THE "POWER" OF TEXT PRODUCTION ACTIVITY IN COLLABORATIVE MODELING : NINE RECOMMENDATIONS TO MAKE A COMPUTER SUPPORTED SITUATION WORK

Language is not a direct translation of a speaker’s or writer’s knowledge or intentions. Various complex processes and strategies are involved in serving the needs of the audience: planning the message, describing some features of a model and not others, organizing an argument, adapting to the knowledge of the reader, meeting linguistic constraints, etc. As a consequence, when communicating about a model, or about knowledge, there is a complex interaction between knowledge and language. In this contribution, we address the question of the role of language in modeling, in the specific case of collaboration over a distance, via electronic exchange of written textual information. What are the problems/dimensions a language user has to deal with when communicating a (mental) model? What is the relationship between the nature of the knowledge to be communicated and linguistic production? What is the relationship between representations and produced text? In what sense can interactive learning systems serve as mediators or as obstacles to these processes

Linguistic Markers of Lexical and Textual Relations in Technical Documents

International audienceThis chapter proposes a number of linguistic " handles " for the description of technical documents, at a lexical level (terminology) and at a textual level (discourse coherence). Examples are given of uses of such insights in document production and management, in particular via document engineering systems. We provide a number of linguistic " handles " for the description of technical documents. Such insights into the " inner workings " of texts may be harnessed in various ways in the production and management of technical documents; we show some applications in document engineering, in systems designed to facilitate access to information. Our focus is on surface markers, i.e. observable text features identified through corpus analysis, signalling the kind of relations between lexical items used in building terminologies (such as generic/specific, see section 1), or relations between text segments involved in discourse coherence (such as theme, or rhetorical relations, see section 2). We insist on the relevance of the notion of genre when working with technical documents, and on the genre-dependent nature of our linguistic markers

Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading

Analyzes studies showing that writing about reading material enhances reading comprehension, writing instruction strengthens reading skills, and increased writing leads to improved reading. Outlines recommended writing practices and how to implement them

Some Challenges of Advanced Question-Answering: an Experiment with How-to Questions

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

The Exploitation of The Rhetorical Structure of The Text to Improve ESP Reading Comprehension

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The semantic and pragmatic comprehension of visual rhetorical codes by literate and illiterate adults in a health communication setting

ThesisThe focus of the study was on the comprehension of visual rhetoric in printed health learning visuals by literate and illiterate adults. The broad aim of the study was to establish whether visual rhetorical codes, which usually perform a strong phatic function, constitute a significant readability barrier in an illiterate adult target group. The literature investigation of the study covered (1) a semiotic perspective of the distinction between visual and verbal texts, (2) visual rhetorical articulation for closed visual texts and (3) the readability of development visuals with the emphasis on health education. The design of the empirical component of the study involved the production of three health education posters with a Tuberculosis theme which were encoded with varying degrees of visual rhetoric taking existing guidelines for the design of development visuals into account. In order to measure the semantic (or literal) and pragmatic (or figurative) comprehension of the visual rhetoric, 300 voluntary, confidential, structured interviews were conducted with clinic patients attending Primary Health Care clinics in the greater Bloemfontein area following the refinement of the test visuals and questionnaires during a pilot phase. The mainly Sesotho speaking and pre-dominantly female study population consisted of 150 literate adult patients (>21 years of age, 12 years of formal schoo.ling or higher) and 150 illiterate adult patients (>21 years of age, 6 years of formal schooling or lower and the demonstrated inability to read and understand the full text of an acronym). The working hypotheses of the study, which read that (1) on the semantic level, the comprehension of visual rhetorical codes in a closed visual text does not differ between literate and illiterate adults, and that (2) on the pragmatic level, the comprehension of visual rhetorical codes in a closed visual text differs between literate and illiterate adults, were both accepted following chi-square analysis which tested for independence of the literate and the- illiterate study population groups. Flowing from the result obtained, design guidelines for the utilisation of visual rhetorical codes in a development communication context, as well possibilities for further research, were formulated

Corpus annotation of macro discourse structures

International audienceWe present our discourse annotation project, Annodis, which aims to make available a diversified French corpus annotated with discourse information, along with a set of tools for annotation and corpus exploitation. An original aspect of the project is that it combines two theoretically and methodologically different points of view on discourse: bottom-up and top-down. In the bottom-up perspective, basic constituents are identified and linked via discourse relations. In a complementary manner, the top-down approach starts from the text as a whole and focuses on the identification of configurations of cues signalling higher-level text segments, in an attempt to address the interplay of continuity and discontinuity within discourse. The focus of this paper is the annotation scheme used in the top-down approach, which revolves around enumerative structures. These structures, which are of particular interest to our project because of their ability to occur in nested configurations and at all levels of granularity (from within a sentence to across text sections), are the discourse object chosen to "bootstrap" our approach. We describe the different stages involved: corpus selection, pre-processing and "marking" techniques, and the specific interface facilities, designed to make it possible for coders to navigate and scan the text in order to identify relevant spans at different granularity levels

Pedagogy, pathology and ideology : the production, transmission and reproduction of medical discourse

The discourse of any institutional field is composed of a variety of different genres. In medical discourse, three prevalent genres are the research article, the doctor—patient interview and the textbook. This article describes how the textual, interpersonal and ideational metafunctions of each genre operate in relation to their institutional context of situation. As a medical text is delocated and relocated from one institutional context to another, transformations take place with regard to: the ideational options of tense, transitivity and process, the interpersonal options of modality and speaker's comment, and its rhetorical organization. These transformations constitute the codes of the pedagogic device. These operate as a symbol system having two ideological effects. First, certain medical texts are privileged over others as `doxic' texts; and second, subjects are variably positioned in the professional field depending on their command of the codes of the genres relating to different institutional sites

Volume 26, Summer 1999 Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal

Complete digitized volume (volume 26, Summer 1999) of Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal