Shanlax International Journal of English

Using an AI Chatbot to Improve Iraqi EFL Students’ Engagement and English Proficiency

Hayder S Alkhafaji — 2025-12-01

With digital technologies reshaping language education, this study investigates the role of chatbot-assisted interaction in developing English speaking proficiency and engagement among Iraqi university learners. Using a mixed-methods design, the research combined pre- and post-intervention speaking assessments with student surveys to examine both linguistic outcomes and learner perceptions. Statistical analysis revealed significant gains in fluency and intonation, though improvements in pronunciation were less pronounced. Students reported that chatbot-mediated tasks increased their willingness to communicate and offered valuable opportunities for interactive practice beyond the classroom. These findings suggest that integrating chatbots into EFL instruction can enrich communicative learning environments and provide meaningful support for students in contexts where opportunities for authentic interaction are limited. Implications for language pedagogy, curriculum design, and the use of AI-driven tools in higher education are discussed.

From Tradition to Transformation: Empowerment through Dress in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “Clothes”

M. Archana Devi — 2025-12-01

“Tradition” usually refers to a protracted-installed custom, perception, or practice passed down through generations, frequently maintained through oral history or repeated behaviours instead of formal documentation or fabric proof. It implies continuity rooted in cultural or communal norms.
The phrase “lifestyle to transformation” shows a procedure of exchange wherein enduring customs, beliefs, or practices are reshaped to align with new societal contexts, values, or needs. This evolution can take region across diverse domains, together with religion, way of life, social structures, and technology.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a famous Indian-American writer, is pleasant regarded for her works such as The Mistress of Spices, Arranged Marriage, and The Vine of choice. Her writing frequently centres on reports of Indian immigrants, mainly girls, navigating unfamiliar environments. Her brief story “Cothes,” from the gathering Arranged Marriage, makes use of garb as a effective image to trace the protagonist’s adventure from conventional roles to self-realisation. Through this metaphor, Divakaruni highlights how outwards change mirrors inner transformation, especially within the context of cultural displacement and emotional loss.
The story “Clothes” explores the journey of an Indian woman, Sumita, who moves to the United States for an arranged marriage. The story uses clothing symbolism to represent her transition between traditional Indian and modern American identities and her eventual, independent awakening after her husband’s death. These changes in apparel replicate her inner warfare, in addition to her evolving connection to her Indian roots and her edition to lifestyles within the United States of America.

Confronting Singularity: Navigating AI’s Future

Aarthi G — 2025-12-01

The rapid development of synthetic intelligence (AI) is shaping a destiny in which the limits between human intelligence and generation blur, redefining cognitive and innovative capacities. Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI envisions a global by way of means of 2045 in which AI surpasses human intelligence and merges with humanity along nanotechnology and brain computer interfaces. While this kind of transformation provides enormous possibilities for boosting human abilities, it also increases essential issues concerning dependency, autonomy, and cultural stability. This paper examines these problems via Lazarus and Folkman’s stress coping model, which highlights the mental traces people may also enjoy while adapting to technological disruptions, and Neil Postman’s Technopoly theory, which warns towards the unchecked dominance of generation in shaping social values and cultural coherence. By situating Kurzweil’s predictions inside those frameworks, the look at underscores the dangers of overreliance on AI, together with the erosion of originality, cognitive stagnation, unemployment, and the lack of human company in innovative processes. Simultaneously, it stresses the significance of moral mirrored image and accountable technological integration to make certain that AI stays a device for human empowerment in place of cultural subordination.
Future studies should expand these insights by way of means of undertaking comparative analyses of AI- and human-generated innovative works, investigating long-term cognitive modifications related to the use of AI, and exploring the cultural results of AI-pushed technopoly throughout numerous societies. Additionally, research on coping strategies, coverage frameworks, and academic interventions could be critical in addressing AI triggered mental strain while safeguarding creativity and originality. By balancing innovation with moral foresight, societies can mitigate the dangers of AI dominance while harnessing its transformative capabilities for collective progress.

