Wind and Riegl: the meaning of a

This article constitutes a detailed critical reading of Edgar Wind’s early work, focussing, in particular, on his German philosophical writings concerning art, art history and art-historical methodology. Through comparisons with the authors Wind tackled (Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Tietze) and by whom he was influenced (Erwin Panofsky, Alois Riegl), this article shows Wind’s contribution towards a redefinition of art history as an autonomous discipline and his plan of a concrete systematic study of art (konkrete Kunstwissenschaft) confronting the important heritage of the thought of Riegl. By following the path which brought Wind to the definition of a systematically organized table of ‘artistic problems’ - which are fundamental to the art interrogation - supposed to work as a kind of compass for the art historian, this article aims to contribute to the understanding and interpretation of such concepts as ‘style’ and the Riegelian Kunstwollen

Investigating Functional Grammar Analysis as an Instructional Tool for Meaning-Making with Fourth-Grade English Learners.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 9.1% (4.4 million) of the students in U.S. schools are learning English as a new language. Unfortunately, an achievement gap between English learners and their native English-speaking peers has persisted for years. It has become imperative for English learners to have equitable access to instruction that will advance their literacy development; mainstream classroom teachers must know how to meet the needs of linguistically diverse students. Literacy and language scholars suggest this requires adopting a linguistic orientation to reading comprehension instruction with which teachers can support English learners’ language development and content-area learning simultaneously. However, there are few empirical models to which teachers can turn to understand how this can occur, with what tools, and the challenges they might encounter. The present study aims to redress this gap. Stemming from Systemic Functional Linguistics theory, functional grammar analysis is a technique that may support teachers in bringing a linguistic orientation to meaning-making with text. This case study investigates one fourth-grade teacher’s enactment of a curriculum designed to support English learners’ meaning-making with a functional grammar approach. To study the teacher’s enactment over the course of a year, I employed qualitative data collection methods including field notes, video recordings, interview, and teacher artifacts. Data analysis drew on constant comparative methods and discourse analysis. This study demonstrates how functional grammar analysis provides a metalanguage with which teachers can facilitate discussions about key ideas that are central to the meanings in text. Through iterative readings of select text excerpts and visual representations of students’ emergent understandings, teachers can scaffold the analysis of word meanings and clauses to help students build causal relations while reading narrative texts and logical/referential relations while reading informational science texts. This study also reveals challenges, such as making metalanguage useful for analyzing characters and teaching both the individual stages of an argument and how the stages should ultimately cohere. For teachers and researchers interested in how we can promote the advancement of English learners’ literacy development, this study illustrates how a linguistic orientation to meaning-making can be translated into a literacy and language pedagogy.PhDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113569/1/carriesy_1.pd

News now: exploratory study of digital news story organization and structure

2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Newspaper publication has expanded beyond the printed format to digital formats to attract readers using iPhone apps, Facebook, Twitter and other outlets. Some apps will open the full story and others link to the full story on the newspaper's website. My exploratory research sought to explore different digital platforms by investigating Washington Post headlines written for the iPhone Application, Facebook, and Twitter. While these platforms limit the information available before linking to the full story on the website, each digital platform provided enough information to identify organizational patterns and sequences of who, what, where, why and how — the key concepts in the journalistic inverted pyramid writing organization. My research investigated the Washington Post's digital headlines in the summer of 2012. The research questions were RQ1: Which questions are answered most frequently in news story headlines on the iPhone app, Facebook newsfeed, and Twitter tweets? RQ2: What are the question sequences presented in the headlines on the iPhone app, Facebook newsfeed, and Twitter tweets? RQ2A: Is there a difference in organization of questions sequences in the headlines of story topics present in one of each of the following platforms: iPhone app, Facebook newsfeed, and Twitter tweets? For my content analysis of the Washington Post digital headlines, I created a sample of a constructed week and took screenshots of headlines. For analysis, I coded all stories (n = 216) published on at least one other platform. I developed a codebook, and one additional coder and I coded every headline in the sample. Despite some variables receiving lower Krippendorff Alpha results than suggested for publication for intercoder reliability (ranging from 0.33 to 0.83), most variables achieved acceptable percent agreements from 84.7% to 95.8%. Because of the exploratory nature of my study, I proceeded with data analysis. Patterns emerged related to information sequences in headlines. "Who" and "what" were used in 77% (n = 22) as leading information in the headline sequences. "Where" was the only other variable included at the beginning of sequences. While 22 different organizational sequences emerged, 50% were used only once. Research Question 2A investigated organization of question sequences. The variable "what," a main action, was included in 100% (n = 27) of the headlines in a portion of the sample using a single headline for each platform about one story. The sequence (who, what) was included in 22% (n = 9) across all three platforms. Other story topics provided additional variables on different platforms

