Overt Strategies Research Articles

Transition markers in Qatari university students' argumentative writing: A cross-linguistic analysis of L1 Arabic and L2 English

The current cross-linguistic study compares university students' use of transition markers (addition, compare/contrast, and consequence markers) in their L1 Arabic and L2 English argumentative writing. It also explores students' metalinguistic understanding of transition markers (TMs) through writing conversation interviews. We analysed the Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing (QCAW), which comprises 390 texts in L1 Arabic and L2 English written by the same Qatari undergraduate students. Using Hyland's (2005) model of metadiscourse, the findings revealed that frequencies of transition marker use among less proficient L2 English writers were closer to L1 Arabic. Based on the results of a writing proficiency test, low-proficiency students transferred overt strategies to signal transitions, supported by the interview findings. Interestingly, students with an average L2 English proficiency exhibited a greater variety in TMs. In contrast, higher-proficiency writers tended to use more complex and subtler means to indicate textual transitions. The students used TMs for different purposes. Lack of knowledge and writing under controlled conditions inhibited some participants from using TMs. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for teaching and assessing TMs.

Playing Both Sides: Russian State-Backed Media Coverage of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Russian influence operations on social media have received significant attention following the 2016 US presidential elections. Here, scholarship has largely focused on the covert strategies of the Russia-based Internet Research Agency and the overt strategies of Russia's largest international broadcaster RT (Russia Today). But since 2017, a number of new news media providers linked to the Russian state have emerged, and less research has focused on these channels and how they may support contemporary influence operations. We conduct a qualitative content analysis of 2,014 Facebook posts about the #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) protests in the United States over the summer of 2020 to comparatively examine the overt propaganda strategies of six Russian-linked news organizations—RT, Ruptly, Soapbox, In The NOW, Sputnik, and Redfish. We found that RT and Sputnik diverged in their framing of the BLM movement from the newer media properties. RT and Sputnik primarily produced negative coverage of the BLM movement, painting protestors as violent, or discussed the hypocrisy of racial justice in America. In contrast, newer media properties like In The NOW, Soapbox, and Redfish supported the BLM movement with clickbait-style videos highlighting racism in America. Video footage bearing the Ruptly brandmark appears in both traditional and new media properties, to illustrate, in real time, civil unrest across the US. By focusing on overt propaganda from the broad array of Russian-affiliated media, our data allows us to further understand the “full spectrum” and “counter-hegemonic” strategies at play in contemporary information operations.

Czynniki wpływające na przekaz języka mniejszościowego. Postawy wobec języka i ideologie językowe w narracjach rodziny na Górnych Łużycach

The transmission of languages in multilingual majority-minority contexts is influenced by language ideologies and language attitudes. In this paper I explore language ideologies in the Upper Sorbian Catholic community and languagepractices related to them. Based on biographic interviews with members of a linguistically mixed family, I also ask about the impact of overt strategies in everyday language choices. The family in question came to adopt a conscious family language policy based on the members’ positive attitudes towards Sorbian and based on their consciousness about community language practices that hamper the transmission of Sorbian in linguistically mixed environments. A positive attitude towards the minority language is a necessary, but not sufficient prerequisite to question habitual community language practices and consciously modify them. The families’ language behavior suggests that consciously modified language practices are adopted in certain domains, in this case mainly in that of the home.

Perspectives from the patient: A content analysis of communication changes, impact, and strategies to facilitate communication in multiple sclerosis

Purpose: Communication changes in multiple sclerosis (MS) are under-explored and under-recognised. Persons with MS (PwMS) are experts in their condition and play a valuable role in informing clinicians and researchers of their condition. This study aimed to investigate the perspectives of PwMS on: (1) MS-related communication changes, (2) the impact of these communication changes across key aspects of a person’s life, including work/studies, relationships, and general quality of life, and (3) strategies used to facilitate communication in daily interactions. Method: Two-hundred and sixty PwMS were recruited internationally and completed an online questionnaire. Content analysis was used to analyse open-ended questionnaire responses. Result: One-hundred and ninety-seven (75.8%) participants reported communication changes, including language, cognitive, speech, voice, and fluency changes. Participants described a variety of personal and environmental factors that influence communication negatively, such as fatigue, stress, and heat. Communication changes were reported to impact on psychological wellbeing, interpersonal relationships, participation and identity in the workforce and career pathways, and tertiary studies. Around 40% of participants reported using a range of overt and covert strategies to manage communication changes. Only 11.2% (n = 22/197) of participants who reported communication changes accessed speech-language pathology (SLP) services. Conclusion: PwMS can experience a wide spectrum of communication changes. These communication changes can have a profound and far-reaching impact on psychological wellbeing and societal participation. Engagement with SLP services is limited compared to the reported prevalence of communication changes. There is a need to raise awareness of the role of SLP in service provision for PwMS to manage communication changes. This paper discusses and provides suggestions for SLP services for PwMS with communication changes. There is a timely need to develop evidence-based interventions to support PwMS manage communication changes and reduce their impact.

