Exploring notions of genre in 'academic literacies' and 'writing across the curriculum': approaches across countries and contexts

The SIGET IV panel on genre in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and “academic literacies” (ACLITS) has set rolling a discussion of the similarities and differences in the two traditions, the former originating in the US in the early 1970s, the latter originating in England in the early 1990s. This paper maps out some elements of each in relation to the other and to genre, which we hope will set in motion further discussions and cross-fertilization

Pengembangan Model Belajar Untuk Meningkatkan Etos Belajar Siswa Sekolah Menengah Di Daerah Pinggiran Provinsi DIY

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan model belajar untuk meningkatkan etosbelajar siswa sekolah menengah di daerah pinggiran provinsi DIY. Penelitian ini merupakankelanjutan dari penelitian sebelumnya tentang etos belajar siswa sekolah menengah di daerahpinggiran provinsi DIY. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah penelitianpengembangan, dengan langkah penelitian difokuskan pada dua tahap yaitu tahapprelimenary dan tahap formative evaluation. Pada tahap prelimenary akan dilakukanpersiapan dan prosedur kerja penelitian, sedangkan tahap formative evaluation dilakukanprototyping (penyusunan model belajar) yang di expert reviews,one-to-one dan small group,serta field test. Uji coba model belajar dalam penelitian ini dilakukan di salah satu SD diKabupaten Bantul. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan, bahwa model pembelajaran centering themargine memberikan kontribusi signifikan dalam meningkatkan etos belajar siswa di daerahpinggiran

Tagging Prosody and Discourse Structure in Elicited Spontaneous Speech

This paper motivates and describes the annotation and analysis of prosody and discourse structure for several large spoken language corpora. The annotation schema are of two types: tags for prosody and intonation, and tags for several aspects of discourse structure. The choice of the particular tagging schema in each domain is based in large part on the insights they provide in corpus-based studies of the relationship between discourse structure and the accenting of referring expressions in American English. We first describe these results and show that the same models account for the accenting of pronouns in an extended passage from one of the Speech Warehouse hotel-booking dialogues. We then turn to corpora described in Venditti [Ven00], which adapts the same models to Tokyo Japanese. Japanese is interesting to compare to English, because accent is lexically specified and so cannot mark discourse focus in the same way. Analyses of these corpora show that local pitch range expansion serves the analogous focusing function in Japanese. The paper concludes with a section describing several outstanding questions in the annotation of Japanese intonation which corpus studies can help to resolve.Work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Ohio State University Office of Research, to Mary E. Beckman and co-principal investigators on the OSU Speech Warehouse project, and by an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship to Jennifer J. Venditti

Computational Approach to Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Dialogues

This paper presents an algorithm for identifying noun-phrase antecedents of pronouns and adjectival anaphors in Spanish dialogues. We believe that anaphora resolution requires numerous sources of information in order to find the correct antecedent of the anaphor. These sources can be of different kinds, e.g., linguistic information, discourse/dialogue structure information, or topic information. For this reason, our algorithm uses various different kinds of information (hybrid information). The algorithm is based on linguistic constraints and preferences and uses an anaphoric accessibility space within which the algorithm finds the noun phrase. We present some experiments related to this algorithm and this space using a corpus of 204 dialogues. The algorithm is implemented in Prolog. According to this study, 95.9% of antecedents were located in the proposed space, a precision of 81.3% was obtained for pronominal anaphora resolution, and 81.5% for adjectival anaphora

A case study on how language learning strategies are fostered in an EFL chilean classroom context

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)This mixed-methods case study attempted to explore how Language Learning Strategies (LLS) are fostered within a secondary level Chilean EFL public school context, based on a teacher’s pedagogical actions. Through empirical observation, task analysis, and an interview, this thesis intended to unveil the rationale behind the predominance of certain LLS at expense of others. Previous studies and literature served as a reference to later on determine potential cohesion between background records and first-hand evidence, which proved to be in relative alignment. Accordingly, this paper looked forward to extrapolating thoughts and assumptions the teacher had about that strategy-fostering bias with objective information evidenced through the development of the tasks carried out during the observation period. The results drew a tendency placing Memory strategies among the rest as the most fostered category, whereas Compensation befell to be the least favored LLS category overall.El propósito de este estudio de caso con un enfoque de investigación mixto fue explorar el desarrollo de la promoción de Estrategias del Estudio de la Lengua (Language Learning Strategies) dentro de una clase de Inglés como Lengua Extranjera (EFL) en un curso/nivel de educación secundaria inmerso en el contexto de un establecimiento educacional público chileno basado en las acciones pedagógicas del profesor a cargo. A través de observaciones empíricas, análisis de actividades y una entrevista, la intención de esta tesis fue develar la lógica tras la predominancia de ciertas Estratégias del Estudio de la Lengua en desmedro de otras. Varios artículos, tesis y otros tipos de documentos literarios sirvieron como referencia para posteriormente determinar la cohesión entre estos precedentes y la evidencia empírica recolectada, la cual ha probado estar en relativa concordancia. Por consiguiente, este documento buscó extrapolar la subjetividad de las reflexiones y suposiciones que el profesor-muestra del caso en cuestión fue capaz de dilucidar respecto a la tendencia a parcializar la promoción de ciertas estrategias con información objetiva obtenida a través del análisis de las instrucciones y actividades desarrolladas por el profesor durante el periodo de observación. Los resultados arrojaron tendencias favoreciendo a las estrategias de Memoria por encima del resto como la categoría más fomentada, mientras que las estrategias de Compensación resultaron ser aquellas con menos rodaje

Participant Subjectivity and Involvement as a Basis for Discourse Segmentation

We propose a framework for analyzing episodic conversational activities in terms of expressed relationships between the participants and utterance content. We test the hypothesis that linguistic features which express such properties, e.g. tense, aspect, and person deixis, are a useful basis for automatic intentional discourse segmentation. We present a novel algorithm and test our hypothesis on a set of intentionally segmented conversational monologues. Our algorithm performs better than a simple baseline and as well as or better than well-known lexical-semantic segmentation methods