Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Topical talk'

This research project addresses the following: how topical talk operates in the organisation and management of MSE interactions; and how topical talk operates in the co-ordination of specific service requests and service provisions. It draws on a corpus of audio-recorded and transcribed interactions between general practitioners and persons seeking general medical services in suburban clinics in Brisbane, Australia. The corpus comprised a total of 67 medical service events (henceforth MSEs), audio-taped with the full informed consent of the participants. Many contemporary medical sociological accounts of the operation of topical talk in MSEs, typified by the work of Mishler (1981, 1984) and Waitzkin (1991), remain anchored to the 'professional dominance' thesis (Freidson 1970a; 1970b), arguing for the fundamental conflict between two perspectives - lay and professional. Topical talk has been formulated as one expression of this conflict in 'doctor-centred' communicative 'styles' (Byrne and Long 1976; Silverman 1987). Within such accounts, familiar interactional patterns in MSEs, including the content and structure of topics, have been theorised as instruments of power and control whereby the dominance of specialised medical knowledge and expertise are established and maintained. Mishler's (1984) characterisation of the conflict between a biomedically oriented 'voice of medicine' used by professional physicians (henceforth GPs) and a 'voice of the lifeworld' used by persons seeking medical services (henceforth Ps) is an expression of the 'professional dominance' thesis. The voices are characterised as attesting to a fundamental, theoretically problematic, asymmetry of power relations between GPs and Ps, thereby reinforcing the ideological status of professionals in general and the medical profession in particular. Further, recommendations regarding correctives to 'professional dominance' centre on advice GPs to attend to the primacy of Ps' talk on their experiences of illnesses rather than apparently 'ignoring' or transforming these topics into biomedical accounts of disease. This research project critiques this formulation of topical talk and the traditional theoretical and empirical bases on which it has drawn. This critique arises from the application of ethnomethodological approaches to the study of MSEs. Such approaches, as outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, are characterised by a number of conceptual and analytic premises: First, particular social structural features of social activities and the institutional contexts within which activities occur should not be assumed to be the primary criteria for judging the import and adequacy of situated action. Second, the parties to situated social events mutually constitute those events in the real world. Third, issues of agency are collaborative situated accomplishments such that the management of everyday social activities is accomplished by the people involved who show one another the rationalities of their actions as they assemble the familiar scenic features of those same institutional events (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1992a, 1992b). These assumptions have been applied in ethnomethodological analyses of social action, including the analysis of professional service encounters that have critiqued the 'professional dominance' thesis (Eglin and Wideman 1986; Sharrock 1979). The novelty of this study is the analysis of the operation of topic organisation as a phenomenon of order. This study also draws on recommendations within Ethnomethodology (Hester & Eglin 1997b; Watson 1997) that sequential and categorial organisations are mutually informative in the analysis of the rationality of situated social action. One of the particular contributions of this thesis is that it not only jointly applies both conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis but also extends this recommendation to the inclusion of topic analysis as was originally provided for by Sacks (1992a , 1992b) and Garfinkel and Sacks (1970). Within this study a model of analysis has been constructed that has enabled the analytical consideration of four dimensions of social organisation: local sequential, extended sequential, topical and categorial organisations. The theoretical and empirical concepts of ethnomethodogical analysis have thus been developed and extended within this project. The central findings of this study are that in institutional service events, the 'service topic' is both significant and consequential, and that persons constitute themselves as bona fide incumbents of the categories GP or P by attending to their actions as topically organised. The local adequacy of any particular interactional move (such as questioning-answering, greetings, the design of a topic proposal, etc) is shown to be referenced to the service topic. This study found no evidence of potential or actual "struggles" between the 'voice of the life-world and the voice of medicine'. Rather, this study finds routine recognition on the part of both Ps and GPs of the centrality of the service topic and, thereby, the service task, and no evidence of orientation to distinctive biographical contributions staged in competition with biomedically relevant service topics. It is found that Ps' biographical references were made in the context of an assembled service topic such that particular service tasks, however conventional, were constituted as both relevant and reasonable as medical goods and service for the specific service recipient and provider. At the most general level, it is concluded that the service topic operates as a phenomenon of order in MSEs where order, as defined by Garfinkel and Weider (1992: 202), refers to all of the rationalities evident in the generic features of institutional events and settings, that is, the situated logic and intelligibility as well as the procedures whereby they are constituted as recognisable social events. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the theorisation, policy-making, medical education, and practices of GPs and Ps within MSEs. Overall, the significance of this work for researchers into medical interactions is that the relevance of the service topic and its pervasive organisational consequences need to be considered analytically. A major outcome of this thesis is the establishment of a new order of interest within the study of institutional interactions. The project demonstrates the pervasive consequences of service topics and thus provides a step forward in the study of institutional service interactions and ways of theorising their rationality, a step that extends beyond social structural pre-theorisations of power and domination and also beyond interactional accounts of the primary relevance of turn taking structures.

