Discursive Activity Research Articles

Melhor livro para criança em 2016 – Inês, de Roger Mello e Mariana Massarani – o que diz a crítica?

El objetivo es comprender qué concepciones de niño y lectura atravesan los discursos de los lectores votantes que premiaron a Inés, de Roger Mello y Mariana Massarani como el mejor libro para ni-ños por la Fundación Nacional del Libro Infantil y Juvenil en 2016. Bajo la óptica del Análisis del Discurso foucaultiana se aborda el concepto de enunciado y formación discursiva, considerando estos presupuestos: i) esos lectores son considerados sujetos competentes para asumir la palabra en relación a una literatura de calidad ii) sus opiniones son acontecimientos discursivos; y iii) todo enunciado tiene una materialidad. Elaborar opiniones es un modo de textualizar impresiones, sen-tidos. La actividad discursiva puede reintegrar conocimientos en los que la tónica es despertar la mirada múltiple del lector. En Inés, palabra e imagen se funden, complementan e incorporan datos de la infancia por el lector adulto. Discurso atravesado por relaciones de saber y poder.

Comunicación política y personalización de contenidos: ¿es Twitter el nuevo medio de referencia para la interacción entre gobernantes y gobernados?

Purpose: The aim of this research is to shed light on how the emergence of social networks has affected political communication in new media. The breaking down of barriers between transmitters and receivers and the potential reconversion of all of them into mass communicators (Fuchs, 2013) affected several spheres: although perhaps only few were affected in such an influential way as the configuration of the social sphere in political communication. Examples such as Barack Obama’s first campaign or Donald Trump’s more recent campaign lead us to think that Twitter is indeed an integral part of political communication strategies. Design/methodology: The research has been carried out through a comparative analysis of discursive activity on Twitter of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, and the President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, between the months of September and December 2018. For this purpose, a methodology has been designed that uses computer-assisted content analysis using the NVivo 11 program. Findings: The results invite us to confirm doubts expressed by several authors collected and presented in our research regarding the potential dynamizing factor of Twitter in the relationship between the governors and the governed. Research limitations/implications: Despite the limited number of cases analysed, it can be inferred that the contribution of Twitter to the enrichment of public debate is to say, at the least, dubious. Originality/value: Both the visualisation of the discourse lines of the analysed politicians and the double focus of the study, quantitative and qualitative, on the thematic tools and rhetoric that characterises the speeches by the analysed politicians, can serve as a starting point for the analysis of the role that Twitter plays both in political communication strategies and in its contribution to the public sphere.

Innovative Model of Communicative Practices

The article deals with the philosophical and pedagogical understanding of communicative practices in the educational process of a higher school. A typology of dialogue interaction in pedagogical search space has been proposed. Its usage creates conditions for the analysis, reflection and self-assessment of students in the organization of their training activity. The experience of organization of communicative educational clusters in higher artistic education, which provides for the transition from the primacy of formalized to innovative models of interaction between all participants of the process, has been presented. The conceptual values-semantic aspects of the implementation of interdisciplinary approach have been analyzed, and it has been shown that this approach opens qualitatively new possibilities for the reflection of the investigated object. The contours of a new view on the problem of dialogue, in particular, through the discursive activity of students, have been outlined: Problem group method, group therapy, group “buzz”, “aquarium”, and lecture-forum. The transition to interdisciplinary integration with project design forms is a prerequisite for creating an innovative model for the development of post-non-classical artistic education. In the organization of the dialogue, we take into account: the students’ method to perceive different points of view, the search for the underlying motives, that is, those problem situations through which the own style of the studied material is formed, the development of tasks-conflicts associated with higher spiritual values, ideological and semantic sphere, designing various variants of interaction ways for dialogue participants.

