Towards criterion validity in classroom language analysis: methodological constraints of metadiscourse and inter-rater agreement

This paper reports on a process to validate a revised version of a system for coding classroom discourse in foreign language lessons, a context in which the dual role of language (as content and means of communication) and the speakers' specific pedagogical aims lead to a certain degree of ambiguity in language analysis. The language used by teachers and students has been extensively studied, and a framework of concepts concerning classroom discourse well-established. Models for coding classroom language need, however, to be revised when they are applied to specific research contexts. The application and revision of an initial framework can lead to the development of earlier models, and to the re-definition of previously established categories of analysis that have to be validated. The procedures followed to validate a coding system are related here as guidelines for conducting research under similar circumstances. The advantages of using instruments that incorporate two types of data, that is, quantitative measures and qualitative information from raters' metadiscourse, are discussed, and it is suggested that such procedure can contribute to the process of validation itself, towards attaining reliability of research results, as well as indicate some constraints of the adopted research methodology.

The Acting in Group of Teachers as Possibility of Resignification of the Interpretation about the Writing Language

Front of the possibility of acting with the teachers who teach in schools of Early Childhood Education for children aged six years, about the re-siginification of the understanding of writing language and of the importance of the child in this age group establish a positive relationship with this mode of language, was developed in 2011, a project linked to the Teaching of UNESP titled “Depathologization learning of the writing and inclusive education: reflections and actions of the teacher of Early Childhood Education”. This project aims to identification of the actions, in the classroom, of the patologization and subsequent implementation of actions depathologization writing by teachers’ actions, considering the increasingly early systematization of formal education of this kind of language in kindergarten. To this end, procedures that characterize the collaborative methodology are adopted. Throughout the methodological course, the engagement of the teachers, of the coordination and of the direction was valued, which seemed to favor both the formation, as the maintenance of the group, were very important aspects to ensure the interaction between its members and the common interest in the reflection about the topic in question. This paper focuses attention on whether thematic axes highlight during the initial survey of the expectations of teachers subsequently addressed in theoretical and reflective meetings leading up to identification of actions the patologization and/or of the proposition of the actions despatologizadoras of the learning of the writing, and in what refers to the way they are addressed.

A new aspect of sign and its implications for the Theory of Communication

Este artigo propõe que a semiótica peirceana pode oferecer bases tanto lógicas quanto epistemológicas para a busca de uma teoria geral da comunicação. No entanto, o desenvolvimento de uma teoria semiótica da comunicação depende, em primeiro lugar, de uma melhor compreensão dos aspectos formais do signo, tarefa atribuída por Peirce à gramática, o primeiro ramo de sua semiótica. Nós apresentamos uma análise das relações do signo, revelando um aspecto não trabalhado por Peirce, ampliando seu número para onze. Este novo aspecto é a relação triádica entre signo, objeto dinâmico e interpretante dinâmico (S-OD-ID). Nós defendemos que esta relação é essencial para a compreensão da comunicação como semiose, por dar conta da repetição ou redundância do signo comunicativo, quando se cria ou transmite informação. O artigo pretende dar um passo a mais na direção de uma teoria da comunicação verdadeiramente universal, através do vínculo entre a semiótica peirceana e a moderna filosofia da linguagem.

The place of (explicit) grammar within the methods and approaches of foreign language teaching: in the north, in the centre or on the margins?

This article analyzes the role that has been attributed to grammar throughout the history of foreign language teaching, with special emphasis on methods and approaches of the twentieth century. In order to support our argument, we discuss the notion of grammar by proposing a conceptual continuum that includes the main meanings of the term which are relevant to our research. We address as well the issue of "pedagogical grammar" and consider the position of grammar in the different approaches of the "era of the methods" and the current "post-method condition" in the field of language teaching and learning. The findings presented at the end of the text consist of recognizing the central role that grammar has played throughout the history of the methods and approaches, where grammar has always been present by the definition of the contents' progression. The rationale that we propose for this is the recognition of the fact that the dissociation between what is said and how it is said can not be more than theoretical and, thus, artificial.

The language of action. How language translates the dynamics of our actions.

The general aim of the thesis was to investigate how and to what extent the characteristics of action organization are reflected in language, and how they influence language processing and understanding. Even though a huge amount of research has been devoted to the study of the motor effects of language, this issue is very debated in literature. Namely, the majority of the studies have focused on low-level motor effects such as effector-relatedness of action, whereas only a few studies have started to systematically investigate how specific aspects of action organization are encoded and reflected in language. After a review of previous studies on the relationship between language comprehension and action (chapter 1) and a critical discussion of some of them (chapter 2), the thesis is composed by three experimental chapters, each devoted to a specific aspect of action organization. Chapter 3 presents a study designed with the aim to disentangle the effective time course of the involvement of the motor system during language processing. Three kinematics experiments were designed in order to determine whether and, at which stage of motor planning and execution effector-related action verbs influence actions executed with either the same or a different effector. Results demonstrate that the goal of an action can be linguistically re-activated, producing a modulation of the motor response. In chapter 4, a second study investigates the interplay between the role of motor perspective (agent) and the organization of action in motor chains. More specifically, this kinematics study aims at deepening how goal can be translated in language, using as stimuli simple sentences composed by a pronoun (I, You, He/She) and a verb. Results showed that the perspective activated by the pronoun You reflects the motor pattern of the “agent” combined with the chain structure of the verb. These data confirm an early involvement of the motor system in language processing, suggesting that it is specifically modulated by the activation of the agent’s perspective. In chapter 5, the issue of perspective is specifically investigated, focusing on its role in language comprehension. In particular, this study aimed at determining how a specific perspective (induced for example by a personal pronoun) modulates motor behaviour during and after language processing. A classical compatibility effect (the Action-sentence compatibility effect) has been used to this aim. In three behavioural experiments the authors investigated how the ACE is modulated by taking first or third person perspective. Results from these experiments showed that the ACE effect occurs only when a first-person perspective is activated by the sentences used as stimuli. Overall, the data from this thesis contributed to disentangle several aspects of how action organization is translated in language, and then reactivated during language processing. This constitutes a new contribution to the field, adding lacking information on how specific aspects such as goal and perspective are linguistically described. In addition, these studies offer a new point of view to understand the functional implications of the involvement of the motor system during language comprehension, specifically from the point of view of our social interactions.

Investigating the role of Copy Number Variants in Specific Language Impairment and identification of new candidate genes

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder defined as an unexpected failure to develop normal language abilities for no obvious reason. Copy number variants (CNVs) are an important source of variation in the susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disorders. Therefore, a CNV study within SLI families was performed to investigate the role of structural variants in SLI. Among the identified CNVs, we focused on CNVs on chromosome 15q11-q13, recurrently observed in neuropsychiatric conditions, and a homozygous exonic microdeletion in ZNF277. Since this microdeletion falls within the AUTS1 locus, a region linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD), we investigated a potential role of ZNF277 in SLI and ASD. Frequency data and expression analysis of the ZNF277 microdeletion suggested that this variant may contribute to the risk of language impairments in a complex manner, that is independent of the autism risk previously described in this region. Moreover, we identified an affected individual with a dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) deficiency, caused by compound heterozygosity of two deleterious variants in the gene DPYD. Since DPYD represents a good candidate gene for both SLI and ASD, we investigated its involvement in the susceptibility to these two disorders, focusing on the splicing variant rs3918290, the most common mutation in the DPD deficiency. We observed a higher frequency of rs3918290 in SLI cases (1.2%), compared to controls (~0.6%), while no difference was observed in a large ASD cohort. DPYD mutation screening in 4 SLI and 7 ASD families carrying the splicing variant identified six known missense changes and a novel variant in the promoter region. These data suggest that the combined effect of the mutations identified in affected individuals may lead to an altered DPD activity and that rare variants in DPYD might contribute to a minority of cases, in conjunction with other genetic or non-genetic factors.

