Gender and genre : a case study of a girl and a boy learning to write

This study addresses questions of gender and genre in early writing by drawing on systemic linguistic theory, It is a longitudinal case study that compares the writing development of two children, a boy and a girl/ who learned to write in classrooms that adopted an approach to writing known in Australia as 'process writing1, The children's written texts were analysed using the systemic functional grammar as developed by MAK, Hallidey and the models of genre and register as proposed by J,R, Martin. The children were followed for the first two and a half years of their schooling, from the first day of kindergarten to the middle of grade two. They were observed weekly during the daily ‘writing time’ and all texts were collected. Although the children were ostensibly 'free’ to determine both the writing topics and text types they produced, systemic analysis revealed that: 1) the majority of texts written were of one genre, the Observation genre, in which the children reconstructed their personal experience with family and friends and offered an evaluation of it. 2) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre, such that the boy reconstructed experience in terms of the male cultural stereotype of being an active participant in the world, while the girl reconstructed experience in terms of the female stereotype of being a more passive observer of experience. It is the strength of systemic linguistic analysis that it revealed how the choices the children made in language were constrained by a number of social and cultural contexts, including: a) the teacher's theoretical orientation to literacy; b) the models of spoken and written language available to the children; and c) the ideology of gender in the culture. In particular, the analysis made visible how children appropriate the meanings of their culture and socialise themselves into gender roles by constructing the ideology of gender in their writing. The study contributes to an understanding of genres by offering a revised description of the Observation genre, which derives from the Observation Comment genre originally identified by Martin and Rothery (1981). It also raises a number of implications for teacher training and classroom practice, including the need for: 1) increased teacher consciousness about gender and genre, especially an understanding that choices in language are socially constructed 2) a critical reassessment of the notion of 'free topic choice’ promoted by 'process writing' pedagogy, a practice which may limit choice and tacitly support the gender status quo.

Ontology-based automated support for goal–use case model analysis

Combining goal-oriented and use case modeling has been proven to be an effective method in requirements elicitation and elaboration. To ensure the quality of such modeled artifacts, a detailed model analysis needs to be performed. However, current requirements engineering approaches generally lack reliable support for automated analysis of consistency, correctness and completeness (3Cs problems) between and within goal models and use case models. In this paper, we present a goal–use case integration framework with tool support to automatically identify such 3Cs problems. Our new framework relies on the use of ontologies of domain knowledge and semantics and our goal–use case integration meta-model. Moreover, functional grammar is employed to enable the semiautomated transformation of natural language specifications into Manchester OWL Syntax for automated reasoning. The evaluation of our tool support shows that for representative example requirements, our approach achieves over 85 % soundness and completeness rates and detects more problems than the benchmark applications.