Participation In Discussions Research Articles

The relationship between peer status and students’ participation in classroom discourse

ABSTRACT To intensify students learning, it is important to understand why individual students participate in classroom discourse differently. So far, there is no empirical evidence illustrating how student participation is affected by the fact that students achieve certain peer status among their classmates. Therefore, this study examines the relationship between peer status and students’ participation. We analyse data gathered via structured observation of classroom discourse and through a standardised sociometric questionnaire establishing peer status on the bases of its two dimensions: peer likeability and social dominance. The sample consisted of 639 ninth-grade students from 32 Czech classrooms. This study shows that the effects of both dimensions on students’ participation are contrary. The regression model shows that the effect of dominance on participation is stronger and is directly proportional: students who are perceived as more dominant participate more. The interconnectedness of peer status and participation intensifies among students with lower academic achievement.

Understanding the role of ICT and study circles in enabling economic opportunities: Lessons learned from an educational project in Kenya

AbstractIn this paper, we explore how the combination of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and self‐organised study circles improves rural communities' ability to enhance their economic opportunities. We present the case study of an adult study‐circle project in the Kwale County of Kenya with the objective of providing rural communities with viable and sustainable livelihoods. Study circles can be seen as a democratic and emancipatory method for learning, where community groups regularly meet for participatory discussions to educate themselves on a variety of topics of their own interest. The main goal of the study‐circle members was to increase economic opportunities using ICT and, more specifically, to start micro‐businesses, improve production efficacy and methods, and obtain employment. Using the capability approach and affordances as theoretical lenses, our analysis of the explorative case study shows that the outcomes of the study circle were dependent on various conversion factors and facilitating conditions, such as resources, skills, socio‐cultural norms, and infrastructure. The main contributions from our work are represented by the five practical lessons learned from the study‐circle members' goals (starting micro‐businesses, product efficiency, and obtaining employment) from the self‐organised training approach (study circles) and from our theoretical approach (combining the capability approach and affordances).

UNIVERSAL AND SPECIFIC FEATURES IN METAPHORICAL PROJECTIONS OF GERMAN AND RUSSIAN SPORTS DISCOURSE

The article deals with the peculiarities of German and Russian sports discourse functioning by the example of metaphorical representations. Metaphor is not only an important mechanism for cognition and communication, at the same time it functions as a cultural code which enables linguists to discover universal and nationally coloured concepts, discourse areas fixed in the collective identity and so on. It is possible to determine a degree of distinctive and universal character of German and Russian sports discourse in three basic directions: analysis of interdiscourse projections; identification of metaphorical borrowings; study of metaphorical «import» of sports concepts in the «intradepartmental» communicative area created inside the sports discourse. The study makes it possible to get as accurate results as possible due to comparative perspective applied to research one of the most essential areas of sports communication – sports jargon, which distinguishes itself against the general background by its bright, vivid and sometimes provocative metaphors. As observations have showed, the given level of the discourse has both zones of coincidence and difference in metaphorical representation of facts, events, phenomena embedded in the sports worldview by the participants of sports discourse. The article aims at promoting the discussion about the issue whether it should be spoken of the existence of one discourse presented in different languages or of a diversity found in discourses associated with one topic and studied as parallel in any language.

Bereaved parents in Israel: from silence to a significant participation in the public discourse

ABSTRACTThis article explores the changing voice of bereaved parents in Israel from 1948 to the present. Until the early 1980s, bereaved parents did not express their grief or protest publicly. Their bereavement was a strictly private matter. In 1982, shortly after the outbreak of the First Lebanon War, their grief and protest burst into the public sphere. From then on, their voice gained momentum and legitimacy and in time directly impacted the political decision-makers. The article defines four phases in the changing content, tone and style of parental bereavement – hidden, political, privatized, and moral – by analyzing and comparing six representative texts.