This research project addresses the following: how topical talk operates in the organisation and management of MSE interactions; and how topical talk operates in the co-ordination of specific service requests and service provisions. It draws on a corpus of audio-recorded and transcribed interactions between general practitioners and persons seeking general medical services in suburban clinics in Brisbane, Australia. The corpus comprised a total of 67 medical service events (henceforth MSEs), audio-taped with the full informed consent of the participants. Many contemporary medical sociological accounts of the operation of topical talk in MSEs, typified by the work of Mishler (1981, 1984) and Waitzkin (1991), remain anchored to the 'professional dominance' thesis (Freidson 1970a; 1970b), arguing for the fundamental conflict between two perspectives - lay and professional. Topical talk has been formulated as one expression of this conflict in 'doctor-centred' communicative 'styles' (Byrne and Long 1976; Silverman 1987). Within such accounts, familiar interactional patterns in MSEs, including the content and structure of topics, have been theorised as instruments of power and control whereby the dominance of specialised medical knowledge and expertise are established and maintained. Mishler's (1984) characterisation of the conflict between a biomedically oriented 'voice of medicine' used by professional physicians (henceforth GPs) and a 'voice of the lifeworld' used by persons seeking medical services (henceforth Ps) is an expression of the 'professional dominance' thesis. The voices are characterised as attesting to a fundamental, theoretically problematic, asymmetry of power relations between GPs and Ps, thereby reinforcing the ideological status of professionals in general and the medical profession in particular. Further, recommendations regarding correctives to 'professional dominance' centre on advice GPs to attend to the primacy of Ps' talk on their experiences of illnesses rather than apparently 'ignoring' or transforming these topics into biomedical accounts of disease. This research project critiques this formulation of topical talk and the traditional theoretical and empirical bases on which it has drawn. This critique arises from the application of ethnomethodological approaches to the study of MSEs. Such approaches, as outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, are characterised by a number of conceptual and analytic premises: First, particular social structural features of social activities and the institutional contexts within which activities occur should not be assumed to be the primary criteria for judging the import and adequacy of situated action. Second, the parties to situated social events mutually constitute those events in the real world. Third, issues of agency are collaborative situated accomplishments such that the management of everyday social activities is accomplished by the people involved who show one another the rationalities of their actions as they assemble the familiar scenic features of those same institutional events (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1992a, 1992b). These assumptions have been applied in ethnomethodological analyses of social action, including the analysis of professional service encounters that have critiqued the 'professional dominance' thesis (Eglin and Wideman 1986; Sharrock 1979). The novelty of this study is the analysis of the operation of topic organisation as a phenomenon of order. This study also draws on recommendations within Ethnomethodology (Hester & Eglin 1997b; Watson 1997) that sequential and categorial organisations are mutually informative in the analysis of the rationality of situated social action. One of the particular contributions of this thesis is that it not only jointly applies both conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis but also extends this recommendation to the inclusion of topic analysis as was originally provided for by Sacks (1992a , 1992b) and Garfinkel and Sacks (1970). Within this study a model of analysis has been constructed that has enabled the analytical consideration of four dimensions of social organisation: local sequential, extended sequential, topical and categorial organisations. The theoretical and empirical concepts of ethnomethodogical analysis have thus been developed and extended within this project. The central findings of this study are that in institutional service events, the 'service topic' is both significant and consequential, and that persons constitute themselves as bona fide incumbents of the categories GP or P by attending to their actions as topically organised. The local adequacy of any particular interactional move (such as questioning-answering, greetings, the design of a topic proposal, etc) is shown to be referenced to the service topic. This study found no evidence of potential or actual "struggles" between the 'voice of the life-world and the voice of medicine'. Rather, this study finds routine recognition on the part of both Ps and GPs of the centrality of the service topic and, thereby, the service task, and no evidence of orientation to distinctive biographical contributions staged in competition with biomedically relevant service topics. It is found that Ps' biographical references were made in the context of an assembled service topic such that particular service tasks, however conventional, were constituted as both relevant and reasonable as medical goods and service for the specific service recipient and provider. At the most general level, it is concluded that the service topic operates as a phenomenon of order in MSEs where order, as defined by Garfinkel and Weider (1992: 202), refers to all of the rationalities evident in the generic features of institutional events and settings, that is, the situated logic and intelligibility as well as the procedures whereby they are constituted as recognisable social events. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the theorisation, policy-making, medical education, and practices of GPs and Ps within MSEs. Overall, the significance of this work for researchers into medical interactions is that the relevance of the service topic and its pervasive organisational consequences need to be considered analytically. A major outcome of this thesis is the establishment of a new order of interest within the study of institutional interactions. The project demonstrates the pervasive consequences of service topics and thus provides a step forward in the study of institutional service interactions and ways of theorising their rationality, a step that extends beyond social structural pre-theorisations of power and domination and also beyond interactional accounts of the primary relevance of turn taking structures.
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Cognition, Language and Special Education
Faculty of Education
Full Text

