This article has two primary goals: (a) to illustrate how a closer analysis of language can lead to fruitful insights into the activities that it helps constitute, and (b) to demonstrate the complexity of the practices that make up Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOGaming) through just such an analysis. The first goal is in response to the way we sometimes treat language in studies of act...

It has been common to use video records of instruction in teacher professional development, but participants have rarely been encouraged to evaluate teachers and students’ actions in those records, allegedly because evaluation deters from the development of a professional discourse. In this study, we inspected teachers' online discussions of animations of classroom episodes realized with cartoo...

Recently, it has been proposed that schools teach disciplinary literacy in science, mathematics, history, and literature classes as students move into middle school and high school. A disciplinary literacy approach emphasizes the specialized knowledge and abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge within each of the disciplines. This article compares disciplinary li...

Reading has been studied for decades by both artificial intelligent researchers and by cognitive psychologists. Yet there still does not exist a theory which accurately describes the process nor a computer system which performs it. To overcome the shortfalls of previous systems, we have developed a functional theory of the reading comprehension process. The theory not only enables us to impleme...

machine can be interpreted together as representing a list of items. (Maier and Hovy, 1991) The next class of relations are referred to as interpersonal relations. Each relation in this class has its own specific effect on the reader. For example, to convince or motivate the reader to do something. They are, therefore, similar to Mann and Thompson’s (Mann and Thompson, 1988) presentational rela...

D ensity functional theory calculations on E (SbM e2)2, E = S or Te, Me = C H 3, indicate that the equilibrium structures are syn-syn or near syn-syn conform ers with overall C2w or C2 symmetry. The calculations further indicate the existence o f syn-anti conform ers about 4 kJ m ol-1 (E = S) or 1 kJ m o l '1 (E = Te) above the equilibrium structure. G as electron diffraction data show that bot...

This paper studies the asymptotic stability problem for a class of uncertain impulsive switched systems with discrete and distributed delays. Based on Lyapunov functional theory, delay-dependent sufficient LMI conditions are established for the asymptotic stability of the considered systems. Moreover, an appropriate feedback controller is constructed for stabilizing the corresponding closed-loo...

This paper takes as its starting point Bernstein’s (2000) concepts of regulative and instructional discourses. Bernstein describes the role of instructional discourse to create ‘specialized skills and their relationship to each other’ and regulative discourse to create ‘order, relations and identity’ and manage ‘attitudes, dispositions and performances’. These concepts from the sociology of edu...

Text analysis traditions in France and the United States include discourse analysis, critical linguistics, French functional linguistics, Bakhtinian dialogics, and “generous reading.” These frames have not been used, however, in crosscultural analysis of university student writing. The author presents a study of 250 student texts from French and U.S. introductory university courses, using a met...

For the past two decades linguists working within the framework of systemic functional linguistics have been developing appraisal theory as a tool for analysing evaluation in discourse. In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current model and then move on to address a number of the challenges that have arisen over the years including distinguishing inscribed from invoked attitude, ...