2,214 research outputs found

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    A Critical Review Of Post-Secondary Education Writing During A 21st Century Education Revolution

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    Educational materials are effective instruments which provide information and report new discoveries uncovered by researchers in specific areas of academia. Higher education, like other education institutions, rely on instructional materials to inform its practice of educating adult learners. In post-secondary education, developmental English programs are tasked with meeting the needs of dynamic populations, thus there is a continuous need for research in this area to support its changing landscape. However, the majority of scholarly thought in this area centers on K-12 reading and writing. This paucity presents a phenomenon to the post-secondary community. This research study uses a qualitative content analysis to examine peer-reviewed journals from 2003-2017, developmental online websites, and a government issued document directed toward reforming post-secondary developmental education programs. These highly relevant sources aid educators in discovering informational support to apply best practices for student success. Developmental education serves the purpose of addressing literacy gaps for students transitioning to college-level work. The findings here illuminate the dearth of material offered to developmental educators. This study suggests the field of literacy research is fragmented and highlights an apparent blind spot in scholarly literature with regard to English writing instruction. This poses a quandary for post-secondary literacy researchers in the 21st century and establishes the necessity for the literacy research community to commit future scholarship toward equipping college educators teaching writing instruction to underprepared adult learners

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    What effect does short term Study Abroad (SA) have on learners’ vocabulary knowledge?

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    This thesis describes a study which tracks longitudinal changes in vocabularyknowledge during a short-term Study Abroad (SA) experience. A test ofproductive vocabulary knowledge, Lex30 (Meara & Fitzpatrick, 2000),requiring the production of word association responses, is used to elicit vocabulary from 38 Japanese L1 learners of English at four test times at equal intervals before and after an SA experience. The study starts by investigating whether there are changes in both the total number of words and in the number of less frequently occurring words produced by SA participants. Three additional ways of measuring the development of lexical knowledge over time are then proposed. The first examines changes in the ability of participants of different proficiency levels in producing collocates in response to Lex30 cue words. The second tracks changes in spelling accuracy to measure if improvements take place over time. The third analysis uses an online measuring instrument (Wmatrix; Rayson, 2009) to explore if there are any changes in the mastery of specific semantic domains. The results show that there is significant growth in the productive use of less frequent vocabulary knowledge during the SA period. There is also an increase in collocation production with lower proficiency participants and evidence of some improvement in the way certain vocabulary items are spelled. The tendency for SA learners to produce more words from semantic groups related to SA experiences is also demonstrated. Post-SA tests show that while some knowledge attrition occurs it does not decline to pre-SA levels. The studyshows how short-term SA programmes can be evaluated using a word association test, contributing to a better understanding of how vocabularydevelops during intensive language learning experiences. It also demonstrates the gradual shift of productive vocabulary knowledge from partial word knowledge to a more complete state of productive mastery

    Gratitude in Healthcare an interdisciplinary inquiry

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    The expression and reception of gratitude is a significant dimension of interpersonal communication in care-giving relationships. Although there is a growing body of evidence that practising gratitude has health and wellbeing benefits for the giver and receiver, gratitude as a social emotion made in interaction has received comparatively little research attention. To address this gap, this thesis draws on a portfolio of qualitative methods to explore the ways in which gratitude is constituted in care provision in personal, professional, and public discourse. This research is informed by a discursive psychology approach in which gratitude is analysed, not as a morally virtuous character trait, but as a purposeful, performative social action that is mutually co-constructed in interaction.I investigate gratitude through studies that approach it on a meta, meso, macro, and micro level. Key intellectual traditions that underpin research literature on gratitude in healthcare are explored through a metanarrative review. Six underlying metanarratives were identified: social capital; gifts; care ethics; benefits of gratitude; staff wellbeing; and gratitude as an indicator of quality of care. At the meso (institutional) level, a narrative analysis of an archive of letters between patients treated for tuberculosis and hospital almoners positions gratitude as participating in a Maussian gift-exchange ritual in which communal ties are created and consolidated.At the macro (societal) level, a discursive analysis of tweets of gratitude to the National Health Service at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that attitudes to gratitude were dynamic in response to events, with growing unease about deflecting attention from risk reduction for those working in the health and social care sectors. A follow-up analysis of the clap-for-carers movement implicates gratitude in embodied, symbolic, and imagined performances in debates about care justice. At the micro (interpersonal) level, an analysis of gratitude encounters broadcast in the BBC documentary series, Hospital, uses pragmatics and conversation analysis to argue that gratitude is an emotion made in talk, with the uptake of gratitude opportunities influencing the course of conversational sequencing. The findings challenge the oftenmade distinction between task-oriented and relational conversation in healthcare.Moral economics are paradigmatic in the philosophical conceptualisation of gratitude. My research shows that, although balance-sheet reciprocity characterised the institutional culture of the voluntary hospital, it is hardly ever a feature ofinterpersonal gratitude encounters. Instead, gratitude is accomplished as shared moments of humanity through negotiated encounters infused with affect. Gratitude should never be instrumentalised as compensating for unsafe, inadequatelyrenumerated work. Neither should its potential to enhance healthcare encounters be underestimated. Attention to gratitude can participate in culture change by affirming modes of acting, emoting, relating, expressing, and connecting that intersect with care justice.This thesis speaks to gratitude as a culturally salient indicator of what people express as worthy of appreciation. It calls for these expressions to be more closely attended to, not only as useful feedback that can inform change, but also because gratitude is a resource on which we can draw to enhance and enrich healthcare as a communal, collaborative, cooperative endeavour