Social media has over the years partly become a platform to express opinions and discuss current events. Within the field of Computer Science, Twitter has been used both as the basis for political analysis - for example using sentiment analysis to predict election results - and within the field of cluster analysis, where the question of how to best design and use an algorithm to extract topics from tweets has been studied. The ClusTop algorithm is specifically designed to cluster tweets based on topics. This paper aims to explore whether it is possible to (a) use an implementation of the ClusTop algorithm to identify topics connected to tweets about Trump and Clinton just before the American 2016 election, and (b) distinguish between the topics used in connection with a specific candidate in states where they won versus states where they lost the election. The problem is approached through the method of a controlled experiment where the data collected from Twitter is divided into groups and run through the ClusTop algorithm. The topics are then compared to draw tentative conclusions about their validity as a basis for election prediction. The study finds that it is indeed possible to adapt the ClusTop algorithm to use with tweets and geolocation to identify different topics, thus confirming the usefulness of the algorithm. In addition to this, the study confirms that manually examining the words used within the topics makes it possible to see differences between them. The work thereby places itself in the tradition of exploring how Twitter can be used for election prediction by being one of the first studies to look at clustering as a way of approaching the problem.

This thesis is concerned with the investigation of politeness in stretches of talk. and covers conversational components like adjacency pairs, sequences, topic, as well as turn internal features such as dispreference markers, and to some extent, mitigation techniques. Troubles-talk in naturally occurring Turkish conversations provides the necessary data. Politeness has so far been studied methodically in single utterances, but its presence in longer stretches of talk has not received a similar interest, nor, to the best of our knowledge, has any methodical work in this area been carried out. To provide a systematic approach to lengthy pieces of conversation, a new framework is developed in Chapter 1 from the well-known notions of politeness like 'face' (Goffman, 1971, 1972) and 'Face Threatening Acts' (FFAs - Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987), while a combination of extracts from the literature of Conversational Analysis is used to flesh out the discussion. 'With the inclusion of Face Boosting Acts, which are thought to be the opposite of FTAs, the framework shows that in situations where 'positive face' is threatened or boosted, the change in the face values creates Interactional Imbalance, always to the disadvantage of one speaker, and the subsequent turn is commonly designed to put the balance right. Where imbalance is created unwillingly to the disadvantage of the recipient, or has to be ignored, speech is marked with dispreferred turn markers. Before looking for evidence of these points in responses to troubles-telling - a considerable threat to the teller's face - procedures of collection, selection and presentation of data are discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 starts with the topic initiating characteristics of troubles-telling and goes on to explore the acknowledgement types that it gets, differentiated in terms of their capacity to encourage or discourage further talk. Despite different consequences for topic, all acknowledgements are found to be face boosters, and preferred turns. In comparison, Advice is explored in Chapter 4 as a dispreferred turn with further face damage for the teller. It is also found to extend the sequence on the one hand, but minimize the chances of having a proper closure for the talk, on the other. Troubles-telling responses, incorporating a varying degree of' disagreement, are examined in Chapter 5, where it is decided that disagreement is a face booster as long as it follows the recognizable patterns in the culture. The summary of these points in the Conclusion opens up the way to further theoretical issues like the relation of Interactional Imbalance to sequence types, Conditional Relevance, and topic, apart from pinpointing the predominance of face considerations in conversational practice in general.

CITE/Language Arts
Ph.D.
This study was an examination of the effect that three levels of topic choice (no choice, limited choice, and complete choice) would have on students' Task Interest and Task Self-efficacy (Study 1, 78 participants), and on three aspects of students' oral output: Accuracy, Complexity, and Fluency (Study 2, 42 participants in 21 pairs). Also examined were the effects that three types of tasks (descriptive, narrative, and decision-making) exerted on these five variables. Data were collected using a questionnaire for Study 1 and recording the participants' conversations for Study 2. Data were collected in nine consecutive treatments to examine the main effects of choice and task, and the interaction effects of choice and task, using two-way repeated-measures ANOVAs. For Study 1, limited choice promoted Task Interest for the descriptive and narrative tasks, and Task Self-efficacy for the narrative and decision-making tasks to a statistically significant degree. In addition, the descriptive task had the highest Task Interest for the no choice and complete choice treatments and had the highest Task Self-efficacy for the no choice of topic treatment. The findings generally indicated that the participants were more interested in the task when there was choice, and that this led to higher levels of Task Interest and Task Self-efficacy. The Study 2 results indicated that Complexity was significantly higher when choice was introduced for the descriptive and narrative tasks. Accuracy and Fluency were not influenced to a statistically significant degree by choice, but they were positively influenced nonetheless. Attentional resources may have been freed up when choice was introduced and the participants may have been more willing to take risks, both possibly causing the significantly higher levels of complexity for choice. Suggestions for further research include a closer examination of the process students use when choosing a topic and examining ways for a more efficient method of introducing choice into the task-based language teaching syllabus.
Temple University--Theses