The The Role of Extensive Reading, Fluency, and Motivation in Enhancing Reading Comprehension Skills of Undergraduates in an ESL Context: A Critical Review

Ananda K.D — 2025-12-01

This study explores the effect of explicit reading strategies on improving the reading comprehension ability of undergraduate students in India, where English is the second language (ESL). This study critically evaluates the applicability of different reading strategies, such as extensive reading, encouragement of the development of fluency, and encouragement of learner motivation which specifically deal with issues faced by ESL learners in the Indian context. Even though the English language is popular in academic and professional spheres, Indian ESL students have problems with reading comprehension because they lack the opportunity to interact with the English language beyond the classroom to enhance their reading skills. The present study seeks to fill this gap by conducting a literature review on the literature that talks about the role played by explicit reading strategies in Indian ESL setting in terms of books, theses, and journal articles. The results show the abundance of reading programs that positively impact vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension, resulting in the elevation of reading proficiency and the significant role motivation has on the interest of the students in reading materials. The study also highlights situational factors, such as how classroom dynamics were integrated, the type of training provided to teachers, and how technological development was used to enhance the efficiency of these interventions. The paper also postulates the means by which these strategies may be incorporated into the ESL curriculum, bearing in mind the diverse cultural backgrounds of the students. This research also provides recommendations for future studies, including conducting studies on longitudinal effects and cross-cultural comparisons.

Ashes of Affection: Necropolitics and the Annihilation of Affection in Perumal Murugan’s Pyre

P.V. Deepa — 2025-12-01

Pyre by Perumal Murugan is a mean-eyed literary reflection on the atrocious intersections of caste, love, and violence in rural Tamil Nadu. Using Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this paper, Ashes of Affection: Necropolitics and the Annihilation of Affection in Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, analyzes how caste structures are the highest powers that control the legitimacy of lives and loves. The main focus of this study is to critically unravel the manner in which the novel presents the social destruction of inter-caste love through social rules in communities, entailing institutionalised practices of exclusion, punishment, and suppression of emotional experiences. This research is based on a qualitative approach to literature, which combines theoretical components of intersectional caste theory, trauma studies, necropolitics, and affect theory, and a detailed study of the text. It analytically examines the narrative, characterisation, and symbolic imagery used by Murugan to show how caste politics dictate desire and determine who can survive, who can fall in love, and who can die. The analysis outlines the politicisation of personal relationships in caste-based oppression and their transformation into regulated relationships. The main hypothesis is that Pyre by Murugan is a necropolitical narrative where caste systems subject physical threat as well as emotional and affective depletion, particularly on individuals who cross over caste lines through romantic affairs. This is a qualitative literary analysis that makes in-depth interpretations of the text based on trauma studies, affect theory, and intersectional caste theory. While the internalised conformity of Kumaresan and the caste otherness of Saroja depict the forces of social death, the village itself is a community necropolitical force of its own. The Pyre, as the title, is a place of burning, disagreement, affection, and control, literally and symbolically. Murugan’s work dramatises caste as a disciplining and destroying power, where necropolitical control makes love impossible to live. This study shows how caste violence kills not just bodies but also emotions, attachments, and futures as it traces the psychological torture of Saroja and the ambivalent resignation of Kumaresan. This paper also contributes to the current debate on caste, emotion, and power in Indian literature because it deals directly with affect and annihilation. The findings presented in this study are moving in the right direction in terms of anti-caste literary criticism and socially minded humanities studies, since they emphasise the value of re-reading Indian fiction through critical approaches that put affect, annihilation, and caste sovereignty at the centre.

Negotiating the Complexities of Bi-cultural Existence

Sumithra Devi. S — 2025-12-01

Multiculturalism fundamentally necessitates the recognition and accommodation of heterogeneity, diversity, difference, and plurality, within which immigrant populations endeavour to retain their native cultural specificities, frequently resulting in the formation of fractured identities. Consequently, the immigrant subject confronts a multiplicity of selves, leading to a vacillation between multiple cultural affiliations, often culminating in an overarching sense of non-belonging. Contemporary diasporic discourse meticulously chronicles the doubly liminal, fluid, and evolving terrains of diasporic existence. Migrant authors, in particular, have extensively explored the potentialities inherent in the “border zone”, a conceptual space where the migrant identity intersects with that of the host culture. This exploration necessitates a critical process of discernment, involving decisions regarding the preservation or discarding of elements from the indigenous culture, alongside an analysis of migrants’ responses to their adopted homelands. The aesthetic of dislocation, as articulated by writers of South Asian origin, powerfully evokes the anxiety, anguish, and epistemic violence that frequently characterise cross-cultural mobility and its resulting displacement. This multicultural trajectory of thought ultimately posits the possibility of simultaneously inhabiting two or more distinct cultural worlds, a condition often accompanied by the emergence of a hybrid sensibility equally conversant in both native and foreign contexts. Indeed, significant variations are observable within immigrant cohorts concerning the degree of ethnic cultural value retention, behavioural adaptations, and the extent of accommodation achieved with the demands of the host culture. These diverse facets of the immigrant experience, brought into sharp focus by cross-cultural encounters, underscore the shared lived realities of diasporic communities, collectively constituting the diaspora ethos. Consequently, “diaspora” emerges as a crucial conceptual tool, effectively highlighting the manifold standpoints generated by migration and displacement. Furthermore, it illuminates an inherently ambivalent politics of both self-positioning and external positioning, as well as processes of self-identification and external identification.

