Understanding how wikis are used to support collaborative learning is an important concern for researchers and teachers. Adopting a discourse analytic approach, this paper attempts to understand the teaching processes when a wiki is embedded in a science project in primary education to foster collaborative learning. Through studying interaction between the teacher and students, our findings ide...

Medical discourse is replete with the language of war and such phrases as ”the war on cancer,” ”magic bullets,” “silver bullets,” “the therapeutic armamentarium,” “agents of disease,” “the body’s defences,” and “doctor’s orders” are deeply engrained in our medical rhetoric. The mindset engendered by this discourse of war renders the patient as a battlefield upon which the doctor-combatant defea...

We introduce a model of coherence which captures the intentional discourse structure in text. Our work is based on the hypothesis that syntax provides a proxy for the communicative goal of a sentence and therefore the sequence of sentences in a coherent discourse should exhibit detectable structural patterns. Results show that our method has high discriminating power for separating out coherent...

Abst rac t . Function-described graphs (FDGs) have been introduced very recently as a representation of an ensemble of attributed relational graphs (ARGs) for structural pattern recogrfition [1, 2]. In this paper, the relationship between FDGs and Random Graphs [3] is analysed and the synthesis process of FDGs is studied, whereas the matching process between FDGs and ARGs is discussed elsewhere...

This article examines (1) the role of scaffolding and (2) patterns that emerged in L2 learners’ dialogic reflections on their spoken performances. Dialogic reflection has recently become a vital concept teacher development studies (Mann & Walsh, 2017), however, learner empowerment not been investigated. In this study, term “dialogic reflection” is used to define 24 tertiary level perfor...

The earliest work on automatic detection of implicit discourse relations relied on lexical features. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that syntactic features are superior to lexical features for the task. In this paper we re-examine the two classes of state of the art representations: syntactic production rules and word pair features. In particular, we focus on the need to reduce sp...

This study examines the constituencies, patterns of interaction, and ideologies in three online fora created to discuss the events of September 11th, 2001. Drawing on comparative case studies, the research explores the frames and discursive styles used by Brazilian, French, and American participants to articulate their views about this polarizing topic. The research identifies commonalities and...