Japan’s responses to China’s rise: Soft balancing in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT Japan’s threat perceptions toward China have hardened over the post-Cold War period. This led Tokyo to rely more on overt balancing strategies compared with engagement and hedging strategies. While hard balancing measures are widely discussed in the literature, little or no attention is paid to soft balancing. Though concerned about China’s strategic rise, Japan’s strategic options are limited by the entrenched normative constraints within the security policymaking structure. These conditions make soft balancing a critical and viable strategy for Japan. The prominence of soft balancing is illustrated by analyzing Japan’s response to China’s widening influence in Southeast Asia, primarily focusing on two areas – East Asian multilateralism and the South China Sea territorial disputes. Empirically, this paper offers a more nuanced analysis of Japan’s response to China’s strategic rise; and theoretically, explains the way Japan’s case strengthens the conceptual utility of soft balancing through the incorporation of a normative perspective.

Sympathetic Vampires and Zombies with Brains: The Modern Monster as a Master of Self‐Control

Sympathetic Vampires and Zombies with Brains: The Modern Monster as a Master of Self‐Control

Making black lives don't matter via organizational strategies to avoid the racial debate: The military police in Brazil

AbstractThe #BlackLivesMatter movement has raised awareness of the killing of black people by law enforcement agents in the United States specifically and racism in general in different parts of the world. Academics in Management and Organizations have discussed various dimensions of racial inequalities and differences in organizations. However, little discussion has taken place regarding the actual practices deployed by organizations to avoid the racial debate. Based on our experience of doing research into the police in Latin America and engaging in the public debate to stop police killing and the killing of police officers, we discuss here the strategies deployed by the military police forces in Brazil to make black lives don't matter by avoiding discussing the police's role in Brazilian racism. We argue that these strategies make the police to fail to recognize their role in the killing of black people in the country. Despite the Brazilian military police being an extreme case, we suggest organizations maintain more open or more overt strategies that make black lives don't matter and call academics to research and denounce these strategies.

Overt translation strategies in the histories of Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound

The present article analyzes the overt translation strategies in Robert Lowell’s Imitations and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, indicating the conscious use of error as a compositional principle for the construction of knowledge through the distance of foreign documents.

Medium (Un)specificity as Material Agency—The Productive Indeterminacy of Matter/Material

In this article, I consider some of the debates brought to the fore by the proliferation of recent textile focused exhibitions, namely, the tension between a continued allegiance to medium specific conventions and the richness, hybridity, and heterogeneity afforded by the post-medium condition of contemporary art. Through a new body of sculptural and installational practice, I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in which the medium specific can be (re)mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s conception of the constellation and mimetic comportment, this model of practice involves a mode of behavior that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the affective indeterminacy of the sensuously bound experiential encounter. This is demonstrated through a range of practice strategies—“thingness,” “staged (dis)contiguity,” and the play between “sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment”—which mobilize a precarious relationship between processes of attachment and detachment. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile through feminist and poststructuralist critique, the work moves away from “a rhetoric of negative opposition” and predetermined discursive frameworks, returning authority to the aesthetic impulse, privileging the ambiguous resonances of an abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation.

Chinese adolescents' reports of covert parental monitoring: Comparisons with overt monitoring and links with information management

This study compared Chinese adolescents' reports of covert parental monitoring with the overt strategies of solicitation and control. We investigated these behaviors in terms of unique associations with adolescents' perceived privacy invasion and the information management behaviors of disclosure and secrecy. High school students (N = 455, 61.5% female; Mage = 17.39, SD = 0.83) from a predominantly rural province of Mainland China reported a high incidence of covert monitoring (60.40%). Covert monitoring predicted privacy invasion more strongly than solicitation or control. Solicitation positively predicted disclosure, while covert monitoring negatively predicted disclosure and positively predicted secrecy. Privacy invasion fully mediated links between covert monitoring and information management. These latter effects were significantly stronger for girls than for boys. Similar to Western adolescents, Chinese youth might apply selective resistance when parents violate their personal domain. The findings suggest linkage between some parental monitoring behaviors and disruptions in Chinese family communication.

