Text Production Research Articles

“Just a pocket knife, not a machete”: Large language models in TEFL teacher education & digital text sovereignty

This paper approaches AI in TEFL teacher education from a perspective of digital text sovereignty (digitale Textsouveränität). Digital sovereignty (digitale Souveränität) is a concept that goes beyond media literacy and data literacy as a set of skills, to include personal competences in a more Humboldtian vision of education. Digital text sovereignty focusses on all those aspects of digital sovereignty that apply to the reception and production of texts, from the ability to produce and consume digital texts to the development of a critically-reflexive attitude to these texts (Frederking, 2022; Frederking & Krommer, 2022), making it especially useful in contexts of TEFL teacher education. This paper is based on an empirical study conducted within the EFL teacher education department of a German metropolitan university during the 2023 summer term. It analyses 21 student essays written after an interactive 90-minute training session on ChatGPT conducted in three intact TEFL teacher education seminars. Qualitative content analysis is used to identify domains of digital text sovereignty discussed in these essays, and to identify key themes related to four aspects of digital text sovereignty: Mediality, Source Code, Intentionality, and Veracity. The findings might be of interest for researchers and teachers educators interested in (a) modelling digital text sovereignty as it applies to AI, and (b) developing teacher education material and programs that target digital text sovereignty in an AI context, or that aim to support (future) teachers in developing an AI-informed pedagogy.

Generative AI in Academic Settings: Exploring ChatGPT Adoption and Implications

This research delves into the multifaceted aspects influencing the adoption and utilization of ChatGPT among postgraduate students. Executed as a qualitative study involving participants from a prominent federal university, the primary objective was to discern students’ nuanced perceptions of ChatGPT and their inclination to embrace it as an academic support tool. Based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the study employed thematic analysis with a focus on critical dimensions. Results illuminate that students are motivated to amplify academic performance, boost productivity, and streamline time management, with ChatGPT emerging as a user-friendly solution. Peer and faculty influence further solidified its integration, evolving into a habitual tool, and the availability of a free version significantly contributed to its widespread adoption. This research highlights the growing prevalence of ChatGPT across diverse academic activities, encompassing exploratory research, programming, presentations, and email composition—however, varying opinions surface regarding its efficacy and limitations in scientific text production. The research findings, particularly in the context of technology assimilation in academia, hold significant relevance for educational policymakers and practitioners. They offer valuable insights that can help form policies that foster the judicious and effective integration of technology within educational settings.

Patronage, Sectarianism, and Cultural Hegemony

Patronage relationships have been ethnographically found at many locations in the Middle East during the second half of the twentieth century but also detected in ancient Near Eastern sources in more recent times, in every case mostly in connection with political situations. Patronage, however, also operates at the level of mentalities and its expression is equally discovered in worldviews of different cultures. This condition may therefore be observed as well in textualized mental expressions like the Hebrew Bible. In cases exposing sectarianism in the biblical stories, we may assert that patron-client bonds are taken by ancient scribes as the key mode for illustrating domination, subordination and in general an ontological order, transcending socio-politics and impacting also on what we would analytically deem a socio-religious imagination and its ulterior conceptual derivations. This paper seeks to relate clues and examples of patronage and sectarianism in the Hebrew Bible while focussing on their socio-cultural background. These expressions, in the history of the production of the biblical texts, would end up manifesting a particular cultural hegemony of a biblical ontology articulated by patronage dynamics in the southern Levant since the Persian period, but especially in connection with the Hasmonean rise to power, centred in Jerusalem.

Exploring Spanish writing abilities of children with developmental language disorder in expository texts.

Numerous studies have shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD), in addition to oral language difficulties, exhibit impaired writing abilities. Their texts contain problems in grammar, organization, cohesion, and length of written output. However, most of these studies have been conducted with English speakers. English is characterized by complex phonological structure, opaque orthography, poor morphology and strict word order. The aim of this research is to observe the writing abilities of children with DLD in a language with simple phonological structure, transparent orthography, rich morphology and flexible word order like Spanish in the production of expository texts. Twenty-six children with DLD (mean age in months = 128.85) and 26 age-and sex-matched typically developing (TD) children (mean age in months = 124.61) wrote an expository text about their favorite animal. In order to analyze how the two groups plan and encode written texts, we looked at word frequency and sentence structure, grammatical complexity and lexical density, and omissions and errors. Compared to the TD group, the children with DLD omitted more content words; made more errors with functional words, verb conjugation and inflectional morphemes, and made a large number of spelling errors. Moreover, they wrote fewer words, fewer sentences, and less structurally and lexically complex texts. These results show that children with DLD who speak a transparent orthography language such as Spanish also have difficulties in most language areas when producing written texts. Our findings should be considered when planning and designing interventions.

