English

This study investigated the perceptions of high school EFL learners to the lexical instructional approach intervention in the contexts of learning vocabulary and grammar. Besides, an attempt was made to explore what difficulties the participants encountered during the experimentation. The data collected through the questionnaire were analyzed using a one-sample t-test, and the results showed that the estimated sample perception mean score was significantly higher than the hypothesized population perception mean score. This implies that EFL learners had positive perceptions towards the lexical instructional approach in the contexts of learning vocabulary and grammar. The data collected through interviews were analyzed qualitatively and the findings showed that students enjoyed and were interested in learning vocabulary and grammar through the lexical instructional approach. Students realized the importance of lexical chunks in learning vocabulary and grammar. In this regard, the inte...

Mary Carpenter, a Victorian prison reformer, asserted that women prisoners were a threat to society, even more so than their masculine counterparts. In Victorian and Edwardian England, life after release from prison was fraught with hurdles, especially for women. Female criminals had deviated from normative gender-biased ideologies describing woman’s true nature as meek, gentle, modest and shameful; they were stigmatized and ostracized, even after serving their sentences in a local or a convict prison. In 1856, Joshua Jebb, Chairman of Convict Prisons, decided to commit to the cause of these women by opening a special refuge, a ‘home’ designed to save them by teaching them ‘womanly qualities’. However, the refuge was quickly stigmatised and became a prison. Yet, this governmental failure paved the way for the efforts of women reformers, who saw the redemption of their ‘fallen’ sisters as their duty. They set up philanthropic societies, opened ‘homes’ and visiting societies to lead criminals to atonement. The idealized views of womanhood, the prescriptive social roles and the contemporary fears for traditional values which shaped the female criminal system also fashioned the missionary work that surrounded the penal sphere. In a sense, lady visitors were missionaries upholding the values and projects of the Empire. But their efforts led to female empowerment: reformers played an active part in the management of relief societies, challenging their traditionally domestic positions. They also faced obstacles, embodied by people who believed that guilty deviants were being unfairly ‘pampered’. The study of this counter-commitment, as well as the struggle of charitable societies and some government officials reveals a facet of the way in which criminals were perceived by society, while the philanthropic network became a net in which some women were ensnared.

The Victorian era was characterised by a fascination with the criminal’s psyche. In the late 1860s, this interest in the criminal mind fused with scientific and medical breakthroughs to create a hybrid, cross-disciplinary field focused on understanding the criminal. Criminology was born. This polyphonic discourse incorporated many disciplines such as biology, psychiatry, anthropology and social science. This convergence of intellectual fields could be seen as gender-based. Female criminals had disobeyed the law as well as gender norms. They were double deviants whose transgression threatened society and its traditional family values. As the eugenics movement started to gain sway, a fear that these degenerate women, known as ‘inebriates’ or ‘feeble-minded creatures’, were breeding generations of atavistic deviants responsible for the decline of the British stock started to permeate society. Female recidivism was increasingly seen as a sign of mental defectiveness, a hereditary pathology. Scientific discourses revolving around the concept of ‘feeble-mindedness’ pervaded the penal sphere. In the case of women, psychiatry was intertwined with gynaecology and preconceptions about sexuality and gender. This criminological discourse led to a convergence of experts working to cure, probe, and neutralise the specific threat women posed. Rather than annihilate traditional moral explanations of crime promoted by some reformers and civil servants, scientific theories merged with them and gave birth to institutional projects such as inebriate reformatories and asylums for the mentally deficient. Criminology and penology were, in the case of women, combined with psychiatry, biology and gynaecology. The birth of male criminology can be contrasted with the emergence of female criminology, at the crossroads between science, eugenics and sexuality. The development of this new hybrid discourse had tangible consequences on the imprisonment of women in the early 20th century; these effects were particularly obvious in inebriate reformatories, asylums, and discussions around sterilisation.

Si la femme victorienne idéale était censée être une fée du logis, la criminelle, elle, était vue comme un démon des prisons. Les détenues, perçues comme autant de déviantes perturbatrices qu'il fallait domestiquer, devinrent un problème majeur à la fin du XIXe siècle. Elles firent l'objet de tentatives de déconstruction et reconstruction identitaires visant à les transformer en « vraies femmes ». Les détenues anglaises et galloises représentent actuellement environ 5% de la population carcérale. Entre 1995 et 2010, le nombre de femmes emprisonnées a connu une augmentation de 125%. Cette hausse inquiétante a relancé le débat sur la question de leur réinsertion. L'idée de réformer les criminels n'est pas nouvelle, mais elle se décline sous une forme différente à l'époque victorienne et édouardienne. Dans une société fascinée par l'esprit criminel 1 , remodeler l'identité des délinquants selon des normes morales genrées apparaît comme fondamental. La femme criminelle en particulier devient la cible de nombreuses tentatives de reconstruction. 1 Cette fascination était entretenue et relayée par la presse, les penny dreadfuls (récits inspirés de faits plus ou moins réels et caractérisés par un amour pour le macabre), les romans policiers ou même encore le music-hall. De Sherlock Holmes à Jack l'Éventreur, les meurtriers réels ou imaginaires captivaient un large public.

While ideal Victorian women were supposed to be " angels in the house " , female criminals were seen as " demons in the jailhouse ". As such, they were a disruptive force and had to be dealt with. Deconstructing and reconstructing these deviants to make them more " womanly " became a major issue in the late 19th century. Nowadays, female prisoners in England and Wales represent 5% of the prison population. Between 1995 and 2010, this number more than doubled. Because of this worrying trend, there has been much debate in Britain around the issue of rehabilitation. Such attempts at rehabilitating criminals are nothing new, but they took on a different dimension in the mid-Victorian and Edwardian eras. In a society that was fascinated with the criminal mind, 1 reconstructing the identity of the criminal for it to fit certain moral and gender-biased standards was key. The female criminal in particular was the focal point of reconstruction attempts. 1 It was fostered by and echoed in the press, penny dreadfuls as well as detective novels and the music-hall. From Sherlock Holmes to Jack the Ripper, fictional and real-life murders captivated a large audience.