The change of pediatric surgery practice due to the emergence of connected health technologies

PurposeDisruptive connected health technologies, or digitalization, are suggested to tackle the healthcare challenges and transform traditional care models. In Finland, the transformation is manifested by the development of various digital hospitals and citizen-centric care models that foster self-care by utilizing connected health technologies. In this paper we introduce qualitative research that uses social practice theory in order to understand how connected health technologies shape a pediatric day surgery practice in future digital hospitals. Major improvement needs were identified to center on discursive actions (i.e., communication that occurs between health professionals and patients), since hospital IT systems, data exchange, and internal and external communication were found to not support pediatric surgery practice as expected. To improve the current situation, we found out that there is a need to change the patient role to be more active, creating data that health professionals could use through their own patient record systems. Connected health solutions allow this type of interaction between things (i.e., communication through mobile apps, medical devices, etc.) and agents (i.e., health professionals). There is an urgent need to improve communication channels such as Chat, WhatsApp, and mobile applications that gather all necessary information and instructions from patients before and after the surgery. However, these solutions cannot be co-created separately from the clinical decision systems that allow discursive actions among healthcare professionals. These solutions, e.g. mobile applications designed to support patients going through the surgery practice, will also significantly impact and change pediatric surgery practice at hospitals.

Indigenous Health Organizing at the Margins: Creating Access to Health by Building Health Infrastructure

ABSTRACT Socio-economic challenges, communicative barriers, and the lack of health infrastructure constitute and reinforce obstacles to health for all, especially for those who live in the underserved spaces of the Global South. This research addresses such contextual adversities by investigating how indigenous people in a remote Himalayan village collectively took ownership of a health-organizing initiative. The result of this initiative was the creation of a four bed mini-hospital designed to increase community members’ access to basic curative and preventative health care. Grounded in praxis-based critical health communication approaches, this research challenges top-down and externally-dictated interventions by placing subalterns at the forefront of a bottom-up and community-led health initiative. The centrality of discursive engagements and local-centric participatory actions of marginalized indigenous participants in this research calls for culture- and communication-centric research initiatives for increasing access to health at the margins.

To Be a Work Means to Set Up a World: Into the Woods with Heidegger

This video article is one outcome of a collaborative project with artist Thomas Wolsing in the summer of 2016. The collaboration was video recorded (FPS, head mounted camera). The footage was thereafter edited into a video article that documents emerging dimensions and themes of this project. My ambition for this collaboration was to experience and discover interlacements between, on the one hand, art theory (epitomized by some sentences of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”) and, on the other hand, artistic and physical-constructional work in building a land art piece. The video article presents dialogues and monologues in situ that circles around the problem of how to bodily and conceptually integrate art theory and concrete artistic practice and the dependence between and incompatibilities of art theory and art making. It shows the experienced integration of physical and discursive actions that, in the moment of performance, is elusive and refutes any ethical assessment. The video is in Danish with English subtitles.

Interactive Component in Oral Narratives of Preschool Children: on the Formulation of Hypothesis

The article presents an effort to elaborate the hypothesis for the experimental research devoted to interactive component in the oral narratives of preschool children. It is vital for psycholinguistics to reach a close approach to understanding of the essence of narrative processes which have in ontogenesis their own specifics, and according to some researches, these specifics are presented in indirect character of the process of narrative creation by child in the form of his verbal interaction with an adult.
 We assume that in order to reveal the ontogenetic cognitive discursive mechanisms involved in the process of narration, it is necessary to correlate the regularities of the verbal interaction of the participants in the narrative situation with the overall narrative tasks coming up in narrative process.
 Mеthodology, purpose and tasks of the research are determined by experimentally-genetic method (L.S. Vygotsky) put forward as main requirements «differentiation of the analysis of a thing and analysis of the process», «genetic restoration of all moments of the process development». The following of these requirements means a close following of the process of narrative development in its dynamics and the peculiarities of its formation at different stages of child’s development, paying attention to frequency facts as well as facts overcoming the limits of «narrow» phenomenon – narrative text.
 To work out the hypothesis the narrative material of the earlier made experiment with a group of 3 to 7 age children was used in which an adult took a passive part. The task was to tell the story. The material was not subjected to any analysis for the reason of the adult’s presence during the storytelling. The analysis of oral histories with interactive component included the following tasks: a) choose regular sequences of utterances in the dialogic interaction of child and adult; b) define the functional purpose of the adult’s utterance in the course in the child’s storytelling.
 The obtained results show that the adult practically at every step of the child’s age is oriented on the child’s comprehension and analyzing episodes of the history, that is on child’s formation of his mental image of structural and event sequence in history. The results of the analysis enabled us to propose a hypothesis for the next research step in the field. Along the line of this hypothesis, in the verbal ontogenesis the very nature of oral story as a multifaceted phenomenon of the discursive activity of man brings up to the surface the inner mechanisms of narration which have dialogue basis.