Low back problems are among the most common nonfatal occupational injuries reported in the United States, and account for substantial healthcare expenditures (e.g., medical care costs) and losses to worker productivity. A strong association has been well-documented between occupational exposure to repetitive trunk motion and low back problems, particularly among workers performing manual material handling (i.e., lifting) activities. A feature of repetitive motion believed important to the development of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), including low back problems, is a lack of within-individual, between-cycle variation of physical exposure summary measures, e.g., when observed visually, the cycle-to-cycle motion pattern appears consistent. An active literature has emerged using concepts of motor control to improve ergonomists’ understanding of physical exposure variation (i.e., motor variability) arising from individual-level mechanisms during repetitive work. Fundamentally, for any particular individual, the onset of exposure to a repetitive physical activity (i.e., task training) involves a learning process during which motor control strategies are developed to accomplish the task effectively. The cycle-to-cycle variability of motor learning metrics, such as postural and task performance summary measures, has been observed to exponentially decay during task training. From an ergonomics perspective, a temporal reduction in postural variability may lead to greater cumulative loading and physiological fatiguing of the underlying muscle tissues (due to more consistent cycle-to-cycle movements), thus increasing MSD risk over time. However, it is not known if, or to what extent, physical task characteristics (e.g., work pace) modify the temporal behavior of motor variability during training of a repetitive occupational activity. Moreover, the relationships between motor variability, task performance, and muscle fatigue during occupational task training are not well understood. The goal of this dissertation was to present new information concerning occupationally relevant metrics of motor learning during training of a laboratory-simulated, repetitive lifting activity. In this study, participants performed 100 repetitions (i.e., cycles) of the lifting task in each of four experimental sessions (i.e., visits) at different combinations of box load (low or high) and work pace (slow or fast). Three main observations were discussed in this dissertation: (i) participants exhibited a greater temporal reduction in the cycle-to-cycle variability of trunk postural summary measures during training of a heavier-weighted and faster-paced lifting activity (Chapter 3), which may have facilitated increases in the efficiency and repeatability of box movements (Chapter 4), (ii) the cycle-to-cycle variability of the erector spinae (back) muscle activity summary measures increased, but the variability of the multifidus muscle activity summary measures decreased, over time during faster-paced lifting (Chapter 3), and (iii) a greater temporal increase in trunk postural variability (i.e., a more “flexible” trunk movement strategy) was generally associated with lesser electromyographic back muscle fatigue during training of the lifting task (Chapter 5). Collectively, these research findings may open pathways to the development of new task design criteria and ergonomic guidelines to promote motor variability in the workplace and, ultimately, improve workers’ musculoskeletal health.