A “A Knot in the Chest”: The Somatic Experience of Displacement and Loss in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

P. Sivashankari — 2025-12-01

This paper analyzes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun through the lens of trauma and embodiment. The focus is on how physical sensations and bodily metaphors convey experiences of war, displacement, and grief. Drawing on the trauma theory of Caruth, Herman, van der Kolk, and embodiment theory, this analysis highlights the use of visceral imagery and the human body to represent psychological trauma. Close reading and qualitative textual analysis were performed to extract key takeaway passages from the novel. For example, Ugwu’s wounds and thirst, Olanna’s panic symptoms, and the sensory richness of crisis everyday life present somatic experiences of psychological trauma. For instance, the bodies of Ugwu and Olanna became living repositories of coerced violence, and they also created trauma in their post-war life. Olanna took too much time to recover from her panic attacks caused by the horror of the war. Ugwu also experienced physical abuse and was wounded at the end of the war. Olanna helped and pampered him to recover from the traumatic experiences. Adichie’s use of these embodied depictions deepens empathy and underscores the political stakes of the Nigerian Civil War. Through the lens of the somatic approach to Half of a Yellow Sun, this article demonstrates how the trauma of war is etched on the body, which has ramifications for comprehending cultural memory and postcolonial healing of the body, the bodies that survived, who perished, and who contributed to the agony of the conflict. They contend that the somatic portrayal of trauma serves as a kind of testimony that is far more effective than the traditional modes of historical narration. The body asserts that the paper is both witness and archive; it makes collective suffering in the context of the recent Nigerian Civil War part of the private sphere, not the public.

Significance of Communication Skills: A Conceptual Overview

Shaik MD Thameem Basha — 2025-12-01

Communication is often considered a fundamental human process that facilitates the mutual transfer and exchange of information, thoughts, and emotions among individuals, shaping interactions in personal, educational, and professional contexts. It serves as the backbone of social relationships and organizational structures, enabling the establishment of meaningful connections. This study delves into the intricate constituents of communication to provide an exhaustive understanding of communication. The paper also examines important processes of encoding and decoding, which transform thoughts into messages and allow receivers to interpret them correctly. This paper discusses the significance of effective communication, emphasizing the need for clarity and coherence to foster successful interactions and accentuate various forms of communication. The role of communication in conflict resolution is discussed, highlighting how effective negotiation and mediation strategies can prevent misunderstanding and enhance workplace harmony. The study also examines the influence of corporate communication on employee engagement and organizational success, outlining the significance of transparent communication from leadership in building trust and motivation among employees. Furthermore, this study explores barriers to effective communication, such as noise, and provides a framework for overcoming these obstacles through mindful communication practices, emotional intelligence, and adaptability. The Study underscores the importance of continuous improvements in communication skills, advocating training programs and self-awareness exercises that enhance interpersonal interactions.

The Quest for Identity in Maya Angelou’s Autobiography - A Study

Shankara Murthy — 2025-12-01

This study examines Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a profound narrative of identity formation shaped by race, gender, trauma, and resilience. This study adopts a qualitative textual analysis methodology, employing close reading supported by feminist, psychological, and African American literary perspectives. This study is limited to Angelou’s first autobiography, focusing on her experiences of racial segregation, sexual trauma, silence, and self-expression. This study contributes to the existing literary discourse by interpreting identity as a dynamic and evolving process rather than a fixed condition, highlighting how trauma can become a source of empowerment. The study concludes that Angelou’s journey from silence to voice symbolises both personal liberation and the collective struggle of African American women for dignity, self-hood, and cultural identity.

