Shared Background Knowledge Research Articles

Going farther, together: completing literacy professional development as peers

PurposeIn the Fall of 2019, Marietta College and Marietta City Schools, in Marietta, Ohio, piloted a program to improve literacy knowledge and pedagogy through completing LETRS training, a two-year literacy professional development based on the science of reading, as peers.Design/methodology/approachThis project was aligned to effective professional development research that states better trainings are content-specific, allow support and collaboration and are ongoing throughout the school year (Blank and de las Alas, 2009; Darling-Hammond, Hyler, and Gardener, 2017) and respect participants work/life schedules (Bigsby and Firestone, 2017).FindingsSome benefits of this collaboration were that teachers, college faculty and teacher candidates were able to communicate more effectively about literacy because we all had shared background knowledge and spoke the same language when it came to literacy. We were also able to make more meaningful clinical experiences for our teacher candidates because we created a stronger connection between the knowledge and pedagogy taught in students’ literacy courses and the practices they saw in real classrooms. Inservice teachers saw the college faculty and teacher candidates as strong partners, which greatly strengthened our clinical preparation.Practical implicationsThe paper includes implications for the development of stronger partnerships between teacher preparation program faculty and school partnership faculty and more authentic and meaningful clinical experiences for teacher candidates.Originality/valueThis project shows how meaningful partnerships and clinical experiences can be created when partnership faculty are seen as peers.

Pragmatic Choice of Diction and Deictic Elements in Select Covid-19 Media Discourse in Nigeria

Recent scholarly works on Covid-19 media discourse and medical discourse have only focused on the use of neologisms within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and language use that investigates communication and exchange of shared background knowledge as important factors between doctors and their patients. This paper investigates the pragmatic choice of words and the various contexts in which deictic elements have been employed by members of Nigeria's Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 to convey meaning with the public. As a pragmatic study, attention is given to the mood aspect, using Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to elicit the potential motivations behind the pragmatic choice of words of the speakers. This paper analyses a total of 92 utterances from four speeches of the Nigeria's Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 members delivered at one of their live telecast press briefings on Tuesday, 27th April 2020, were taped and transcribed for analysis. The utterances were analysed with antconc software, which provided a frequency tally of the specific deictic elements used in the speeches. The findings of this study on the one hand, indicate that speakers at the press briefing used person deixis such as I, We, and Us in both inclusive and exclusive contexts to demonstrate pity for the public and to pragmatically connect with the public as if both the speech producers and the public are engaged in a serious battle against Covid-19. On the other hand, our grammatical analysis revealed the use of military diction, leading the researcher to conclude that the members of the Nigerian Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 assume State authority for themselves.

Why Wounded Storytellers Need to be Vulnerable Readers

<p>The essay examines the interdependences between experience, narration, and dialogue. I begin by reflecting on my early work, The Wounded Storyteller, and progress to my current work on vulnerable reading. Questions raised include the extent to which people can tell stories they call their own, and where people acquire the resources to tell stories. Responses to these issues depend on the distinction between stories as particular, local, and contingent, and narratives as generally available cultural resources. Shared background knowledge of narratives makes specific stories tellable and recognizable. Experience, I argue, is given shape as it is articulated in stories, but it always exceeds what a story can tell.</p>

Practice Contestation in and between Communities of Practice: From Top-Down to Inclusive Policymaking at the World Bank

Abstract By focusing on like-mindedness, community of practice (CoP) scholars are often accused of downgrading issues of power and contestation. This article theorizes practice contestation as an integral part of participation in a community. Building on a relational ontology and the concept of epistemic power, I define practice contestation as tacit (practical) or discursive interventions challenging the shared background knowledge of a CoP. This process is bidirectional (pushing for and against change) and happens at two levels (within a CoP and at the boundaries with other CoPs). This framework leads to four types of practice contestation: internal disruption, internal resistance, external pressure, and external resistance. These concomitant types of contestation participate in the constant fluctuations of international practices and social orders. Methodologically, this article looks at the CoP of World Bank’s senior managers and their boundaries with other communities, and it builds on interview material and archival documents collected between 2017 and 2020.

Encrypted Semantic Communication Using Adversarial Training for Privacy Preserving

Semantic communication is implemented based on shared background knowledge, but the sharing mechanism risks privacy leakage. In this letter, we propose an encrypted semantic communication system (ESCS) for privacy preserving, which combines universality and confidentiality. The universality is reflected in the fact that the structures of all network modules of the proposed ESCS are public, and the training database is shared, which is suitable for large-scale deployment in practical scenarios. Meanwhile, confidentiality is achieved through key encryption. Based on the adversarial training, we design an adversarial encryption training scheme to guarantee the accuracy of semantic communication in both encrypted and unencrypted modes. Experiment results show that the proposed ESCS with the adversarial encryption training scheme can perform well regardless of whether the semantic information is encrypted. It is difficult for the attacker to reconstruct the original semantic information from the eavesdropped message.

Exploration of phonological jokes in Maryam Apaokagi's selected comedy skits

The majority of studies on Nigerian comedy are discourse- and pragmatics-related, despite the impact of phonology on humour creation as seminal studies have shown. These seminal studies describe phonological jokes to mean ambiguous utterances whose humour lies in their multiple phonological interpretations. However, comedy skits from Nigeria show that there are more dimensions to phonological jokes. Therefore, this study investigated the phonological jokes in comedy skits from Maryam Apaokagi, using Chomsky and Halle’s Distinctive Features and McGraw and Warren’s Benign Violation Theory. Twenty skits were purposively selected from the artist’s YouTube channel. Four strategies were identified in the data: minimal pairs, phonological restructuring, phonological ambiguity, and phonological extension. Four instances each of minimal pairs and phonological restructuring were identified; the former replaced phonemes in words, thus, changing their meanings, while the latter re-arranged phoneme sets and syllables to achieve new structures. There were two instances of phonological ambiguity where strings of sounds had multiple meanings; homophony was engaged to achieve rhythm and humour. Phonological extension had twenty-eight instances; it occurred when one character produced a syllable, and another extended it by providing a longer but partially similar word. Four types of phonological extensions were identified, and these were extension into regular words, popular names, concepts and other languages. The jokes portrayed socio-cultural and economic situations in Nigeria like poverty, promiscuity, high living costs, and burglary. Apaokagi used comedy to teach patience and tolerance. The comprehension of these jokes thrived on shared background knowledge between the artist and the audience.

Deep Learning-Enabled Semantic Communication Systems With Task-Unaware Transmitter and Dynamic Data

Existing deep learning-enabled semantic communication systems often rely on shared background knowledge between the transmitter and receiver that includes empirical data and their associated semantic information. In practice, the semantic information is defined by the pragmatic task of the receiver and cannot be known to the transmitter. The actual observable data at the transmitter can also have non-identical distribution with the empirical data in the shared background knowledge library. To address these practical issues, this paper proposes a new neural network-based semantic communication system for image transmission, where the task is unaware at the transmitter and the data environment is dynamic. The system consists of two main parts, namely the semantic coding (SC) network and the data adaptation (DA) network. The SC network learns how to extract and transmit the semantic information using a receiver-leading training process. By using the domain adaptation technique from transfer learning, the DA network learns how to convert the data observed into a similar form of the empirical data that the SC network can process without re-training. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can be adaptive to observable datasets while keeping high performance in terms of both data recovery and task execution.

Experimental practices and objectivity in the social sciences: re-embedding construct validity in the internal\u2013external validity distinction

The experimental revolution in the social sciences is one of the most significant methodological shifts undergone by the field since the ‘quantitative revolution’ in the nineteenth century. One of the often valued features of social science experimentation is precisely the fact that there are (alleged) clear methodological rules regarding hypothesis testing that come from the methods of the natural sciences and from the methodology of RCTs in the biomedical sciences, and that allow for the adjudication among contentious causal claims. We examine critically this claim and argue that some current understandings of the practices that surround social science experimentation overestimate the degree to which experiments can actually fulfil this role as “objective” adjudicators, by neglecting the importance of shared background knowledge or assumptions and of consensus regarding the validity of the constructs involved in an experiment. We take issue with the way the distinction between internal and external validity is often used to comment on the inferential import of experiments, used both among practitioners and among philosophers of science. We describe the ways in which the more common (dichotomous) use of the internal/external distinction differs from Cook and Campbell’s original methodological project, in which construct validity and the four-fold validity typology were all important in assessing the inferential import of experiments. We argue that the current uses of the labels internal and external, as applied to experimental validity, help to encroach a simplistic view on the inferential import of experiments that, in turn, misrepresents their capacity to provide objective knowledge about the causal relations between variables.

Pragmatics in the interpretation of scope ambiguities

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus study of pragmatic factors involved in interpreting potentially ambiguous sentences with negation and universal quantifiers, as demonstrated by the Russian sentenceOni ne uspejut vsjo eto sdelat’‘They won’t have time to do all this.’ Ambiguity in such sentences results from potential differences in scope assignment. If negation scopes over the quantifier, we get the interpretation of partial negation: ‘They will manage to do some of these things, but not everything.’ If negation scopes over the verb, we get total negation: ‘They won’t manage to do anything.’This study is based on Russian and English data extracted from a variety of corpora. We demonstrate that while syntactic conditions where scope ambiguity is possible are different for Russian and English, in situations when both languages allow it, speakers rely on the same pragmatic mechanisms for disambiguation that are based on Gricean cooperation principle and shared background knowledge. Disambiguation is facilitated by lexical markers, different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings, and similar in Russian and English. We show that the interpretation of the quantifier is pragmatically different for verb-negated and quantifier-negated readings (emphatic in the former case and quantificational in the latter), and lexical markers of each reading are semantically and pragmatically consistent with this difference. Namely, verb-negated readings occur primarily in the context of demonstrative pronouns in their pragmaticalized meaning of negative assessment and negatively connoted nouns, while quantifier-negated readings occur in the context of verbs with quantitative semantics and quantitative implicatures that consolidate the interpretation of quantification.

Harry Potter and the Border Crossing Analogy: An Exploration of the Instructional Use of Analogy in a TESOL Methods Course

ABSTRACTThe following exploratory study examines the effects of a Harry Potter–inspired “border crossing” analogy (HPBCA) on preservice teachers' (n = 25) Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) content knowledge and disposition toward English language learners (ELLs). The analogy capitalizes on the prior and shared background knowledge many preservice teachers have of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, the related films, and discourses that surround the Harry Potter phenomenon. Study results suggest mild agreement among participants of the perceived positive impact of the HPBCA on their TESOL content knowledge, although a slightly less than neutral response toward the perceived impact on their disposition toward ELLs. The results hold implications for the pedagogical use of analogy in teacher education beyond mathematics and science, as well as the role of prior/shared knowledge in teaching and learning.

A listener’s stance-taking in mediation

This article analyses a highly acrimonious conflict mediation session between a previous romantic couple in order to illustrate how one listening disputant’s embodied stances influence the trajectory of another disputant’s unfolding narrative. For example, even without speaking, the listener’s facial expression and postures serve to refuse the other speaker’s participant framework. In order to unpack the complexity of this interaction, we drew on both conversation analytic and dialogic notions of stance. We found that to analyse embodied stances in our data requires an understanding of both the local sequential analysis of the unfolding orientations of the participants as embodied stances are being deployed, as well as the larger interactional patterns that occur across the entire mediation session. This case study illustrates the challenge, to mediators and researchers alike, posed by unequal access to the disputant’s shared background knowledge.

Gubernatorial debate sessions in Nigeria: A socio-cognitive analysis

This article adopts Benoit’s functional theory of campaign discourse and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive theory (context models) in discussing two gubernatorial debate sessions in Nigeria. The selected debate sessions (Ondo Governorship Debate and Lagos Governorship Debate) are recovered from YouTube files and transcribed. However, only utterances from candidates in the two major political parties in Nigeria, namely, Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) (now renamed All Progressives Congress (APC)) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), are subjected to content analysis. Context models in the aspects of discourse meaning and argumentation are also considered. Findings reveal that first, candidates’ utterances range from acclaims to attacks and defenses. Second, topics help to derive candidates’ ideologies which are further exemplified within the ambience of shared background knowledge (presupposition). Finally, candidates adopt legal/illegal jargons, explanations, statements of evidence, examples and illustrations to explicitly exemplify their mental dispositions and beliefs. We conclude by stating that candidates’ utterances were found to be relevant within the context of the debates and, by extension, the prevalent socio-political problems in Nigeria.

