particularities of the source text. Such an idea of translation is a strategic
schematization of an idealized inter-national world in which nations are
situated at various geographical points, enclosed by territorial borders and
invested with nationalist narratives (Venuti, 2013). All this tends to lead to
kind of cultural closures and can have far-reaching repercussions for our
global world. To some of the cultural critics, such closure scan, at times,
possibly result into the ethnocentric states of mind which can be
dangerous for our shared and collective existence (Bayart, 1996, pp. 7-21).
What goes hand in hand with this large-scale domestication of the
less privileged discourses or what provides it with a rationale to operate is
the Eurocentric tendencies in our socio-academic world. From Macaulay’s
denunciation of the entire Indian and Arabic literature to Fredric
Jameson’s highly unflattering view of the ‘Third World novel’, we come
across a long line of these Eurocentric tendencies which put the non-
European texts at a clear disadvantage in the power politics of translation.
Here is Macaulay’s utterly sweeping statement, “. . . a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia” (in Momma, 2013, p. 97). Now look at this totalizing statement by
Frederic Jameson, “The third-world novel will not offer the satisfaction of
Proust or Joyce” and will only “remind us of outmoded stages of our own
first-world cultural development” (in Bahri, 2003, p. 18). These two
statements by two leading spokes persons of the European politico-
cultural world go, at least, some way illustrating that patronizing attitude
which, to Venuti and Spivak, has been a hallmark of the European literary
traditions.
This makes one wonder as to whether Hafiz Shriazi (a Persian poet
whose works are regarded as a pinnacle of Persian literature), Baba Farid
(a Sufi saint of the Punjab), Sultan Bahu (a Sufi mystic, poet and scholar
active mostly in the Punjab), Abu Aqil Labid ibn Rabiah (an Arabian poet of
41
exceptional literary prowess), Abu Ali Ahmad ibn Miskawayh (a
philosopher and historian from Iran who was the author of the first major
Islamic work on philosophical ethics), Al-Jahiz (a notable Arabic prose
writer), Francis Marrash (a Syrian writer and poet of the Nahda
movement—the Arabic renaissance), Maulana Rumi (a Persian poet, jurist,
Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic),Tulsidas (a Hindu poet-saint,
reformer and philosopher), Muhammad Iqbal (legendary Urdu poet and
the ideological father of Pakistan) and other scores of such Arab, Indian
and Persian writers are as worthless as not to produce the brilliance and
grandeur of ‘a single shelf of a good European library. This also makes one
wonder as to what is there in Proust or Joyce which one does not find in
Taha Husayn, Tawfiq al-Hakim or in Naguib Mahfouz. Moreover, if the
artistic majesty and literary merits of Bahaa Taher, Nawal El Saadawi or
Orhan Pamukare not known to the European readership, it is largely due to
the power politics of translation because of which either such literary
giants have not been translated at all into the European languages or they
have been translated in a highly domesticated fashion. Therefore, when a
non-European writer of exceptional merit and prowess is translated into a
European language in a domesticated way, he/she ipso facto loses the
lion’s share of his/her originality and turns out to be just harping on the
commonplace European literary themes and motives.
Although considerable effort has been made even within the
European cultural as well as the academic world to combat such
stereotypical legacies, people like Venuti, Niranjana and Spivak have
shown its vigorous persistence to this day. To these writers, when it comes
to translation, the non-European literatures are usually relegated to the
genre of non-canonical literature. The supposed canonicity of the
European literatures invests them with greater power and influence. These
practices and trends have contributed to the asymmetry of the
contemporary cultural relations. At the same time, they have been one of
the main causes behind the traditional European estimation of the non-
European literatures. Obviously the European scholars are aware of only
those Oriental works which have been translated into any of the major
European languages. What has not been translated into any of the
European languages just does not exist for them as such. This is once again
what I have discussed above as the politics of exclusions. Even Frederic
Jameson has been indicted of it by Aijaz Ahamad. To Ahmad, Jameson is
guilty of a facile overgeneralization and his statement about the Third
World Literature is insufficiently theorized (1994, pp. 98-110). To mention
yet another case in point: even the most celebrated and influential Muslim
poet, Rumi, was introduced to Europe as late as 1935, when R. A.
Nicholson translated him into English. Similarly, there are scores of
42
Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic, African literary giants waiting to be
translated into any major European language.
The Way Out
It is paramount to re-think this way of going about the business of
translation. Thanks to the radical and insightful theorizations of the late
20th century, at present a sizable critical literature is available which can
help us appreciate the power politics of translation and take steps to avoid
it. People like Venuti, Berman, Lefevere, Niranjana and Spivak stand for an
ethics of difference in translation (Munday, 2013, p. 128). The golden
principle endorsed by these scholars is crisp and effective: instead of
moving the author to the reader, seek to move the reader to the author (p.
134). This means that a translator should avoid obliterating the linguistic
and cultural distinctiveness of a source text as much as possible. Instead of
rewriting a source text in the image of a privileged target text, the job of a
translator should remain to communicate it on its own terms as much as
possible.
This obviously is not an easy task given the sedimented and
centuries-old notions such as appropriateness, transparency, correctness
and fluency. These notions are firmly rooted not just in the minds of a large
number of translators but also in the publishing industry and the
academia. The difficulty of breaking away from them has always been
recognized by the translation scholars mentioned above (Saldanha &
O’Brien, 2013, p. 198). Therefore, Venuti calls for more valor and greater
courage on the part of the translators and asks them to resist and defy the
Eurocentric hegemony and discursive dominance in an ethnodeviant
manner. After all, speaking truth to power has been the dream of all the
postcolonial theorists ranging from Edward Said to Gayatri Spivak
(Munday, 2013, p. 93).
All these theorists and scholars agree that the syntactic
specificities and the cultural distinctiveness of the source texts should not
be sacrificed for the sake of spurious and stereotypical notions of urbanity,
taste and accuracy. All such elitist notions are bourgeoisie constructs
formed to perpetuate the Anglo-American discursive dominance in a post-
industrial and globalized world. The best way to stand up to the
appropriations and rewritings of the source texts is the strategy of
foreignization—a technique advocated by Lawrence Venuti. Foreignization
can be understood as a radical translation technique which is aimed to
send the reader abroad instead of bringing the author home (Boase-Beier,
2011). It does not advance the pseudo claim of substituting the source text
in an absolutist and unmediated way. Its avowed aim remains to vigilantly
43
register and communicate all the essential linguistic and cultural
characteristics of a source text (Toury, 2012, pp. 48, 210).
Furthermore, foreignization does not seek to barter away the
actuality of the source text with the acceptability of the target text. In this
way, the technique of foreignization efficiently excludes any possibility of
setting up the ideological dominance of the target text over the source
text. Instead, it puts the source text at par with the target text and the
power imbalance between them is strategically calibrated. In a systematic
way, the strategy of foreignization foregrounds the cultural and linguistic
peculiarities of the source text by enhancing their visibility and reinforcing
their centrality (Asghar, 2014). This calls for a kind of interventionism on
the part of the translator which Venuti describes in the following words:
I want to suggest that insofar as foreignizing translation
seeks to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation,
it is highly desirable today, a strategic cultural intervention
in the current state of world affairs, pitched against the
hegemonic English-language nations and the unequal
cultural exchanges in which they engage their global
others. Foreignizing translation in English can be a form of
resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural
narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic
geopolitical relations. (Venuti, 1995, p. 208)
It should also be noted that the technique of foreignization does not seek
to overly familiarize the source text to the reader. Rather a quasi-surrealist
ambience of mystique is retained in which the reader is set free to develop
his/her own understanding in an experimental and incremental way. The
suspense and curiosity of the foreign is not totally repealed. Nor is any
overly patronizing assistance offered to the reader. The autonomy of the
reader is as much respected as the autonomy of the source text. The
regimes of power are replaced with democratic textualities. As a result,
instead of being a liability, it appears to be one of the most remarkable
assets of a translation to look unfamiliar and foreign (Munday, 2013, pp.
57, 62). Therefore, in its most characteristic form, foreignization prevents
the source and non-canonical texts from being standardized, internalized,
in short, cannibalized (Asghar, 2014).
However, it is not enough to just foreignize the source text. Along
with this a paradigm shift of perspective is required which would allow a
re-thinking of the non-European and non-canonical literatures. Moreover,
what is commonly called the World Literature (sometimes in
contradistinction with the so-called Third World Literature) is not to be
taken as an outcome of the contemporary internationalization but instead
44
as a critical dimension by which various cultures and cultural turmoils can
be appreciated in their complexities.
Arjun Appadurai, the Indian-born US ethnologist and writer, has
ingeniously introduced some new post-national perspectives which seek to
substitute translation with deterritorialization, that is, by transferring,
blending and shifting the local towards the metropolitan (1996, p. 198).
The post-national demographic dynamics such as diaspora, exile
and migration are throwing new challenges to the practice of translation.
The present day Syrian refugee crisis, galvanized by the tragic death of
three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy whose image made
global headlines after he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while
attempting to escape the civil war in Syria, aptly illustrates the immensity
of these challenges. As a corollary of this, the idea of a nation as the carrier
of culture and the sole source and target of translation is being
increasingly questioned. Therefore what needs to be revised is not just the
practice of translation but the canons of cultural studies and
comparative/world literature. In this regards, our literary imagination,
hybrid identities, syncretistic cultural experiences and composite self-
images should all be accorded a due place. Therefore, all acts of translation
should be underwritten not only by our collective affiliations but also by
what Homi Bhabha calls our “shared historical traumas” (see Simon, 1996,
137).
Conclusion
Today when the questions of identity and voice are increasingly
coming into play, we can no longer ignore the power politics of translation
and its effects on the marginalized texts and communities. In this study, I
have laid bare the deeper questions of ideology, power, manipulation and
hegemony which invariably underpin the practice of translation. Instead of
investigating the question of translation from purely semantic and
syntactic perspectives, the practice of translation has to be judged from
ideological and political viewpoints also in order to understand its nexus
with power and control.
Moreover, ours is a world of terrorism, suicidal fury and genocidal
conflicts verging on ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Our
technological prowess has added exponentially to our ability to kill. Never
in human history was there a more crucial and more immediate need to
understand the other cultures and civilizations as it is now. With the
onslaught of a neo-imperial vernacular hatched by the Eurocentric
corporate culture, a new challenge has been posed to the fate of less
privileged languages during the practice of translation (Fisk, 2007, p. 678).
In the view of this complexity of the situation what is really required is the
45
greater and more empathic understanding of the source texts during their
translation into the dominant European target texts. Cultural
misapprehensions born of highly domesticated translations can lead to
ethnocentric states of minds. Translation is the foremost means to initiate
and sustain a dialogue between different cultures and nations.
Therefore, it is paramount to be aware of the ideological and
political factors which can impact negatively upon our perception about
other peoples and nations. It is time to re-assert and re-invent the
autonomy and distinctiveness of the source texts and less privileged
discourses. In this regard, Venuti’s technique of foreignization can go a
long way to help us. The sources texts should no longer exist as mere raw
material awaiting the miraculous prowess of a translator to turn into
something real and finished. What has to be realized by the translators,
theorists, scholars, researchers, diplomats and policy makers is the plain
fact that every language stands for a culture and a historic tradition and
when it constitutes a source text; its historico-cultural legacies must be
recognized and honored. That is the only way to ensure a mutually
respected co-existence in a world already rent with the linguistic and
ethnic clashes.
46
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49
Relevance of Authentic Materials to the Attention Span

of Adult Learners in English Language Classes in Pakistan
Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja

Abstract
This article assesses the relation of authentic materials to the
attention span of adult students in English language classes in Pakistan. It
determines the advantages of authentic materials and points out what
care and caution need to be taken while using them to obtain their
maximum benefit. A literature review of the problem is presented first
enumerating the advantages of authentic materials in an English language
class, and then several strategies are suggested to get the best outcome
from their use. Both qualitative and quantitative research tools have been
administered in this research to get the relevant data. Since the problem
of sustaining students’ attention in class especially in EFL classes has been
the topic of concern, the qualitative tool helps find out that the right kind
of authentic materials depending on various factors including the situation,
the learners and the topic as well as the art of exploiting authentic
materials in the class help extend students’ attention span and make
teaching and learning successful. The quantitative tool helps in
determining that use of authentic materials is not resisted by the learners,
and teachers consider them a great help in making teaching/learning
process a fun. This paper concludes that by incorporating authentic
materials in English language teaching in Pakistan, a great many positive
changes can be brought in the English language curricula being taught at
all levels in Pakistan. It recommends the teachers, administrators, policy
makers and syllabus designers to focus on sustaining learners’ attention
with the best use of authentic materials to optimize their learning in an ESL
class. This paper is a building block for future research on the issue of the
use of authentic materials in English language classes. The culture of the
college classroom, teaching and learning could be transformed towards
betterment by funding the researchers to focus on this issue.
Keywords: authentic materials, adult learners, attention span, ELT
Introduction
English still has an important role in Pakistan, even though it is
soon to be replaced by Urdu as the official language. All Pakistani interests
across the world are addressed through this language. Moreover, it is the
language of higher learning especially in the fields of medicine, science and
technology. The researcher has noticed with concern that many of our
50
students, even those with advanced degrees, are unable to tackle basic
proficiency tests such as IELTS or TOEFL with confidence.
The main reason for this serious lack of target language proficiency
could be that they are taught far-fetched fables, pastoral poetry and
stories specially written in the context of History of Islam and Pakistan, but
the functional aspect of the language is ignored. Structures of English are
taught through the traditional Grammar Translation Method (GTM), (refer
to Punjab Text Book Board Intermediate English Book 1 & 3). The point to
be noted is that the policy makers in Pakistan still seem to think that the
language will come by itself as a by-product of teaching literature.
Another dilemma of ELT in Pakistani context is the erroneous
treatment of course books by most teachers. In the first place, even the
courses do not, as such, provide the teacher any support. For instance, the
Textbook of English for class XI, National Book Foundation (2004), has
exercises at the end of every short story with total disregard to the content
of the story and no co-relation with subsequent class activities. The first
lesson carries exercises on Nouns, the second on the Present Perfect
Tense, the third on the use of Adverbs and Present Perfect Tense and so
on. This lack of logic in the teaching tools or aids and materials neutralizes
whatever motivation the students might have had in the beginning. They
are left with high affective filters even if they are pushed to sit in the class
through institutional force and other factors. These typical examples are
quite sufficient to make it clear why Pakistani learners knock at the doors
of language centers and language universities. Enrollment in the courses of
the National University of Modern Languages, for example, can run as high
as two thousand adult learners annually.
The researcher has witnessed the phenomenon (not without
agony) of how learners, mostly in Government institutions, sit with dull,
blank faces and remain uninvolved in the teaching. The old-fashioned
lecturing system has much to do with this. Students become passive and
inattentive.
In an informal round of observations in colleges in Islamabad and
Rawalpindi, the researcher noted that many language teachers were not
even using the blackboard or whiteboard, let alone advanced teaching
aids. No authentic materials were in evidence to inculcate real language
skills. With some in-depth discussion and intimate interaction, the
researcher was able to form insights into the issue at hand. The variable
discussed and explored here is the use of authentic material. An effort is
made to explore what difference the use of authentic materials can make
in arresting and extending the learners’ attention span.
51
Review of Literature
Taking the term semantically at the outset, authentic simply
means original, genuine, natural or not artificial. Though it also has a
connotative meaning of authority but in ELT terminology an authentic text
is the one whose primary intent is to communicate meaning from native
speakers of the language (Swaffar, 1985). For the present study the same
has been accepted.
Two elements mainly determine the authenticity of the teaching
material. The first is the text, written, spoken or sound-recorded that
comes from a native speaker of English for the listeners or readers. The
second is the purpose of the text which means manipulation or
exploitation of the material under the use that can help the learners to
seek guidance for their immediate needs, not only in the classroom but
also in real life situations for practical purposes. In a nutshell, both the
content of the text as well as its purpose make it authentic (Purcell-Gates,
2003). In a language class, these two aspects are to be considered
important while selecting materials for teaching.
Researchers define authentic materials in many ways. Peacock
(1997) defines authentic materials as “(those) that are produced to fulfill
some social purpose in a language community.” Widdowson (1990)
contends that authentic material would be that which is designed for
learners of English and used in the classroom in a way similar to the one it
was designed for. Morrow (1977) asserts that an authentic text is a stretch
of real language produced by real speakers or writers for real audiences,
and designed to convey a real message of some sort. Spelleri (2002)
contends that authentic materials refer to any items for the general
community and not specifically for the ESL community. According to these
definitions, news articles or radio/TV bulletins of the Pakistani media
would not fall in this category. There is no certainty that what is being
offered is close to the kind of speech or writing produced by native
speakers.
There are many other issues regarding the nature or use of
authentic materials. First, the tension between native and non-native is
less severe now than it used to be, as the World Wide Web is an immense
library of authentic materials for the language learning classroom. Of
course, all the material available on the www is not necessarily uploaded
by native English speakers. However, most of it lies within acceptable
limits. Second, it is not clear whether we are dealing with authenticity of
task, or authenticity of situation (Taylor, 1994). The question of bringing in
something authentic in the class raises doubts in teachers’ minds whether
52
the classroom itself is unauthentic. Breen (1985) talks of four types of
authenticities:
1. Authenticity of the text which may be used as an input data for our
learners
2. Authenticity of the learners’ own interpretation of such text
3. Authenticity of the task conducive to language
4. Authenticity of the actual social situation of the language classroom
Breen includes almost everything in the term, but Taylor (1994) points out
that authenticity is a relative term and its different aspects can be found in
different degrees. Widdowson (1979) clarifies the ambiguity to some
extent by saying that authenticity is not a quality residing in instances of
language, but a quality which is bestowed upon them and is a created
response of the receiver. Authenticity is to be realized in the act of
interpretation. Theorists seem generally convinced that texts may be
undisputedly authentic if they are written or spoken by native English
speakers even if not for the purpose of language teaching.
Third, many theorists doubt the use of the material in language
classroom in a way that makes it artificial or unauthentic. Taylor’s (1994)
arguments help to resolve this uncertainty. He discards the view that the
classroom is an artificial place that affects the authenticity of the material
used. A classroom is a place where authentic materials are used for
authentic or real purposes in life. Taylor also suggests that learners are
somewhat like theater-goers who willingly suspend their disbelief
(Coleridge, Biographia Literaria) and learn practical lessons of life from the
plays they watch. Learners can similarly create an aura of authenticity for
themselves in the classroom; they know the difference between learning a
language and using it.
Finally, it is not what kind of text we have that matters but how we
use it. It is the purpose that determines the authenticity of the text. For
example, letter writing is a typical activity in a language classroom.
However, if a letter produced by this exercise is not post-able (to coin a
term); the activity falls short of the ideal of authenticity. Learners should
not only be told the techniques and methods of skills or sub skills of
language to be learnt or used, they should be invited to understand both
the underlying logic of the activity on one hand, and its real functions on
the other. Only then an activity of this nature can be termed authentic in
the sense that Gates et al. (2003) have defined. Nevertheless, if an actual
restaurant menu is brought in the class and learners are asked to select
food items within a specific amount, both the menu as well as the
subsequent activity may be considered authentic; if the second condition
53
of applicability in real-life situations beyond the classroom is addressed,
the activity comes into the category of authentic teaching.
The use of authentic materials for learning is not something
conceived by language teachers only. It has some grounding in well-
conceived theories dating back to Descartes with his “I think, therefore I
am” stance. Cognitivists tell us that it is the mind of the learner that
possesses and processes everything. Recent studies have revealed that
knowledge and learning are closely linked with context. Wilson (1993)
contends that authentic activity involves situations in which actual
cognitive processes are generated, rather than simulations of the kind
employed in schools. Perhaps that is one reason for the rise of English for
Specific Purposes (ESP). Authentic materials offer learners opportunities to
create and recreate their own curricula under the supervision of the
teacher.
There may be diverse purposes for language teaching in the minds
of teachers, course devisers and policy-makers of pre-school, school and
other forms of formal and professional educational systems. But,
regardless of policy, two main purposes tend to motivate the average adult
when she or he comes to the English class. The first is to learn English for
immediate and real needs (these may vary from person to person), and the
second is to adapt to a new community, which could be because he or she
works in a multi-national set-up, or has migrated to an English-speaking
country. Spelleri (2002) is right in saying that it is impossible to separate
linguistic needs from the learner’s survival needs. Language is a tool, not
an end in itself. Authentic material is useful because it goes beyond
matters of structure and vocabulary to the provision of working
implements for real life situations.
Authentic materials dispel the impression from the mind of the
adult learner that s/he is in the class to read a particular text. On the basis
of his practical experience with the classes of English language learners of
Mexican immigrants, Delgado-Gaitan (1987) shares his view that generally
adult learners, when given a text book to read, presume that they are
supposed to do academic reading. Therefore, a new trend of giving more
value to the reader is emerging; text is less significant than the immediate
needs of the reader or the adult learner. Thus, any understandable text,
written or spoken, that may interest the learners in the class and that can
help with practical needs, is authentic. In this regard, Ashley Hasting and
Brendra Murphy (2002) contend that most of the materials that ordinary
people seek for entertainment and enlightenment are authentic. Such
material is also useful in stretching the attention span of the learners
because it is interesting. A movie, documentary, dialogue, TV talk, news
bulletin, comic, magazine, editor’s column, restaurant menu or instruction
54
manual could thus be included in the category. With this in view, we can
say that almost every book lying on the shelves of our library is authentic
in its own right. However, the right of the learner is the real test and
determinant of authenticity.