The purpose of this study is to investigate family mealtime dynamics from the adolescent's perspective and explore what topics are discussed compared to what topics they would like to discuss, and to examine the association among mealtimes and the adolescent's academic status and self-esteem.

I den här uppsatsen undersöks interaktionen mellan tre programledare och en intervjuad forskare i ett utdrag från ett intervjusamtal i radio. Syftet med studien är att undersöka vilka övergripande topiker och vilka kommunikativa projekt som förekommer i samtalsutdraget. Likaså att undersöka hur de kommunikativa projekten kan relateras till den hybriditet som detta samtalsutdrag kännetecknas av, då samtale tkan kategoriseras som en hybridiserad pratshowintervju. Samtalsdelen består av drygt åtta minuter, som transkriberas och analyseras med hjälp av en topikanalys i kombination med en analys av de kommunikativa projekt som florerar i samtalsutdraget. Resultatet av analysen visar att samtalsutdraget innehåller olika kommunikativa projekt som ibland kolliderar. Programledarna vill ha svar på sina mestadels enkla och grundläggande frågor, men forskaren svarar inte alltid enkelt och grundläggande. Forskaren är där för att beskriva omständigheterna kring hundraårsjubileet av upptäckten av kosmisk strålning, i egenskap av elementarpartikelfysiker. Programledarna är beroende av att deras lyssnare tycker att innehållet är intressant och värt att lyssna på. Därför hamnar det på deras lott att så gott de kan göra programinnehållet intressant för lyssnarna. För att uppfylla det tillkommer lokala projekt, såsom att förmå den intervjuade att vara mer personlig och göra ansatser för att ge samtalet en mer vardaglig och avslappnad prägel. Till exempel genom det sätt som de ställer frågor till forskaren. Men även den journalistsiska uppgiften att popularisera vetenskapen som forskaren intervjuas om tillkommer, då det rör sig om ett radioprogram inom sektorn för Public service.

The discourse of older healthy adults is commonly described as lengthy and off-topic and thought to be associated with a general cognitive decline that occurs in healthy aging. This study investigated the overall decline in attention associated with healthy aging and its relationship to instances of off-topic speech (OTS) in a constrained and unconstrained language production task. Ninety cognitively healthy adults participated and comprised three age cohorts (40 – 75+). Participants completed cognitive measures of attention and two discourse tasks that included recounting personal events and describing a procedure. Older adults exhibited poorer scores on measures of selective and shifting attention, and elderly adults produced more OTS as compared to middle-aged (40s) and older (60s) adults in the unconstrained task only. Poorer scores of shifting attention were significantly correlated with more OTS in the older adults (60s) only. Overall, a marked increase in variability of language production was observed with advancing age. Results indicated the need for further research on the relationships between age, attention, OTS, and task type in healthy aging to determine an underlying cause for increasing variability of language production with age.

