We are delighted to welcome you to the second issue of the 2020 volume of Annual Review of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. This issue includes three research articles, one book review and one research report. The scope of the studies presented here is extensive, illustrating the diversity of research carried out by postgraduate students in the School of Education, Communication and Language Science. Indeed, this issue includes papers from students in cross cultural communication. Here we present an overview of the papers included in this issue.

Dhiaa Kareem Ali is the head of the Department of English at the Faculty of Education-the University of Kufa, Najaf, researching the intersection of discourse, society and politics. His research interests are centred on critical discourse studies, language, politics, argumentation analysis as well as populism found in various digital media practices. Dhiaa completed his PhD at Newcastle University in 2018. In his paper, Dhiaa examines the recent history of the discourses on wars and conflicts in Iraq and the macro discourses of the representation of Iraq through key historical events in the US press. The aim of the research is to examine both continuity and changes in this representation on the basis of the changes taking place on the international political scene in general and with regard to the involvement of the US in particular. This study examines the discourses of US newspapers during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) and the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq to see how the themes: Saddam, Iraqi people, Halabja are discursively represented in these two wars and whether there is a shift of the US stance toward the themes’ coverage. An interdisciplinary framework that combined corpus linguistics with the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to CDA is employed in the research.

Yumeng Jing graduated from Broadcasting and Television Director at Xi'an Polytechnic University for her bachelor’s degree, completed her MA in Cross-Cultural Communications and Media Studies at Newcastle University. In this study, Yumeng explores the attitude towards discussing politics in front of non-Chinese of Chinese postgraduate students studying at Newcastle University UK as well as the reasons behind it. The results of this study indicate that Chinese postgraduate students tend to consider politics as a taboo topic in intercultural communication influenced by the external environment and the education they have received. Compared with previous studies in a similar area, this study takes social variables into consideration and finds that gender or the major of participants might also influence the attitude of Chinese students towards discussing politics in front of non-Chinese, which shed several lights on the further study about the reasons behind the culturally specific taboo.

Yung-Chia Kuo attained his MA in Cross-cultural Communication and Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University and his BA in Management Science at the Republic of China (Taiwan) Military Academy. Kuo utilised a match-guided technique to investigate Chinese postgraduate students’ language attitudes towards their peers’ accents and influence of language attitude on their willingness to communicate in a multilingual university setting. The findings indicate that a native English accent is relatively preferable; however, a particular non-native accent, such as French accent, also elicits a positive result. Language attitudes do not influence students’ willingness to communicate. The findings reveal that the native accent stereotypes and social categorisation of ethnicities influence the language attitudes and the ignorance of lingual issues in the subject-knowledge learning setting. Therefore, this has implications for the merit of applying the content and language integrated learning approach in language teaching. This paper will be of interest to those in the fields of sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication and teaching English to speakers of other languages (specifically L2 willingness to communicate).

Mrs Anastasia Grammenou and Emeritus Professor Nicholas Miller report on the findings of a cross-sectional study on the acquisition of morphological awareness in written language of children with dyslexia aged 11 yrs. Monolingual Greek speaking Students with dyslexia attending the last year of Primary Greek schools, was compared to phonological and reading age matched control group and chronological age matched control group on a series of morphological awareness tests, phonological awareness tests and the Working Memory Test Battery for Children. To the best of our knowledge it’s the first time that phonological and reading aged matched group was compared to children with dyslexia. Moreover, we had as a starting point the metamorphological awareness tasks categorization of Bialystock and Ryan and we developed three condition testing material in written language. The sentence completion task which tags syntactic morphological awareness and derived noun morphology production, the word identification task which tags relational morphological awareness and suffixes recognition and the nonword identification tasks which tags the distributional morphological awareness and affixes orthographic representations. Results on morphological awareness clearly differentiated children with dyslexia with both control groups, indicating a second deficit in noncompensated children’s with dyslexia spelling ability. Three factors were identified to shape up children’s with dyslexia production of morphologically complex words. These are the phonological representation words, the grapheme-phoneme correspondence ability and the visuospatial sketch pad. The article is of interest to special education teachers, teachers of the Modern Greek language, primary school teachers, speech pathologists, and school and clinical psychologists.

The ARECLS Journal has been an academic voice for postgraduate students for more than 10 years and we hope this will continue, with the support of staff, student editors and the PGR community of ECLS. We would like to thank the contributions for submitting their work for publication in ARECLS. Special thanks are also extended to the editorial board’s student reviewers, in 2021.

Simin Ren (Senior Student Editor) & Peter Sercombe (Staff Editor)