The use of authentic materials enlivens the classroom. Language
teachers can bring to the classroom a variety of interests. Teachers are
also educators, so education and general development are part of their
responsibilities (Sanderson, 1999). Not only are the changing trends of life
reflected through authentic materials, but language change is also
reflected in the materials. Learners and teachers can keep abreast of those
changes.
It is pertinent here to discuss Literature as a source of authentic
materials, because the main content of English language teaching in
Pakistan is taken from literature. Mostly adults in Pakistan do not come to
the class to experience the subtleties of charged language or refined styles
of language. Their primary concern is to develop communication skills that
can serve them in life beyond the classroom. They may come to attend
English language class, for instance, to be able to respond to the
complaints, feedback letters and other missives issued by their children’s
teachers and school administration or to be able to look for better jobs,
draft good employment letters or master interview skills, but not to
acquire a fastidious taste for poetry or fiction. Selections must be made
carefully with practical end purposes in mind.
Media can help in teaching language skills. Language proficiency
implies integration of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.
According to one estimate (Burely, 1995) we spend more than 40 per cent
of our time in listening, about 35 per cent in speaking, nineteen per cent in
reading and only about five per cent in writing. Pakistani students do a lot
of listening—our authoritarian classroom attitudes do not encourage
participation, so they are expected to sit still and listen to the teacher
talking for long stretches of time. However, their competence in this skill
usually remains poor, partly because they are not really listening (at least,
not attentively) and partly because the models of English presented in the
average classroom are sub-standard, exhibiting marked interference from
the first language in delivery and structure. Students fail to achieve good
bands in IELTS, for instance, because of inadequate exposure to authentic
listening texts. It is observed that many (if not all) Pakistani immigrants in
the UK learn listening skills in a few months of exposure to native speech.
For our English language class, BBC World, VOA, CNN, etc. are some useful
and easily accessible sources. Learners may be advised to practice listening
through these media beyond the classroom. Compared to what students
get in ordinary schools, the functional courses offered by the National
55
University of Modern Languages, Islamabad are more effective in
inculcating authentic listening skills by including authentic materials such
as cassette recordings/CDs of What to Say, Getting on in English, Choosing
Your English and Going to Work in English Language Teaching.
The textbooks prescribed by planners in boards and universities in
Pakistan are not revised for years, whereas world trends and supporting
data keep on changing day by day. A book being taught at the
Intermediate level in Pakistan contains facts and figures in two essays,
“Hunger and Population Explosion” by Anna Mackenzie and “China’s Way
to Progress” by Galeazzo Santini, that were valid in 1973 at the time of the
first edition. They are still being taught in a drastically changed world. This
kind of material creates barriers in learning and makes the classroom dull
or even embarrassing, thus exacerbating negative affective factors.
Authentic materials help developing an understanding of life and
culture thereby preparing students to have a practical approach to life.
Maria Spelleri (2002) opines that with the help of authentic materials,
three things are embedded, namely, language learning, cultural insight and
practical application. She is also of the view that it enriches the learners’
understanding and is useful for them in real life. In Pakistan, for example,
there is the undesirable practice of teaching letter-writing with fictitious
names of persons and places, like city ABC and person XYZ. This erroneous
and unauthentic way of teaching can result in ridiculous incidents when
learners are seen using unconsciously the same thing in their practical life.
Chrissa Ahstrom (2003) shares her experience of teaching maps and
directions in the class in their original shape. She narrates that once her
students, Mexicans, were asked to draw directions to their homes, and the
whole class practically used one learner’s work when she invited the class
over for dinner.
Many other practical advantages of the use of authentic materials
in the class have been noticed and observed in recent times. One language
leaner expressed her views after completing a literacy course that a
newspaper had been a horrible pile of papers before but turned to be an
object full of interest (LPALS study program, Purcell-Gates, 2003). The
discerning teacher is guided by learners as well as situations: given a
chance, the most desirable content finds its own level in the class, and the
most desirable results are produced through this contextualized approach
in teaching. The use of authentic materials promotes openness, liberty and
the spirit of democracy where all voices are duly heard. Prescribed books
are formal in tone and hardly carry day to day scenes of the cities and
streets. Authentic materials keep the teachers and the learners in touch
with changing trends of life. Latest editions of newspapers, or radio and TV
programs keep the interest alive and the motivational level of adult
56
learners high. Without the relevance factor, the attention span of students
is likely to be short. Contrived material or dead information cannot be
expected to hold their attention for a pedagogically productive length of
time.
It is tempting to select materials that are learner-contextualized,
but some risk is involved. One cannot form many judgements about
English language learners from the level assessment test or short interview
given prior to their placement in a program. The more you get involved
with your learners, the more you realize their contextual needs. It
demands a lot of patience to understand the context of each learner. The
difficulties are exacerbated in dealing female learners in co-education
classes in a Muslim society where females have their peculiar socio-
psychological problems. Most Pakistani adult learners lack speaking skills
and find it difficult to explain what is going on in their minds. However, L1
may be used for this purpose, provided the teacher knows the same
language. If we develop a culture in the class that promotes learners’
interest, it may turn out to be an additional burden for the teacher. The
planning of the teacher and the learners may go in opposite directions. For
instance, very often one comes in the class with enough tools, plans and
materials ready for a whole teaching session, but the learners wish to talk
about hot issues. This is a common experience in Pakistani adult classes
where an unstable political scene often stimulates learners more than
other practical skills. On such occasions, teachers need to be vigilant and
imaginative to exploit the situation in a tactful manner, but the end
product is rewarding. Student participation is enhanced, attention is
maintained and motivation tends to remain high.
Human interests are also diversified and unlimited in number. A
teacher may think that filling in a passport application form is a valuable
skill to practice in the class, but there may be some learners in the same
class who know that they will never need a passport. In their research
study, Erik Jacobson and his associate researchers opine that transferring
skills, however, between contexts is extremely difficult and rarely
accomplished by learners to the degree often assumed by the educators
(NCSALL, 1995).
The level of difficulty of the text is also a barrier. It needs to be
explained and simplified during the prior brainstorming talk so that the
learners may not lose all interest in the text. Purcell-Gates (2003) opines
that the level of difficulty of the text is not only a problem for the learners
but, at times, the teachers also find themselves struggling with the
materials. She has also advised teachers to take into account what she calls
the instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative
57
and informational needs. Coming up to this standard is, of course, a great
challenge for an English language teacher.
It is true that English language teachers, rather all teachers, must
work hard to produce desirable results but the teaching strategy involving
the use of authentic materials does, in fact, put pressure on the teacher.
Selecting, grading, streamlining and operating authentic materials in the
class are not as simple they seem to be at first thought.
Methodology
In order to analyze the role of authentic materials in arresting the
attention span of English language learners, the researcher used the
following questionnaire combining the quantitative tool viz., survey items
1 & 2 and qualitative tool viz., Interview Questions 1, 2, 3 & 4.
Quantitative Tool Survey Items
I. Using authentic materials in your English language class is
resisted by the learners as they think that it is not
important from examination point of view and it delays
completing the course.
II. Without the use of authentic materials in the language
classroom, teaching/learning starts getting dull and
boring and learners’ attention span breaks time and again
as a result the teacher has to exert more energy to keep
the learner focused.
Qualitative Tool Interview Questions
I. How can authentic materials used in the classrooms
stretch the attention span of the learners and make
learning experience more interesting and lower their
affective filter?
II. Do you agree that without the use of authentic materials
in the language classroom, teaching/learning starts
getting dull and boring and learners’ attention span
breaks time and again as a result the teacher has to exert
more energy to keep the learners focused?
III. How can authentic materials keep the learners involved
and motivated in the learning process?
IV. Do you agree that using authentic materials in your
English language class is resisted by the learners as they
think that it is not important from examination point of
view and it delays covering up the course?
Quantitative Tool
In order to get the quantitative data on the research question
“How can authentic materials used in classrooms stretch the attention
span of the learners and make learning experience more interesting and
58
lower their affective filter?” Survey items 1 (Using authentic materials in
your English language class is resisted by the learners as they think that it
is not important from examination point of view and it delays completing
the course.) & 2 (Without the use of authentic materials in the language
classroom, teaching/learning starts getting dull and boring and learners’
attention span breaks time and again as a result the teacher has to exert
more energy to keep the learner focused.) were designed to determine the
side effects of the use of authentic materials and the harms of not using
them while imparting the language skills in the learners. The responses of
the target population viz., the teachers determined the effectiveness of
such teaching tools which supposedly engage the learners and make them
participative and involved in the class activities. The possible side effects of
using authentic materials mentioned were that using them in your English
language class was resisted by the learners as they thought that they were
not important from examination point of view and they delayed
completing the course. The possible disadvantage of not using authentic
materials in the class discussed in survey item 2 was that without the use
of authentic materials in the language classroom, teaching/learning would
start getting dull and boring and learners’ attention span would break time
and again as a result the teacher would have to exert more energy to keep
the learner focused.
The scale used for these survey items was five point Likert scale.
The results on these survey items were analyzed with the help of bar
charts. Chi-square test was applied to them all in order to find the
association or independence of the attributes since the survey was given
to the teachers teaching English as language and those involved in
teaching English as subject.
Sampling for Research Survey
For collection of the data based on the statements mentioned above, the
survey was distributed to 200 teachers in the following fashion:
Table 1: Sampling of Teachers from Universities
Language Teachers No of Respondents
National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad 80
International Islamic University, Islamabad 10
Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad 10
Total 100
59
Table 2: Sampling of Teachers from Government Colleges
Subject Teachers No of Respondent
Islamabad Model College for Boys, H-8, Islamabad 12
Islamabad Model College for Boys, H-9, Islamabad 12
Islamabad Model College for Boys, F-10/4, Islamabad 6
Islamabad Model College for Boys, G-6/3, Islamabad 9
Islamabad Model College for Boys, F-8/4, Islamabad 10
Islamabad Model College for Boys, G-10/4, Islamabad 9
Islamabad Model College for Boys, I-10/1, Islamabad 9
Government Degree College, Satellite, Rawalpindi 9
Government Gordon College, Rawalpindi 14
Government Asghar Mall College, Rawalpindi 10
Total 100
Quantitative Data Analysis

Use of authentic materials in relation to adult learners’ attention
span in English language class creates many crucial and critical questions.
The concern in this research article is to verify whether there are any risks
or advantages involved especially from psychological perspective in the
use of authentic materials in English language classroom. However, the
reaction and response of the adults who are exposed to the authentic
materials for the first time in their education is also important since in
most of the cases, the adult learners have earlier been tuned and trained
in a completely different manner. Therefore, there is a dire need of
reflection upon the use or lack of authentic materials in Pakistani curricula
of English in general but the classroom tactics in dealing with the authentic
materials in the adult English language classroom in particular. It is hoped
that this portion of the research paper will be of help for the fellow
researchers, the classroom practitioners, the course designers and the
policy makers alike.
60
Statement 1: Using authentic materials in your English language class
is resisted by the students as they think that it is not important from
examination point of view and it delays completion of the course.
80 66% Teachers
56%
No. of Respondents
60 Teaching
English as
40 32% Language
15% 15%
20 6% 2% 4% 2% 2% Teachers
Teaching
0 English as
Strongly Disagree Uncertain Agree Strongly Subject
Disagree Agree
Responses
Figure 1: Distribution of Teachers' Responses to Statement 1

Since the calculated value of chi-square = 8.72 (see appendix) is
more than the critical value of 5.991, the null hypothesis H0 is rejected. It
means that the teachers teaching English as language and the teachers
teaching English as subject have different opinion about the proposition.
Using authentic materials is always useful as it makes the linguistic
inputs more comprehensible. This proposition was put in the survey item-1
due to the hypothesized apprehension that our exam system makes the
teachers work on the textual contents only from examination point of view.
It does not allow them to use authentic materials in their language class as
learners resist it declaring it unimportant from examination point of view.
Some teachers also think that it delays completion of the course.
However, if the authentic materials are used to supplement the
course and text book and move around the learners’ needs to direct the
language proficiency enhancement and language skills development, they
are neither resisted by the teachers nor by the learners. The survey results
clearly point out the accuracy of this analysis as 15% language teachers
and 6% subject teachers strongly disagreed, 66% language teachers and 56%
subject teachers disagreed with the proposition.
The difference in the opinions of language teachers and the
subject teachers is mainly due to the majority of subject teachers showing
uncertainty. If the number of agreeing and disagreeing respondents is
focused, it becomes clear that there is not much difference in the opinions
of language teachers and subject teachers. On both sides, the agreeing
respondents are more in number. Thus we can conclude that majority of
61
the teachers (may they be teaching English as language or as subject) think
that the use of authentic materials is resisted by the learners as they find
them of no use for their exams. This leads to another conclusion that the
teachers are aware of Pakistani learners’ psyche that they all the time keep
thinking about their exams and do not concentrate on their studies in the
class as a means to develop them communicatively and linguistically.
Rather passing in exams and getting good grades is their only desire.
Here we come to realize the need to change the overall psyche of
the whole society. It needs to be reformed to the direction of accepting
education as a means of developing some skills in the learners, and not a
petty means of getting a piece of paper (degree) to get the
job/appreciation from the people around. The society is to be
revolutionized so that the individuals are able to appreciate the
competence reflected in the everyday performance and not in the degrees
only. At the same time, there is a need to change the syllabus taught and
assessment system practiced as well. Only in this way, the adult learners
will appreciate and get motivated to make the best use of the aids and
authentic materials in making themselves linguistically competent.
Linguistic inputs provided to them in the class will also become more
comprehensible since their attention span will be properly arrested.
Statement 2: Without the use of authentic materials in the language
classroom, teaching/learning starts getting dull and boring and
learners' attention span breaks time and again as a result the teacher
has to exert more energy to keep the learners focused.
50%
47%
50
No. of Respondents
40 Teachers
27% Teaching
30 24%
21% English as
20 14% Language
8%
10 3% 4% 2% Teachers
Teaching
0
English as
Strongly Disagree Uncertain Agree Strongly
Subject
Disagree Agree
Responses
Figure 2: Distribution of Teachers' Responses to Item-2

