The sound in the poem is not a decoration, but an important way to convey the meaning and a communicative skill that directly affect readers. Sound and meaning complement each other and coordinate with each other to better convey the thought of poetry. Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His creation covers a wide range and he has always been the focus of academic circles. This article attempts to take Yeats’ early work The Song of the Happy Shepherd as an example to explore the connection of sound and meaning of Yeats’ poems from both its content and form. The relation between sound and meaning in a poem is like the relation between music and dance, harmonious matches enhancing each other. Sound enables to the expression of the meaning of poems. It plays an essential role to research the function of sound in the poem and contributes to have a deeper understanding of Yeats.

The rapid development of China’s economy and society needs innovative and inter-disciplinary English talents. However, traditional skill-oriented foreign language teaching leads to the absence of English major students’ critical thinking. Content and Language Integrated Learningcan solve this problem well. This article integrates Content and Language Integrated Learning with principles of language and critical thinking integrated teaching to explore how to make effective instructional designs in English major writhing class to develop students’ critical thinking, with the expectation of providing instructional ideas for college English teachers.

This study builds on the interpersonal meaning strand of the Systemic Functional Linguistics to highlight the suasive power of human language. In itemizing Lamang’s electioneering campaign speech via such toolkits as mood, modality and personal pronouns, this paper employs a qualitative technique. It finds that the avalanche of mood types used by Lamang is made up of declarative clauses, which are echoed to convey information and convince the audience with positive facts. As to modal verbal operators, they are used to evince the speaker’s adamant determination, and his unflinching commitment to move the whole country forward out of the dark ages and also build up his authority and selfishness. The prominent application of personal pronouns namely: “we” and “you” – “we” patterns, is meant to create an intimate dialogic style which can shorten the distance between the speaker and the audience, weaken the power and maintain a reliant and equal relationship between them. This greatly helps to persuade the addressees. Overall, this paper attempts to set into the fore the orator’s communicative alertness as he to shifts from braggardism or boastfulness to opportunistic humility depending on the context.

American voters elect the President and Vice President of the United States of America indirectly, through an arrangement known as the Electoral College system. The U.S. Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, as amended by the 12th Amendment in 1803, together with a series of implementing federal statutes, provides the broad framework through which electors are appointed and by which they cast votes for the President and Vice President. However, the Constitution says nothing about how the states should allot their electoral votes. The winner- take-all was the choice of the majority of the States. Presently, 48 states and the District of Columbia (Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions, having adopted the district system) have adopted the winner-take-all method of allocating electors. Under this method, the slate of electors, representing the presidential and vice presidential ticket that wins a plurality of votes in a state is elected on Election Day in November, and later meets in mid-December as the Electoral College to cast all of the state’s electoral ballots for the winning presidential and vice presidential candidates. This electoral system has proved undemocratic in modern time. The objective of this paper is to shed light on the limits of the American presidential electoral system which is no more in accordance with the ideals of the democracy today. Through historicism and Marxism theories, investigations have shown that some candidates can get a majority of the popular votes but fail under the winner- take-all conundrum. More importantly, the system has generated a dangerous geographical separation with red and blue territories in the same United States. The compromises and ideals of 1787 constitutional convention are rather outmoded for the 21st century democracy.