CMC

... This is shown as the following mark: ... Death is the only truth in our life. The body of your abbu [father] has disappeared but he will continue to be with us as a golden part of our memory and source of inspiration to be right when everything else seems wrong. Be his soul in peace. ...

South Africa’s educational landscape is scarred with economic and educational inequalities. South African tertiary education today has to deal with a variety of challenges including the lack of funding, both on the student’s side and on the side of the institution.  The most prominent challenge relevant to our research is the extensive lack of skills and knowledge of students when coming from secondary school where they are rarely exposed to cognitive skills. Our students struggle to understand the notion of a ‘concept’ or ‘metaphor’ in an artwork: that art is not just representative or aesthetic, but communicates a message, an idea, a criticism, or appreciation. This requires creative and critical thinking. We present a case study of a drawing and animation project that aimed to facilitate this. We argue that through the integration of art theory and drawing practice, students came to understand not only how to detect critical thinking by other artists, but how to implement concepts, metaphors, or symbols in their own work. Through this project we explored drawing
• as a bridge to close the gap between theory and practice,
• as a tool for creative and critical thinking, and
• as a means to introduce technology on a basic (low-cost) level.
We found that our integrated approach narrowed the theory/practice gap and enhanced creative and critical thinking, resulting in student work of greater conceptual quality.

Recent research suggests that as a social public problem, domestic violence is sustained in a number of social contexts that naturalize violence against women through gendered discourses and ideologies of male violence. This paper examines domestic violence vis-à-vis public participation in the media. In doing so, it seeks to explore the social public aspects of domestic violence and to investigate whether the gendered discourse of male violence is also sustained through the new electronic spaces of public participation. To this end, a corpus of unsolicited digital comments – a form of ‘citizen journalism’ – to a British online newspaper was compiled and analysed. This paper draws from research on gender, pragmatics and critical/computer-mediated discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that some citizen journalists resorted to abuse-sustaining discourses; these were challenged by others who questioned the gendered ideologies of male violence against women.

People often share emotions with others in order to manage
their emotional experiences. We investigate how social
media properties such as visibility and directedness affect
how people share emotions in Facebook and their
satisfaction after doing so. 141 participants rated 1,628 of
their own recent status updates, posts they made on others’
walls, and private messages they sent for intensity, valence,
personal relevance, and overall satisfaction they felt after
sharing each message. For network-visible channels—status
updates and posts on others’ walls—they also rated their
satisfaction with replies they received. People shared
differently between channels, with more intense and
negative emotions in private messages. People feel more
satisfied after sharing more positive emotions in all
channels and after sharing more personally relevant
emotions in network-visible channels. Finally, people’s
overall satisfaction after sharing emotions in networkvisible
channels is strongly tied to their reply satisfaction.
Quality of replies, not just quantity, matters, suggesting the
need for designs that help people receive valuable responses
to their shared emotions.

After the turn of the millennium, ways of creating new words which were considered rare(r) before became more common thanks to digital communication. Grammars in Hungarian language have not reflected yet to language changes, however, after the expansion of Facebook in Hungary, more and more people started to deal with this issue. In this paper, instead of the traditional approach to word-formation methods (main – rare), I suggest the introduction of a trichotomic model (common – „common-rare“ – rare).

One of the crucial parts of Indonesian language learning is the assessment. Assessment is the most important activity to measure the students’ ability and skill in a learning activity. The right assessment should be able to measure what should be measured so that the assessing activity can provide information about the achievement level of the learning activity. Therefore, an appropriate and feasible assessment tool is needed to measure the students’ ability and skill in Indonesian language learning.

"  Nous élaborons dans notre thèse un cadre analytique pour la
  description des pratiques communicationnelles en autant qu'elles
  sont médiatisées par un dispositif numérique. Nous nous sommes
  basé sur une théorie de la pragmatique textuelle telle qu'elle a
  été développée au cours du 20$^e$ siècle dans le cadre de plusieurs
  disciplines (philosophie du langage, linguistique, sociologie,
  ethnologie). Nous avons identifié le concept de texte comme une
  clé pour la compréhension de l'interaction entre les moyens et les
  modes de communication: un texte est un ensemble de signes structuré
  ayant une existence matérielle et une fonction sociale.  Un texte
  apparaissant sur l'interface d'un dispositif numérique a un statut
  spécifique qui dépend à la fois des propriétés matérielles des
  appareils qui constituent son support et des fonctions sociales
  qu'il remplit dans le contexte d'une configuration médiatique. La
  théorie que nous proposons dans notre thèse vise à élucider ce
  statut en décrivant les structures textuelles comme résultat de
  l'interaction entre les propriétés du support et les conditions du
  contexte.
 