Wind and Riegl: the meaning of a ‘problematical’ grammar

This article constitutes a detailed critical reading of Edgar Wind’s early work, focussing, in particular, on his German philosophical writings concerning art, art history and art-historical methodology. Through comparisons with the authors Wind tackled (Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Tietze) and by whom he was influenced (Erwin Panofsky, Alois Riegl), this article shows Wind’s contribution towards a redefinition of art history as an autonomous discipline and his plan of a concrete systematic study of art (konkrete Kunstwissenschaft) confronting the important heritage of the thought of Riegl. By following the path which brought Wind to the definition of a systematically organized table of ‘artistic problems’ – which are fundamental to the art interrogation – supposed to work as a kind of compass for the art historian, this article aims to contribute to the understanding and interpretation of such concepts as ‘style’ and the Riegelian Kunstwollen

The effects of individual differences and linguistic features on reading comprehension of health-related texts

Background. Relatively little attention has been focused on whether or how the effects of reader characteristics, or of the linguistic properties of a text, predict reading comprehension of health-related information. In addition, there is little evidence for the utility of any of the writing guidelines promulgated by the National Health Service (NHS) in order to improve the comprehension of health information. Nonetheless, some previous research suggests that health-related texts could be adapted for different groups of users to optimise understanding. Thus, existing knowledge presents important limitations, and raises concerns with potentially far-reaching practical implications. To address these concerns, I investigated how variation in individual differences and in text features predicts the comprehension of health-related texts, examining how the effects of textual features may differ for different kinds of readers. Method. The focus of this thesis is on Study 3, in which I investigated the predictors of tested comprehension, but I report preliminary studies where I examined the readability of a sample of health-related texts (Study 1), and the perceived comprehension of a sample of health-related texts (Study 2). In the primary study (Study 3), I used Bayesian mixed-effects models to analyse the influences that affect the accuracy of responses to questions probing the comprehension of a sample of health-related texts. I measured variation among 200 participants in their cognitive abilities, to capture the effects of individual differences, as well as variation in the linguistic features of texts, to capture the effects of text structure and content. Results. I found that tested comprehension was less likely to be accurate among older participants. However, comprehension accuracy was greater given higher levels of education, health literacy, and English language proficiency levels. In addition, self-rated evaluations of perceived comprehension predicted comprehension, but only in the absence of other individual-differences-related predictors. Variation in text features, including readability estimates, did not predict comprehension accuracy, and there was no evidence for the modulation of the effects of individual differences by text features. Discussion. Text features did not module the effects of individual differences to influence comprehension accuracy in any meaningful way. This suggests that adapting health-related texts to different groups of the population may be of limited practical value. Implications. Individual differences really matter to comprehension. Thus, optimally, understanding of health-related texts amongst the end-users should be tested, and interventions to aid readers, such as those with relatively low health literacy levels, could be used to improve comprehension of health-texts. In the absence of sensitive measures of reader characteristics, and when testing of understanding is not possible, the use of end-user evaluations of health-related texts may serve as a useful proxy of tested comprehension. However, looking for text effects, and guidance focusing on text effects, seems less useful given the reported evidence. Consequently, the effectiveness of designing health-related texts with the consideration of NHS’s text writing guidelines, is likely to be limited

Improving Deaf Accessibility to Web-based Multimedia

Internet technologies have expanded rapidly over the past two decades, making information of all sorts more readily available. Not only are they more cost-effective than traditional media, these new media have contributed to quality and convenience. However, proliferation of video and audio media on the internet creates an inadvertent disadvantage for deaf Internet users. Despite technological and legislative milestones in recent decades in making television and movies more accessible, there has been little progress with online access. A major obstacle to providing captions for internet media is the high cost of captioning and transcribing services. To respond to this problem, a possible solution lies in automatic speech recognition (ASR). This research investigates possible solutions to Web accessibility through utilization of ASR technologies. It surveys previous studies that employ visualization and ASR to determine their effectiveness in the context of deaf accessibility. Since there was no existing literature indicating the area of greatest need, a preliminary study identified an application that would serve as a case study for applying and evaluating speech visualization technology. A total of 20 deaf and hard-of-hearing participants were interviewed via video phone and their responses in American Sign Language were transcribed to English. The most common theme was concern over a lack of accessibility for online news. The second study evaluated different presentation strategies for making online news videos more accessible. A total of 95 participants viewed four different caption styles. Each style was presented on different news stories with control for content level and delivery. In addition to pre-test and post-test questionnaires, both performance and preference measures were conducted. Results from the study offer emphatic support for the hypothesis that captioning the online videos makes the Internet more accessible to the deaf users. Furthermore, the findings lend strong evidence to the idea of utilizing automatic captions to make videos comprehensible to the deaf viewers at a fraction of the cost. The color-coded captions that used highlighting to reflect the accuracy ratings were found neither to be beneficial nor detrimental; however, when asked directly about the benefit of color-coding there was support for the concept. Further development and research will be necessary to find the appropriate solution

Reading Recovery Teacher Understandings About Language and Early Literacy Acquisition

This study investigated Reading Recovery teacher understandings about language and early literacy acquisition by applying a constructivist grounded theory design. Participants were Reading Recovery teachers working across three varied districts in Massachusetts (N=33). The purpose of the study was to engage Reading Recovery teachers in surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observations to understand the degree to which Reading Recovery teacher participants value varied student language patterns. Addressing biases faced upon school entry by children who speak differently than their teachers is essential. When students are identified for early literacy intervention, an asset-based frame is critical to ensure accelerated growth. The guiding question was, “What do Reading Recovery teachers understand about using language/linguistic diversity as an asset in early literacy acquisition?”. What might be learned, in terms of Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Practices (CLSP), from Reading Recovery teachers was also discussed. The theory that emerged is that engaging in reflective processes, communicating theoretical understandings regarding reciprocity, working to expand oral language flexibility, and fostering the growth of collective expertise specifically to support linguistic diversity were all necessary. The observation portion of this study found evidence of Reading Recovery teachers working to be culturally and linguistically responsive to all children including multilingual, multidialectal, and monolingual students. Five examples included in the discussion are 1. Daily explicit instruction around literary structures 2. Personalized instruction 3. Positioning the child as a writer: allowing the syntax and meaning of a child to drive conversations and determine the written message 4. Never invalidating a child\u27s syntax or semantics while fostering syntactic flexibility 5. Embedding a Told and then restating that unknown word in a meaningful phrase. Implications for pedagogical practice included working within a CLSP framework to deepen educator understandings of how to honor and teach into linguistic diversity as a strength and develop more robust theoretical and practical collective expertise on the matter. Implications for further research include deepening the connection between Reading Recovery and CLSP. Finally, in the larger field of education the work of culturally sustaining practices and linguistically sustaining practices may need to be discussed as both individual and intertwined issues

Consuming Identities: Response, Revision, and Reimagining in Adolescent Transactions With Branded Young Adult Fiction

While children’s and young adult literature has always been a product marketed and sold for profit, the past two decades have seen a dramatic upsurge in young adult literature that is transmediated and commercially “branded” (Sekeres, 2009), positioning these books as only one product of many sold in a franchise. Despite the popularity of branded young adult fiction, little is known about how adolescent readers are navigating and valuing the myriad commercial products that are part of their reading experiences. The growing popularity of young adult literature, its increasing commodification as branded fiction, and concomitant concerns about its diminishing literary quality and implicit consumerist socialization of youth make the present an especially important moment to learn more about the literacy practices of adolescents engaging with branded young adult fiction. This dissertation study investigated how a group of Hispanic youth read between and across print, media, and material branded young adult fiction texts, critically analyzing how participants made sense of these texts through social interactions and considering the ethical and political implications of their engagement in the literature. Drawing from intersectional, feminist research traditions, this qualitative study is grounded in a conceptual framework of critical, sociocultural perspectives of literacy, resource orientations toward youth culture and identity, and transactional theories of reader response. Eleven ninth grade students participated in a weekly afterschool group in which they collectively engaged in an inquiry into branded young adult fiction. Additional data were collected through focus groups, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, survey, and artifact analysis. This research provides insight into possibilities for branded young adult fiction to occupy multiple and contradictory spaces in adolescents’ lived worlds. Participants’ transactions with these texts reflected the ambiguous positioning of print novels within franchises, contested traditional notions of reader, author, and interpretive authority, and suggested pedagogical opportunities for conceptualizing reading and reader response as embodied and materially situated. As participants engaged with branded fiction, their negotiations offer new understandings of the agency enacted by youth as they, through their entanglement with popular culture and prevailing consumerist forces, take critical positions, audition different identities, and create and inhabit multiple worlds

Differentiated reading instruction through guided reading : a framework for effective reading instruction in the primary grades

Effective reading instruction has been an evolution of many different theories and ideas, and best practices are continually changing and being debated. Differentiated instruction has also been a hot topic in the education world recently, but is not a new concept. What evolves when differentiated instruction is teamed with effective reading instruction? When implemented properly, these two concepts can interweave to create a model for reading instruction that delivers a research-based, effective curriculum which meets the needs of all learners