Denna uppsats undersöker hur argument som bygger på statistik kan förstås utifrån den klassiska retoriken. Utgångspunkten är den vanligt förekommande uppdelningen av bevismedel som antingen tillhörande konsten eller inte, där statistik ofta placeras i den senare kategorin. Denna uppdelning undersöks kritiskt genom en nyläsning av Aristoteles, Cicero och Quintilianus. Uppsatsen visar att Cicero ger ett bättre retoriskt perspektiv än Aristoteles eller Quintilianus för att förstå hur statistikargumentation fungerar. Därför används just Ciceros topiker (loci) såsom de är systematiserade i verket Topica för att analysera två debatter om jobbfrågan mellan Fredrik Reinfeldt och Stefan Löfvén under valåret 2014. Analysen finner främst 9 loci i debatterna, och belyser därmed flera olika sätt som statistik kan användas för att skapa argument i retoriska syften.

This study examined the everyday practices of families within the context of family mealtime to investigate how members accomplished mealtime interactions. Using an ethnomethodological approach, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, the study investigated the interactional resources that family members used to assemble their social orders moment by moment during family mealtimes. While there is interest in mealtimes within educational policy, health research and the media, there remain few studies that provide fine-grained detail about how members produce the social activity of having a family meal. Findings from this study contribute empirical understandings about families and family mealtime. Two families with children aged 2 to 10 years were observed as they accomplished their everyday mealtime activities. Data collection took place in the family homes where family members video recorded their naturally occurring mealtimes. Each family was provided with a video camera for a one-month period and they decided which mealtimes they recorded, a method that afforded participants greater agency in the data collection process and made available to the analyst a window into the unfolding of the everyday lives of the families. A total of 14 mealtimes across the two families were recorded, capturing 347 minutes of mealtime interactions. Selected episodes from the data corpus, which includes centralised breakfast and dinnertime episodes, were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system. Three data chapters examine extended sequences of family talk at mealtimes, to show the interactional resources used by members during mealtime interactions. The first data chapter explores multiparty talk to show how the uniqueness of the occasion of having a meal influences turn design. It investigates the ways in which members accomplish two-party talk within a multiparty setting, showing how one child "tells" a funny story to accomplish the drawing together of his brothers as an audience. As well, this chapter identifies the interactional resources used by the mother to cohort her children to accomplish the choralling of grace. The second data chapter draws on sequential and categorical analysis to show how members are mapped to a locally produced membership category. The chapter shows how the mapping of members into particular categories is consequential for social order; for example, aligning members who belong to the membership category "had haircuts" and keeping out those who "did not have haircuts". Additional interactional resources such as echoing, used here to refer to the use of exactly the same words, similar prosody and physical action, and increasing physical closeness, are identified as important to the unfolding talk particularly as a way of accomplishing alignment between the grandmother and grand-daughter. The third and final data analysis chapter examines topical talk during family mealtimes. It explicates how members introduce topics of talk with an orientation to their co-participant and the way in which the take up of a topic is influenced both by the sequential environment in which it is introduced and the sensitivity of the topic. Together, these three data chapters show aspects of how family members participated in family mealtimes. The study contributes four substantive themes that emerged during the analytic process and, as such, the themes reflect what the members were observed to be doing. The first theme identified how family knowledge was relevant and consequential for initiating and sustaining interaction during mealtime with, for example, members buying into the talk of other members or being requested to help out with knowledge about a shared experience. Knowledge about members and their activities was evident with the design of questions evidencing an orientation to coparticipant’s knowledge. The second theme found how members used topic as a resource for social interaction. The third theme concerned the way in which members utilised membership categories for producing and making sense of social action. The fourth theme, evident across all episodes selected for analysis, showed how children’s competence is an ongoing interactional accomplishment as they manipulated interactional resources to manage their participation in family mealtime. The way in which children initiated interactions challenges previous understandings about children’s restricted rights as conversationalists. As well as making a theoretical contribution, the study offers methodological insight by working with families as research participants. The study shows the procedures involved as the study moved from one where the researcher undertook the decisions about what to videorecord to offering this decision making to the families, who chose when and what to videorecord of their mealtime practices. Evident also are the ways in which participants orient both to the video-camera and to the absent researcher. For the duration of the mealtime the video-camera was positioned by the adults as out of bounds to the children; however, it was offered as a "treat" to view after the mealtime was recorded. While situated within family mealtimes and reporting on the experiences of two families, this study illuminates how mealtimes are not just about food and eating; they are social. The study showed the constant and complex work of establishing and maintaining social orders and the rich array of interactional resources that members draw on during family mealtimes. The family’s interactions involved members contributing to building the social orders of family mealtime. With mealtimes occurring in institutional settings involving young children, such as long day care centres and kindergartens, the findings of this study may help educators working with young children to see the rich interactional opportunities mealtimes afford children, the interactional competence that children demonstrate during mealtimes, and the important role/s that adults may assume as co-participants in interactions with children within institutional settings.