    Thematic Working Group 3 - Inclusion of Excluded Populations : Access and Learning Optimization via IT in the Post-Pandemic Era

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    Thematic Working Group (TWG) 3’s theme is “Inclusion of excluded populations: access and learning optimization via IT in the post-pandemic era”. A focal concern is established by the presence of the first word – ‘inclusion’ – and how this relates to ‘excluded populations’. Much of the research in this field has focused on inclusion for individuals; however, the evidence shows that educational exclusion has multiple dimensions (Passey, 2014). To accommodate this within the current focus, therefore, identifying key dimensions of ‘excluded populations’ will be a key concern of this document. ‘Access’ will be considered beyond physical technology access, involving aspects of accessibility, agency and empowerment. These aspects relate to a definition of access that concerns the needs for individuals to develop and have digital capabilities and abilities to select applications appropriate to purpose, as discussed, for example, by Helsper (2021) and Passey et al. (2018). Taking this wider concern for access, ‘learning optimization’ will be explored as a term that highlights the need to focus on technological access and provision enabling successful outcomes. Given the fact that the intention of the work of TWG3 is to explore findings in the ‘post-pandemic’ context, communication technologies as well as just information technology, ‘IT’, are clearly important and need to be considered. Additionally, exclusion factors to be addressed need to be clearly identified so that inclusion can be accommodated and ensured in the context of specific excluded populations. However, inclusion should not be implemented as an imposition in the context of digital technologies, as some populations do not wish to use digital technologies (Wetmore, 2007), and in this respect the issue of the need to acknowledge diversity is important

    Reshaping Higher Education for a Post-COVID-19 World: Lessons Learned and Moving Forward

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    A corpus-based investigation into lexicogrammatical incongruity and its relation to irony

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    Presented is a corpus-based investigation into the lexicogrammatical features of irony. A common understanding of irony is of a trope in which the dictum and the implicatum are seen as incongruous. I argue that patterns of lexicogrammatical incongruity can reflect this incongruity at the pragmatic level. Additionally, a bottom-up examination of authentic examples of ironic utterances can reveal common lexicogrammatical patterns. This study attempts to readdress the paucity of linguistic studies into irony by focusing on real-world examples of irony as a source of data. Examples of irony were taken from two irony-rich discourse environments and ironic examples were extracted using an independent framework of irony. Commonalities of patterning were first identified, and then interrogated across the two DIY corpora, as well as two general corpora, in order to measure both frequency (raw/t-score) and fixedness. Finally, a deeper examination of the concordance lines revealed whether such patterns carry an ironic force. Three significant findings are presented. Firstly, the study explores lexicogrammatical patterns of collocation concerning multiple hedging: that is, two or more lexical items which ostensibly have a hedging function, yet often frame strong evaluative or rhetorical statements. Secondly, I present patterns of collostruction in which the progressive aspect colligates with cognition verbs. It is the lexicogrammatical incongruity within these patterns that is often a source of irony. Usage of these phrases does not, however, guarantee that the statement will always be ironic. Yet, when compared within larger general corpora, these patterns demonstrate high tendencies of pragmatic characteristics related to irony. Therefore, the final results chapter argues that such patterns can be considered as having ironic priming. Identification and awareness of such patterns may help audiences in accurately reaching ironic interpretations. More practically, these patterns may also help NLP methodology by building upon previous attempts of automated irony detection to create more robust algorithms. Furthermore, there are wider implications to what corpus linguistic methodology can explore in regard to connections between pragmatics and lexicogrammar
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