Humanitarianism and War with Special Reference to Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting

S.K. Ponmalar — 2025-12-01

This paper attempts to figure out the poem Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen from a humanitarian context. Wilfred Owen is one of the leading poets, who is best known for writing war poems during World War I. Strange Meeting is one of his most famous war poems, which deals with senseless destruction of war and humanity. As change in every individual can be a social change, prioritising humanity in war can create tremendous changes in society.
Prioritising a humanitarian approach considers that war can produce destruction, death, and hopelessness, whereas humanity fills the world with peace. Death and destruction in battle are not supposed to be glorified as human beings are considered valuable when they are human. Wilfred Owen is not sentimentalizing heroism in war. Instead, he makes us visualise the war as horrifying, unreasonable, and dehumanising and introduces us to the insinuating realities of war, interests, the power of ideological manipulation, and other important psychological aspects.
This paper also identifies ways to find humanitarianism in war by exposing the recent suffering people have experienced in the name of war. Analysing the poetry of war poets allows the reader to focus on another side of war from a humanitarian perspective.

English Spoken Utterances of Iraqi Students on Technical Terms

Ali Abdalkarem M. Sadeq — 2025-12-01

The study examines the pronunciation of English technical terminology related to furniture and household objects by Iraqi EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. The study seeks to assess pronunciation accuracy and identify prevalent phonological difficulties among learners, acknowledging the growing significance of technical terminology in global communication. The present study used a random sampling method to select 50 students aged between 10 and 12 to participate in the investigation. Participants were instructed to pronounce 40 technical phrases, and their pronunciations were evaluated against standard models provided by Google Translate, supported by the pronunciation norms of the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were utilized to evaluate the incidence and categorization of pronunciation errors, such as stress misplacement, syllable omission, and vowel substitution. The findings indicated significant variability in pronunciation skills, with simpler and more familiar phrases achieving higher accuracy rates. The findings illustrate the difficulties faced by Iraqi students in comprehending the phonology of technical terminology and underscore the significance of employing audio-visual pronunciation aids in EFL instruction. This research advances the field of language education by offering insights into effective methodologies for enhancing oral proficiency within technical environments.

A Psychoanalytic Study of Tragic Fall in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones: Jones and His Defence Mechanisms

Swapnil Satish Alhat — 2025-12-01

This paper analyses Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) as a drama in which the fall of Brutus Jones unfolds inside the mind rather than on the stage of political events. The analysis is rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, especially the functioning of repression, denial, and projection, and follows a close reading of Jones’s behaviour, speech, and hallucinations. The study traces how the image of the emperor becomes a shield he builds for himself—one that hides his guilt, fear, and memory of his violent past. As the play progresses, this carefully constructed identity begins to crack, and the forest hallucinations appear as pieces of the unconscious mind rising to the surface.
The findings show that every vision Jones encounters marks the weakening of his ego and the return of what he once pushed away. Instead of fate or divine punishment, O’Neill presents a tragedy shaped by the mind itself—a collapse triggered by fear and the failure of the very mechanisms that are meant to protect him. In this sense, The Emperor Jones mirrors Arthur Miller’s idea of modern tragedy, where the downfall grows from within the protagonist. Jones’s journey reveals that the real tragedy lies not in losing power but in losing the inner balance that once held his identity.

Between Ethics and Survival: A Kohlbergian Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Marrying the Hangman

Swapnil Satish Alhat — 2026-01-22

This paper explores Margaret Atwood’s Marrying the Hangman through the ethical framework of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, using the Heinz Dilemma as a reference point for interpreting moral choice under pressure. This study aims to examine how Atwood reconfigures this dilemma by placing a woman at its centre—one who must choose between death and survival through an act that defies conventional morality: marrying the executioner appointed to kill her. Methodologically, the poem is read through each stage of Kohlberg’s model to trace the protagonist’s psychological movement from fear, coercion, and dependence to a conscious assertion of life, however compromised. These findings suggest that while Heinz’s dilemma foregrounds justice, law, and rational judgment, Atwood introduces a parallel moral universe shaped by vulnerability, gendered power, and the instinct to live. This study also engages with Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg in In a Different Voice, highlighting how women often reason ethically through care, responsibility, and relational survival rather than abstract rules. Atwood’s poem reinforces this view, showing that moral action may emerge not from ideal choices, but from the only choices available. In conclusion, the analysis reveals that Marrying the Hangman challenges traditional definitions of morality by demonstrating how survival itself can be a moral act in an oppressive world. This reading invites further research into how women’s ethical decisions are represented in literature, particularly when power, autonomy, and survival intersect. The poem ultimately asks whether morality can remain intact when life must be negotiated at the intersection of power and death.