Participation as a complex phenomenon in the EFL classroom

PhD ThesisThe present study is concerned with the process of how EFL learners organise their classroom participation. Although oral engagement is considered the main indicator of student participation, opportunities to participate in oral discussion are not always available to all students due to different issues, (e.g., a large number of students in the class). The main focus of this research is therefore to describe how students participate in classroom discussion through other modes rather than explicit oral participation. This study involves the analysis of different forms of student participation used alternatively in EFL classrooms. Such forms related to the ongoing discussion are employed for different purposes by EFL students. Since previous studies have focused on verbal participation such the interrelated issues between teacher-student exchanges, much remains to be learned about the micro-interactional practice used by language learners to participate in classroom interaction. Therefore, this study aims to extend the existing knowledge of student participation in EFL classrooms. The analysis of data is based on Conversation Analysis (CA) methodology which can be used to analyse language and its environment, including a combination of talk and the use of body in the classroom context. The data base consists of about 14 hours of video and audio recorded lessons taken from second and third-year students of English Departments in Libyan universities. The reason for using video and audio recordings is that to have good chance for deep analysis of talk and embodied action. The findings show that there are other forms of student participation, including embodied action and desk talk. Embodied action analysis reveals that students as collaborative members rely on a variety of embodiments to sustain classroom interaction. The results obtained from this analysis provide evidence of the extent to which such these embodiments are exploited by language learners to participate in their classrooms. This means that students are not only orally participating but they are also non-orally constructing a kind of group participation through distributing meaningful signals. Such signals include different patterns of gazes, facial expressions, nodding heads body orientation and movements towards teacher or class. In addition, the findings show that desk talk produced beyond teacher-student talk is actually relating to the ongoing discussion. Students produce such desk talk in order to cope with ongoing discussion and to compensate for their lack of explicit oral opportunities to participate in classroom discussion

Paradoxes of interactivity: perspectives for media theory, human-computer interaction, and artistic investigations

Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. "Paradoxes of Interactivity" brings together reflections on "interactivity" from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound

On the linguistic constitution of research practices

This thesis explores sociologists' routine research activities, including observation, participant observation, interviewing, and transcription. It suggests that the constitutive activities of sociological research methods - writing field-notes, doing looking and categorising, and the endogenous structure of members' ordinary language transactions are suffused with culturally methodic, i.e. ordinary language activities. "Membership categories" are the ordinary organising practices of description that society-members - including sociologists - routinely use in assembling sense of settings. This thesis addresses the procedural bases of activities which are constituent features of the research: disguising identities of informants, reviewing literature, writing-up research outcomes, and compiling bibliographies. These activities are themselves loci of practical reasoning. Whilst these activities are assemblages of members' cultural methods, they have not been recognised as "research practices" by methodologically ironic sociology. The thesis presents a series of studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis. Using both sequential and membership categorisational aspects of Conversation Analysis, as well as textual analysis of published research, this thesis examines how members' cultural practices coincide with research practices. Data are derived from a period of participant observation in an organisation, video-recordings of the organisation's work; and interviews following the 1996 bombing in Manchester. A major, cumulative theme within this thesis is confidentiality - within an organisation, within a research project and within sociology itself. Features of confidentiality are explored through ethnographic observation, textual analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis. Membership Categorisation Analysis brings seen-but-unnoticed features of confidentiality into relief. Central to the thesis are the works of Edward Rose, particularly his ethnographic inquiries of Skid Row, and Harvey Sacks, on the cultural logic shared by society-members. Rose and Sacks explicate the visibility and recognition of members' activities to other members, and research activities as linguistic activities

Paradoxes of Interactivity

Current findings from anthropology, genetics, prehistory, cognitive and neuroscience indicate that human nature is grounded in a co-evolution of tool use, symbolic communication, social interaction and cultural transmission. Digital information technology has recently entered as a new tool in this co-evolution, and will probably have the strongest impact on shaping the human mind in the near future. A common effort from the humanities, the sciences, art and technology is necessary to understand this ongoing co- evolutionary process. Interactivity is a key for understanding the new relationships formed by humans with social robots as well as interactive environments and wearables underlying this process. Of special importance for understanding interactivity are human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as media theory and New Media Art. »Paradoxes of Interactivity« brings together reflections on »interactivity« from different theoretical perspectives, the interplay of science and art, and recent technological developments for artistic applications, especially in the realm of sound

Designing Text Entry Methods for Non-Verbal Vocal Input

Katedra počítačové grafiky a interakc

Subtitling for the Deaf and the Hard-of-hearing: A Reception Study in the Turkish Context

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of subtitling for people with hearing impairments and to improve the accessibility to audiovisual material for hearing-impaired viewers in Turkey. It starts by providing a detailed general overview of the current state of accessibility and includes a detailed discussion on existing legislation, an outline of the limited practice of subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH) in Turkish and a profile of the assumed target audience. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a set of guidelines that can be used in the production of quality SDH in Turkey. In order to achieve these aims, the study adopts a product-oriented descriptive approach and first investigates the guidelines applied in countries where SDH has long been established as a professional practice in an attempt to reveal some of the shared values of good practice as well as potential divergences. Following this descriptive analysis, some of the key contradicting practices in the guidelines – speaker identification, reading speed, indication of sound and paralinguistic information – are tested on an audience of (37) Turkish hearing-impaired viewers so as to unveil their needs and preferences within the framework of Audience Reception Theory. Quantitative data on the preferences of Turkish viewers was collected by means of questionnaires filled in by the participants after they had watched different sets of subtitles, each of them testing a different feature. Further qualitative data was obtained through interviews conducted with four participants who took part in the experiment so as to generate more in-depth information regarding their preferences. The results yielded by the statistical analysis of the quantitative data and the interpretive phenomenological analysis of the qualitative data culminated in the drafting of a set of guidelines that can be used in the production of SDH in Turkey

Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe

This thesis is about the poetic edge of language and technology. It inter-relates both computational creation and poetic reception by analysing typographic animation softwares and meditating (speculatively) on a future malleable language that possesses the quality of being (and is implicitly perceived as) alive. As such it is a composite document: a philosophical and practice-based exploration of how computers are transforming literature, an ontological meditation on life and language, and a contribution to software studies. Digital poetry introduces animation, dimensionality and metadata into literary discourse. This necessitates new terminology; an acronym for Textual Audio-Visual Interactivity is proposed: Tavit. Tavits (malleable digital text) are tactile and responsive in ways that emulate living entities. They can possess dimensionality, memory, flocking, kinematics, surface reflectivity, collision detection, and responsiveness to touch, etc…. Life-like tactile tavits involve information that is not only semantic or syntactic, but also audible, imagistic and interactive. Reading mediated language-art requires an expanded set of critical, practical and discourse tools, and an awareness of the historical continuum that anticipates this expansion. The ontological and temporal design implications of tavits are supported with case-studies of two commercial typographic-animation softwares and one custom software (Mr Softie created at OBX Labs, Concordia) used during a research-creation process