GEMA Online™ Journal of Language Studies 339 Volume 12(2), Special Section, May 2012 ISSN: 1675-8021 Editorial Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Culture, Power And Values: Language And Literary Studies In The Local-global Context Pramela Krish pramela@ukm.my School of Language Studies and Linguistics Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Hafizah Latif hlatif@ukm.my School of Language Studies and Linguistics Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Zalina Mohd Lazim zalina@ukm.my School of Language Studies and Linguistics Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Research and innovations in language-related issues are very diverse and pose several challenges be it in the local or global context. The seven articles in this Special Issue articulate these local and global issues and challenges from pedagogical, linguistic and literary perspectives. They are a selection of papers presented at the SoLLs.INTEC 2011 International Conference organised by the School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia which have been revised and undergone the normal review process for this journal. In relation to pedagogy, the researchers discuss issues in language development incorporating cultural values and power relations in the classrooms. They also illustrate the use of an automated tool for marking which in the past was totally dependent on the human mind. In the field of linguistics, two researchers explore the meaning of lexical items and the different senses of prepositions in the Arabic contexts. In literary works, the writers have taken a new approach in projecting and addressing social conflicts of today’s society. Another article looks at the master-slave relationship in a Shakespearean play to offer new perspectives on loyalty and nobility. Faiz Sathi Abdullah and Kobra Hosseini take a critical approach in exploring power relations in Iranian high school classrooms. The article, Discursive Enactment of Power in Iranian High School EFL Classrooms has adopted Freire’s (1970) Critical Pedagogy which calls for the transformation of the oppressive and repressive conditions that commonly afflict any language learning situation and seeks to uphold a more equitable brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UKM Journal Article Repository