Feasibility report: Delivering case-study based learning using artificial intelligence and gaming technologies

This document describes an investigation into the technical feasibility of a game to support learning based on case studies. Information systems students using the game will conduct fact-finding interviews with virtual characters. We survey relevant technologies in computational linguistics and games. We assess the applicability of the various approaches and propose an architecture for the game based on existing techniques. We propose a phased development plan for the development of the game

The story of Oh: the aesthetics and rhetoric of a common vowel sound

Studies in Musical Theatre is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to musical theatre. It was launched in 2007 and is now in its seventh volume. It has an extensive international readership and is edited by Dominic Symonds and George Burrows. This article investigates the use of the ‘word’ ‘Oh’ in a variety of different performance idioms. Despite its lack of ‘meaning’, the sound is used in both conversation and poetic discourse, and I discuss how it operates communicatively and expressively through contextual resonances, aesthetic manipulation and rhetorical signification. The article first considers the aesthetically modernist work of Cathy Berberian in Bussotti’s La Passion Selon Sade; then it considers the rhetorically inflected use of ‘Oh’ to construct social resonance in popular song;finally, it discusses two important uses of the sound ‘Oh’ which bookend the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, serving to consolidate the allegorical and musico-dramatic narrative of the show

‘Only Brooks of Sheffield’: conversation, crossover writing, and child and adult perspectives in David Copperfield and its juvenile adaptations

This article examines the role that conversations between children and adults play in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adaptations of it for a child audience. First, I show conversation as an important vector in Dickens’s exploration of child and adult knowledge in the original novel. The rules of conversation are suspended in mixed-age companies, as is most powerfully expressed in my titular example: an adult joke turning on the child David’s non-comprehension of a remark by Mr Murdstone. Nonetheless, other conversations show sensitive adults mitigating power differentials between child and adult, and present the child David as unusually perspicacious (in line with his overall characterization). Second, I turn to juvenile adaptations of David Copperfield by writers including Dickens’s granddaughter Mary Angela Dickens. I argue that these works minimize not just the number of conversations in direct speech, but also the process by which David makes conversational inferences; the (now third-person) narrator often fills conversational gaps for the child reader. In the final section, I argue that the relative unimportance of conversation in the adaptations, as opposed to Dickens’s novel, cannot be attributed to concerns with suitability or intelligibility alone. Instead, Dickens’s preoccupation with conversations between adults and children relates to David Copperfield’s original status as a crossover or cross-written text that would have been read by a mixed-age audience. Once this dual address is removed in the adaptations, age-levelled knowledge positions are of much less concern. As such, conversation in David Copperfield metaphorizes the labour (and ethical responsibilities) of the cross-writer

Word searches: on the use of verbal and non-verbal resources during classroom talk

Word finding difficulties in children are typically characterised by search behaviours such as silence, circumlocution, repetition and empty words. Yet, how children’s word searches are constructed (including gesture, gaze and prosody) and the actions accomplished during interaction have not yet been researched. In this study, eightyear- old Ciara is interacting with her teacher in the classroom. 37 segments containing word searches were analysed according to the procedures used by conversation analysts. Ciara’s interactional resources include co-ordinated deployment of syntax, pitch height and downward gaze during solitary searching that assist the enterprise of self-repair. Gaze shift towards the teacher signals a transition relevance place, thus constituting a direct invitation for her to participate in the search. Ciara’s interactional resources include semantic category labelling, phonological self-cuing and pronominal substitution that supply valuable linguistic information to the teacher and trigger production of the searched-for item. Recommendations for language teaching and therapy are presented