Степень влияния банковского сектора на страховой рынок

<span>Ставший явным контроль банков над страховым сектором в последние годы</span><span class="myHorizontalScaleForEmDashSpaceBefore"> </span><span>–</span><span class="myHorizontalScaleForEmDashSpaceAfter"> </span><span>одна из самых обсуждаемых тем в финансовой и научной среде, но пока участники дискурса не пришли к единому мнению о том, как влияет такое взаимодействие на другие секторы экономики. Кроме того, отмечено, что количество страховых компаний быстро сокращается. Цель настоящей работы</span><span class="myHorizontalScaleForEmDashSpaceBefore"> </span><span>–</span><span class="myHorizontalScaleForEmDashSpaceAfter"> </span><span>доказательство двух рабочих гипотез о том, что банки: 1) оказывают давление на страховой рынок, 2) ведут его к олигополизации с высокой концентрацией доли отдельных компаний. С помощью корреляционного, сравнительного и количественного анализа коэффициентов, отвечающих за тип структуры страхового рынка, нам удалось доказать, что банковский сектор практически полностью контролирует страховой рынок, на котором в результате давления банков происходит процесс установления олигополии.</span>

Rhetorical Elocution: Figurative Expression of Political Discourse

The modern definition of rhetoric is based on the conception of rhetoric as a universal system of persuasion, so persuasive discourses are the main object of rhetorical researches. Political discourse, the primary purpose of which is persuasion, is a textbook example of persuasive discourse. The paper presents a study into political rhetoric: the comments ant political programmes of the candidates in the presidential election in the Republic of Lithuania. This research aimed to determine the dominant figurative expression in political comments according to the methodological approach of the discipline of rhetoric and on previous studies. Figurative expression is a broad linguistic category involving the use of (non-)linguistic tools of expression which perform the aesthetic and (or) persuasive function. In rhetorical studies, a figurative expression is realised and analysed not as a standard embellishment of discourse, but primarily as an instrument of persuasion. It must be noted that for elocution-level rhetoric analysis of political discourse, essential expression tools are those that reflect the worldview and the values of discourse participants. Therefore, besides the rhetorical analysis, the methods of content and context analysis are also invoked. Discourse studies reveal a direct interaction between rhetorical tools and persuasion of the message. Rhetorical figures perform the function of information “framing” and adapting the expectations of the addressee.

Attitudes in discourse: Italian polar questions and the particle mica

This paper explores ways in which discourse participants convey an attitude about another discourse participant’s conversational move. We examine the semantics/pragmatics of Italian positive and negative polar questions (building on the literature on biased questions) and propose the first fully compositional analysis of the Italian particle ‘mica’, appearing in negative polar questions and negative assertions. The core is that ‘mica’ is member of a family of presuppositional, epistemic ‘common ground management’ operators, leading to a new account of epistemic inferences in biased polar questions that relies on the presuppositional nature of these operators. We argue that ‘mica’ is a high-left-periphery particle that indicates a presupposed bias against a proposition being added to the common ground, anchored uniformly to the speaker and therefore not showing ‘interrogative flip’. The paper develops connections between common-ground management operators and evidentials, arguing that interrogative flip (and lack thereof) is a phenomenon that should be studied for a wide variety of discourse particles. EARLY ACCESS

The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives

This article develops an account of the discourse updates contributed by utterances of declarative sentences with the Cuzco Quechua reportative. The challenge posed by such utterances is that the speaker does not need to be committed to the at-issue proposition φ and may even deny its truth. They are therefore not assertions. Yet φ can behave in many ways like an asserted proposition in discourse: it can be used to answer questions, link to the discourse with veridical rhetorical relations, and, if accepted by the interlocutors, be subsequently presupposed. The proposed semantics for the reportative assigns the commitment to φ to a third-party principal instead of to the discourse participant producing the utterance, leaving them free to disagree with φ. However, if they do not disagree, they will be understood as intending to propose it to the common ground. This, it is argued, is due to the Collaborative Principle, a pragmatic principle that requires discourse participants to provide evidence of any discrepancy in commitments. The analysis is implemented in a modified version of the discourse framework of Farkas & Bruce 2010. EARLY ACCESS

Linguistic Representation of Power in Edward Bond’s Lear: A Lexico-Pragmatic Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis

This paper investigates the linguistic representation of power in Edward Bond’s Lear (1978). More specifically, the paper tries to explore the extent to which power is linguistically represented manipulatively and/or persuasively by means of specific lexical and pragmatic devices in the discourse of the selected play. The main objective of the paper is to explore how power relations, irrespective of their type, influence the cognitive world of the discourse participants, which in turn attempts a change in their conversational behavior to the extent that allows the acceptance of a specific argument in a particular way. The paper adopts a lexico-pragmatic perspective to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), instanced by Fairclough’s (1989) lexical model for the analysis of discourse, and the concepts of politeness and face (Thomas, 1995; Yule, 1996a). The main research question of the paper is: to what extent do different power relations, encoded lexically and/or pragmatically, affect the conversational behavior of the play’s characters, persuasively and/or manipulatively? Some lexical and pragmatic strategies have been highlighted and then linguistically analyzed to expose their effectiveness in deciphering persuasive and manipulative power relations in the selected play. Among these strategies are: euphemism, myth-making, positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, and politeness strategies. The paper concludes that power has linguistically been encoded in the discourse of the selected play, both persuasively and manipulatively, to affect a cognitive shift in behavior reflected in the conversational interaction among characters.

I and We in Corporate Discourse: The Realization of Sociocultural and Linguopragmatic Characteristics of Communication

The paper outlines the significance of the opposition I : : We within corporate discourse, the study of which claims to become one of the main areas of studying professional communication in the age of globalization. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to establish common and different forms of expressing personal and collective aspects in social communicative content in the genre of congratulatory speech. The research material is represented with the texts of congratulatory speeches in the German, Russian and Czech languages. The authors focus on the implementation of the current social and cultural status of a person in the texts, belonging to the genre of corporate discourse, which is defined in the paper as a type of institutional business communication, realized both in special, documentary texts of a given professional sphere, and in a complex of ritual, etiquette and ceremonial texts. In selected language versions, the authors reveal the common rigid structure of speech and the insignificant linguopragmatic and stylistic variability of language means caused by the general positive perlocutivity of this performative genre. The revealed features include, in particular, the self-orientation of congratulatory speeches in German as an explication of active self-presentation, that expresses rationality and individualism of the German collective style; reflection of the collective consciousness of the Russian society in the forms of deixis associated with the expression of intentions We : : I+everyone; as well as obligatory explication of close friendly relations of the sender and the recipient of congratulations in the Czech linguistic culture.The uniformity of linguistic means, noted in the acts of congratulatory speech, is explained as an intention to follow common discourse rules and universal commandments of global professional communication, shared by all discourse participants.

Creating Space for an Alternative Discourse in the Context of Neoliberal Hegemony: The Case of a Long-Standing NGO

This article contributes to a better understanding of how to create space for an alternative discourse, despite increased dominance of neoliberal ideas (particularly as sustained by donor control). In a detailed case study, we show how an international non-governmental organization (NGO) endeavors to build a reputation of expertise centered on the dynamic adaptation of the market and participatory (i.e., grassroots, solidarity-focused) discourses. By producing and disseminating what it hopes to be convincing hybrid artifacts (e.g., in the form of guidelines and articles) that exhibit this expertise, the NGO aims to establish the credibility needed for hybrid artifacts (and the alternative participatory discourse that they carry) to be endorsed, solicited and eventually, adopted by donors and other actors in international development. By highlighting strategic behavior outside the typical confines of funding transactions, our findings shift the focus from shorter-term to longer-term strategizing. Ultimately, our case study illustrates how an organization, against the power of control over financial resources, endeavors to cultivate a counter discourse through the “soft” power of expertise.

Gene Editing for the EU Agrifood: Risks and Promises in Science Regulation

In today’s innovation-driven agrifood domain, the perspective of using so-called New Breeding Techniques (NBTs) on both non-human animals and plants calls into question the regulatory approach (process/product-based) to be used, while asking for a critical reflection on the potential impact of products on the industrial sector and citizens. A possible reconfiguration of European (EU) discipline will have to grapple with not only agrifood market’s interests and needs, but mostly and primarily with the growing quest for public and participatory discussion on the current dominant vision on life sciences. Only through restoring visibility to the intertwining of knowledge production will it be possible to obtain EU governance of gene editing that is more authoritatively reliable from a scientific stance, as well as more transparently discussed and democratically shared at legal and policy level.

