1. Over recent years, the sphere of education has started to pay more attention to the role of constructive teacher-students’ relationships in determining the academic experiences of the students. ...

This paper investigates trolling as a socio-discursive phenomenon within Malaysia’s public discourse on the abolishment of two national school examinations, namely the Primary School Achievement Test (UPSR, abolished in 2021) and the Form Three Assessment (PT3, abolished in 2022). The study analyses 895 first-level Facebook comments to identify how trolling was used and to explore its rhetorical strategies and cultural significance. Through critical discourse analysis, five dominant trolling strategies were identified: provocation, exaggeration, hostility and ridicule, personal attacks, and humour. These strategies reveal the trolling’s dual role as both a disruptive force and a reflection of societal tensions surrounding governance, education, and cultural norms. The findings demonstrate how trolling amplifies collective anxieties and entrenches socio-cultural hierarchies, while simultaneously challenging institutional narratives and fostering affective solidarities among dissenters. Situating trolling within frameworks of digital populism, symbolic marginalisation, and affective publics, this paper highlights its capacity to articulate resistance while undermining deliberative dialogue. This study contributes to sociolinguistic scholarship by emphasising the cultural specificity and ideological dimensions of trolling, providing a nuanced understanding of its role in digital public engagement and policy contestation.

Hughes, like numerous African Americans, endured segregation, oppression, and marginalisation. In his poetry, ...

This research endeavours to examine the discursive construction of blackness and whiteness by protestors spanning from Minneapolis to the entirety of America following the murder of Floyd. The data, which were analysed using the framework of van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis approach, consisted of 140 slogans collected from photos found on CNN, BBC, AP News, CBS News and Shutterstock websites. The analysis uncovered several recurring discursive strategies utilised to construct the notions of vulnerable blackness and privileged whiteness, including polarisation, concretisation, norm and value violation, victimisation, negative lexicalisation, generalisation, compassion move, self-identity descriptions, negative comparison, resource description and hyperbole. The findings revolve around ‘Othering’, which emphasises positive self-perceptions and negative perceptions of others while shedding insight into the power dynamics between White and Black people. This study offers unique perspectives on whiteness and blackness within the wider social context of the United States by addressing systemic racial inequality and societal change.

This article investigates how culture-bound terms in The Simpsons series, season 27, are translated from English into Arabic. The study mainly focuses on the types of culture-bound terms and the subtitling strategies used to translate these terms. Moreover, this research addresses the effectiveness of translation strategies in conveying Arab cultural values, norms, and Islamic practices to Arabic-speaking audiences. The investigation, grounded in two theories, namely, Newmark’s taxonomy for culture-bound types and Gottlieb’s taxonomy of subtitling strategies, used a descriptive approach to analyze a dataset of 150 culture-bound terms. The findings show that The Simpsons series includes a variety of religious material, social and metaphorical terms as well as terms of address. Data analysis revealed that subtitling strategies, including transfer, expansion, dislocation, deletion, and imitation, have been extensively employed in conveying culture-bound terms to Arabic-speaking audiences. These strategies were effective in conveying Arab cultural values, norms, and Islamic practices by deleting and toning-down words that might contradict Arabic Islamic values and culture. The study aims to enhance our understanding of how subtitling strategies can be leveraged to preserve elements of Arabic Islamic values and culture.

This study examines how transgender identities are discursively formed in post-Assad Syria by conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of 550 purposively selected Facebook comments that respond to a viral video showing the assault of a transgender individual by the Syrian army. The findings show that transgender individuals are predominantly depicted as moral deviants, political threats, and religious transgressors, with their exclusion rationalized through dehumanization, religious condemnation, and securitized language. Key linguistic strategies encompass disease metaphors, Quranic narratives of devastation, and nationalist rhetoric depicting gender nonconformity as a Western intellectual incursion. Although counter-discourses promoting rights and medicalization exist, they remain systemically suppressed. The study illustrates how language functions as a social control tool, legitimizing exclusion and violence. This research elucidates discursive patterns, thus contributing to the discourse on digital moral policing, ideological naturalization, and the language reinforcement of gender hierarchies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).