  Dans un premier temps, nous avons identifié trois propriétés qui
  définissent le statut spécifique d'un signe dont le support est
  numérique: par rapport à la forme qui devient perceptible sur
  l'interface du dispositif, le signe est virtuel parce qu'il ne
  s'épuise pas dans son actualisation, multidimensionnel, parce
  qu'il est articulé selon des dimensions indépendantes des limites de
  l'espace-temps physique, et programmable, parce que son invocation
  est toujours gérée par un programme qui peut être configuré.
 
  Dans un deuxième temps, nous avons montré comment ces propriétés
  matérielles reconfigurent les structures textuelles: les rapports
  entre différentes parties du texte (intratexte) et les rapports du
  texte avec d'autres textes (intertexte) -- qui pour un document
  écrit sont implicites dans la typographie du texte -- peuvent être
  explicités grâce à l'ingénierie informatique qui les traduit en
  structures virtuelles, multidimensionnelles et programmables. Nous
  avons insisté sur l'importance du paratexte qui décrit l'interface
  par laquelle le texte devient disponible pour l'usager. Nous avons
  décrit en détail les figures que prend ce paratexte et les
  opérations qu'il rend possibles.
 
  Dans un troisième temps, nous avons montré les conséquences
  proprement pragmatiques du nouveau statut du texte numérique: le
  paratexte numérique permet de rendre explicites les différents
  facteurs pragmatiques qui sont implicites dans l'usage d'autres
  médias. Nous avons distingué cinq dimensions pragmatiques qui toutes
  sont régulées par le paratexte: le paratexte crée un espace-temps
  documentaire dans lequel les textes se déploient, signifie les
  institutions qui le contrôlent, ouvre une place pour les
  subjectivités de différents acteurs, permet de structurer leurs
  rapports. Il fait appel à de nouvelles compétences et permet
  l'intégration des informations inscrites dans le document dans des
  savoirs et des pouvoirs. C'est grâce à son paratexte qu'un texte
  devient document, c'est-à-dire l'objet d'une énonciation,
  produit, distribué et consommé grâce à l'infrastructure d'un
  média.
 
  Nous avons mis à l'épreuve cet ensemble conceptuel en l'appliquant
  au domaine de la communication scientifique. Il nous a effectivement
  permis de comprendre 1) comment les appareils numériques confèrent à
  l'information scientifique un nouveau statut -- les rapports qu'elle
  exprime peuvent être explicités dans un espace informationnel plus
  complexe, plus extensif et plus dynamique --; 2) comment les
  dispositifs numériques modifient les structures de l'énoncé
  scientifique -- il n'est plus un objet inerte sur papier, mais un
  objet dynamique qui peut expliciter ses articulations internes et
  externes et qui s'ouvre à de nouvelles formes d'interaction --; 3)
  comment les médias numériques remédiatisent le savoir scientifique
  -- les différents acteurs concernés (chercheurs, éditeurs,
  bibliothèques, public) interagissent dans un espace médiatique
  connecté qui fait émerger de nouvelles figures du savoir.
 
  Enfin, nous argumentons que la pragmatique textuelle de la CMO nous
  amène à comprendre l'informatique en tant que nouvelle technologie
  de l'intellect dans le sens de Goody parce qu'elle augmente les
  opérations cognitives que l'écriture a rendues possibles."

There has been no shortage of definitions of the concept of “critical thinking” over the years and the concept has been subject to much detailed scholarly work. In social and educational terms critical thinking is an important topic. Of late, critical thinking has also been widely discussed in the popular media, and the concept has been regarded as one of the most important graduate outcomes expected of a university education. However, despite this, scholars have yet to arrive at a holistic conception of critical thinking—a model of critical thinking as it were—that might usefully underpin the range of considerations about critical thinking that occur in the higher education literature. This paper: (1) reviews the various definitions and approaches to critical thinking, and (2) incorporates them into a single, coherent model. A number
of disagreements in critical thinking scholarship are outlined as ‘axis disputes’ arising from the proposed model.

