This article discusses strategies to express intimacy with and exaltation of the addressee ― affective stances morphologically incompatible in the Japanese honorific system, wherein addressees are marked as either psychologically distant and exalted, honored, shown respect or intimate and not exalted. To resolve this dilemma, speakers commonly embed soliloquy in dialogic discourse, a strategy d...

Much of the literature concerning participant relationships in academic writing has discussed features that project the stance, identity, or credibility of the writer, rather than examining how writers engage with readers. In contrast, this article focuses on strategies that presuppose the active role of addressees, examining six key ways that writers seek explicitly to establish the presence o...

Social constructivist approaches to learning, based on the work of Vygotsky and others, are gaining momentum in the field of second and foreign language learning. However, social constructivist rhetoric often seems remote and even irrelevant to practicing teachers. In this paper, we will briefly explain the constructivist approach to teaching reading to students of English as a foreign language...

This paper proposes a set of methods and a framework for evaluating, modeling, and predicting group interactions in computer-mediated communication. The method of sequential analysis is described along with specific software tools and techniques to facilitate the analysis of message– response sequences. In addition, the Dialogic Theory and its assumptions are presented to establish a theoretica...

This paper describes the development of CATS or Cognitive Affordances of Technologies Scale, a tool that can aid faculty, instructional designers, and e-learning specialists in identifying and leveraging the cognitive affordances of a learning technology. CATS includes seven multi-disciplinary research supported categories of cognitive affordances that can be harnessed to enrich student learnin...

Anaphora resolution for dialogues is a difficult problem because of the several kinds of complex anaphoric references generally present in dialogic discourses. It is nevertheless a critical first step in the processing of any such discourse. In this paper, we describe a system for anaphora resolution in multi-person dialogues. This system aims to bring together a wide array syntactic, semantic ...

More and more of the information on the web is dialogic, from Facebook newsfeeds, to forum conversations, to comment threads on news articles. In contrast to traditional, monologic resources such as news, highly social dialogue is very frequent in social media, as illustrated in the snippets in Fig. 1 from the publicly available Internet Argument Corpus (IAC) (Walker et al., 2012). Utterances a...

This paper reports on an exploratory study that explores the instructional patterns within English as a Foreign Language (EFL) secondary school classrooms in Syria. Recently, the Syrian Ministry of Education (MoE) has introduced a new national curriculum which recommends a shift in EFL teachers’ instructional practices. Despite this costly innovation, there has been no attempt to check whether ...

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the study of interactional metadiscourse markers in different contexts. However, not much research has been conducted about the discourse of journal author guidelines, especially the use of meta-discourse markers in this genre. Therefore, this corpus-based study had three main aims: 1) to delve deep into the types, frequencies and f...

This paper reviews the literature linking ICT to teaching thinking skills and advocates a new dialogic framework which has implications for practice. The main conceptualisations of the relationship between ICT and teaching thinking are described as, the computer as tutor, the computer as cognitive tool and the computer as support for collaborative learning. The computer supported collaborative ...