Интернет-дискуссия как форма электронного участия: российская специфика

Авторский подход, изложенный в статье, предлагает теоретически и технологически обоснованные способы дискурс-анализа повседневных дискуссий граждан в интернете для понимания степени их делиберативности и увязки результатов дискуссий с существующим политическим процессом. В качестве теоретической основы используется теория коммуникативной этики Юргена Хабермаса в рамках его модели делиберативной демократии, т.е. демократии, основанной на нормативной и морально-этической необходимости обсуждения различных точек зрения в публичном пространстве современного общества для их последующего сближения. Для тестирования предлагаемого авторами методологического подхода использовались интернет-дискуссии по вопросам уничтожения антисанкционных продуктов и повышения пенсионного возраста в России. Был проведен дискурс-анализ более пяти тысяч постов, сделанных участниками дискуссии на интернет-форумах в разных российских городах. Кодировался ряд важных параметров интернет-дискуссий с точки зрения их делиберативности. Согласно результатам исследования, анализ текущих интернет-дискуссий как делиберативных практик дает возможность выявить важные нюансы, касающиеся интерпретации значимых событий, которые трудно получить с помощью традиционных социологических методик исследования общественных настроений или с применением таких автоматизированных методов исследования, как анализ тональности высказываний вне прямой связи с их морально-этическим обоснованием. Эмпирические данные, полученные в результате дискурс-анализа, послужили основой для проведения эксперимента по использованию алгоритмов глубинного машинного обучения реккурентной нейросети, с тем чтобы обучить ее предсказывать позиции участников дискуссий на основании их высказываний. Эксперимент выявил возможности, условия и ограничения применения технологий искусственного интеллекта для более глубокого понимания результатов общественных дискуссий.
 Благодарность. Работа выполнена при поддержке РНФ, проект №18-18-00360 «Электронное участие как фактор динамики политического процесса и процесса принятия государственных решений». Авторы благодарят студентов Даниила Волковского (СПбГУ) и Петра Бегена (Университет ИТМО) за участие в эмпирических исследованиях, которые представлены в данной статье.

Ideology, metaphor and persuasion in times of elections: a corpus-based study of British and Spanish economic reports

Metaphor has been studied as a pervasive and intrinsic discourse tool over the last decades in many different types of discourse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Semino 2008, Kövecses 2010, etc.). Considering the strong effect it has on the discourse participants and how it can persuade them towards one side, action, or thought (Charteris-Black 2004, Silaski 2012), it is necessary to study it when the timeframe and the discourse where it is used are ideologically loaded. Based on recent studies on metaphor in economics (Alejo 2010, Herrera-Soler and White 2012, Soares da Silva et al. 2017), metaphor in the press (Koller 2004/2008) and metaphor and ideology (Goatly 2007, Silaski 2012), this article presents a corpus-based study of metaphor in reports of economic affairs in the English and Spanish press during the pre-election week of 2015. The corpus (about 160,000 words) consists of reports published by six newspapers that support different political spheres (left, centre and right): The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph in English, and Público, El País and ABC in Spanish. From a Critical Metaphor Analysis perspective (Charteris-Black 2004), the study starts from the hypothesis that the political stand of each newspaper might condition the metaphors. Indeed, metaphors pointing at certain side of political spheres appear in all the sub-corpora of the study, but in distinctive ways, as will be shown. In any case, critical factors such as cognitive and cultural reasons beyond the political stand of the media in question need to be acknowledged as well, which conveys further and more comprehensive analyses.

Implementing digital game-enhanced pedagogy: Supportive and impeding language awareness and discourse participation phenomena

AbstractThis descriptive study investigated the implementation of student-selected, entertainment-purposed digital games for foreign language teaching and learning. During a 15-week semester, 16 Korean EFL students enrolled in an introductory educational technology course played online games, visited gaming sites, and completed instructional tasks. Conceptualizing games as social practices and drawing from the bridging activities framework (Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008), instructional tasks were designed to enhance language awareness and to present possibilities for socialization into gaming discourses. The study investigated the ways that the designed pedagogy supported or impeded language awareness and gaming discourse participation. The study found that the students exhibited language awareness in many ways, but that there were missed opportunities in developing student understandings of language as a social medium. Additionally, six students (38%) directly participated in gaming spaces, and some of them took on more central roles in gaming practices over time. Other students, however, did not attempt to directly participate in gaming sites or were not successful in their attempts. These findings are discussed in regard to pedagogical design, including game selection and supporting learner analyses of gaming discourses, as well as avenues for future research examining socialization in classrooms and gaming spaces.