Córdoban Discourses: A Drama of Interreligious Dialogue

SETTING: Cordoba, Spain, 1135 CE, 29th year of the reign of ‘Ali “amir al-muslimin,” second king of the Berber Almoravid dynasty, rulers of Moorish Spain from 1071 to 1147. Cordoba, the capital of Andalus and the center of the Almoravid holdings in Spain, is a bustling cosmopolitan center, a crossroads for Europe and the Middle East, and the meeting-point of three religious traditions. Most significantly, Cordoba at this time is the hub of European intellectual activity. From the square—itself impressively large and surrounded by a massive collonade, the regularity and ordered beauty of which typifies the Moorish taste for symmetry (so beloved of M.C. Escher)—can be seen the huge Cordoban mosque, erected in the 8th-century by Khalif Abd-er-Rahman I to the glory of Allah, oft forgiving, most merciful. It is the second largest building in Islam, and the bastion of the still entrenched but soon to fade Muslim presence in western Europe. SCENE: Three figures sit upon stone benches beneath the westernmost colonnade of the Cordoban mosque, involved in an animated, though friendly discussion on matters of faith and reason, knowledge and God, language and logic. The host is none other than Jehudah Halevi, and his esteemed guests Master Peter Abelard and the venerable Råmånuja, whose obviously advanced age belies his youthful voice, gleaming eye, quick hands, and general exuberance. It is autumn, early evening…

Beyond Belief: Japanese Approaches to the Meaning of Religion

For several centuries, Japanese scholars have argued that their nation’s culture—including its language, religion and ways of thinking—is somehow unique. The darker side of this rhetoric, sometimes known by the English term “Japanism” (nihon-jinron), played no small role in the nationalist fervor of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While much of the so-called “ideology of Japanese uniqueness” can be dismissed, in terms of the Japanese approach to “religion,” there may be something to it. This paper highlights some distinctive—if not entirely unique—features of the way religion has been categorized and understood in Japanese tradition, contrasting these with Western (i.e., Abrahamic), and to a lesser extent Indian and Chinese understandings. Particular attention is given to the priority of praxis over belief in the Japanese religious context. Des siècles durant, des chercheurs japonais ont soutenu que leur culture – soit leur langue, leur religion et leurs façons de penser – était en quelque sorte unique. Or, sous son jour le plus sombre, cette rhétorique, parfois désignée du terme de « japonisme » (nihon-jinron), ne fut pas sans jouer un rôle déterminant dans la montée de la ferveur nationaliste à la fin du XIXe siècle, ainsi qu’au début du XXe siècle. Bien que l’on puisse discréditer pour l’essentiel cette soi-disant « idéologie de l’unicité japonaise », la conception nippone de la « religion » constitue, quant à elle, un objet d’analyse des plus utiles et pertinents. Cet article met en évidence quelques caractéristiques, sinon uniques du moins distinctives, de la manière dont la religion a été élaborée et comprise au sein de la tradition japonaise, pour ensuite les constrater avec les conceptions occidentale (abrahamique) et, dans une moindre mesure, indienne et chinoise. Une attention toute particulière est ici accordée à la praxis plutôt qu’à la croyance dans le contexte religieux japonais.