Since the calculated value of = 9.86 (refer to appendix) is more
than the critical value of 5.991, the null hypothesis H0 is rejected. It means
that the teachers teaching English as language and the teachers teaching
English as subject have different opinion about the proposition.
62
Teaching aids like authentic materials in the language class make
the teaching job easy, systemic and impressive, and also keep the learners
focused, involved and motivated. The proposition was designed with the
hypothesis in opposition to the teachers who take authentic materials as
attention-diverting agents rather than facilitating tools. Such teachers take
themselves as the most important authentic materials. What is
hypothesized then is that without the use of authentic materials,
teaching/learning starts getting dull and boring and learners’ attention
span breaks time and again. As a result, the teacher has to exert more
energy to keep the learners focused.
3% of language teachers, 4% of subject teachers strongly
disagreed, 27% language teachers and 24% subject teachers disagreed. It
does indicate that mere authentic materials are not enough. They are not
enough if the teachers are not trained to make effective and productive
use of them. These sections of the teachers need to be given in-service
training. Same goes with 2% uncertain language teachers and 14%
uncertain subject teachers. Apart from these responses, a teeming
majority of teachers from both sides have accepted the proposition and
have shown like mindedness.
Qualitative Data Analysis
The following is the gist of discussions based on interviewees’
responses to the four interview questionnaire items mentioned in the
methodology part. Ten teachers were interviewed, five teaching English as
language and five teaching English as subject. The language teachers were
taken from National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad and
subject teachers were taken from Federal Government colleges.
Authentic materials and modern teaching aids have always been
considered helping tools especially in language classes. These, in fact are
the sources of stretching adult learners’ attention span. Besides bringing
an element of newness and freshness to arouse students’ interest,
authentic materials, realia and other teaching aids also bring the learners
in close contact with the language as it is used in real life. In this way, these
materials not only bring fun in the class but also make the learners learn by
doing. The teachers’ job also becomes easier as a result. Ms. A.H. says,
“Nowadays as teachers we are trying to apply as many modern teaching
techniques as possible and even we are surprised at the positive outcome
at times.” Mr. Z.B. is of the view, “Authentic materials enhance the
practicality aspect or utility aspect of learning.” Mr. A.H. says, “The audio
visual aids bring a lot of fun and life to your class . . . the students are
involved and they learn by doing things. They actually use language in a
constructive way.”
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No educational system can be perfect. Every educational
institution needs to revise and update its syllabus and policies on regular
basis. Realizing that there are some deficiencies in the syllabus of an
ongoing course, the teacher finds it his/her responsibility to make up for
this through some technique or strategy. Authentic materials seem to offer
a great help in this regard. Ms. S.J. comments, “Our syllabus in colleges is
not perfect. A lot of things are out-dated and boring. Some parts are very
difficult for the students . . . realia, extra materials and authentic materials
prove to be a blessing for teachers in such situations. They help teachers
make difficult things easier . . . and boring parts interesting.” Mr. A.H.
says, “If students are bored in class or the drop-rate gets higher, people
blame the teacher, whereas actually the problem lies with the syllabus.
Our textbooks are not up to date . . . the teacher can try to make these dull
and boring parts interesting by using the available sources only . . .
Authentic materials are very important in helping teachers in such
situations.”
The most widely used lecture method makes the students passive
and dull. When students find the teacher using the authentic materials
making them interact with the real world text, the passivity seems to fade
away gradually. Mr. A. H. is of the view, “Language is related to . . . the real
world. If the teacher uses such things (authentic materials, realia and
modern teaching aids) that create real contact of the students with the
real world . . . They have good effect on the learning and make learning
interesting and attractive. Actually, seeing is believing.” Ms. S.J. says, “The
modern teaching aids develop interest in the environment of the class . . .
the proper and suitable use and application of the authentic materials,
realia and teaching aids are essential for teachers. If these are used only to
attract the students’ attention in the class and they do not serve the
purpose of teaching/learning, their usage is not appropriate.” Moreover,
merely having the equipment in the class may help in attracting students’
attention initially. However, when the students find that these have little
bearing on their learning, they get distracted and lose interest.
The authentic materials should be used with the primary purpose
of making learning effective and successful. The teaching should not
depend entirely on it. Instead, they should be used to facilitate teaching
and learning. In this way, the general complaint made against their use in
the class that they are not important from the examination point of view,
would die its death. Ms. A.S.H. says, “If you use authentic materials in a
proper way . . . that actually reinforces the learning of the students.” Ms.
A.S. says, “. . . if we are doing some audios and visuals, we definitely need
to use the proper equipments.” Mr. A.H. says, “It totally depends on how
the teacher uses it (authentic material, realia, etc.) and that how the
64
students react to it . . . The teacher has to supervise everything in a careful
manner. Only then these extra materials would have their desired impact.”
Thus the teacher needs to be very vigilant.
These materials have double significance when English is taught
and assessed as a language since they help the students to improve their
skills. Ms. S.J. says, “Students should be made to realize that their
assessment system or their examination system is going to be language-
based and not that they have to cram things from their books.” When
learners tune into area of language skills, they realize the importance of
authentic materials. Once this belief is established among all the
stakeholders involved in the target learning/teaching that the objective of
the whole process is teaching and assessing language skills, resistance to
the use of authentic materials will fade away. Teachers and adult learners
will no more be syllabus slaves, and affective barriers will be acceptably
low.
Conclusion
In general, the authentic materials have been considered a great
help in stretching the attention span of the learners. If authentic materials
are used to supplement the course and text book and designed to address
learners’ needs, it is likely to be accepted by both teachers and students
more readily. There is a need of annual review of the existing syllabus of all
levels and grades by a team of experts who should make the syllabus
connected with the authentic materials, if not entirely subservient to
them. The most optimistic support, in this regard, comes from the element
of cyber technology which is gradually replacing the prescribed
curricula/textbooks.
The prescribed syllabus in Punjab and Federal Government
Colleges has generally been found deficient in a number of areas. The
fundamental mistake that our course devisers usually commit is
incorporating the content in the syllabus not written or spoken by the
native English speakers. This deficiency results in poor exposure of our
learners to the real challenges of the global and pluralistic world.
Resultantly, even in the classroom, they fall into complete hibernation and
lose the required attention span. The material presented and methods of
teaching adopted also do not bring any satisfaction or sense of
achievement in them.
The teachers involved in this research find extra material,
authentic materials and realia always useful in language classes as they
reduce the affective filter and make the linguistic inputs more
comprehensible. They also find teaching aids like audio visual aids effective
in making the teaching job easy and systematic, and also in keeping the
65
learners involved and motivated. But for some teachers, these are
attention diverting agents rather than facilitating tools.
However, the advantages of using authentic materials are
numerous just like their numerous sources. The greatest advantage of the
use of authentic materials is its direct applicability in the lives of the
learners. It has been witnessed that the drop-out rate in the adult ESL
class, where authentic materials approach is skillfully applied, tends to be
low. Once the learners are enrolled after careful assessment of their
previous level of skill in the target language and their immediate needs are
addressed by proper exploitation of carefully selected and operated
authentic materials, there is a reduced incidence of students dropping the
course without completion. The main reason for this is that the use of
authentic materials makes them more involved and their attention span
remains considerably extended. The use of authentic materials makes the
learners realize that the class work is not a burden but a worthwhile task
that is closely linked with everyday affairs of their lives. As a result their
learning zeal remains alive, their morale high and the attention span
stretched.
Computer software and the Internet are the best sources of
authentic materials provided that they reach the learners after being
filtered by professional and experienced teachers. These, then become
authentic almost in every meaning and manifestation of the term. Internet
is easily accessible to the adult learners. It is rather closer to them when
they are away from the classroom environment. It has taken guise of the
best friend during the hours of isolation. Introduction of authentic
materials through internet in Pakistani classroom of adults should not be
blocked because our adults are no longer strangers to the cyber world
whether they live in urban, semi-urban or rural areas.
The Internet makes the work of the learner as well as the teacher
easier. A great variety of material on the net really arrests the attention
span of the learners and removes almost all the psychological barriers in
the way of learning. Exposure to the Internet is a good activity as it is an
application of communication skills. Adults do not need their teachers’ or
neighbors’ help doing things like searching for jobs or seeking admissions
to colleges and universities. Even forms are filled in, there and then, and
tests and interviews also conducted on the web. This is how we can
address some of the main objectives of adult learners who come to learn
English language for practical purposes in their present lives and future
growth.
To sum up, the planned and professional use of authentic
materials in our classrooms with the primary objective of keeping the
66
learners’ attention span stretched is the need of the hour. The future
direction of this desirable and somewhat practicable and productive
methodology seems to be very bright. Moreover, dynamic trends in
teaching and learner-centrism are also there to welcome the use of
authentic materials.
Recommendations
1. Using material and literature from the real world plays an important
role in keeping the learners attentive and involved. Adult language
learners naturally find these real world contacts more interesting and
stimulating than edited and controlled learner world exposure. The
use of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, movies, radio or TV is an
easy way to bring the real world into the classroom to increase their
interest. They also provide a chance to expose the learner to the
cultural aspects of the language.
2. Using audio visual aids while using authentic materials in the class
comes in handy in arresting the attention of the learners and in
drawing them into a given activity. In particular, while giving
instructions for activities or presenting new linguistic inputs, devices
such as the OHP or multimedia, laptop, whiteboard, smart board etc.,
or simply the white (or black) board should be used for reinforcement.
Authentic materials given should be first filtered by the professional
and experienced teachers. These should embed language learning,
cultural insight and practical application.
3. Introducing authentic materials is often hard in the class but majority
of the teachers have agreed that with their use, teaching/learning
process becomes a fun and the learners remain interested, attentive,
participative and focused. If such a class gets a bit noisy, educational
administration should appreciate it instead of condemning the
teacher. The teachers and administrators should take the classroom as
a workshop where the learners learn to do by doing, and acquire the
language skills for success in practical life.
4. Using more than one way to pass on instructions related to language
activities or to new language inputs for the learners is highly
recommended. Use of diversified means opens diversified channels of
putting the inputs into the brains of the learners and as a result has a
positive impact on the attention span of the learners. The teachers
teach to address the immediate needs of the learners. Therefore, they
should use the text, written, spoken and recorded by a native speaker
of English to develop reading and listening skills of the learners.
5. Teaching English as a language and not as a subject of mathematics,
physics or chemistry is also a key recommendation. The purposeful use
of authentic materials can be a big help in this regard.
67
6. Involving situation and context in the use of authentic materials ignite
the cognitive process in the learners for real language learning. Here,
the teachers should not be unmindful of the learners’ linguistic needs
which generally initiate from their social survival needs. They should
give more value to the learners and less to the text to gain authenticity
of purpose. The learners’ resistance to the use of authentic materials
especially in the subject teachers’ class should be handled
professionally, democratically and patiently. The judicious, selective
and planned use of L1 should be allowed to arrest the attention span
of the learners while using authentic materials.
7. Revising the text books used for English teaching periodically for the
sake of authenticity is the last but not the least important
recommendation. The teachers should be trained to use authentic
materials with the primary intent of communicative competence
development of the learners on the model of native speakers of the
language. They may be given special incentives and rewards on using
authentic materials in order to motivate them further to carry on the
tough tasks of selecting, grading, streamlining and operating the
authentic materials in the class.
68
References
Breen, M. P. (1985). Authenticity in the language classroom. Applied
Linguistics, 6(1), 60-70.
Burley, A. (1995). Listening: The forgotten skill. New York, NY: John Wiley
& Sons Inc.
Gaitan, C. D. (1987). Mexican adult literacy: New directions for
immigrants. In S. Radencich (Ed.), Becoming literate in English as a
second language (pp. 9-32). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hasting, A. A. (2002). Thoughts on the use of authentic materials.
Retrieved from http://www.focalskills.info/articles/authentic.html
Jacobson, E., Degener, S., & Purcell-Gates,V. (2003). Creating authentic
materials and activities for the adult literacy classroom: A
handbook for practitioners. Cambridge, MA: NCSALL.
Littlewood, W. (1992). Oral Communication: A Methodological
Framework. Oxford: Blackwell.
Meloni, C. (1998). The Internet in the classroom: A valuable tool &
resource for ESL/EFL teachers. Retrieved from
http://www.aguadillaenglish.net/TEED_readings/internet%20in%2
0the%20classroom.pdf
Morrow, K. (1977). Authentic texts and ESP. In S. Holden (Ed.), English
for Specific Purposes (pp. 13-16). London: Modern English
Publications.
Peacock, M. (1997). The effect of authentic materials on the motivation
of EFL learners. English Language Teaching Journal, 51(2), 144-156.
Rivers, W. M. (1978). A practical guide to the teaching of English as a
second language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sanderson, P. (1999). Using newspapers in the classroom. Cambridge:
Spelleri, M. (March-April 2002). From lessons to life: Authentic
materials bridge the gap. ESL Magazine, 5(2), 16-18.
Swaffar, J. (1985). Reading authentic texts in a foreign language: A
cognitive model. The Modern Language Journal, 6(1), 16-34.
Taylor, D. (1994). Inauthentic authenticity or authentic inauthenticity?
TESL-EJ, 1(2), A-1.
Widdowson, H. G. (1979). Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
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Widdowson, H. (1990). Aspects of language teaching. Oxford: Oxfrod
University Press.
Wilson, A. (1993). The promise of situated cognition. New Directions for
Adult and Continuing Education, 1993(57), 71-79.
Appendix
Chi Square Tests for Quantitative Data Analysis
Chi-square test for the independence or association between the
attributes for statement 1
We write the hypotheses as following:
1. Ho= There is independence between language teachers and subject
teachers and their responses towards the statement.
H1= There is association between language teachers and subject teachers
and their responses towards the statement.
2. Level of significance α is given , α = 0.05
2
3. Test: Statistics used is x where
Computation: The given table of observed frequency is written as:

Table 3: Chi-Square Test for Teachers' Responses to Statement 1
A1 A2 Total
B1+B2 15+66=81 6+56= 62 B1+B2= 143
B3 2 4 B3= 6
B4 +B5 15+2=17 32+2=34 B4+B5= 51
Total A1=100 A2=100 n=200
The corresponding expected frequencies are as follows:
A1 A2 Total
B1+B2 = =71.5 = = 71.5
(B1+B2)=
143
B3 = =3 = =3 (B3)= 6
B4+B5 = = 25.5 = = 25.5 (B4+B5)= 51
Total (A1)= 100 (A2)=100 n=200
70
The necessary columns are as follows:
fo fe fo - fe
81 71.5 9.5 90.25 1.26

2 3 -1 1 0.3
17 25.5 -8.5 72.25 2.8
62 71.5 -9.5 90.25 1.26
4 3 1 1 0.3
34 25.5 8.5 72.25 2.8
= 8.72
4. Critical region: = 5.991

5. Conclusion: Since the calculated value of = 8.72 is more than the
critical value of 5.991, the null hypothesis H0 is rejected.
Chi-square test for the independence or association between the

attributes for statement 2
We write the hypotheses as below:
1. Ho= there is independence between language teachers and subject
teachers and their responses towards the statement.
H1= there is association between language teachers and subject teachers
and their responses towards the statement.
2. Level of significance α is given , α = 0.05
2
3. Test: statistics used is x where
Computation: The given table of observed frequency is written as:

Table 4: Chi-Square Test for Teachers' Responses to Statement 2
A1 A2 Total
B1+B2 3+27=30 4+24=28 B1+B2= 58
B3 2 14 B3= 16
B4 +B5 47+21=68 50=8=58 B4+B5= 126
Total A1=100 A2=100 n=200
The corresponding expected frequencies are as follows:
71
A1 A2 Total
B1+B2 = = 29 = = 29
(B1+B2)= 58
B3 = =8 = =8 (B3)=16
B4+B5 = = 63 = = 63 (B4+B5)=126
Total (A1)= 100 (A2)=100 n=200
The necessary columns are as follows:

fo fe fo - fe
30 29 1 1 0.03
2 8 -6 36 4.5
68 63 5 25 0.4
28 29 -1 1 0.03
14 8 6 36 4.5
58 63 -5 25 0.4
= 9.86
4. Critical region: = 5.991

5. Conclusion: Since the calculated value of = 9.86 is more than the
critical value of 5.991, the null hypothesis H0 is rejected
72
The Linguistic Representation of Gender Identities in

Pakhtu Proverbs
Qaisar Khan (Main Author)

Nighat Sultana (Co-Author)
Arab Naz (Co-Author)
Abstract
As an important marker in a human society, language performs a
variety of functions. It serves the role of a primary vehicle for transmitting
cultural norms, values and expectations from one generation to the other.
It, therefore, emerges pivotal in connecting the past and the present and
also determines the future trends. This research paper argues that
language reflects as well as preserves, propagates and perpetuates
gendered culture. Analyzing the language used in Pakhtu proverbs, the
paper explores the significant role of language in the formation and
construction of gender identity in cultural setup. The study is based on the
qualitative analysis of 3000 collated folk proverbs from archived (and/or)
published collections and their authors’ interpretations. The collections
primarily relate to Pakhtun social setup in the province of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa. They share the code of Pakhtunwali with Pakhtuns living in
the Pakistani province of Baluchistan and on the other side of the border
towards Afghanistan. The findings of the study therefore equally apply to
them. The study contends that the proverbs adhere to the tenants of
Pakhtunwali and reinforce patriarchal social structure. The gendered
linguistic expressions also serve as a means to preserve the age-old gender
inequalities, which in turn are manipulated and exploited to erect social
structure marked by gender imbalance. The language of proverbs
advocates masculinity and male domination in decision-making process,
division of labor, domestic and public sphere.
Keywords: language, gender identity, folk proverbs, Pakhtunwali
Introduction
Pakhtu proverbs constitute an important part of the corpus of
Pakhtun folklore. Proverbs popularly known as mataluna (plural of Matal)
are highly valued for expression of Pakhtun identity and are “prized pearls
of wisdom” to guide them throughout their lives (Tair & Edwards, 2006, p.
ii). The social traditions of Pakhtuns are enshrined in Pakhtunwali- the
code of honor that defines what it means to be Pakhtun (Duncan, 1990;
Hawkins, 2009; Johnson & Mason, 2008) while to Nawaz Tair (1987)
Pakhtunwali still survives as it is preserved in proverbs. Pakhtu proverbs
73
dominate life affairs as they are believed to be a rich, authentic and
eternal fountain of wisdom and faith of Pakhtuns (Enevoldsen, 2004). On
the basis of this belief, they are learnt painstakingly and contextualized
during conversation situations to add to the validity, credibility and
acceptability of a point of view.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa spreads over an area of 74,521 sq km and
has a population of over 22 million. Majority of them are Pakhtuns (also
called Pashtuns, Pathans) speaking Pakhtu (also called Pashto, Pashtu)
language. Other languages include Khowar, Hindko, Kohistani, Shina,
Torwali, Kashmiri, Kalasha and Kaghani are also spoken. A considerable
number of Afghan refugees are also scattered in refugee camps in
different parts of the province. Formerly, the province was called North
West Frontier Province (N-W.F.P.) but through 18th amendment in Federal
Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 2010, it was renamed as
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Khyber represents historic Khyber Pass near
Peshawar toward Afghanistan while Pakhtunkhwa implies near the
Pakhtuns, is representative of the majority Pakhtun population of the
province (Khan & Sultana, 2012; Khan, Sultana, Bughio & Naz, 2014).
As said above, Pakhtu is spoken in majority of the province with
the visible presence of Hindko speakers in Hazara, Mansehra, Abbottabad,
Haripur, Dera Ismail Khan and Peshawar. For all practical purposes, Pakhtu
remains the major source of communication in the province. Urdu is also
used for official purposes in government offices and courts. Incidence of
the use of Urdu is also found in larger business centers like Peshawar,
Mardan and Nowshera due to people coming from other provinces of the
country. Afghan refugees who have settled in the province after the
Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s are predominantly
Afghan Pakhtuns thus speaking Pakhtu and sharing cultural norms and
values and the code of Pakhtunwali.
In the subsequent discussion, a theoretical overview of the
relationship between gender and proverbs is presented which introduces
Pakhtu proverbs, their historical background and their currency and
relevancy in Pakhtun interaction pattern with particular reference to the
relative position of men and women as two representative but segregated
segments of Pakhtun culture. It also highlights the significance of their
contextual analysis to see as to how the content and themes contained in
proverbs are perceived and understood particularly among Pakhtuns. Next
are discussed gender modeling, gender segregation, gendered power
structure and gender socialization in proverbs followed by a
comprehensive conclusion.
74
Gender Identity and Proverbs
In most of the world’s cultures, proverbs are part and parcel of
everyday life that are spoken trippingly and understood immediately (Tair
& Edwards, 1982). A proverb is a short but famous sentence which
describes either truth or instruction. Commenting on the popularity and
utility of a proverb, Shinwari (1999) says that it is that talk or sentence,
which comes out extemporarily from the mouth of an experienced elder or
scholar on witnessing a story, an event or incident. This sentence proves so
meaningful and effective that other people also use it on similar occasions
and thus it gradually becomes popular. He further adds that a proverb
survives the ravages of time but its narrator and background are forgotten.
Thus, today there are proverbs but their background events and stories are
not known. In addition, the wisdom contained in Pakhtu classical poetry
has also acquired the status of proverbs (Enevoldsen, 2004). Proverbs are
the “molecules” of popular literature with particular reference to Pakhtuns
as they express their cultural identity (Tair & Edwards, 1982, p. i).
Research studies including Akbar S. Ahmed (1980), Salma Shaheen
(1984), Jens Enevoldsen (2004) and Tair and Edwards (2006) reveal that
proverbs are the outcome of long historic customs, social practices and
traditions. In the Pakhtun social setup, the practice of gathering together
to a common place mostly hujra (guest house) or mosque to share and
discuss social issues and problems, events and happenings can be said to
be a major contributor to the enrichment of the corpus of Pakhtu
proverbs. Culturally, Pakhtuns believe in sharing and caring and such
occasions are marked by the presence of men of all ages, outpouring
words containing wisdom, which have evolved into proverbs by virtue of
repeated use over a longer period of time.
From semantic point of view, Tair and Edwards (2006) argue that
the meaning contained in proverbs is so compressed and complex in
relation to metaphor that it necessitates more social knowledge to
properly understand and appreciate them. They further add that proverbs
remain more or less meaningless apart from context. Similarly, they are of
the view that proverbs are not “folkloric relics, verbal decorations, or
collector’s items” but the reflection, expression, or embodiment of cultural
values, thinking and social labeling. In addition, they “can be used to
propose a course of action, affect a change of attitude, or provoke a
change in perspective. Proverbs are rhetorical tools to accomplish social or
personal ends” (pp. ii-iii).
Among Pakhtuns, proverbs are alive and play significant role in
their speech both formal and informal. They are abundantly found in oral
culture and also in books, newspapers and literary dramas, novels and
75
short stories. Similarly, conversation situations both inside and outside the
home contain frequent recourse to proverbs. They may be employed as
penetrating weapons of verbal combat in heated arguments in conflict
situations whether political, social or domestic. To Tair and Edwards (2006)
Pakhtu proverbs embody the overall image of Pakhtun life and their world
serving as prisms that “enable us to see and understand a colorful
spectrum of images, beliefs, values, behaviors and customs” of Pakhtuns
(p. ii).
Highlighting the significance of a proverb, Katozai states (2005)
that it serves as a guiding principle of human life from which one gets
instruction and guidance in every aspect of life, every occasion and every
time. Mostly, proverbs depict and reflect the life style of a nation or
residents of a particular locality’s ethnic or language group because their
background contains much history, true events and instruction. In this
context, Tair and Edwards (2006) observe that meaning contained in a
proverb is linked to a worldview and way of life that give us an insight into
aspects of culture including values, ethics, religious concepts, attitudes and
gender relations. With particular reference to Pakhtun society, they argue
that nothing is beyond the province of proverbs: they serve as a moral
guide and resource in the affairs of routine life as they contain lessons
about faith, honor, human nature, friends, enemies, power and revenge.
They further add that “proverbs are not only a window into their world;
they are windows that enable us to look out from their vantage point, and
see the world through Pashtun eyes” (p. iv). Based on the findings of this
research study, both from the literature reviewed and field observations,
proverbs guide, teach, reinforce and perpetuate Pakhtun customs and
traditions.
Method and Material
The present study is based on the qualitative analysis of Pakhtu folk
proverbs through assembling or collating texts, by a review of archived and
published materials and their authors’ interpretations. The locale of the
study is the north-west province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (former N-W.F.P)
in Pakistan which borders Afghanistan to its West. The residents of the
province are predominantly Pakhtuns whose life is steered by the age-old
code of honor called Pakhtunwali (Rahman, 1995).
The study is based on 3000 proverbs assembled, however, the
approach is selective and confined to only the analysis of those
representative proverbs which relate to the representation of gender
identities in the context of the local culture. An emphasis on the language
of these proverbs is also undertaken to appreciate the cultural
construction of words and labels among Pakhtuns.
76
The assembled data indicates that mostly men have authored the
books about proverbs. The main reason of it is the lack of access to
education among Pakhtun women and their confinement to their homes
only (Khan & Sultana, 2012). This may be a pertinent debating point to
explore gender bias in these proverbs which future research studies may
undertake. However, two works by a female author, Salma Shaheen (1984
& 1988-9), a renowned educationist associated with University of
Peshawar were consulted but her collection of proverbs was found similar
to the rest with particular reference to gender identities and
representation. Furthermore, the anthologies do not actually report from
field observation of any single instance of the performance of a proverb
causing someone to choose to behave in a certain way. Rhetorically, they
do admonish people to choose certain styles of action, and warn against
others, but without the observation of actual pragmatic effects of speech
events (where a received proverb leads to behavior), we can only say that
they are designed rhetorically to dictate and evaluate action, in uncertain
relationship to actual actions performed.
The study employs the perspectives of Social Learning Theory and
Cognitive Development Theory that emphasize the crucial role of
communication in the inculcation of masculinity and femininity (Wood,
2007) while dealing the text of proverbs as discourses in a Foucauldian
sense, enunciated in critical Post-Structuralist Perspective to mean “ways
of constituting knowledge, together with social practices, forms of
subjectivity, and power relations” (Durrani, 2008, p. 599; see also Weedon,
1997, p. 105).
Results and Discussion
To start with, the pattern of gender modeling followed in
anthologized Pakhtu proverbs is markedly masculine in intent and content.
Display of courage, power and energy are masculine while patience,
perseverance and submissiveness are presented as female virtues. In
cultural context, men are associated with the outside world while female
must remain in the confines of the four walls of home. As referred to
earlier, proverbs encompass the whole of Pakhtun life and their language
and therefore rich in instructional material to guide gender development
within the context of Pakhtunwali. In the next part, we draw a sketch of
gender modeling as enunciated in the corpus of Pakhtu proverbs.
Masculine and Feminine Models
Pakhtu proverbs express male ideology (Tair & Edwards, 2006) and
project masculine models exuding strength, power and energy. They are
symbols of bravery and courage. They are portrayed as relentless warriors
as a proverb says that A single son of Pakhtun is also an army (Lashkari,
77
2005, p. 67). In another place it is said that A brave son is known by the
way he weeps in his cradle (Lashkari, 2005, p. 70). The existence and
survival of a male child is exalted and his death or an injury is considered
as an unbearable loss to the family (Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 280) whereas
the presence or absence of a daughter is more or less insignificant (Tair,
1980, p. 66). So much so the birth of a female child is met with tears and
goes uncelebrated (Ahmed, 2004; Grima, 1992).
More importantly, there is a tendency toward a negative or hateful
portrayal of women in Pakhtu proverbs (Tair & Edwards, 2006). Instead of
modeling women to be more progressive and participative in social life,
these proverbs restrict, confine and seclude them. The seclusion or purdah
is institutionalized as a means to gender segregation which is integral to
the concept of Pakhtunwali (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Khan, Sultana, Bughio &
Naz, 2014). Female fate is best illustrated in the proverb, For a woman
either the home or the grave (Lashkari, 2005, p. 52; Tair & Edwards, 2006,
p. 227). In other words, she can either survive at home or embrace death
to leave her home (Shaheen, 1988-9). Such proverbs tend to teach,
educate and socialize women according to the principles of Pakhtunwali.
They are consistently taught to behave in a socially acceptable manner.
This whole process of schooling and guiding women subjugate them to the
dictates of patriarchal social structure. They are idealized when they worry
only about their skills at homemaking and not to worry about the rest of
world: When Tora (name of a lady) puts the cooking pot on the hearth, she
puts all her worries under her feet (Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 168). They are
socialized to step into the shoes of their mothers as a proverb puts it:
When the daughter proves that she is well behaved she steps into the shoes
of her mother (p. 325). Warning messages for women to behave
themselves frequently occur in these proverbs. They are projected as
weak, frail and having little wit in comparison to men (Katozai, 2005). In
this regard, a famous proverb is that Had women no noses, they would
have fed on filth (Lashkari, 2009, p. 85; Tair, 1980, pp. 45-53). Such
belittling representations of women in the social setup render them
secondary and force them to look for male support in order to thrive
socially. In the same way, the fate of wives is no less pathetic. The