The Politics of Economic LiberalizationWueest, BrunoCham, Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 169 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐62321‐4

The Politics of Economic LiberalizationWueest, BrunoCham, Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 169 p., ISBN 978‐3‐319‐62321‐4

Low Achieving Students’ Realization of the Notion of Mathematical Equality with an Interactive Technological Artifacts

In this study we analyzed the discursive actions employed by low-achieving students when they used an interactive technological artifact that simulates a two-pan balance scale to learn about mathematical equality. The study was guided by the commognition framework. Three pairs of low-achieving 16-year-old students participated in this study, in which they were asked to use the artifact to compare mathematical expressions. The results indicate that the commognitive processes exploited by students as they learned the mathematical equality-inequality were reflected in the evolution of their discourse. This evolution was present in the sequence of routines, with which the students were engaged. This routine evolution advanced from everyday discourse into mathematical discourse. The routines’ evolution was guided by the teacher, and therefore, we conclude that the combination of the potentials of the artifact together with the teacher’s actions helped students understand the mathematical equality-inequality.

Methodological substantiation of the conditions for the use of textual discursive activity in foreign language training

The article discusses the features and conditions of foreign language learning on the basis of textual activity with the identification of the discursive nature of the text and its role in learning. The author compares different points of view and suggests methodological assumptions about the reorganisation of the traditional approach to the practice of teaching in the system offoreign language education. The author gives a methodological substantiation of the conditions for the development of textual activity and examines the use of discourse in the educational process using the example of folding – deployment of educational and scientific information, which made it possible to develop an info map of memory development, speech to reproduce the structure of the text and its effective learning.

Метафорический дискурс: в поисках сущности речевой образности

The metaphorical discourse is interpreted by the authors as a specific type of figurative speech speculation, which transforms the subject or sign information into figurative representations. It is justified that the semantic core of metaphorical discourse is the concept as an operational unit of commonplace (naive) consciousness. There is a study of the question upon the development of meanings in images and in verbal iconic signs. The mechanisms of synergy of these phenomena are revealed which arise through interiorization of the objective meanings that generate meaning-images and exteriorization of the verbalized meaning-images that produce cognitive metaphors – mental substratum of the semiosis of speech imagery. It is proved that the components of such linguistic semiosis that transforms a thought-code into a language of words are the processes of activity consciousness: acts of metaphorical nomination, search for the inner form of a secondary nominee, semantization, connotation, etc. It has been revealed that such processes of activity consciousness, responsible for speech speculation on the verge of the verbal and the averbal, constitute the essence of discursive consciousness. The results of the analysis showed that it is responsible for all the basic text-generating processes that are formed on the linguistic and extra-linguistic borders: a) for the search for meaning and its verbalization; b) for the development of meaning in images (including verbal iconic signs); c) for the search for equivalents of object-sensual images – to metaphorical ones; d) for the discursive activity of subjects of imagery communication (the author and the reader) whose linguistic consciousnesses directly participate in the generation and perception (understanding) of meaning in general and the personal meaning born in the depths of metaphorical discourse in particular.

O IMPACTO DA INTERFACE ENTRE A APRENDIZAGEM BASEADA EM PROBLEMAS E A ARGUMENTAÇÃO NA CONSTRUÇÃO DO CONHECIMENTO CIENTÍFICO

O objetivo do presente trabalho é compreender o impacto que a interface entre a Aprendizagem Baseada em Problemas (ABP) e a argumentação desempenha para a promoção da construção do conhecimento científico. Tomamos como foco de análise, as interações dialógicas entre aluno-aluno e aluno-professor ao longo da resolução de um problema na metodologia ativa ABP, por entendermos que a configuração deste tipo de metodologia favorece o debate crítico e reflexivo de ideias. As análises foram feitas com base na perspectiva da argumentação enquanto mecanismo epistêmico e promotor do pensamento crítico e reflexivo, bem como dos pressupostos sobre os indicadores de alfabetização científica para a promoção da aprendizagem. Nossos resultados apontaram que, embora a metodologia ABP seja propícia ao desenvolvimento de interações dialógicas, por si só, não garante que a argumentação ocorra nem tampouco que os alunos expressem indicadores de alfabetização científica. Concluímos que o desenvolvimento de interações dialógicas depende muito mais do manejo do tutor através de determinadas ações discursivas, as quais fazem toda a diferença quando se pretende utilizar a argumentação para o processo de ensino e de aprendizagem.