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The scholar integration proposal demands that the school organize itself to facilitate the access for students with hearing impairment to the curriculum, allowing them, under those circumstances, to have educational opportunities to reach enough knowledge to perform their citizenship. The educational needs of these students demand effort of educators providing them a flexibility of the instruction resources, making feasible the opportunities of learning that take into account their singularity, especially related to communication. This paper had as the main objective an assessment to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of fairy tale dramatization, as an educational strategy to provide an improvement of the oral comprehension of stories for five students with hearing impairment, aged between 7 and 13, enrolled on a public school. It was used an experimental multiple baseline design between individuals, which started with an assessment of previous knowledge that each participant had; hearing impairment, previous knowledge about the fairy tale, followed by the participation of each one in a training with a pedagogical activity and in the end a dramatization related to the fairy tale. These activities were performed by each student in different moments, in a same group composed of four no-hearing-impairment participants. The data were collected by video and/or tape recordings. One statistical descriptive analysis was applied, by comparing the previous knowledge that each student with hearing impairment had about the fairy tale, before and after the achievement of both pedagogical activities and dramatization. The results showed that the participants who had been exposed to the two posterior interventions showed more improvement in performing the assessment tests of the fairy tale oral comprehension, as much in the evaluations accomplished after the introduction of the pedagogical support activity as after the dramatization activity. Although the two interventions had promoted improvement in this performance, there were differences in the magnitude of the change when it was compared with each individual among themselves, or in the student himself, the effect of the two strategies (pedagogical support and dramatization). The inter and intra-individual rate differences suggest that individuals benefited themselves in different ways when the two teaching strategies were used, and it seems to point toward that there is no superiority of one strategy over another, what implies the importance in diversifying the teaching instruction to fulfill the individual particularities in learning condition of students with hearing impairment.
A proposta de integração escolar exige que a escola se organize para facilitar o acesso dos alunos com deficiência auditiva ao currículo, permitindo, assim, que eles tenham oportunidades educacionais na aquisição de conhecimentos necessários, para o exercício de sua cidadania. As necessidades educacionais desses alunos exigem que os educadores proporcionem a eles uma flexibilização dos recursos instrucionais, viabilizando oportunidades de aprendizagem que considerem a sua singularidade, especialmente em relação à comunicação. Este estudo teve por objetivo principal avaliar a efetividade da utilização da dramatização de uma história infantil, como uma estratégia educacional para promover a melhora da compreensão oral de histórias por cinco alunos com deficiência auditiva, com idade entre 7 e 13 anos, matriculados em uma escola pública. Foi utilizado um delineamento experimental de linha de base múltipla entre sujeitos, o qual iniciou-se com a avaliação do conhecimento prévio que cada participante portador de deficiência auditiva tinha da História, prosseguiu com a participação de cada um deles em treino via atividade pedagógica e, posteriormente, via dramatização referente à História, sendo que essas atividades foram realizadas com cada um deles em momentos diferentes, embora com um mesmo grupo composto por quatro participantes ouvintes. Os dados foram coletados através da gravação em vídeo e/ou áudio. Aos resultados aplicou-se uma análise estatística descritiva, comparando-se o conhecimento prévio que cada aluno com deficiência auditiva tinha da História, antes e após a realização das atividades pedagógicas e de dramatização. Os resultados demonstraram que os participantes que foram submetidos às duas intervenções subseqüentes apresentaram melhora no desempenho em testes de avaliação da compreensão oral da História, tanto nas avaliações realizadas após a introdução da atividade de apoio pedagógico, quanto após a atividade de dramatização. Embora as duas intervenções tenham promovido melhora no desempenho, houve diferenças na magnitude da mudança quando se comparam os diferentes sujeitos entre si, ou no mesmo sujeito. As diferenças inter e intra-sujeitos sugerem que os indivíduos se beneficiaram de forma diferente quando as duas estratégias de ensino foram utilizadas, e isso parece indicar que não há superioridade de uma estratégia sobre a outra, o que implica na importância de diversificar o ensino, a fim de atender às especificidades individuais no estilo de aprendizagem de alunos com deficiência auditiva.

