Against the backdrop of national policies advocating for the integration of ideological and political education into college courses and the strengthening of Chinese cultural dissemination globally, this paper aims to explore effective strategies for incorporating the narration of China’s stories into the College English curriculum. Focusing on North China Electric Power University (Baoding), the study employs a combination of teaching practice and a questionnaire to investigate the current status, pathways, and methods of integrating China’s stories in College English instruction. The research findings reveal that the integration of China’s stories in class teaching enhances students’ cross-cultural communication abilities and deepens their understanding of Chinese culture. The study highlights the feasibility of merging language learning with cultural narrative and calls for expanded extracurricular practice and long-term impact research. These findings offer practical insights for college English curriculum innovation and cultural soft power enhancement.

Beginning Syntax: An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis aims to present the basic concepts of syntactic theory to readers without requiring prior linguistic knowledge. Starting from the ideas of modern generative linguistics, the author systematically introduces basic concepts and the latest developments in linguistic theory in a step-by-step fashion. Topics covered include Phrase Structure Rules, X’-theory, Wh-movement Rules, Universal Grammar, Movement Parameters, and the Architecture of Grammar. The book explores multiple perspectives in natural languages, emphasizing the relationship between linguistics and cognition, society, and politics. It highlights the importance of formal and cognitive theories, treating language as a program running on the hardware of the brain and positioning syntactic theory at the core of cognitive theory. Chapters One through Six provide a detailed exposition of the foundational knowledge in syntax, while Chapter Seven expands the explanatory scope of Generative Grammar. It describes the distribution of word order features of world languages and proposes the wh-movement parameter hypothesis, offering the necessary analysis for understanding Parameter Hierarchies. Then, it systematically introduces the five components in a particular overall grammar model. The publication of this book is considered a milestone, as it utilizes the Parametric Comparison Method to analyze universal patterns and diversities in world languages. It develops Chomsky’s (2005) theory of parameter differences related to the third factor in language and Greenberg’s (1963) hypotheses on language universals and word order typology. The book focuses on providing scholars with in-depth foundational knowledge in syntax, inspiring thoughtful consideration of deep-seated issues in language structure.

This paper examines Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were through the lens of the Integrated Model of Ideological Representation in Discourse (IMIRD) to explore how environmental risk is communicated as a tension between silence and resistance. Developed by Ogungbemi (2016), IMIRD synthesizes the ideological depth of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the structural precision of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and lexical analysis to investigate how language encodes power, agency, and ideological positioning. Applying this model, the paper analyzes transitivity structures, agency assignment, and discursive silencing in Mbue’s depiction of a fictional African village devastated by corporate oil pollution. Through a close reading of narrative voice, clause structure, and dialogic framing, we demonstrate how Mbue’s linguistic choices—such as collective narration, passive constructions, and high-transitivity clauses—represent the villagers’ oscillation between voicelessness and defiant resistance. The study reveals how narrative grammar functions as a site of ideological struggle: one where corporate actors are obscured or backgrounded, while subaltern voices struggle for recognition. Ultimately, we argue that How Beautiful We Were is not only a literary account of environmental injustice but also a compelling discourse of resistance, showing how storytelling—when examined through IMIRD—operates as a vehicle for reclaiming agency, memory, and ecological justice.

Nigeria is home to numerous distinguished poets who craft classical poetry inspired by ancient Arab traditions. One notable modern Nigerian poet is Dr. Muhammad Mansur Jibril, a lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language at Bayero University in Kano, and the author of the poetry collection titled "The Flower of Joy." This collection features sixty-five poems spanning various genres, totaling one thousand two hundred thirty-four [1234] verses, many of which describe the poet's travels within Nigeria and abroad. The themes addressed in this collection include didactic poetry, divine love, pride, satire, praise, flirtation, and elegy. This study will specifically focus on travel poetry. The aim is to analyze the construction of travel poems within the collection, highlighting the extent of the poet's creativity in this genre and positioning this creativity from a regional to a global perspective. The research employs an inductive and analytical approach, structured as follows: the concept of construction among linguistics, the notion of poetic construction among critics, the aesthetics of the openings, the aesthetics of the conclusion in the poems of the collection, the aesthetics of the poem's sections, and finally, the conclusion along with a list of references.