Language, Thought, Relativism, Nationalism: An Interdisciplinary Study

Ms. Neumer and her team began their project with a critical analysis of the various theories of the relationship between language and thought. Their aim was to develop a theoretical position concerning the issue of universalism versus relativism. This issue is closely bound up with one of the main questions of the history of East and Central Europe, namely, the question of the nation, and the possibility of mutual understanding between national cultures. The team attempted to avoid falling into an all-too-common trap, that of allowing a political perspective to obscure the central theoretical issues. In a project whose outcome totalled over 1000 pages of manuscript in German, English and Hungarian, they touched on cognitive psychological, linguistic, semiotic, socio-semiotic, and other such themes. Their experience has convinced them of the fruitful heuristic possibilities of the interaction of scientific and philosophical approaches in this area of research. A preliminary analysis of the history of philosophy and inquiries into conceptual fields revealed that, in order to reach strong relativist conclusions concerning the unity of thought and language, it is required to take as a point of departure the widest possible sense of these concepts. But in fact, such an option ends up refuting itself: pursuing the premises to their final conclusion one arrives at the restriction of relativism. The team outlined a theory of the understanding of the Other which, borrowing from analytical as well as continental-hermeneutic trends, does not underestimate, on the one hand, the difficulties of understanding between various forms of life, cultures, and languages, but, on the other hand, can provide an alternative solution to the theory of incommensurabiltiy. Within the boundary of this problematic the team studied the problems of translatability, the acquisition of the mother and foreign languages, and natural or cultural determinacy of kind terms. The team regards its most original contribution to be the association of the problem of relativism-universalism and the language-thought relation with contemporary investigations into the question of orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Their conclusion was that, although certain connections can be revealed both between forms of communication and the thesis of the unity of language and thought, and between periods in the history of communication and the predominance of relativistic or universalistic tendencies, forms of communication do not unequivocally determine the answers to these questions.

Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

Review of "Lingua e diritto. Livelli di analisi"

The book Lingua e diritto: Livelli di analisi brings together contributions by scholars from different fields: anthropology, theory and philosophy of law, comparative law, European law, translation, discourse analysis, pragmatics, morpho-syntax and cognitive linguistics. Contributions deal with a number of issues situated at the interface between language and law: questions of meaning and the interpretation of legal texts, the nature of legal interpretation, problems of ambiguity and vagueness in legal texts, the characteristics of legal language, legal terminology and the multilingualism of European law. As a whole, the book provides insights into a number of different topics and perspectives situated at the interface between language and law. It is of interest both to lawyers and linguists as a valuable and very welcome contribution to the field of legal linguistics.

XSAMPL3D: An Action Description Language for the Animation of Virtual Characters

In this paper we present XSAMPL3D, a novel language for the high-level representation of actions performed on objects by (virtual) humans. XSAMPL3D was designed to serve as action representation language in an imitation-based approach to character animation: First, a human demonstrates a sequence of object manipulations in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. From this demonstration, an XSAMPL3D description is automatically derived that represents the actions in terms of high-level action types and involved objects. The XSAMPL3D action description can then be used for the synthesis of animations where virtual humans of different body sizes and proportions reproduce the demonstrated action. Actions are encoded in a compact and human-readable XML-format. Thus, XSAMPL3D describtions are also amenable to manual authoring, e.g. for rapid prototyping of animations when no immersive VR environment is at the animator's disposal. However, when XSAMPL3D descriptions are derived from VR interactions, they can accomodate many details of the demonstrated action, such as motion trajectiories,hand shapes and other hand-object relations during grasping. Such detail would be hard to specify with manual motion authoring techniques only. Through the inclusion of language features that allow the representation of all relevant aspects of demonstrated object manipulations, XSAMPL3D is a suitable action representation language for the imitation-based approach to character animation.

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy investigations of functionally defined language areas in schizophrenia patients with and without auditory hallucinations

