Abstract
The publication of the December issue coincides with the birth anniversary of Mohammad Ali Jinnah that falls on 25 December. Jinnah, whom the nation remembers as Quaid-e-Azam - the father of the nation, is credited with the creation of Pakistan as a culmination of his unparalleled struggle to emancipate the Muslims of Indian sub-continent. It is very rightly felt and stated by scholars and critics related with political science that no other leader of Muslims could match the stature of Mr. Jinnah’s leadership. This has been taken up as the conclusion for the Forum Article in this issue. The author has used the framework proposed by Northhouse (2013) for retrospection in order to identify the traits that earned him the unique status of Leader par excellence.
The main Articles section starts off with a very sensitive subject gender responsiveness to assert the need for paying greater attention to developing gender –specific response or measures in the wake of calamities and conflicts as well as the ensuing crisis. All gender responsive measures, services and programmes are hinged on the basic principle that gender makes a difference, and that physical, behavioural, social and cultural differences should be well accounted for before any action may be claimed as truly based on a gender specific approach. The author discusses gender responsive measures in the backdrop of almost three decade long conflict that affected women equally in Sri Lanka. The readers while reading the paper will be able to draw a parallel in hindsight about their own contextual scenarios where women have been affected, perhaps due to a different crisis, and were provided with some responsive measures or care. This paper implicitly draws attention towards the need to do socio-cultural and applied research for inducing an immediate and a positive impact on the communities and the people within them.
The articles “Investigation and validation of sentence parsing strategies: A psycholinguistic measurement” and “Codeswitching in Pakistani English Language classrooms: Perceptions of English Language teachers” are related to English Grammar and Sociolinguistics respectively offering further empirical research. The first study investigates Iranian adult EFL learners’ sentence processing strategies specifically minimal attachment and late closure parsing strategies. A major aim of this research is to study the relationship between language proficiency and parsing strategies. The second study is exploring second language teachers’ perceptions about codeswitching in Pakistani English language classrooms. The paper makes an important conclusion that codeswitching serves academic as well as social purposes. Academic purpose ensures learners’ understanding and clarity about the classroom content; whereas the social objective allows the teachers social interaction with their students and for building rapport with them. This second purpose to many applied linguists in a fundamental characteristic of second language classrooms to enable learners to feel a lesser threat to their identity and their language. This conclusion has several implications for the language teachers and their language classrooms and provides directions for further research that if this social function is achieved then how this phenomenon impacts language-learning and shapes up learner- identity.
Sajida Zaki . (2014) Editorial, Journal of Social Sciences & Interdisciplinary Research, Volume 3, Issue 1.
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