Since the beginning of the Internet, its features have been used to communicate knowledge between researchers in different universities or scientific laboratories, and later, with the increasing growth of the World Wide Web, knowledge became a collective good shared by its users. The current investigation has three main objectives: a) to describe the professional web forum as a discursive subgenre of the web, b) to illustrate the mechanism of knowledge transmission on the professional web forums, and c) to observe the variation across languages of the professional web forum as a subgenre of the knowledge transmission process.
In the analysis of the linguistic material of the professional web forum corpus we used a theoretical framework based on different linguistic trends and theories currently developed in France.
The analysed material consists in a comparable texts corpus, organised, in five sub-corpora, in function of the language the participants in the web forums use to communicate: English, Spanish, French, Romanian, and Catalan.
The analysis of the linguistic material of the professional web forum corpus provides essential information concerning the discursive features of the knowledge transmission process in different languages.

Technology offers opportunities for teachers to interact with students in a very authentic and compelling way. This review aims at answering the review question: Can technology promote online instructional scaffolding in teaching and learning? To answer this question, the researchers review different studies that investigate the implementation of applications and software in English language teaching and learning. The study highlights methods of using technology to overcome problems of time limitations and other barriers and create more meaningful teaching and learning. Technology makes learning more student-centered through instructional scaffolding, which promotes teaching and learning and enhances student's interaction skills. Moreover, using technology helps to teach as it has an emotional influence that encourages students to develop their personality and learning skills.

The theory of social presence is perhaps the most popular construct used to describe and understand how people socially interact in online learning environments. However, despite its intuitive appeal, researchers and practitioners alike often define and conceptualize this popular construct differently. In fact, it is often hard to distinguish between whether someone is talking about social interaction, immediacy, intimacy, emotion, and/or connectedness when they talk about social presence. Therefore, the focus of this chapter is on outlining the evolution of the construct of social presence in an effort to understand better its relationship to online learning.

High Tech & Low Tech Out-of-Classroom Language Learning for Arabic L1 Speakers of English
Anthony K. Kripps
Salalah College of Technology, Sultanate of Oman

Abstract
As early as the nineteenth century the value of foreign language learning outside the classroom was recognized. In the 1960s, a statistical correlation was found between learners’ extracurricular use of the target language and their scores on standardized foreign language proficiency tests. Subsequently, a direct correlation was found between TOEIC/TOEFL scores and extracurricular use of English, as reported by test-takers.  Finally, in the 1990s out-of-classroom language learning (OCLL) was dubbed a strategy. Increasingly, researchers are acknowledging that more second language acquisition takes place outside the classroom than inside.  This article surveys research into both low-tech and high-tech extracurricular language learning in the light of measurable proficiency gains. High-tech includes blended learning and Computer Mediated Communication. Special attention is paid to the situation of Arabic L1 learners of English.
Keywords: blended learning, CALL, CMC, extracurricular learning, proficiency gains

Learning the vocabulary of a second language is a burdensome task (Nation, 2001) and one which requires a great deal of effort on the part of the learner. This report reviews literature that surrounds three key themes of lexical knowledge and development in childhood, learning strategies and vocabulary learning strategies. By engaging in this report the author then reflects on the literature as it pertains to the young learner classroom and sets out a plan of action as to how he can promote vocabulary learning strategies to his preschool language learners. The author then discusses how this report could be used as a departure point for further research in the field of vocabulary language strategies in the young learner classroom.

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.2, 2014   
                                                                                                                                                      Pp.206-220

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Towards a Critical Thinking Classroom

Omnia Nabih Ahmed
Yanbu University College (YUC)
Yanbu, Saudi Arabia


Abstract
The major objective of the present study is to investigate the effectiveness of using Richard Paul’s “Elements and Standards of Reasoning (E&Ss)” on improving the Critical Thinking skills as well as writing skills of EFL Saudi students. Students were identified as high, mid and low-level students. The progress of each group was measured through a progressive series of rubric assessments of their writing, examining five key areas important in rhetorical composition: clarity of writing, analysis of author’s argument, use of supporting information, organization, and grammar and syntax. Through the introduction of this focused Critical Thinking training, student composition improved in all of the five key areas, among all the groups.
Keywords: critical thinking, writing skills, critical thinkers, passive learners, standards of reasoning