Judeo-Syriac in late antiquity and the Middle Ages

In 2012 the term ‘Judeo-Syriac’ was coined independently by two scholars to refer to Syriac written in Jewish Aramaic/Hebrew script, in texts from late antiquity, on the one hand, and in medieval texts, on the other. In this article the differences between these two types of Judeo-Syriac are established, particularly in respect of their sociolinguistic contexts. The earlier context involves the Jews of Edessa and its environs, for whom Syriac was their mother tongue, and who, as evidenced by the Peshitta Old Testament, normally used Syriac script; their use of Jewish script in funerary inscriptions was exceptional. The later context involves Jewish scholars, for whom Syriac was not their mother tongue, engaging with Syriac Christian scholarship, initially through direct contact with Christian scholars. The textual products of such collaborations resulted in Judeo-Syriac texts that continued to be copied by Jewish scholars who had little knowledge of Syriac in Syriac script.

Fragments of Alchemy from a Cairene Synagogue: Context, Codicology, and Contents of the Alchemical Corpus of the Cairo Genizah

This article presents the results of a survey and a first assessment of the corpus of alchemical manuscripts retrieved from the Cairo Genizah, a storage room mainly intended for sacred writings that is attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo. The alchemical manuscripts are described in their codicological and palaeographic features; their content is analysed in the context of the medieval production of alchemical texts in the surrounding Islamic world. The alchemical corpus of the Genizah represents a unique and widely unstudied source for our understanding of the relationship between Jews and alchemy in the medieval Mediterranean World.

Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England by Marisa Libbon (review)

Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England by Marisa Libbon (review)

The death of Elizabeth II on Wikipedia: fleshing out freedom through technoliberal participation online

AbstractWhile journalists performed a long‐rehearsed move to announce the death of Elizabeth II on the BBC, several volunteer editors rushed to break the news in the late queen's Wikipedia article. Aside from updating verb tenses from is to was, such edits entailed a revisionist approach, with Wikipedians seeking to shape how the British royals would be portrayed online. Tracing the negotiations and edit wars on the English‐language Wikipedia surrounding this event, this article asks: to what extent does collaborative textual production subvert individual authorship in favour of knowledge co‐production and collective authorship? Drawing on an online ethnography on Wikipedia's metapages, I propose technoliberal participation as a framework to flesh out how internet users frequently perceive whatever is available online as a property of the collective. Online projects such as this self‐styled ‘free encyclopedia’ maximize their participants’ freedom to express themselves while setting them free from a sense of long‐lasting commitment to the project. Considering the place of technoliberal participation in several online settings, I argue that the perception of digital technologies as neoliberal tools to address neoliberal problems sets out freedom as a watchword around which content authorship is not erased, but reframed, via a responsibility‐free, do‐it‐yourself media ideology.

The work of art in the age of artificial intelligibility

AbstractThe emergence of complex deep-learning models capable of producing novel images on a practically innumerable number of subjects and in an equally wide variety of artistic styles is beginning to highlight serious inadequacies in the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and legal frameworks we have so far used to categorise art. To begin tackling these issues and identifying a role for AI in the production and protection of human artwork, it is necessary to take a multidisciplinary approach which considers current legal precedents, the practice of software engineering, historical attitudes towards technological innovation and a sustained technical analysis of the models themselves. This paper queries the location and nature of substantive artistic work in the developmental stages of an AI-generated image, offering critiques of existing assumptions and posing questions for future research. The emergence of convincing AI creative output, artistic or literary, has significant long-term implications for the humanities, including the need for re-appraisal of foundational ideas about authorship and creativity in general. The effects of artificial intelligence, whether generalised or task-specific, cannot be ignored or displaced now that easy-access, scalable image and text production is a reality.

Subculture of female Korean culture fans: pleasure, creativity, and sisterhood

The entry of the Korean wave in the early 2000s in Indonesia, which was facilitated by internet technology, has become part of communication activities. This has led to the formation of subcultures of fans of Korean wave products, namely K-Drama and K-Pop, including women's subcultures who like K-drama and K-Pop. This subculture was built and developed through social media such as Facebook and WhatsApp. This article reviews how the digital era has changed how female fans interact to empower themselves through subcultures in the online space, mainly focusing on female fans of K-pop bands and K-dramas. Using the ethnographic research method, the research results show that along with the digital era that continues to develop, the subculture of female fans, initially formed through a physical collective group, has now evolved into a subculture of female fans formed through internet-based interactions. The subculture of female fans in the online space has become a forum for exploring pleasure, creativity, and self-empowerment through text production and reproduction of media texts supported by digital technology. Exploration of fun, creativity, and self-empowerment merged in a sense of sisterhood, participatory and collaborative culture.

Examining student translators’ writing and translation products: quality, errors and self-perceived mental workload

ABSTRACT Although writing and translation are closely related text productions, their interface has rarely been studied in translator training. This study examined student translators’ writing and translation products in terms of their quality, errors and self-perceived mental workload. Data were collected from 11 intermediate-level translation students at a university in mainland China. They were asked to complete four tasks: L1 (Chinese) writing (L1W), L1 (English-Chinese) translation (L1T), L2 (English) writing (L2W), and L2 (Chinese-English) translation (L2T). The results of quantitative analyses revealed no significant linear correlation between self-perceived mental workload and quality/errors, but a significant effect of task type on mental workload. Errors most frequently occurred in translation and L2 text production. The L2W error rate predicted L2T scores and L2T error rates. A discrepancy was noted between the students’ self-evaluation and their actual performance. The findings of this study may help researchers and teachers gain a fine-grained understanding of students’ performance in writing and translation and shed light on the development of pedagogical measures in translator training.

Shared cognition in the translation process: Information processing and meaning production as interactive accomplishments

ABSTRACT This article complements the current understanding of cognitive processing in translation by discussing the concept and providing empirical evidence of socially shared, interactive cognition as it emerges in collaborative team translation processes. By analyzing face-to-face interaction between audio-describers, the article shows how cognition is distributed and shared between cognitive agents (in the sense of a tolerable shared interpretation), and how interaction is elementary of this translating system. The article reports on an interaction analysis of video data from authentic collaborative audio description processes. It intends to pave the way for the study of social interactions in translation and interpreting processes from the viewpoint of cognitive processing. The analysis describes different phases of the translation act, from source text analysis to target text production, and details cognition as information processing and meaning production, operations which extend from the personal level of a human being to the intersubjective and cultural-collective ones.

O funcionamento pré-discursivo e as estratégias textuais

In this work, we aim to show how a textual analysis deals with discursive "anteriorities". Pre-discourse refers to ideas, beliefs and narratives that circulate in a society or social group and that influence the production and interpretation of discursive uses (Paveau, 2013 [2006]). These pre-discourses must be considered in the linguistic analysis of the text since they affect individual perspectives and positions in relation to different issues. We analyzed two humorous cartoons to understand the dynamics of social and cultural influences that permeate textual production and interpretation. By taking pre-discourses into account in textual analysis, we admit that meaning is not only a result of the internal characteristics of the text but is also influenced by the broader context in which the text occurs. We justify why the analytical criteria of textual linguistics, such as, text plan, intertextuality and referencing, consider argumentative strategies assuming the distributed cognition.

Curriculum policies for brazilian high school education: the discursive production of the state education network of Mato Grosso do Sul (2012)

The analyses presented aim to problematize the discursive nuances (both political and curricular) of the identity constructed for high school education in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. To this end, we examine the 2012 High School Curricular Reference Document (MATO GROSSO DO SUL, 2012) in its primary condition, that is, as an “official” text and, therefore, bearer of authorized language, product, process, and producer of interested power relations. Official discourses have the capacity not only to influence but also to regulate fundamental aspects of education, such as the production and distribution of legitimate pedagogical texts, the social relationships underlying the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, and the organization of educational contexts. In summary, given the complexity that the curriculum presents to the educational field, the analysis of official discourses becomes more than necessary; it becomes urgent. Contrary to what was initially hypothesized, the curricular proposal for the network was made, in the midst of a reform movement, as one of the “innovative” educational actions operationalized by the state agent. The organization of the document, which is part of the efforts to inaugurate and reformulate the curriculum, reaches different levels of power (from national to local) and is guided by principles from the economic field, especially those of a neoliberal matrix, which in the educational field assume specific contours, translated in the incorporation of Competence Theories.

