Education Commons^™

In Search Of Conversational Grain Size: Modelling Semantic Structure Using Moving Stanza Windows, Amanda L. Siebert-Evenstone, Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens, Wesley Collier, Zachari Swiecki, David Williamson Shaffer

Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens

Analyses of learning based on student discourse need to account not only for the content of the utterances but also for the ways in which students make connections across turns of talk. This requires segmentation of discourse data to define when connections are likely to be meaningful. In this paper, we present an approach to segmenting data for the purposes of modeling connections in discourse using epistemic network analysis. Specifically, we use epistemic network analysis to model connections in student discourse using a temporal segmentation method adapted from recent work in the learning sciences. We compare the results of this …

The Skills Gap Agenda In Canadian Higher Education Research Summary, Melody Viczko Dr, Jenna Lorusso, Shannon Mckechnie

Education Publications

Solving the skills gap is a difficult task due to the differing opinions on the subject. Even though these opinions may be different, they are all driven by the same assumptions that students are primarily motivated by economic reasoning in what they choose to study. We think that’s a problem, because there are many reasons that motive students and not all students have equal access to economic resources.

Research Summary: The Skills Gap Agenda In Canadian Higher Education, Melody Viczko Dr, Jenna Lorusso, Shannon Mckechnie

Education Publications

The issue of the ‘skills gap’ is an important discussion in higher education policy both in Canada and internationally. The idea of the skills gap is that there is an inconsistency between the skills of graduates and the needs of the labour market. The problem here is that there is no agreement about the nature of the skills gap, or that a skills gap even exists. Given that there is no agreement surrounding the issue of skills, we ask: What should we make of the different representations of the skills gap, and how are post-secondary students positioned in this issue?

How Do Welcome Statements Differ From Mission Statements?: The Salience Of Genre, David Ayers, Wanda Brooks

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

In this analysis, we sought to identify key linguistic properties of mission statements and to explain how these properties function toward managerial purposes. Data included a target corpus of 920 community college mission statements (47,943 words), a domain-specific corpus of 632 “welcome statements” published on websites by community college presidents (173,534 words), and a general reference corpus extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (16.53 million words) (Davies, 2017). We used specialized corpus linguistics software to generate standardized word frequencies and to tag each corpus for parts of speech. We then identified the words and parts of speech that …

A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis Of The Discourse Of English Friday Sermons, Ahmad Alenezi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

On every Friday, in every mosque in the world, Muslims gather for Friday sermons in answer to the call: “O you, who have believed, when [the adhan] is called for the prayer on the day of Jumu’ah [Friday], then proceed to the remembrance of Allah and leave trade. That is better for you, if you only knew” (Quran, 62:9). Typically, the Friday prayer is shortened by half to accommodate the presentation of the Friday sermon; this emphasizes the importance of the sermons. The present study is a discourse analysis that examined 12 sermons delivered on the first Friday of every …

A Situational Analysis Of Municipal Early Childhood Education Policy Documents, Maureen Cullen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Studies have been conducted at the provincial and federal levels that expose dominant discourses in child care policy documents and reports. However, there has not been a similar examination of documents at the municipal level. This study uses a qualitative situational analysis to investigate discourses that are present in municipal documents of a mid-size Ontario city as they pertain to the child care sector. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discourse, this study interrogates the discursive functions that dominant ideas might have on policies that inform funding, programming, and subsidies. Through a cartographic exercise of map making, this study reveals and …

Critical Discourse Analysis And Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Data Analysis Strategies For Enhanced Understanding Of Inference And Meaning, Mary Ziskin

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

This manuscript describes an approach to critical qualitative data analysis that combines (1) Carspecken’s critical qualitative methodological framework (1996; 2012) with (2) the conceptual resources of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as framed by Fairclough (2003, 2016) and colleagues (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). Carspecken’s methodological theory illuminates the connection between sociopolitical power and culture by introducing the content of validity claims into analysis of discourse. In turn, CDA helps to support the analysis of validity claims in that these are often expressed or legitimated through implicit references, and through the rhetoric, shape, or tone of what is …

Getting To What Is: Poetry As A Genre Of Access For Multilingual Learners, Audrey A. Friedman, Joelle M. Pedersen, Chris K. Bacon

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This paper explores the poetry writing of 15, multilingual ninth graders to construct a practitioner framework for analyzing writing as discourse with multilingual learners (MLs). Grounded in an understanding of poetry as a genre of access for both teachers and students, we asked: How does poetry—read as a specific, situated discourse—reveal linguistic and cultural competence among MLs in an urban, high-school classroom?

Using four tools of Critical Discourse Analysis—situated meaning, significance building, connections building, and identity building—we analyzed student poetry produced via an online mentoring platform. Through applying these lenses, three major themes emerged, which structured our framework: language experimentation, …