Plonický Tamás publicista, futballrajongó előszavával: „Pofára esett, mint a zsíros kenyér” – mondta Böde Dániel, a magyar labdarúgó válogatott csatára a Nemzeti Sport riporterének, miután megkérdezték tőle, hogy miért vágta földhöz a norvég csapat egyik hátvédjét. Az olvasó, aki garantáltan nem fog pofára esni e kötet elolvasása után, éppen egy futballról és nyelvészetről szóló művet tart a kezében. Egy olyan alkotást, amely kiválóan ötvözi e két, egymással látszólag össze nem illő területet, és a maga kutatási módszereivel alaposan körüljárja a facebookos futballközössége(ke)t. Ha a fentebb említett eseményhez bármikor és bárhol hasonlóan vicces vagy kínos jelenet játszódik le, előtörnek a semmiből a kreatív futballmémgyárosok, a közösségi aktivitás az egekbe szökik, a Facebook pedig „felrobban”. Így válhat mémmé egy mozdulatsor, egy aranyköpés, vagy terjedhetnek el poénos szójátékok egy klubcsapat „állandó” helyezéséről. De vajon meg lehet-e találni a Böde-féle klasszikus jelenetben is a tudományt? Vajon van-e relevanciája egy ilyen jellegű kutatásnak? Vajon a vicces mémek részeivé válhatnak-e a nyelvészet immunrendszerének? Ez a főként futballról, annak egy speciális közösségéről, az internetes futballkultúráról szóló kötet – amellett, hogy megválaszolja a feltett kérdéseinket – egy tökéletesen kivitelezett, izgalmas vállalkozás. Istók Béla munkája egyrészt azért tekinthető kiemelkedő alkotásnak, mert példaértékű észrevételeket fogalmaz meg, és körültekintő szakirodalmi bázist alkalmaz, másrészt azért is, mert felülnézetből, tudományos-nyelvészeti módszerekkel vizsgálja az elsőre talán tudománytalannak, megközelíthetetlennek tűnő futballtartalmakat. A szerző ezt rendkívül meggyőzően, szabatosan, stilizáltan és különböző, az érvrendszereit alátámasztó táblázatok és képek segítségével teszi. A könyv egy kifogástalan olvasási élmény: nyelvészeknek és futballrajongóknak egyaránt. Komárom, 2018. május 31.

In my paper based on the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation (Istók 2018a: 27–64), I examine the general characteristics of communication on Facebook regarding its form and meaning applying the active method of scientific research (reasearch via a questionnaire, N=2833). While in Messenger messages meaning is more decisive than form, in the case of posts and comments on Facebook (especially in the case of the former) form also acquires a more important role: it encodes metainformation about the user. Language is also significantly influenced by the device (with a virtual or physical keyboard), the type of communication genre (personal or public), the age of the user (younger or older) and the fear of a bad reputation (negative opinions regarding the wrongly presented self-image).

This paper examines the email discursive practices of particular speakers of two different languages, namely Peninsular Spanish and British English. More specifically, our study focuses on (in)formality and (in)directness therein, for these lie at the heart of considerable scholarly debate regarding, respectively (i) the general stylistic drift towards orality and informality in technology-mediated communication, and (ii) the degree of communicative (in)directness – within broader politeness orientations – of speakers of different languages, specifically an orientation towards directness in Peninsular Spanish vis-à-vis indirectness in British English. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the role of (in)formality and (in)directness in email messages sent by members of two groups of undergraduate students to their university lecturers. To this end, a corpus of 100 impromptu emails was compiled and analysed. Results revealed complex, fluctuating patterns regarding levels of (in)formality and (in)directness that underlined cross-cultural variation in the way that different sociopragmatic principles found expression in a specific computer-mediated communicative situation.

Upper stage and in-space liquid rocket engines are optimized for performance through the use of high area ratio nozzles to fully expand combustion gases to low exit pressures, increasing exhaust velocities. Due to the large size of such nozzles, and the related engine performance requirements, carbon-carbon (C-C) composite nozzle extensions are being considered to reduce weight impacts. Currently, the state-of-the-art is represented by the metallic and foreign composite nozzle extensions limited to approximately 2000°F used on the Atlas V, Delta IV, Falcon 9, and Ariane 5 launch vehicles. NASA and industry partners are working towards advancing the domestic supply chain for C-C composite nozzle extensions. These development efforts are primarily being conducted through the NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program in addition to other low level internal research efforts. This has allowed for the initial material development and characterization, subscale hardware fabrication, and completion of hot-fire testing in relevant environments. NASA and industry partners have designed, fabricated and hot-fire tested several subscale domestically produced C-C extensions to advance the material and coatings fabrication technology for use with a variety of liquid rocket and scramjet engines. Testing at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) evaluated heritage and state-of-the-art C-C materials and coatings, demonstrating the initial capabilities of the high temperature materials and their fabrication methods. This paper discusses the initial material development, design and fabrication of the subscale carbon-carbon nozzle extensions, provides an overview of the test campaign, presents results of the hot fire testing, and discusses potential follow-on development work. The follow on work includes the fabrication of ultra-high temperature materials, larger C-C nozzle extensions, material characterization, sub-element testing and hot-fire testing at larger scale.