English-language swearing as humor in Swedish comic strips

In this paper, I investigate the Swedish, non-native use of English swear words in Swedish-language comic strips. I first consider the established relationships between both swearing and humor, and comics and humor. I propose that swear word usage and the comic strip framework contribute to a mutual feedback loop, whereby the comic strip derives its humor from the use of English swear words, while at the same time the comic strip context, by invoking a play frame, primes the swear word usage for humorous interpretation. Modeling Siegel (1995), I then consider how a code-switch to English serves as a framing device or contextualization cue for humor in Swedish-language contexts. The analysis of a selection of Swedish comic strips draws from the Encryption Theory of Humor (Flamson and Barrett, 2008), and suggests that humor created via the Swedish practice of swearing in English is a function of shared background knowledge that capitalizes on the fundamental incongruity of two discourse systems operating under different norms of appropriateness.

Twelve‐Month‐Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape

Infants infer social and pragmatic intentions underlying attention‐directing gestures, but the basis on which infants make these inferences is not well understood. Previous studies suggest that infants rely on information from preceding shared action contexts and joint perceptual scenes. Here, we tested whether 12‐month‐olds use information from act‐accompanying cues, in particular prosody and hand shape, to guide their pragmatic understanding. In Experiment 1, caregivers directed infants’ attention to an object to request it, share interest in it, or inform them about a hidden aspect. Caregivers used distinct prosodic and gestural patterns to express each pragmatic intention. Experiment 2 was identical except that experimenters provided identical lexical information across conditions and used three sets of trained prosodic and gestural patterns. In all conditions, the joint perceptual scenes and preceding shared action contexts were identical. In both experiments, infants reacted appropriately to the adults’ intentions by attending to the object mostly in the sharing interest condition, offering the object mostly in the imperative condition, and searching for the referent mostly in the informing condition. Infants’ ability to comprehend pragmatic intentions based on prosody and gesture shape expands infants’ communicative understanding from common activities to novel situations for which shared background knowledge is missing.

Potential problematic rhetorical style transfer from first language to foreign language: a case of Indonesian authors writing research article introductions in English

ABSTRACTRhetorical style transfer from first language to a foreign language can be serious problems in academic writing, such as research articles (RAs). This study is aimed at analyzing the rhetorical style of Indonesian RA introductions in multiple disciplines written by Indonesian authors and published in Indonesian research journals especially on the ways authors justify their research topic and research activity and suggesting potential problems if this style is used when writing RAs in English. Four hundred RAs written in Indonesian by Indonesian speakers were selected for this study from mostly university-based research journals. The analyses were conducted using a genre-based analysis method following a problem justifying project model by Safnil [2001. Rhetorical structure analyses of Indonesian research articles. An unpublished PhD diss., the Australian National University, Canberra Australia]. The results show that: (1) unlike English authors, Indonesian authors consider establishing shared background knowledge important in their RA introductions but not justifying their research project; (2) Indonesian authors justify their research topic by personal reasons and reviewing the current knowledge and practices and (3) while some use subjective and practical reasons to justify their research projects, many do not justify it at all. If Indonesian authors use this rhetorical style when writing RAs in English, this can cause the article to be rejected by international journals.

Hedging as a Multifunctional Phenomenon of Research / Popular Research Articles

The paper analyses the versatile usage of hedges in medical academic texts and compares the (sub)genre peculiarities of the scientific research articles (RA) and science popularization articles (PRA). While comparing the two subgenres, the generalized three factors of strategies and functions influencing hedging usage were discriminated, i.e., the expectations of the discourse community, intentions, and shared background knowledge. The comparative analysis of RA and PRA aims at investigating the use of the multifunctional hedging device, and at the end the corpus of nearly 90 000 words and 20 articles has been comprised as a research database. A normative use of hedges in academic texts is treated as appropriate nowadays. The research focuses on the analysis of hedging strategies and functions. It stretched the borders of one function and analyses hedging as a pragmatic, semantic, social, and cognitive phenomenon in the field of epistemic modality. The hedge is viewed from the semantic, pragmatic, cognitive, and social perspectives. This article reviews the role and legitimacy of hedging producing deliberate elusiveness in scientific texts, interprets the cases of hedge uses, infers their functions and meaning. It as well discusses the vector of movement direction from the “author-centred rhetoric” to the “object-centred rhetoric” and vice versa. Hedging is interpreted in the frame of epistemic modality.

Semantic Stability and Implicit Consensus in Social Tagging Streams

One potential disadvantage of social tagging systems is that due to the lack of a centralized vocabulary, a crowd of users may never manage to reach a consensus on the description of resources (e.g., books, images, users, or songs) on the Web. Yet, previous research has provided interesting evidence that the tag distributions of resources in social tagging systems may become semantically stable over time, as more and more users tag them and implicitly agree on the relative importance of tags for a resource. At the same time, previous work has raised an array of new questions such as: 1) how can we assess semantic stability in a robust and methodical way? 2) does the semantic stabilization varies across different social tagging systems and ultimately, and 3) what are the factors that can explain semantic stabilization in such systems? In this work, we tackle these questions by: 1) presenting a novel and robust method, which overcomes a number of limitations in existing methods; 2) empirically investigating semantic stabilization in different social tagging systems with distinct domains and properties; and 3) detecting potential causes of stabilization and implicit consensus, specifically imitation behavior, shared background knowledge and intrinsic properties of natural language. Our results show that tagging streams that are generated by a combination of imitation dynamics and shared background knowledge exhibit faster and higher semantic stability than tagging streams that are generated via imitation dynamics or natural language phenomena alone.

Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together?

Cooperation requires that individuals are able to identify, and preferentially associate with, others who have compatible preferences and the shared background knowledge needed to solve interpersonal coordination problems. The present study investigates the nature of such similarity within social networks, asking: What do friends have in common? And what is the relationship between similarity and altruism? The results show that similarity declines with frequency of contact; similarity in general is a significant predictor of altruism and emotional closeness; and, specifically, sharing a sense of humor, hobbies and interests, moral beliefs, and being from the same area are the best predictors. These results shed light on the structure of relationships within networks and provide a possible checklist for predicting attitudes toward strangers, and in-group identification.

Semantic Stability in Social Tagging Streams

One potential disadvantage of social tagging systems is that due to the lack of a centralized vocabulary users may never manage to reach a consensus on the description of the entities (e.g., books, user or songs) in the system. Yet, previous research has provided interesting evidence that the tag distributions of entities can become stable over time as more and more users tag them. At the same time, previous work has raised an array of new questions such as: (i) How can we assess the stability of social tagging systems in a robust and methodical way? (ii) Does stabilization of tags vary across different social tagging systems and ultimately, (iii) what are the factors that can explain semantic stabilization in such systems? In this work we tackle these questions by making the following contributions: (i) we present a novel and robust method which overcomes a number of limitations in existing methods, (ii) we empirically investigate semantic stabilization processes in a wide range of social tagging systems with distinct domains and properties and (iii) we investigate potential causes for semantic stabilization, specifically imitation behavior, shared background knowledge and intrinsic properties of natural language.

An Ontology-based Approach to Text Latent Semantic Domain Recognition

 Abstract—The semantic gap between human language and machine language (logical view of text used by machine) is the most important challenge of content management. While focusing on the specific message that a text is intended to convey, knowledge is exchanged through natural language assuming a large body of shared background knowledge. Thus, a considerable amount of the knowledge in a text is actually very implicit and remainsunder the surface(1). This study intends to reveal the under the surface knowledge, named Semantic Domain, of a text in order for the machine to recognize and process it. Given a text and an ontology that models the domain knowledge, the specific message of the text is those concepts that explicitly appear in the text. The remaining part of the ontology constitutes the background knowledge. However, not all of the concepts of the ontology equally contribute to the Latent Semantic Domain of the text. So, it is very import to specify how the concepts of the ontology are involved in the Latent Semantic Domain of the text. In order to do so, the semantic relatedness between the concepts mentioned in a text, as a whole unit, and the other concepts of the domain should be measured. This measure determines how a domain concept is related to the specific message of the text. In order to implement this idea, each concept of the ontology is represented by a vector that semantically describes the concept in the semantic space of the domain. Considering just the concepts of a text in a vector, it describes its concept in the semantic domain of the text. This representation of concepts provides the formal basis to compare and determine their role in the Latent Semantic Domain of a text.