Ways of interacting: What underlies instructional coaches' discursive actions

Ways of interacting: What underlies instructional coaches' discursive actions

Life-threatening complications in childbirth: a discursive analysis of fathers’ accounts

ABSTRACTObjectives: To explore the discursive construction and social actions achieved by accounts given by men following a birth in which the mother developed life-threatening complications.Background: Existing qualitative research employing interpretative thematic analysis of men’s accounts of births in which the mother developed life-threatening complications highlights men’s expressions of distress and marginalisation. This paper extends this, adopting different epistemological and analytic approaches to those accounts.Methods: Audio recordings and transcripts of semi-structured interviews collected by Hinton et al. were re-analysed using an approach informed by narrative analysis, discursive psychology and the discursive action model. Participants were four white British men whose partners experienced a maternal ‘near-miss’ event.Results: This analysis illustrates how men in this study draw on cultural narratives of ‘normal’ birth to construct experiences. Narrative constructions highlight separation of health professionals from laymen. These men use a discourse of self-reliance within families to construct their path to recovery.Conclusion: The strength of available narratives of birth and limited accessibility of alternative ones may impact how men tell their experience. Men in this study discursively attend to issues of power, agency and male identity, re-establishing entitlement to speak about their experience, but construct emotional support as unavailable to them.

Negotiating different disciplinary discourses: biology students\u2019 ritualized and exploratory participation in mathematical modeling activities

Non-mathematics specialists’ competence and confidence in mathematics in their disciplines have been highlighted as in need of improvement. We report from a collaborative, developmental research project which explores the conjecture that greater integration of mathematics and biology in biology study programs, for example through engaging students with Mathematical Modeling (MM) activities, is one way to achieve this improvement. We examine the evolution of 12 first-semester biology students’ mathematical discourse as they engage with such activities in four sessions which ran concurrently with their mandatory mathematics course and were taught by a mathematician with extensive experience with MM. The sessions involved brief introductions to different aspects of MM, followed by small-group work on tasks set in biological contexts. Our analyses use the theory of commognition to investigate the tensions between ritualized and exploratory participation in the students’ MM activity. We focus particularly on a quintessential routine in MM, assumption building: we trace attempts which start from ritualized engagement in the shape of “guesswork” and evolve into more productively exploratory formulations. We also identify signs of persistent commognitive conflict in the students’ activity, both intra-mathematical (concerning what is meant by a “math task”) and extra-mathematical (concerning what constitutes a plausible solution to the tasks in a biological sense). Our analyses show evidence of the fluid interplay between ritualized and exploratory engagement in the students’ discursive activity and contribute towards what we see as a much needed distancing from operationalization of the commognitive constructs of ritual and exploration as an unhelpfully dichotomous binary.

Konserwatyzm i problem jego rozpoznawalności w dyskursie publicznym

W niniejszym artykule przedstawiona została analiza opublikowanej w 2017 roku polskojęzycznej wersji tak zwanej Deklaracji Paryskiej, zatytułowanej „Europa, w jaką wierzymy”. Zgodnie z zapowiedzią autorów Deklaracji ma ona stanowić wyraz troski środowiska konserwatywnych intelektualistów o obecny stan europejskiej polityki, kultury i społeczeństwa. Ma także afirmować tak zwaną „prawdziwą Europę”. Analiza pokazuje, że zadaniem postawionym przed Deklaracją jest nie tylko sama afirmacja, ale przede wszystkim zaświadczenie o jej (Deklaracji) konserwatywnym charakterze. Tej drugiej sprawy dotyczy zasadnicza część artykułu. W tym celu omówione zostają cztery wyodrębnione w toku badań formalne własności retorycznej organizacji Deklaracji. Tekst uzupełniony jest komentarzem do analizy, w którym zaproponowana zostaje możliwość próbnego rozpatrzenia tradycji w dziedzinie kultury politycznej jako tradycji form publicznego wypowiadania (się).

Prozeduren als Diskurshandlungen im glottodidaktischen Prozess

The glottodidactic system is a specific communication system, in which learners acquire a language by means of a language. From the anthropological point of view language is a human property and does not exist independently of the human mind. Only texts exist independently as products of human activity created by means of internalized formation and functional rules. Hence language can be neither taught nor transmitted to the learner. Language can only be acquired by the interaction with the environment. Therefore it is of great importance for the learning process to introduce appropriate didactic procedures which help the learners to develop communication skills in authentic-like situations by means of discursive activities.

