Hot weather, hot topic:Polarization and sceptical framing in the climate debate on Twitter

Extreme weather events like the heat wave of 2018 reinforce public attention for climate change. Social media platforms facilitate, define and amplify debate about this topic. They give rise to counterpublic spaces through which counterpublics such as climate sceptics get a stage they would not easily get in mainstream media. Previous research suggests that sceptics use these spaces as safe havens, but also as bases for interventions in the hegemonic debate. Applying a multideterminant frame model, we analyse the Twitter debate among climate change ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. We study all tweets in which the heat wave was related to climate change and which were shared by Dutch and Flemish users between 28 July 2018 and 4 August 2018. Laying bare the worldviews underlying the frames of sceptics and non-sceptics, we first demonstrate the diversity of – unilaterally interacting – ideological interests. Building upon this analysis of the scope of the debate and analysing its form, we show that both groups mostly use similar antagonistic strategies to delegitimize and denaturalize their out-groups. We argue that these interventions promote polarization rather than a constructive agonistic debate. As such, this study refutes previous studies that consider sceptic frames as deconstructive and non-sceptic frames as constructive

Conversational elements of online chatting: speaking practice for distance language learners?

A critical issue in the delivery of language courses at a distance is to provide adequate scaffolding and monitoring1 of learners to assist them in the development of their interlanguage. As well as being one of the main reasons students enroll in language courses, oral interaction is considered beneficial to interlanguage development since it provides opportunities for negotiation of meaning. In the case of campus-based students, learners' progress in speaking the target language is supported and monitored mainly in the classroom. If non campus-based or online students do not attend face-to-face classes, how do they find opportunities for oral interaction? Using a Conversational Analysis and Second Language Acquisition perspective, the author considers elements which are common to both face-to-face oral interactions and chatting via a computer, with a view to assessing the potential of synchronous text-based communication tools to support the development of the speaking skills and interlanguage of distance language learners. This is done by reviewing findings of previous studies on synchronous text-based communication tools and identifying selected characteristics of oral interaction which are present in the chat sessions of two groups of campus-based intermediate level learners of Italian. In particular, the study focuses on repairs and incorporation of target forms, variety of speech acts, particularly questions and clarification requests, and the presence of discourse markers

The gilded masks of digital rhetoric : social and pedagogical implications of evolving paralinguistic elements in web composition

Over the past few years it has become apparent to educators that the traditional focal points of composition are being necessarily shifted, outside of the classroom, because of the rhetorical spaces made available by the Internet. In the wake of the Web 2.0 revolution, when social networking and the production of web texts are flourishing, it’s more important than ever for educators to take note of the changes occurring in discursive habits and of the ability of students to respond to those changes in a way that will allow them to participate in and shape the dialogue. In undertaking a study of some of the most academically weak but rhetorically strong elements of online composition, emoticons, I argue that the use of these symbols as gestural representations are one indication of a collective attempt to remove composition from the institution of education. Furthermore, I believe that proficiency with content production and interpersonal communication on the web is a survival skill, emerging as a result of what economists and scholars call the “information economy,” and that using emoticons to augment linguistic communication is a subset of that development. As a result of the division between academic composition and web composition, the forms and styles of online writing are left to evolve unguided by education and have important implications, not just for pedagogy, but for the social constructs which govern the ways we use language to create and disseminate information. The manner in which educators succeed or fail to address changes in composition will have a direct bearing on how students identify themselves as writers, how they evaluate content, and with what authority they speak online

Predictive Analysis on Twitter: Techniques and Applications

Predictive analysis of social media data has attracted considerable attention from the research community as well as the business world because of the essential and actionable information it can provide. Over the years, extensive experimentation and analysis for insights have been carried out using Twitter data in various domains such as healthcare, public health, politics, social sciences, and demographics. In this chapter, we discuss techniques, approaches and state-of-the-art applications of predictive analysis of Twitter data. Specifically, we present fine-grained analysis involving aspects such as sentiment, emotion, and the use of domain knowledge in the coarse-grained analysis of Twitter data for making decisions and taking actions, and relate a few success stories