The relationship between body concern and visual perspective: remembering body shape through a stranger’s eyes.

Background: Previous research into body image has found a relationship between high body concern and how memories focused on appearance are recalled, especially in terms of visual perspective, vividness and negativity. For example, Osman & Cooper (2004) found that those with Body Dysmorphic disorder viewed memories focusing on the appearance from an observer perspective and rated them as more vivid and negative. However, despite evidence that body concern is increasing within the normal population (37% of 18-34 asked were dissatisfied with their body, British Social Attitudes Survey, 2014), past research has not focused on those with a nonclinical body concern. Present study Aim: To distinguish whether a relationship exists between non-clinical body concern and the visual perspective, vividness and negativity of a memory focused on the body. Prediction (1) Body concern would predict recalling the memory focused on the body from an observer perspective

Specificity in LSP

The defining feature of our field is the teaching and use of language for specific purposes. Not surprisingly, this has led to a debate over just how specific those purposes should be. The debate is longstanding, stirred initially by Hutchinson and Waters' classic 1980 article, 'ESP at the Crossroads' and reinvigorated most recently by Hyland (2002), who argues that the field has drifted away from specificity, becoming too generalized and diffuse. This paper lays out the arguments on both sides and then stakes out a position that draws from each of them. While agreeing with some of Hyland's criticisms of the 'wide-angle' position (for example, that generalized LSP can fail to appreciate the distinct linguistic and rhetorical features of specialized discourses), the paper criticizes his 'narrow-angle' position as well by pointing out that it can easily lead to a teacher-centered prescriptivism and to an overly rigid focus on certain forms and tasks at the expense of others. Furthermore, such an approach fails to prepare students for the unpredictable new forms of communication that await them in their professional careers. In general, a teachercentered approach, no matter how specific, is unlikely to have the pedagogical effectiveness of a student-centered approach, especially in heterogeneous classes. Specificity, it is argued, must ultimately be supplied by the student, not by the teacher, for it is the student more than the LSP teacher who is in the process of becoming an insider and whose interests are best served by becoming an astute analyst of the specialist discourse. The teacher's role should be that of facilitator, instructing students in analytic strategies, both rhetorical and textual. The paper concludes with a number of illustrations in how this can be done, drawing especially on work in genre study

Review Essay

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98420/1/j.1467-1770.1980.tb00159.x.pd

Critical discourse analysis and rhetoric and composition

pre-printOver the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere. Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition. This essay surveys much of this recent literature, noting how rhet/comp has incorporated CDA methodology in a variety of studies of inequality, ethics, higher education, critical pedagogy, news media, and institutional practices. CDA uses rigorous, empirical methods that are sensitive to both context and theory, making it ideal for the demands of a range of projects being developed in our field

The Need for Professionally Oriented ESL Instruction in the United States

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90262/1/3586694.pd

Point-driven understanding in engineering lecture comprehension

Nonnative speakers have long been known to have trouble understanding academic lectures. ESP researchers and teachers agree that the problem lies mainly at the discourse level, not at the sentence level; accordingly, a body of discourse-oriented teaching materials for lecture comprehension is now on the market. Though a step in the right direction, these materials fail to do justice to the rhetorical, strategic nature of academic lectures. As our study shows, students may understand all the words of a lecture (including lexical connectives and other discourse markers) and yet fail to understand the lecturer's main points or logical argument.Our study was an exploratory one. Fourteen NNS graduate and undergraduate students watched an authentic 16-minute videotaped lecture on a topic in mechanical engineering and then were asked to provide immediate-recall summaries, which were then analyzed in consultation with the lecturer. Although the lecture was clerly structured around several main points, most of the students failed to grasp these points. These results are discussed in terms of listening strategies: the successful students used a `point-driven' strategy while the unsuccessful ones used an `information-driven' strategy. We conclude that students should be taught how to listen to lectures in a more rhetorical, strategic way. More generally, if we are to teach students to understand and communicate more effectively, we should help them see how the organization of their discourse fits into the larger goals, agendas, and contexts in their fields.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/28773/1/0000605.pd

Multi-dimensional analysis, text constellations, and interdisciplinary discourse

Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) has been widely used to explore register variation. This paper reports on a project using MDA to explore the features of an interdisciplinary academic domain. Six dimensions of variation are identified in a corpus of 11,000 journal articles in environmental studies. We then focus on articles in one interdisciplinary journal, Global Environmental Change (GEC). It is expected that they will diverge sufficiently to produce differences that are analogous to register differences. Instead of identifying these “registers” on external criteria, we use the dimensional profiles of individual texts to identify ‘constellations’ of texts sharing combinations of features. Six such constellations are derived, consisting of texts with commonalities in their approaches to research: the development of predictive models; quantitative research; discussions of theory and policy; and human-environment studies focusing on individual voices. The identification of these constellations could not have been achieved through an a priori categorisation of texts

Just One? Solo Dining, Gender and Temporal Belonging in Public Spaces

In recent years, various lifestyle websites have offered tips on eating out alone as well as lists of the best restaurants for solo dining in major cities of the world. Utilising the theoretical concepts of participation units, territories of the self (Goffman 1972[1971]) and belonging (Author B2011, 2013), this paper explores the challenges that spatio-temporal conventions pose for women solo diners in particular. Through the lens of solo dining, we explore being alone and belonging in shared public spaces, and the gendered nature of aloneness and respectability. The papercontributes to existing theory by examining the influence that time has on a woman solo diner’s ‘single’ participation unit, her ability to lay claim to public space and her relationship with the surrounding social environment. The paper concludes by exploring what the new trend of solo dining can offer and the consequences this has for how sociologists conceptualise sociality inpublic spaces

Engaging with terminology in the multilingual classroom:Teachers’ practices for bridging the gap between L1 lectures and English reading

In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e., how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments

Sympathy for the devil? A defence of EAP

The ability to communicate in English is now essential to academic success for many students and researchers. Not only has the language established a fairly firm grip in higher education, particularly in the lives of postgraduate students, but also in academic research, where careers are increasingly tied to an ability to publish in international journals in English. Countless students and academics around the world, therefore, must now gain fluency in the conventions of relatively ‘standardized’ versions of academic writing in English to understand their disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning (e.g. Hyland 2009). English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and the teaching of academic writing in particular, has emerged to support this process (Hyland & Shaw 2016; Hyland 2017a). However, EAP, and its relationship to English language education more generally, is seen from a number of different perspectives, not all of which flatter the field. Among the more critical are that it is complicit in the relentless expansion of English which threatens indigenous academic registers (e.g. Phillipson 1992; Canagarajah 1999), that it is a remedial ‘service activity’ on the periphery of university life (Spack 1988), and that it imposes an imprisoning conformity to disciplinary values and native norms on second language writers (e.g. Benesch 2001)