Taming dissent: the United States and the Italian centre-left, 1948–1978

Italy was the first country in which the United States tested its ‘political warfare’, the integrated application of overt and covert strategies to stabilise internal politics. This article illustrates that while America’s most intrusive and aggressive methods against Communist power in Italy often backfired, its diplomatic use of Italy’s interplay of domestic politics and foreign policies was relatively successful. It was an indirect method that hinged on America’s flexibility towards the moderate centre-left forces. American counterintuitive toleration and sometimes encouragement of mild political and cultural dissent in Italy helped refute and isolate the determined opposition of the strong Italian Communist Party.

Teach It, Don't Preach It: The Differential Effects of Directly-communicated and Self-generated Utility Value Information.

Social-psychological interventions in education have used a variety of "self-persuasion" or "saying-is-believing" techniques to encourage students to articulate key intervention messages. These techniques are used in combination with more overt strategies, such as the direct communication of messages in order to promote attitude change. However, these different strategies have rarely been systematically compared, particularly in controlled laboratory settings. We focus on one intervention based in expectancy-value theory designed to promote perceptions of utility value in the classroom and test different intervention techniques to promote interest and performance. Across three laboratory studies, we used a mental math learning paradigm in which we varied whether students wrote about utility value for themselves or received different forms of directly-communicated information about the utility value of a novel mental math technique. In Study 1, we examined the difference between directly-communicated and self-generated utility-value information and found that directly-communicated utility-value information undermined performance and interest for individuals who lacked confidence, but that self-generated utility had positive effects. However, Study 2 suggests that these negative effects of directly-communicated utility value can be ameliorated when participants are also given the chance to generate their own examples of utility value, revealing a synergistic effect of directly-communicated and self-generated utility value. In Study 3, we found that individuals who lacked confidence benefited more when everyday examples of utility value were communicated, rather than career and school examples.

Discovering what is hidden: The role of non-ritualized covert neutralizing strategies in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder

Background and objectivesNeutralizing strategies are secondary to obsessions and an additional cause of distress and interference, but they have received little attention in theories and research, especially the non-ritualized covert strategies. This study focuses on the comparative impact of non-ritualized covert and compulsive-overt strategies in the course of OCD. MethodsEighty-two OCD adult patients completed measures assessing distress, interference, appraisals and overt and covert neutralizing strategies to control obsessions. Thirty-eight patients who had completed cognitive therapy were assessed again after treatment. ResultsOnly overt compulsions are associated with OCD severity. Nonetheless, considering the main symptom dimension, covert strategies are also associated with severity in patients with moral-based obsessions. Patients who used covert strategies more frequently, compared to those who use them less, reported more sadness, guilt, control importance, interference, and dysfunctional appraisals. Regarding the overt strategies, patients who used them more reported more anxiety and ascribed more personal meaning to their obsessions than the patients who used them less. After treatment, recovered patients decreased their use of both covert and overt strategies, while non-recovered patients did not. There was a higher rate of non-recovered patients among those who used more non-ritualized covert strategies before treatment. LimitationsEmotions and appraisals were assessed with a single item. OCD symptom dimensions were only assessed by the Obsessive–Compulsive Inventory. ConclusionsIn addition to studying overt compulsions, the impact of covert neutralizing strategies on the OCD course and severity warrants more in-depth study.

Covert research and adult protection and safeguarding: an ethical dilemma?

Purpose– This paper aims to consider the contentious issue of covert research in studying the social contexts of vulnerable groups. It explores its potential utility in areas where overt strategies may be problematic or denied; and examines and problematises the issue of participant consent.Design/methodology/approach– Using a literature-based review and selected previous studies, the paper explores the uses and abuses of covert research in relation to ethics review proceedings governing social research, with an especial focus on vulnerability.Findings– Findings indicate that although the use of covert research is subject to substantial critique by apparently transgressing the often unquestioned moral legitimacy of informed consent, this carries ethical and practical utility for research related to safeguarding concerns. Arguably covert research enables research access to data likely to reveal abusive and oppressive practices.Research limitations/implications– Covert research assists in illuminating the hidden voices and lives of vulnerable people that may otherwise remain inaccessible. Such research needs to be subject to rigorous ethical standards to ensure that it is both justified and robust.Practical implications– Emphasising the need to consider all angles, questions and positions when addressing the social problem of adult protection and safeguarding.Originality/value– Increasingly social research is treated as being as potentially harmful as medical research. Ethics review tends towards conservative conformity, legitimising methodologies that may serve less social utility than other forms of investigation that privilege the safeguarding of vulnerable people.

