Estrategias discursivas multimodales, factuales y subjetivas en el relato digital educativo

As new technologies continue to emerge, students and lecturers are provided with new educational tools. One such tool, which is increasingly used in higher education, is digital storytelling, i.e. multi-media digital narratives. Despite the increasing attention that education and media scholars have paid to digital storytelling, there is scant research examining digital narratives from a discourseanalytic perspective. This paper addresses this gap in the literature and, in line with the belief that individuals make meaning through a range of semiotic devices, including, among others, language, sound, graphics and text, it aims to examine discourse strategies of factuality and subjectivity in historical-cultural digital narratives and their multimodal realisations. To carry out this study a corpus of 16 digital stories was compiled and analysed from a multidisciplinary framework which draws from studies on digital storytelling, computer-mediated communication, media studies, and multimodal discourse analysis. Results show that students/digital story tellers resort to a number of varied multimodal discursive strategies which are constitutive of their identity as capable students in an educational setting.Las nuevas tecnologías ofrecen a estudiantes y profesores nuevas herramientas educativas. Entre éstas destaca el relato digital, una herramienta que se emplea cada vez más en educación superior. Pese a la gran atención que el relato digital ha recibido por parte de expertos en educación y en medios, existen escasos estudios de relatos digitales desde la perspectiva del análisis del discurso. Este trabajo se hace eco de esta escasez y, partiendo de la premisa de que los individuos construimos el significado a través de variados medios semióticos que incluyen, entre otros, lenguaje, sonido, gráficos y textos, examina las estrategias discursivas, factuales y subjetivas, en narrativas histórico-culturales y su realización multimodal. Para desarrollar este estudio se recogió un corpus de 16 relatos digitales que se analizó desde un enfoque multidisciplinar que se apoya en estudios previos de relato digital, de comunicación por ordenador, estudios de medios de comunicación y análisis del discurso multimodal. Los resultados muestran que los estudiantes/narradores digitales recurren a una gran variedad de estrategias discursivas multimodales que contribuyen a formar su identidad de estudiantes capaces en el entorno educativo

Multimodal discourse strategies of factuality and subjectivity in educational digital storytelling

As new technologies continue to emerge, students and lecturers are provided with new educational tools. One such tool, which is increasingly used in higher education, is digital storytelling, i.e. multi-media digital narratives. Despite the increasing attention that education and media scholars have paid to digital storytelling, there is scant research examining digital narratives from a discourse-analytic perspective.This paper addresses this gap in the literature and, in line with the belief that individuals make meaning through a range of semiotic devices, including, among others, language, sound, graphics and text, it aims to examine discourse strategies of factuality and subjectivity in historical-cultural digital narratives and their multimodal realisations (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001; Patrona 2005). To carry out this study a corpus of 16 digital stories was compiled and analysed from a multidisciplinary framework which draws from studies on digital storytelling, computer-mediated communication, media studies, and multimodal discourse analysis. Results show that students/digital story tellers resort to a number of varied multimodal discursive strategies which are constitutive of their identity as capable students in an educational setting

'Maleducados/Ill-mannered' during the #A28 political campaign on Twitter: A metapragmatic study of impoliteness labels and comments in Spanish

This paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the label maleducado /ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain's General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from five ad hoc corpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital discourse provided by Sketch Engine. The analysis adopts a corpus-based metapragmatic approach, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings revealed that maleducado was the most frequent metapragmatic label under scrutiny in the Twitter corpora and motivated the subsequent study of lay conceptualizations of this term

Morality, Aggression, and Social Activism in a Transmedia Sport Controversy

This article examines how the interconnections between morality, aggression, and social activism are discursively articulated in two data sets: a face-to-face sport controversy and a corpus of evaluative online comments in response to reports of said controversy. The study adopted a combined transmedia, critical, and intersectional perspective that revealed the divergent interpretations of the controversy as an aggression that threatened the moral or a case of activism in defense of the moral. Thus, competing moral and social frameworks were found to lie behind social division and suggested the need for intersectional awareness and critical views on the complex and unstable distinctions between causing and taking offence and between the roles of transgressor/offender and victim/offended

Discourse Analysis: Activity Book

The present book contains 10 units. Each unit opens with a brief introduction and is followed by a number of tasks to be completed by students either as in-class or take-away activities. These are meant to reinforce the knowledge of the subject by guiding students in applying a range of tools for the analysis of discourse to excerpts from authentic languae us

Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations

Despite the increasing interest scholarly research has shown in the study of computer-mediated communication, there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of assumed homogeneity of language usage over the net and focus on the social diversity and variation that characterizes any communication. With this in mind, the present paper is an investigation into the stylistic choices that a particular group of email users made when engaged in a specific activity type. More specifically, it explores the variation in the discourse practices employed to open and close emails in conversation alongside the institutional power of participants and the interactional position of each email contributing to the conversation. To carry out this study a corpus of short email conversations in Peninsular Spanish was collected (n = 240). The analysis focused on the opening and closing sequences of the emails that made up the conversations and considered opening and closing linguistic conventions as discursive practices that members of a community may use strategically. The findings revealed that the discursive practices under scrutiny were subject not only to technological but also to social and interactional constraints and thus highlighted contextual variability. Further, the high degree of sociability in the electronic episodes studied was interpreted as reflecting a ¿people first, business second¿ communicative style

Teaching linguistic politeness: a methodological proposal

The aim of this article is to explore theoretical and methodological aspects of the teaching of pragmatics in a second language. Taking as point of departure the pragmatic continuum, which includes pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, we focus on the promotion of sociopragmatic knowledge in classroom contexts. More specifically, it is argued that a revised contextual and interactional view of Brown and Levinson¿s (1987) model of linguistic politeness, related to such notions as genre and politeness systems, offers suitable tools of pragmatic description for use in teaching and learning second languages. We start with a brief overview of linguistic politeness from a socio-cognitive framework. Then, we revise the main methodological approaches to the teaching of pragmatic knowledge in general and the specific teaching of linguistic politeness in particular. Finally, we make a methodological proposal for use in foreign language instruction

Multimodal Discourse Strategies of Factuality and Subjectivity in Educational Digital Storytelling

As new technologies continue to emerge, students and lecturers are provided with new educational tools. One such tool, which is increasingly used in higher education, is digital storytelling, i.e. multi-media digital narratives. Despite the increasing attention that education and media scholars have paid to digital storytelling, there is scant research examining digital narratives from a discourseanalytic perspective. This paper addresses this gap in the literature and, in line with the belief that individuals make meaning through a range of semiotic devices, including, among others, language, sound, graphics and text, it aims to examine discourse strategies of factuality and subjectivity in historical-cultural digital narratives and their multimodal realisations. To carry out this study a corpus of 16 digital stories was compiled and analysed from a multidisciplinary framework which draws from studies on digital storytelling, computer-mediated communication, media studies, and multimodal discourse analysis. Results show that students/digital story tellers resort to a number of varied multimodal discursive strategies which are constitutive of their identity as capable students in an educational setting