This article describes a practical approach to judging the nature and quality of critical discourse in a computer conference. A model of a critical community of inquiry frames the research. A core concept in defining a community of inquiry is cognitive presence. In turn, the practical inquiry model operationalizes cognitive presence for the purpose of developing a tool to assess critical discou...

This research study focuses on the discourse of a community of student teachers and a peer tutor in an English language teaching teacher education programme. The chief aims of this study are (1) to examine the features of the discourse in online and face-to-face modes of communication, (2) to investigate the community practices, and extrapolate how the student teachers and the peer tutor build ...

in any discourse domain, certain chunks are particularly frequent and deserve attention by the novice to be initiated and by the expert to maintain a sense of community. to make a relevant contribution to the awareness about applied linguistics texts and discourse, this study attempted to develop lists of lexical chunks frequently used in the abstracts of applied linguistics journals. the abstr...

This paper examines the importance of ‘discourse architecture’ and ‘community’ to the maintenance and growth of virtual publics. ‘Virtual publics’ are computer mediated discourse spaces created by using various technologies including email, the USENET, web based bulletin boards, IRC, MUDS, etc. It is argued that the over-emphasis to date on ‘community’ has discouraged systemic analysis of colla...

This paper explores discourse features of Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and the need for sign language interpreting students to acquire an understanding of, and skills in, a range of discourse genres in Auslan in order to effectively carry out the work required in their profession. Discourse features of spoken English are outlined and compared with those of signed languages, and an overview...

In the last decade, members of the computational linguistics community have adopted a perspective on discourse based primarily on either Rhetorical Structure Theory or Grosz and Sidner’s Theory. However, only recently, researchers have started to investigate the relationship between the two perspectives. In this paper, we use Moser and Moore’s (1996) work as a departure point for extending Marc...

Earlier linguistic studies of political discourse revealed that, not many works exist on pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in this genre. Apart from Mullany (2002), who employs relational and face works to analyses impoliteness in political discourse, Taiwo (2007), Adetunji (2009), and Ademilokun (2015), who employ discourse analytical tools in analyzing the political speeches, there exist ver...

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to study interaction patterns among the members of a community of practice within the Dutch police organization and the way they share and construct knowledge together. The online discourse between 46 members, using First Class, formed the basis for this study. Social Network Analysis and content analysis were used to analyze the data. The results show that the...