1,720,976 research outputs found
Problem Solving in the COVID-19 ERT University Classroom
No full textThis paper deals with pragmatic aspects of Emergency Remote Teaching adopted in an academic setting as a COVID-19 containment strategy. We consider an intensive introductory course in English Language and Linguistics
taught at the University of Bologna by the author of this study (30 academic hours). Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, the first half of the course was taught full distance, synchronically on Microsoft Teams, while the second part was administered live, with part of the audience present in the physical classroom, and the rest connected online from home. Lessons were videorecorded and transcribed using Microsoft Stream, and subsequently stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatised corpus in English. As the study is methodologically grounded in corpus pragmatics (Aijmer/Rühlemann 2015),
both corpus findings and videorecordings are analysed pragmatically for metacommunicative expressions (Bazzanella 2002, 2010), and metadiscursively for markers of interactivity (Hyland 2005: 49). The results
show that the root cause of most pragmatic accidents (as revealed, in corpus data, by the frequency of hesitations, apologies, and other expressions of uncertainty and doubt) is a contextual mismatch arising from the fact that the same lecture is administered simultaneously to students on campus and online. Despite some positives, e.g., more interactivity (Luporini 2020) in comparison with the fully in-person version of the course that was taught prepandemically (Fusari 2021), it is therefore suggested that hybrid teaching should be much more carefully planned if it is to continue after the pandemic
Culturemes in an Italian-English Bilingual Food Blog during COVID-19
No full textThis paper presents a parallel corpus study of culturemes in the Italian and English versions of the food blog "Juls’ Kitchen – Stories and Recipes from Tuscany" during COVID-19 total lockdown in Italy (9 March-18 May 2020) to ascertain how some culturemes may have shifted due to lifestyle changes originating from COVID-19 measures. Three categories of culturemes are analyzed: time-related, food-related and lockdown-related. The results show that lifestyle changes have affected not only the practice and narration of cooking but also such fundamental tenets of culture as time, in different ways in the Italian and English version of the blog
Investigating complex noun–noun modification in academic prose
No full textUnderstanding and using nominalized structures is a fundamental skill for advanced TESOL students, especially in academic settings. This lesson encourages students to experiment with the structure of the noun group in academic English with a special focus on its potential complexity (e.g. job satisfaction vs. community college faculty job satisfaction). This can be done by looking at how the noun group “can be expanded to a more or less indefinite extent” (Halliday, 1998, p. 196) by adding other nouns before (pre-modification) and after it (post-modification). Working with grammatical tags in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), students are encouraged to reason in terms of the mechanism whereby the idea expressed by a central noun can be specified and/or expanded
Language is purposeful. Some thoughts on teaching Systemic Functional Grammar
No full textThis volume is part of a Festschrift to celebrate the work of Donna R. Miller. The author is also one of the editors of this book. Her chapter suggests a reflection on the role of teaching grammar at university, with a specific focus on Systemic Functional Linguistics for non-native learners of English who aim to achieve a high level of proficiency in the English language. It is explicitly based on the guidance and inspiration Donna R. Miller gave her mentees and younger colleagues at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LILEC) of the University of Bologna. The chapter looks at the methodologies used to teach this subject at the LILEC Department, and on the advantages and disadvantages of teaching this grammatical formalism at BA level
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
“Yeah, you know, these are the miracles of technology.” Interactivity in the COVID-19 ERT university classroom
Full text linkCOVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT, Karakaya, 2020) has been described as “an unprecedented challenge in university teaching” (Nuere & de Miguel, 2020), requiring lecturers to adapt or devise entirely new syllabi and testing methods in a very short period of time (Bryson & Andres, 2020; Major, 2020). This study investigates a relatively unexplored area of ERT, i.e. interactivity in the online and blended academic classroom, with specific reference to (1) positive and corrective feedback by the teacher; (2) student live feedback through open microphone; (3) face-saving and other repair strategies. We consider an intensive introductory course of English Language and Linguistics taught at the University of Bologna (Italy) by the author of this study, for a total of 30 hours. Following university policy and Italian special COVID-19 laws, 50% of the course was taught full-distance on Microsoft Teams, while 50% was administered “live,” with part of the audience connected online from home. Lessons were recorded, transcribed, and stored on the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to create a fully POS-tagged and lemmatized corpus in English. The results show that the level of interactivity is higher than it was the case prepandemically (Luporini, 2020), as students take and keep the floor on average 11.3 times for each 90 minutes lecture. Feedback is more positive than corrective, and repair strategies hinge on humour, sometimes eliciting spontaneous laughter in the “live” classroom. Although this may leave the analyst under the impression that students enjoyed this learning experience more than traditional ones, the data also show a high level of anxiety on the part of all participants, as testified by the remarkable frequency of hesitations,
apologies, weak modals and pragmatic accidents
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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