Development of a Korean Version of Pro-Change’s Processes of Change Measure for Effective Stress Management

This study aimed to develop a Korean version of Pro-change’s processes of change measure for effective stress management (PPSM). Effective stress management refers to any form of healthy activity practiced at least 20 min per day to manage stress. PPSM includes 30 items and consists of two higher-order and ten first-order factors. It measures the covert and overt strategies that individuals use to initiate and maintain effective stress management, namely the processes of change. The participants included 542 Korean college students. The Korean version of PPSM was found to consist of two higher-order and ten first-order factors, which was consistent with the original PPSM. Reliability was examined in terms of internal consistency. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranged from 0.41 to 0.83, which was largely compatible to those of the original, Japanese, and Chinese PPSM. The Korean PPSM version was validated against the stages of change for effective stress management. The differences in the scores of the processes of change were largely consistent with those of previous studies.

The Effects of Mathematics Strategy Instruction for Children with Serious Problem-Solving Difficulties

This study investigated the role of strategy instruction on solution accuracy in children with and without serious math difficulties (MD) in problem solving. Children's posttest solution accuracy was compared on standardized and experimental measures as a function of strategy conditions. Strategy conditions included curriculum materials that gradually increased the number of irrelevant propositions within word problems. Children in Grade 3 ( N = 193) were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: materials + verbal strategies (e.g., underlining the question), materials + verbal + visual strategies, materials + visual strategies (e.g., correctly placing numbers in diagrams), materials only-no overt strategies, and an untreated control. Compared to children with MD in the control condition, posttest outcomes for children with MD on standardized measures improved significantly under verbal + visual conditions, whereas posttest scores on the experimental problem-solving measures improved under the materials-only condition. Those strategy conditions found least effective made substantial demands on children's working memory capacity. The authors discuss benefits and limitations of strategy instruction.

Broadening the Scope of Research on Emotion Regulation Strategies and Psychopathology

Despite the increasing interest in the study of emotion regulation strategies and psychopathology, researchers have predominantly focused on covert emotion regulation strategies—that is, those strategies that occur within the individual (e.g., cognitive reappraisal, suppression). Conversely, less attention has been devoted to the examination of the relationship between psychopathology and overt emotion regulation strategies (e.g., drinking alcohol, seeking advice). This has resulted in a limited understanding of the complex repertoire of emotion regulation strategies that individuals possess, and how patterns in the use of strategies might relate to psychopathology. We asked 218 undergraduates to report on their habitual use of 15 covert and overt emotion regulation strategies and symptoms of seven different mental disorders. Overt strategies were associated with symptoms and, at times, they predicted psychopathology above and beyond the more frequently studied covert strategies. These findings have implications for developing a more sophisticated understanding of patterns of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation.

“Uh. . . . not to be nitpicky,,,,,but…the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”

This paper investigates the phenomenon known as trolling — the behaviour of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement’s sake. Having previously started to answer the question, what is trolling? (Hardaker 2010), this paper seeks to answer the next question, how is trolling carried out? To do this, I use software to extract 3,727 examples of user discussions and accusations of trolling from an eighty-six million word Usenet corpus. Initial findings suggest that trolling is perceived to broadly fall across a cline with covert strategies and overt strategies at each pole. I create a working taxonomy of perceived strategies that occur at different points along this cline, and conclude by refining my trolling definition.

Implicit and explicit learning in individuals with agrammatic aphasia.

Implicit learning is a process of acquiring knowledge that occurs without conscious awareness of learning, whereas explicit learning involves the use of overt strategies. To date, research related to implicit learning following stroke has been largely restricted to the motor domain and has rarely addressed implications for language. The present study investigated implicit and explicit learning of an auditory word sequence in 10 individuals with stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia and 18 healthy age-matched participants using an adaptation of the Serial Reaction Time task. Individuals with aphasia showed significant learning under implicit, but not explicit, conditions, whereas age-matched participants learned under both conditions. These results suggest significant implicit learning ability in agrammatic aphasia. Furthermore, results of an auditory sentence span task indicated working memory deficits in individuals with agrammatic aphasia, which are discussed in relation to explicit and implicit learning processes.

Variable plural marking in Jamaican Patwa and Tok Pisin: A linguistic perspective

AbstractThis article is concerned with plural marking in two English-lexified creoles, Jamaican Patwa and Tok Pisin. In addition to bare plurals, these creoles possess two overt strategies of plural marking—a free-standing morpheme and the suffix -s. The analytic and inflectional plural markers occur according to different linguistic constraints. It appears that the creoles use two conceptually and typologically different number marking systems — that of set noun languages, based on the opposition between singleton and collective sets, and that of singular object noun languages, based on the opposition between singular and plural individuals. This poses problems for the definition of the lexical semantics of the creole nouns if one assumes the existence of cross-linguistic differences. The analysis proposed here is based on the universalist approach to lexical semantics. Under this approach, individuated and collective (set) interpretations of plurals are encoded in the noun phrase structure.