1,721,000 research outputs found
A Corpus-based Approach to the Analysis of the Video Abstract Genre: A Phase-based Model
Full text linkAcademics constantly strive to gain greater visibility for their research, in particular through digital platforms that allow their research to be communicated to a wider public. Alongside old and well-established academic genres (e.g. the Research Article, the Abstract, and the Conference Presentation), new genres have emerged including the Blog, the TED Talk Lecture, and the Video Abstract. While the first two of these genres have received considerable attention in the discourse analysis community, research into the Video Abstract genre has only recently been undertaken despite the fact that scientific publishers (e.g. Taylor & Francis, Elsevier and SAGE) urge authors to present their articles in this way in order to enhance article visibility and improve the chances of an article being cited. The present study, grounded in ESP genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, investigates the strategies used in video abstracts by researchers to share their research using a small corpus of video abstracts taken from international journals of three different academic fields, namely Medicine, Biology, and Chemistry. In particular, the study attempts to understand the changes brought about by the shift from the written to the video channel of communication vis-à-vis the dissemination of research findings
Access to Discourse in English through Text Analysis. A Preparatory Guide for Undergraduate Students.
No full textThis book explores different approaches to the investigation of discourse, particularly narrative and scientific discourse. Besides presenting approaches from different scholarly traditions, the book provides many examples of the way in which they can be applied to authentic contemporary texts, such as blogs, printed cartoons and TV stories for children, as well as more traditional ones, including recipes, fables, and research articles. The book is intended for both classroom and individual use. Each chapter contains an activity section which will help readers revise the chapter’s key topics through text analysis and which also suggests what project work might be undertaken
Medical video abstracts and their subgenres: a phase-based approach to the detection of generic structure patterns
No full textIn recent years, digital platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and ResearchGate have broadened the range of genres used in specialised knowledge dissemination. This paper focuses on the Video Abstract (VA), a four-to-five-minute presentation of what lies behind the production of a specific research article (RA). This emergent genre transcends the confines of the RA allowing researchers to reinterpret their research making use of multiple information flows thanks to the meaning-making affordances created by the videotrack, the soundtrack and, above all, their simultaneous interplay. The extent to which researchers make full use of these affordances is examined in relation to the generic structure of a small specialised video corpus of medical VAs published in ten international journals. The study shows that the VA tends to replicate the generic structure typical of the RA but does so by using different subgenres which address a wider audience than that of the RA
Exploring collaborative writing in wikis: a genre-based approach
Full text linkWhile CALL research into collaborative writing in the L2 using wikis has mainly focused on the texts written by learners in terms of their grammatical accuracy (e.g. Mak & Coniam, 2008; Lee, 2010), the purpose of the present study is to draw attention to these texts as instances of a given genre. It reports on a small-scale experiment investigating a collaborative writing assignment using wikis focusing on the narrative genre. Specifically, it explores the extent to which first-year students in the Degree Course in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) used wikis to include hypermedia objects such as audios, videos, images and hyperlinks when engaging with this genre online. The study draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) theory and its extensive research into genre analysis, in particular Hasan’s (1984) Generic Structure Potential (henceforth, GSP) and its application to nursery tales
Multimodal Text Analysis and English Language Teaching
No full textCorpora of spoken texts are commonly investigated by applying approaches borrowed from the investigation of corpora of written texts, partly due to the lack of adequate concordancing software tools. This common practice has somewhat limited the potential spoken texts bring to the study of oral discourse. Based on the theoretical and technical innovations which have taken place in the field of multimodal corpus linguistics (Baldry and Thibault, 2001; 2006a; 2006b; forthcoming), especially within the MCA project (Baldry, 2007b; 2008a; Baldry and Thibault, 2008), this thesis presents an alternative method for analysing spoken corpora for language functions and notions (van Ek and Trim, 1998a; 1998b; 2001). In particular, it applies the scalar-level approach developed within multimodal corpus linguistics to a corpus of 52 texts, carefully selected from the Padova Multimedia English Corpus (Ackerley and Coccetta, 2007a; 2007b), and demon-strates how this approach to text analysis facilitates the study of language functions and notions vis-à-vis their multimodal co-text (Baldry, 2008a). To illustrate this, the online multimodal concordancer MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring System) (Baldry, 2005; Baldry and Beltrami, 2005) was used to create, annotate and concordance the corpus in terms of functions and notions, as well as non-verbal features including gestures, dynamics and gaze. The findings of this research have been applied to English language teaching and learning by creating interactive activities illustrating the way in which corpora of spoken texts and multimodal concordancing techniques can be used by language learners and teaching material developers alike. The activities have been included in the online English course Le@rning Links (Ackerley, 2004; Ackerley and Cloke, 2005; Ackerley, Cloke and Mazurelle, 2006; Ackerley and Cloke, 2006; Ackerley and Coccetta, in press)
Old wine in new bottles. The case of the adjacency-pair framework revisited
Full text linkThis study reports on the preliminary stages of a project concerned with presenting a systematic framework for annotating and analysing film dialogue which blends corpus annotation with adjacency pair theory (Schegloff, Sacks 1973). The adjacency pair model, which consists of closed sets of pairs, is applied to a searchable online corpus in which all the episodes of the U.S. medical drama House M.D. are transcribed and divided into scenes, the basic search unit. The article describes the modifications and adjustments to the original adjacency-pair model in order to accommodate the highly specialized dialogue of medical settings not envisaged by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and the different interpersonal relationships between the characters, as well as the complex intersemiotic interactions characterizing TV film series
Developing university students’ multimodal communicative competence: Field research into multimodal text studies in English
No full textReconsideration of Hymes' concept of communicative competence within a multimodal perspective implies that learners of a foreign language should develop a metalanguage that enables them to talk about how semiotic resources are co-deployed in specific texts and to relate their insights to these texts' contexts of situation and culture. This article reports on how research into multimodality, developed within Halliday's systemic functional framework, has been integrated into a university syllabus for text studies in English through a specific course designed to achieve this goal. In other words, students engaged in text analysis activities using analytical tools that guided them in the exploration of the complex array of semiotic resources that contribute to a text's meaning, but within a wider-ranging syllabus whose ultimate goal is to promote overall communicative competence. The article describes instruments for multimodal text analysis and sample materials created for the course. It then draws conclusions about the feasibility and benefits of an approach to text studies in English that fosters multimodal communicative competence, which naturally has an important metacommunicative component as it encourages reflection on texts
First Steps towards Multimodal Functional Concordancing
No full textThe development of the MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring System, Baldry 2005, Baldry/Beltrami 2005) online corpus construction and concordancing system, capable of investigating a variety of multimodal texts without denuding them of their distinguishing features, has led to extensive research on the integration of multimodal corpora, and multimodal concordancing in particular, into university syllabuses in the past few years (Baldry et al. 2005, Grunther 2005, Ackerley/Coccetta 2007b, Baldry 2007, in press, Grunther 2007, Coccetta in press, Dalziel/Metelli in press). This article describes a pilot project set up at the University of Padua (Coccetta 2004) which through the use of the MCA system made a small corpus of film texts, the English Language Learning Oriented (ELLO) film corpus, more easily accessible to language learners and allowed them to investigate: a) how a specific language function (van Ek/Trim 1998a, 1998b, 2001) is enacted by a set of different language forms and b) the ways in which the various manifestations of this function perform in relation to the multimodal co-text in which they are produced. In so doing, it illustrates some of the benefits this approach brings to language learning and gives examples of teaching materials based on the ELLO film corpus which are designed to promote language learners’ communicative competence
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