Words Faithful to the Phenomenon

The article presents the developing of a tool aimed to analyze the decision-making (DM) processes in critical care contexts. It was developed in a study conducted through a phenomenological approach. By analyzing the discursive practice through which physicians in an intensive care unit (ICU) arrive at decisions, we construct a discursive profile of each ICU involved, to improve the ICU team members’ knowledge of the complexity of their DM processes. To do so, we develop a system of analysis capable of capturing discursive actions faithfully. Our method facilitates a system of analysis that highlights the role of the various discursive acts in conversational flow, starting from the needs in an ICU setting, which are spontaneously recognized from the data, to the almost simultaneous processes of description and understanding. This has led to the creation of a tool follows the phenomenological-grounded route.

Persuasive Conduct: Alignment and Resistance in Prospecting “Cold” Calls

Social psychology has theorized the cognitive processes underlying persuasion, without considering its interactional infrastructure—the discursive actions through which persuasion is accomplished interactionally. Our article aims to fill this gap, by using discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine 153 “cold” calls, in which salespeople seek to secure meetings with prospective clients. We identify two sets of communicative practices that comprise persuasive conduct: (1) pre-expanding the meeting request with accounts that secure the prospect’s alignment to this course of action without disclosing its end result and (2) minimizing the imposition of the meeting to reduce the prospect’s opportunities for refusal. We conclude that persuasive conduct consists in managing the recipiency of the meeting requests by promoting alignment and hampering resistance. Overall, this article contributes to the wider discursive psychological project of “respecifying” psychological phenomena such as attitudes, memory, and emotion from the realm of social cognition to the realm of social interaction.

MAIN PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: LINGUISTIC ASPECT

Introduction. The article deals with the linguistic aspect of the basic principles ofpsychotherapeutic discourse analysis. Research on discourse is one of the priorities in modernlinguistics. Integrative processes in science generally are based on the expansionism ofanthropocentric linguistics and they contribute to the formation of a cognitive-communicativeparadigm of knowledge, where discursive activity is seen in the light of internal mentalprocesses. Psychotherapeutic interaction of both participants in the process – the therapist andthe patient – is interpreted as a discursive practice that requires a thorough linguistic analysisto identify the motivational, cognitive and communicative aspects of the speech activity of bothparticipants in the psychotherapeutic session, and that determines the relevance of our research.The purpose of the article is to highlight the content and linguistic specificity ofthe main principles of psychotherapeutic discourse analysis.The methodology for the analysis of psychotherapeutic discourse involves the definitionand description of the communicative strategies implemented in the discourse, basedon expansionism, anthropocentrism, functionalism and explanatory. The basic principles of psychotherapeutic discourse analysis do not depend on a specific psychotherapeutic school,since the isolation of tactical and strategic potential is determined by the specificity ofpsychotherapeutic communication, according to the distribution of communicative roles andpositions of the participants in the therapeutic process, their expectations, the dynamics oflanguage initiatives, message sequencing, listening and understatement.As a result of the research, the role of the correlation between the personality’s worldviewand his psychological problems in the process of production of statements is determined.The communication in psychotherapeutic discourse is described in terms of a linguistic formof purposefulsocial activity. The article establishes the dynamics of linguistic means for realizationof the basic principles of psychotherapeutic discourse analysis with the description of tacticaland strategic potential.Summing up, the author arrives at the following conclusions: 1) the semantic space ofthe language, objectified in the system units of the linguistic worldview, and the nature ofcommunication are mutually determined by the type of discourse within which the communicationis carried out, and the structure of language personalities; 2) interpretation of communicationduring psychotherapeutic sessions is based on considering the discourse as the social interaction.Such an interpretation is tied to each specific pragmatic situation and the mental processes ofthe therapist and the client, verbalized in tactical and strategic potential; 3) along with verballyexpressed communicative strategies and tactics, the revealed understatement plays a constitutiverole in the analysis of psychotherapeutic discourse, i.e., it points to the important componentsof the internal experience of the subject. The patient's speech often includes hushing up thatcorresponds to deeply displaced layers of the unconscious.