Background: Cerebral dysfunction occurring in mental disorders can show metabolic disturbances which are limited to circumscribed brain areas. Auditory hallucinations have been shown to be related to defined cortical areas linked to specific language functions. Here, we investigated if the study of metabolic changes in auditory hallucinations requires a functional rather than an anatomical definition of their location and size to allow a reliable investigation by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Methods: Schizophrenia patients with (AH; n = 12) and without hallucinations (NH; n = 8) and healthy controls (HC; n = 11) underwent a verbal fluency task in functional MRI (fMRI) to functionally define Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Left and right Heschl's gyri were defined anatomically. Results: The mean distances in native space between the fMRI-defined regions and a corresponding anatomically defined area were 12.4 ± 6.1 mm (range: 2.7–36.1 mm) for Broca's area and 16.8 ± 6.2 mm (range: 4.5–26.4 mm) for Wernicke's area, respectively. Hence, the spatial variance was of similar extent as the size of the investigated regions. Splitting the investigations into a single voxel examination in the frontal brain and a spectroscopic imaging part for the more homogeneous field areas led to good spectral quality for almost all spectra. In Broca's area, there was a significant group effect (p = 0.03) with lower levels of N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA) in NH compared to HC (p = 0.02). There were positive associations of NAA levels in the left Heschl's gyrus with total (p = 0.03) and negative (p = 0.006) PANSS scores. In Broca's area, there was a negative association of myo-inositol levels with total PANSS scores (p = 0.008). Conclusion: This study supports the neurodegenerative hypothesis of schizophrenia only in a frontal region whereas the results obtained from temporal regions are in contrast to the majority of previous studies. Future research should test the hypothesis raised by this study that a functional definition of language regions is needed if neurochemical imbalances are expected to be restricted to functional foci.

Jazz drummers recruit language-specific areas for the processing of rhythmic structure

Rhythm is a central characteristic of music and speech, the most important domains of human communication using acoustic signals. Here, we investigated how rhythmical patterns in music are processed in the human brain, and, in addition, evaluated the impact of musical training on rhythm processing. Using fMRI, we found that deviations from a rule-based regular rhythmic structure activated the left planum temporale together with Broca's area and its right-hemispheric homolog across subjects, that is, a network also crucially involved in the processing of harmonic structure in music and the syntactic analysis of language. Comparing the BOLD responses to rhythmic variations between professional jazz drummers and musical laypersons, we found that only highly trained rhythmic experts show additional activity in left-hemispheric supramarginal gyrus, a higher-order region involved in processing of linguistic syntax. This suggests an additional functional recruitment of brain areas usually dedicated to complex linguistic syntax processing for the analysis of rhythmical patterns only in professional jazz drummers, who are especially trained to use rhythmical cues for communication.

Language ideologies: the formation and legitimisation of New Zealand English

New Zealand English first emerged at the beginning of the 19th century as a result of the dialect contact of British (51%), Scottish (27.3%) and Irish (22%) migrants (Hay and Gordon 2008:6). This variety has subsequently developed into an autonomous and legitimised national variety and enjoys a distinct socio-political status, recognition and codification. In fact, a number of dictionaries of New Zealand English have been published1 and the variety is routinely used as the official medium on TV, radio and other media. This however, has not always been the case, as for long only British standard norms were deemed suitable for media broadcasting. While there is some work already on lay commentary about New Zealand English (see for example Gordon 1983, 1994; Hundt 1998), there is much more to be done especially concerning more recent periods of the history of this variety and the ideologies underlying its development and legitimisation. Consequently, the current project aims at investigating the metalinguistic discourses during the period of transition from a British norm to a New Zealand norm in the media context, this will be done by focusing on debates about language in light of the advent of radio and television. The main purpose of this investigation is thus to examine the (language) ideologies that have shaped and underlain these discourses (e.g. discussions about the appropriateness of New Zealand English vis à vis external, British models of language) and their related practices in these media (e.g. broadcasting norms). The sociolinguistic and pragmatic effects of these ideologies will also be taken into account. Furthermore, a comparison will be carried out, at a later stage in the project, between New Zealand English and a more problematic and less legitimised variety: Estuary English. Despite plenty of evidence of media and other public discourses on Estuary English, in fact, there has been very little metalinguistic analysis of this evidence, nor examinations of the underlying ideologies in these discourses. The comparison will seek to discover whether similar themes emerge in the ideologies played out in publish discourses about these varieties, themes which serve to legitimise one variety, whilst denying such legitimacy to the other.