텍스트 생산을 통한 연대: 1990년대 초 갓질라(Godzilla)와 뉴욕의 한국계 미국인 미술가들

텍스트 생산을 통한 연대: 1990년대 초 갓질라(Godzilla)와 뉴욕의 한국계 미국인 미술가들

3D LETTER: AESTHETIC PRACTICE, HISTORY AND RESEARCH PROSPECTS

As a language phenomenon, literature resists being described in terms of linguistic units and structures. Of key importance is the aesthetic experience of language and its uses in context. The experience is particularly dependent on the changing formats of communication, the development of the technologies of production and distribution of texts. This dependency, in turn, creates fresh stimuli for creative experimental work with word and letter. The nature of these processes being largely pre-reflexive invites and presupposes the effort of reflection. The potential for ‘self-problematization’ contained in a literary text is a crucially important but yet largely unexplored aspect of its meaning and form. It invites a philologist to try out new analytic techniques. Perspectives of present day developments in cognitive literary studies are closely related to the so called ‘material turn’ and ‘experiential turn’ in the humanities. The means of poetic expressivity are transformed in the changing media field providing for the increasingly multisensorial experience of writing and reading. The alliance of literary scholarship with cognitive research in embodied and situated knowledge is promising of new fruit.

Handwriting Skills and Their Role in Text Generation: A Longitudinal Study with Graphonomic Measures

<p>This study sought to examine the influence of transcription skills, evaluated using graphonomic measures, on the proficiency of text generation in students attending primary schools in Spain. A longitudinal design was employed involving 278 Spanish students distributed across three cohorts (cohort 1: 1st-2nd-4th grade; cohort 2: 2nd-3rd-5th grade; and cohort 3: 3rd-4th-6th grade). Two data collection points were used to administer the graphonomic measures, and a composition letter task was conducted at the conclusion of the study. Four multigroup structural equation models were employed, examining the direct pathways from graphonomic measures (i.e., pressure, speed, pauses, and road length) on text generation (i.e., length, fluency, planning, revision, and organization). The models demonstrated a good fit to the data. The findings from the four models, analyzed within the three cohorts, indicated that the significant effect of transcription (i.e., handwriting) on text production was primarily observed in Cohort 1 (early grades), while no significant effects were found in Cohort 2 (intermediate grades). This suggests that the importance of handwriting in text production in a transparent orthography may be more pronounced during the initial stages of writing development when students are acquiring foundational writing skills.</p>

‘Motz […] en main’ or words you can hold in your hand: Rabelais in the Printshop (Quart Livre, 55–6)

In chapters 55-56 of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, Pantagruel and his companions encounter a soundscape of inexplicable, disembodied voices and noises, which turn out to be sounds that have frozen into visible, tangible, sensory objects. This article uses the episode to think about words as objects in the world, with a physical presence and sensible properties. Considering first the widespread critical suspicion of the frozen words’ materiality through the lens of the fetish, the article then turns to the material culture of textual production and focuses on the sixteenth-century printshop, where words, in the form of metal type, are also things. The article aims to take a new perspective on the materiality of the frozen words; to consider Rabelais’s familiarity with the printing process; and to explore the impact of the technology of movable type on perceptions of meaning and error in Rabelais’s work.

Text plan and argumentative orientation in the opinion article genre of the selection process of a Federal Institute

The main objective of this work is to analyze the opinion article genre produced in the selection process of a Federal Institute. Surely, when analyzing the examples of these textual productions with a focus on argumentative orientation, the research allows us to weave reflections on writing in Basic Education. To do so, we focus on studies that deal with textual, linguistic and enunciative aspects of argumentation, anchored, above all, on Textual Analysis of Discourses, bearing in mind theoretical assumptions concerning the text plan and linguistic marks, important aspects in understanding of written production. Methodologically, the research has a qualitative approach, and the corpus consists of a prototypical composition of the selection exam. The results confirm the importance of the teaching process and the school as spaces for the development of argumentative action in the most varied discursive practices. Regarding the text plan, we observed the influence of the ENEM writing, mainly, in the conclusion of the analyzed text, considering that the strategy is the inclusion of the thesis resumption and the intervention proposals, in general.

The Transgression List in Šurpu Tablet IV and Its Sordid Moral Implications

Abstract Modern scholarship has become more attentive to the interrelation between performative and scholastic factors in the production of ancient Near Eastern ritual texts. This article aims to shed light on the compositional processes responsible for the integration of a list of transgressions into Šurpu Tablet 4. This analysis is facilitated by the identification of a close parallel from the Namerimburruda tradition. The comparison of these texts illuminates the subtle manner by which scribe responsible for Šurpu IV appropriated earlier materials to fit the theological and rhetorical aims of the new composition. This focused case study can serve as a point of departure for further research on the flexible roles of interpolated sin lists in ancient Near Eastern literature.