As a way of tracking popular framing of CMC, this article critically reviews an international corpus of 101 print-media accounts (from 2001 to 2005) of language-use in technologies such as instant messaging and text messaging. From the combined perspective of folk linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this type of metadiscourse (i.e., discourse about discourse) reveals the conceptual and...

Over the past two decades, comparative linguistic anthropological research has disclosed the significance of metadiscourse and metasignaling for the establishment, maintenance, and transformation of social relations. One type of metasignal-signal relationship has, because of its role in producing sociability, come to seem especially interesting with regard to the evolutionary origins of human l...

A full understanding of text is out of reach of current human language technology. However, a shallow Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach can be used to provide automated help in the assessment of essays: our approach uses genre, cue phrases and a set of patterns. Cue phrases, with their associated semantics, are used in conjunction with patterns to identify categories of argumentation p...

Portfolio assessment as one of the alternatives to testing is defined as the systematic collection of student work measured against predetermined scoring criteria. This paper aimed to investigate the effect of portfolio assessment in the oral performance of EFL learners in an attempt to examine its impact on their metadiscourse awareness. To determine the impact of portfolio assessment on the o...

This study examined the effect of the ZPD-based discourse scaffolding on EFL learners' co-construction of L2 metadiscourse performing collaborative writing tasks and explored the discourse scaffolding dynamics. The participants were 160 EFL students that were assigned to four different treatment conditions: (i) formal teaching, (ii) input enhancement, (iii) non-ZPD interaction, and (iv) ZPD-bas...

This study examines a corpus of conversations of Turkish preschool-age children with adults, with the goal of analyzing 2 types of extended discourse structures (i.e., lists and narratives). Lists and narratives are compared with respect to (a) their internal structures, and (b) their social functions in the participants’ daily interactions. The analyses suggest that although lists and narrativ...