proverbs incite women to carry out the wishes of their husbands (Tair,
1980, p. 77) otherwise they shall be considered at par with enemies posing
a threat to the stability of family structure (Lashkari, 2005, p. 42).
On another level, in the proverbs generally, the word woman
carries negative connotations and is used in a belittling and derogatory
manner (Tair, 1980, pp. 45-53). William Fry (1972) notes the same with
regard to sexual jokes and states that there also a woman “is represented
as naive or simply stupid, easily outmaneuvered by the male, who gets
78
what he wants without cost” (p. 139). Further, negative personality traits
like suspicion, weakness or lack of power and energy are associated with
feminine gender. The display of such traits by men, are also termed
womanish in a negative sense and such men are rebuked for their unmanly
behavior (see also Stockard & Johnson, 1980, p. 6). Instances of such
expressions in Pakhtu proverbs may include: You became Hindu in
Ramadan (Islamic holy month of fasting), A woman in harvest time
(Lashkari, 2005, p. 25), and Woman was born on the day of suspicion (Tair
& Edwards, 2006, p. 299). The proverbs A brave man’s kick will force him to
sit like a woman (p. 159) and The earning of a woman is as worthless as
the load carried by a she donkey (Tair, 1980, p. 53) are also significant in
this regard. In these proverbs, personality attributes associated with
womenfolk are conventionally termed as negative or vile, carrying social
and cultural disapproval.
Thus, there is a marked difference in the representation of
masculine and feminine models in Pakhtu proverbs. They project a gender
segregated social structure where men remain at the helm of affairs with
women idealized in domestic domain.
Comparative Presentation of Masculine and Feminine Models
A famous Pakhtu proverb says: When the brother becomes a man
of prowess, his sister basks under his protection (Lashkari, 2005, p. 76; Tair
& Edwards, 2006, p. 337). It serves a sour commentary on the relative
status and position of both genders in Pakhtun social fabric. It renders men
powerful, strong and entrusted with the cultural responsibility of
controlling and safeguarding the supposedly sans strength womenfolk.
This dependency of women upon men ranges from the affairs of
homemaking to the wider socio-economic sphere.
Pakhtu proverbs adhere to male ideology in that the world is
viewed from men’s perspective. Here, women are projected as additional,
secondary and supportive in their social roles. The analysis of proverbs
reveals that finding a woman for marriage is of less significance as long as a
man has money and wealth: When there is money, the woman will come
even from Kalabat (name of a far off village) (Shinwari, 1999, p. 21; Tair &
Edwards, 2006, p. 167). Involvement in meaningless quarrels and fights is
attributed to women with particular reference to polygamous situations
(Enevoldsen, 2004, p. 10; Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 182). Further, they are
portrayed as extravagant in spending the hard-earned money of their men.
A proverb puts it, The khan is angry, his wife is happy (Tair & Edwards,
2006, p. 218). It implies that men are constantly troubled by the lavish
spending of their wives. They do not realize the pain of earning. In
comparison, husbands are exalted to zenith height and women are
79
admonished to give them respect and regard to the extent of worship:
“Khawand” (husband) is a name for God (Tair, 1980, p. 79; Tair & Edwards,
2006, p. 221). Similarly, those men who remain cooperative and
supportive to their women are ridiculed as submissive and hen-pecked:
Although his wife ground the flour, the dust lies on his neck (Tair &
Edwards, 2006, p. 287).
Regarding women’s secondary but supportive role, instances from
Pakhtu proverbs show that men are compared to mountains and kings
while women are termed as their pillars and viziers respectively (Lashkari,
2005, p. 84). For instance, the proverb A woman cannot replace a man no
matter how good she is (Lashkari, 2005, p. 88, Tair, 1982, p. 63) stipulates
the inherent superiority of men over women. In Pakhtun families, women
are mostly secondary in decision-making processes pertaining to
homemaking and mate selection and if ever a woman is found at the helm
of the affairs, this too is attributed to male patronization: If the mother
dominates, it is because of the father, who patronizes her (Lashkari, 2005,
p. 6; Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 29).
At another level, bravery in men is reciprocated by beauty in
women. The former must take pride in their weapons while the latter must
remain satisfied with their jewellery: A malak (honorable man) needs
sword a woman needs a house (Tair, 1982, p. 62). Women must always be
on guard and must safeguard their beauty otherwise the proverb, Oh
brother the infidel! Oh shameless sister (Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 349)
becomes relevant to such situations where a brother must, in order to
save his family’s honor; prove severe upon his sister. It is interesting to
note that a brother is to guard her before marriage while this responsibility
shifts to her husband after marriage. The expression, Oh, shameless sister
(be-sharme khori) is used to scold an immodest, shameless, or brazen
woman, that is, one who fails to exhibit modesty in her dress, public
behavior and demeanor, for example, not covering her head or face
properly, wearing tight clothes, walking ahead of her husband, talking
openly with men (ibid.). In other words, a Pakhtun woman leaving the
confines of her home without purdah or veil is considered violation of her
beauty and honor (Khan, 2008, p. 102).
In short, the proverbs teach relative superiority of men over
women. A woman a supposed to stay at home and support her man in his
responsibilities in the public domain. She is also expected to behave
herself and not to create any untoward situation for her brother, husband
or father. She is expected to follow men’s decisions and to remain
obedient. Men, on the other hand, are projected as decision makers and to
look after the needs of female family members. They are also expected to
80
monitor women and to decide their futures according to the code of
honor- Pakhtunwali.
Gender Segregation and Gendered Power Structure in Proverbs
Pakhtu proverbs are coined and repeated historically with a view
to order and direct the coming generations to regulate their society. In the
context of gender, proverbs advocate gender segregation as the distinctive
mark of Pakhtun society. The proverbs propagate guidelines as to how the
two genders are to act and operate in life, erecting gender hierarchies
comparable with the spirit and aspirations of Pakhtun ideals of
Pakhtunwali. They identify masculine and feminine spheres of activity and
draw a clear line between the two. For instance, a famous proverb, It is
better for a woman to suffer the shaving of her head than to be cast out of
the home by her husband (Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 293) clarifies the point.
It is explicit in statement of gendered social expectations. It is also a clear
display of patriarchy and the subservience of women. The power structure
in Pakhtun society in general and the family in particular is gendered
where women are belittled for their Long hair, little wit (Katozai, 2005, p.
388).
Pakhtu proverbs describe women mostly in the domestic sphere.
They are expected to observe purdah (female seclusion and veiling) and
hold themselves back from public appearances (Tair & Edwards, 2006, p.
349). They are also expected to invest and spend the earning of their
husbands frugally, to limit their wants and be more tidy and clean with
their household work: I know a slut (untidy and dirty) who keeps more
leaven than necessary, but does not clean the pot with residue on the
edges (p. 127). Women are therefore expected to worry only about their
homes (Shaheen, 1988-9, p. 56) and leave the outside world to men who
would earn and feed them as the proverbs state: Man is mountain, woman
is his support; Man is king, woman is his vizier; Man earns, woman spends
(Lashkari, 2005, p. 84; Tair, 1980, 62). In the same way, daughters are
idealized in their roles of emulating their mothers and sons their fathers as
stipulated in Like mother, like daughter and Like father, like son (Tair &
Edwards, 2006, p. 208).
With regard to gendered power structure, women are at the
mercy of their men. For instance, a proverb states, A good wife leads her
life according to the wishes of her husband (Lashkari, 2005, p. 7). They
must cater to the expectations of their husbands in order to enjoy
comparative leverage in domestic issues like decision-making. More
importantly, respect for men is absolute and there is no option available to
the contrary, A husband, good or bad but the wife must respect him (p.
110). In this connection, Tair and Edwards (2006) note that Pakhtu
81
proverbs advocate decency, patience and goodwill of the husband as
starting points for women to have a prosperous domestic life: When a
woman understands her husband, shall have ordered life at home (p. 29;
see also Lashkari, 2005, p. 41).
In short, the power structure is strictly gendered in the corpus of
Pakhtu proverbs. Men are at the helm of affairs while women are to obey
and follow their decision as integral to rules of business and survival in the
society.
Gender Socialization in Proverbs
Pakhtu proverbs remain crucial for their role in gender
socialization. Their language is steeped in instructional phrasing, the
repetitive nature of which makes it a potent source of socialization in
society. As mentioned earlier, the world of proverbs encompasses almost
all aspects of the culture including gendered social patterns. From
proverbs, one can construct the image of an ideal Pakhtun social setup
with regard to gender. The language is ripe with meaning and is
manipulated to erect particular gender norms. They attempt to draw and
paint the best and the ideal in person, gender and situation. They also
delineate the worst and the most hateful. In relation to gender, women
are defined in their limited sphere of activity, desirable looks and with
reference to their relations with men. By contrast, the latter’s identity, as
revealed in these proverbs, is progressive and liberal. A brief sketch of the
gender socialization pattern in proverbs is presented as follows.
Pakhtu proverbs, with particular reference to marital relationship,
socialize women to respect and follow the wishes of their husbands
(Lashkari, 2005, p. 110; Tair, 1980, p. 77; Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 221).
They are taught that It is better for a woman to suffer the shaving of her
head than to be cast out of the home by her husband (Tair & Edwards,
2006, p. 293). They are also instructed to content themselves with the
confines of home as their only abode till death (Ahmed, 1976, p. 47; Tair,
1982, p. 63; Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 227). It is only then that they shall
deserve their place both at home and in society. By doing so, they shall
also become a reason for the honor of their men: White turbans (symbol of
honor) are given to the men by the women (Lashkari, 2005, p. 65; Tair &
Edwards, 2006, p. 291, 299). In other words, men deserve respect if they
own well-behaved women as sisters, daughters or wives. In comparison,
men are socialized to be on guard and not to refer to their wives in crucial
decisions: If you care about wife, she will turn you mad (Lashkari, 2005, p.
43; Tair, 1982, p. 222). They are also informed about the insurmountable
difficulties which they may encounter in feeding and clothing women:
Feeding a wife is like feeding an elephant (Tair, 1982, p. 63).
82
Several instructional content in Pakhtu proverbs also relate to
purdah (seclusion or veiling) - an effective technique to segregate gender:
A woman who does not observe purdah is like food without salt (Lashkari,
2005, p. 127). Honor in Pakhtun society is associated with women and
men are advised to guard their honor to earn respect for family (Lashkari,
2005, p. 20; Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 327). Similarly, both women and men
are idealized to emulate their own sex as When the daughter proves that
she is well behaved she steps into the shoes of her mother (Tair, 1982, p.
126; Tair & Edwards, 2006, p. 325). In the same way, women are instructed
only to worry about their household duties particularly cooking (Tair &
Edwards, 2006, p. 168) while men are asked to earn and feed their families
(Lashkari, 2005, p. 84). In context of gender socialization, it is observed
that such instructional content has contributed to passivity among women
in Pakhtun society. Girls, from a very tender age, attempt to emulate the
role of their mothers. This has resulted in stagnation in the society with
reference to the contribution of women in the progress of society.
Conclusion
Textual analysis shows how the language of proverbs is assertive in
the formation of gender identity. It exalts men and defines their social
presence as indispensible to the societal structure and stability. They are
exalted for their masculine traits and attributes; performing acts of
heroism and bravery; showing initiative and agency. Terms associated with
ideal masculinity like a brave son; iron-like; behaving like men; a brave
man’s kick; a man of prowess; don’t run away from the battlefield; gun;
Pakhtu (code of honor) and turban (sign of honor) are frequently found in
proverbs. On the other hand, the survival of women is subject to the
goodwill of men and they must therefore obey them without protest.
Further, she is idealized when she follows the culturally prescribed
feminine dress pattern; to observe purdah (seclusion/veil); to content
herself with the confines of her home; to submit to the will of male family
members and to segregate herself from the public domain. The language
of proverbs is ripe with key words and expressions particular to women
like home or grave; purdah (dress or veil or seclusion); ill-bred; oh
shameless sister; jewellery; and suspicion that highlight their social
standing and position relative to men.
Pakhtun society adheres to the social structure portrayed and
projected in proverbs. Consequently, the society is marked by gender
disparity and unequal distribution of power. It affords maximum capacity
to absorb its male members: “Khawand” (husband) is a name for God (Tair
& Edwards, 2006, p. 221) but has lesser capacity to accommodate female
members.
83
In a comparative presentation of men and women in proverbs, the
society is divided on gender basis where men are projected at the helm of
affairs while women are strictly defined and projected in a limited sphere
of activity, that is, domestic domain. Pakhtu proverbs speak for gender
segregation as enunciated in Pakhtunwali. This is achieved mainly by
restricting and confining women to domestic sphere mainly by the social
norm of purdah for them. The power structure is also gendered with
virtually negligible space allocated for women. Pakhtu proverbs play
significant role is gender socialization in the context of Pakhtun society.
They describe various roles and events and also divide and segregate them
on clearly defined gender lines. Men are socialized to be brave and bold
while women are taught to support and assist them. Authority and
decision-making power must rest with men while women must improvise
to find ways and means to add to the comfort of their men at homes.
To sum up, it is important to mention that there are other genres
in Pakhtu, such as landay (also called tappa, which is folk song type
comprising of two lines), a genre much performed and perpetuated by
women, that carry very different portraits of women and also, especially,
some critical perspectives on Pakhtun/Pashtun/Pathan men (Khan, Bughio
& Naz, 2011). This necessarily points to the fact that no single genre tells
the whole story of a community’s social structure and values. Proverb,
then, is one kind of rhetorical genre and there are others representing
other equally indigenous viewpoints on social values and human character
types. Proverbs are main source of expression of Pakhtunwali and
contribute in a major way to its constitution alongside other genres
however.
84
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CONTENTS ISSN 2222-5706
Research Papers
Sajid Ahmad & Muhammad Asim Mahmood
Jamil Asghar
Nexus
Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja

Qaisar Khan, Nighat Sultana & Arab Naz

Proverbs
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Patron-in-Chief

Maj. Gen. (R) Zia Uddin Najam HI (M)

Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja 50

Qaisar Khan, Nighat Sultana & Arab Naz 73

Comparing Explicit Features of Pakistani Press Reportage

1 Business Press Reportage BU.PR

It is also a notable fact that the comparison of Pakistani press reportage

Figure 1: Comparison of Brit.PR with Pak.PR on Five Textual

Figure 2: Informational Features in Brit.PR and Pak.PR

Figure 3: Narrative Features in Brit.PR and Pak.PR

Figure 4: Features of Explicitness in Brit.PR and Pak.PR

Figure 5: Comparison of British BU.PR with Pakistani BU.PR

Figure 6: Comparison of British ME.PR with Pakistani ME.PR

Figure 7: Comparison of British PO.PR with Pakistani PO.PR

Figure 8: Comparison of British SP.PR with Pakistani SP.PR

BU.PR Mean Min. Max. SD

Dimension 2: Narrative vs. Non-narrative Concerns

Dimension 3: Explicit vs. Situation-Dependent Discourse

Dimension 5: Impersonal (Abstract vs. Non-Abstract Style)

Example: Highly Informational Discourse in Pak.PR

Example: Explicit Vs Situation-Dependent Discourse in Pak.PR

Example: Highly Narrative Discourse in Pak.PR

The Power Politics of Translation: A Study of Translation-

Relevance of Authentic Materials to the Attention Span

Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja

Quantitative Data Analysis

Figure 1: Distribution of Teachers' Responses to Statement 1

Figure 2: Distribution of Teachers' Responses to Item-2

Computation: The given table of observed frequency is written as:

B4+B5 = = 25.5 = = 25.5 (B4+B5)= 51

Total (A1)= 100 (A2)=100 n=200

81 71.5 9.5 90.25 1.26

4. Critical region: = 5.991

Chi-square test for the independence or association between the

Computation: The given table of observed frequency is written as:

Total (A1)= 100 (A2)=100 n=200

The necessary columns are as follows:

4. Critical region: = 5.991

The Linguistic Representation of Gender Identities in

Qaisar Khan (Main Author)

Local orders are to be made by Pay Orders and Foreign orders by

Muhammad Saboor Hussain Raja

Qaisar Khan, Nighat Sultana & Arab Naz

NUML JCI is indexed & abstracted by Proquest & Ebscohost

Subscription Rates (per issue)

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