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in foreign language education is increasingly being treated as an obvious option for teachers to use in order to facilitate instruction and promote the development of a range of learners' competences. However, relatively little research has been devoted to the idea of implementing ICT in order to enable students who are absent from lessons, e.g. due to hospitalisation, to reunite with their colleagues and continue education despite physical absence from the classroom. This chapter is a report of a case study which was administered at a teacher training institution with a view to examining the effects of using videoconferencing software in the EFL classroom in order to enable an absentee to continue course participation. The study focused on investigating the students' views on the need to maintain learners' classroom presence despite health problems, their attitudes towards the utilisation of videoconferencing software for that purpose, the effects of videoconferencing on their performance in a lesson, e.g. levels of participation, the technical problems which they experienced in the course of the lessons under study and the possibility of the experience translating into the teacher trainees' own classroom practices in the future.

The results of the ANCOVAs revealed that using vocabulary learning software was more effective than using printed book on vocabulary learning, vocabulary breadth, and vocabulary depth of the participants. The results of the present study could help EFL course book designers, foreign language institutes, educational planners, material developers, teachers, and learners to provide a better context for EFL learning.

Die Definition des e-Mails ist in der wissnschaftlichen Literatur bis auf den heutigen Tag nicht einheitlich. Die verschiedenen Sichten wurden zusammengetragen und gegeneinander abgewogen, verdichtet. Ein täglich benutztes Kommunikationsmittel wird aus terminologischer, historischer und sprachlicher Sicht beleuchtet. Funktion, Kommunikationsarten und Gender gehen dabei nicht vergessen. Außerdem wird den gängigen Vorurteilen und Clichés nachgegangen: Wie ist es etwas mit der Verluderung der Sprache durch e-Mail, Chat, etc.? Den Vermutungen aus dem Volk stehen wissenschaftlich fundierte Fakten gegenüber und erstaunliche Ergebnisse.

The use of short message services (SMS) on mobile phones has gained huge popularity in most western and many developing countries — so much so that it has become established as the preferred medium for mobile communication especially among young people. This article explores SMS as used for discreet communication between people in the same physical space (‘shared physical space SMS’ — or ‘SPS-SMS’). Drawing from semi-structured interviews with young people in Norway, 10 different scenarios of SPS-SMS use are explored and analysed within an interactionist framework. These sites of SPS-SMS are presented here as ‘communicative affordances’. It is concluded that the mobile phone, by the application of SPS-SMS, affords communicative layers of transparency, by which various SMS users maintain semi-synchronous communication, both for care and coordination. Although a qualitative study of this nature does not lend itself to generalizations about SPS-SMS communication, it does demonstrate how detailed studies of extraordinary uses of mediated communication may be used to widen analyses of social interaction.

Tanulmányomban a nemzetspecifikus mémek és a vizuo-verbális humor kapcsolatát vizsgálom pragmatikai szempontból. A magyar TrollFoci Facebook-oldalán közzétett Böde- és Dárdai-mémek humoros hatásának alapjául az explicit és implicit jelentés kölcsönviszonya (dinamikus jelentésképzés), az irónia (a jelentéstől való eltérés), a hiperbola (túlzás) vagy pedig az immutáció (helyettesítés) szolgál.

This chapler introcluces the embodied metaphor as a means of studying the mnltiJ'acetecl relationship between computer-ntediated communication (CMC) and culture. It argues that the embodied metaphor ffirs a more reliable framework, as opposed to both deterministic and dispositional perspectives, in that it provides a way to understand, explain, andframe the user's adaptive response to CMC. Furthermore, il also argues that culture has the potentictl to shape interactions by influencing the way metaphors are enacted. The author hopes that the aforementioned approach will provide a new understanding of the interplay between CMC and culture, informingfuture study design and bridging the existing gap between qualitalive and quantitalive research through action science.