The Walk and the Talk

It is widely believed that we ought not to criticize others for wrongs that we ourselves have committed. The author draws out and challenges some of the background assumptions about the practice of criticism that underlie our attraction to this claim, such as the tendency to think of criticism either as a social sanction or as a didactic intervention. The author goes on to offer a taxonomy of cases in which the moral legitimacy of criticism is challenged on the grounds that the critic him- or herself engages in the behavior that he or she criticizes in others. The author argues that, in each type of case, the would-be critics should not constrain their participation in moral discourse on the grounds that they are not themselves innocent of the wrongdoing they criticize in others.

Wikipedia: quotations at the interface of encyclopedic and participatory practices

Due to its genuinely participatory practices, quotations in Wikipedia entries are dynamically and collectively negotiated and revised by members of the broader public against the background of Wikipedia's central editing principles. Hence, quotations are an essential elaboration site of competing encyclopedic and participatory practices. This paper aims to show how Wikipedia authors, in modifying the context, focus and perspective of source material, engage in complex processes of framing and reframing of the source material and their participatory activities. These framing activities not only concern the quote-worthiness of source material and users' academic and/or participatory aspirations, but are also carried out at an interpersonal level and thus contribute to new dimensions of public encyclopedia-writing and reflective participatory discourse “from below”. To scrutinize these processes, this paper examines the types and functions of quotations in two highly contested example articles (Nation and Brexit) and their respective Talk-sections as retrieved in September 2017 (Nation) and December 2017 (Brexit), with a total of 49500 words. Corresponding to the two different discourse environments, contributors to both articles use quotations primarily in their indexical and argumentative functions. By contrast, quotations in the Talk-section mainly serve interpersonal and metapragmatic functions, sometimes intertwined with argumentative functions.

Subtitles and cinematic meaning-making: Interlingual subtitles as textual agents

AbstractThis theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films –Heidi(2015), Heimatland(2015) andDer Goalie bin ig(2014) – the following communicative effects are found and illustrated: uniformity, authorisation, foregrounding, aestheticisation, foreignisation. These effects are conceptualised in terms of Constitutive Communication theory and textual agency (Cooren. 2004. Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings.Organization11(3). 373–393. doi:10.1177/1350508404041998), which describe that by communicating with audiences, subtitles animate into being other participants in film discourse and contribute to what viewers take away in terms of characters, stories, the cultural aspects they represent and the source culture(s) from which the text is perceived to communicate.

Membangun Ketahanan Berbasis Komunitas dalam Mengurangi Risiko Bencana di Desa Pilomonu Kabupaten Gorontalo

BUILDING RESILIENCE BASED COMMUNITIES IN DISASTER RISK REDUCTION IN THE PILOMONU VILLAGE GORONTALO REGENCY. This article discusses the concept of community-based disaster risk reduction so that it can realize community resilience to disasters. The implementation of community-based disaster resilience programs uses participatory approaches, observation, interviews, socialization, training, and Forum Group Discussion (FGD). The establishment of the PRB and TSBM forums received a positive response from the community because Pilomonu Village was classified as a disaster-prone village, especially landslides and floods. Analysis of the resilience index conducted by the forum based on indicators and achievements found that Pilomonu Village is included in the category of 'village not yet strong' and the level of preparedness is low. Indicators of community disaster resilience that have been established and adjusted in the document can be the main focus of all parties related to disaster risk management. The PRB and TSBM forum are those who have overall access to improving disaster resilience because forum skills in involving stakeholders are a determinant of the success of disaster resilience to lower-level communities. Integration between the Pilomonu Village government program and disaster risk reduction forums can guarantee the sustainability of forum performance.

Person and deixis in Heiltsuk pronouns

AbstractHarbour (2016) argues for a parsimonious universal set of features for grammatical person distinctions, and suggests (ch. 7) that the same features may also form the basis for systems of deixis. We apply this proposal to an analysis of Heiltsuk, a Wakashan language with a particularly rich set of person-based deictic contrasts (Rath 1981). Heiltsuk demonstratives and third-person pronominal enclitics distinguish proximal-to-speaker, proximal-to-addressee, and distal (in addition to an orthogonal visibility contrast). There are no forms marking proximity to third persons (e.g., ‘near them’) or identifying the location of discourse participants (e.g., ‘you near me’ vs. ‘you over there’), nor does the deictic system make use of the clusivity contrast that appears in the pronoun paradigm (e.g., ‘this near you and me’ vs. ‘this near me and others’). We account for the pattern by implementing Harbour's spatial element χ as a function that yields proximity to its first- or second-person argument.