The aim of this study was to analyze the salience of issue dimensions in the Swedish parliament debates by the established parties during the rise of the Sweden Democrats Party (SD). Structural topic modeling was used to construct a measurement of the salience of issues, examining the full body of speeches in the Swedish parliament between September 2006 and December 2019. Trend analysis revealed a realignment from a focus on socio-economic to socio-cultural issues in Swedish politics. Cross-correlation analyses had conflicting results, indicating a weak positive relationship between the salience of issues and the support of SD – but low predictive ability; it also showed that changes in the support of SD did lead (precede) changes in the salience of issues in the parliament. The ramifications of socio-cultural issues being the most salient are that so-called radical right-wing populist parties (RRPs), or neo-nationalist parties, has a greater opportunity to gain support. It can make voters more inclined to base their voting decision on socio-cultural issues, which favors parties who fight for and are trustworthy in those issues – giving them more valence in the eyes of the voters.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1988.
Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-137).

The purpose of the current study is to understand the reintroduction of taboo topics between romantic dating partners. Through a qualitative methodological approach, the current study discovers the most prominent taboo topic between romantic partners, why romantic partners reintroduce taboo topics, and what effect the reintroduction has on the relationship. The findings present that “previous relationships” is the most prominent taboo topic. Partners either avoid the taboo topic discussion altogether or the taboo topic discussion is reintroduced because a situation occurred in which one partner saw, spoke with, or spent time with a previous partner. Finally, the current study found that reintroducing taboo topics causes conflict and the use of self-protective mechanisms within the relationship.
Department of Communication Studies

Based on these results, task-readiness is suggested as a theoretical extension to the concept of planning to catch both task-external readiness (different types of planning: rehearsal, strategic planning, and on-line planning) and task-internal readiness (content familiarity, schematic familiarity, and task type familiarity). A general framework of task-readiness is proposed as the basis of theorization of task planning and task familiarity.
Research into task-based language teaching (TBLT) has yielded fruitful results with regards to pre-task and during-task preparation activities, with some consensus being reached in a number of areas. Pre-task planning and task repetition usually give rise to fluency and complexity, whereas on-line planning is likely to help with complexity and accuracy. In general, pre-task planning, task repetition, and on-line planning are all task-external manipulations in which extra preparation time is provided so that learners can focus their attention on improving some performance areas. The present study is an attempt to extend the notion of planning from a task-external to a task-internal perspective.
Results showed that both topic familiarity and strategic planning help learners with more fluent language, but the effect sizes indicate that strategic planning was more powerful in this regard. Topic familiarity pushed learners for slightly more accurate performance with very significant gains in lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. In contrast, planning was associated with significantly higher complexity and lexical density. Proficiency seemed to be concerned with forms rather than meaning expression as higher proficiency participants always scored higher in accuracy and sometimes in complexity, but not so much in fluency or lexis.
The design of the study is empirical and quantitative in nature. The effects of strategic planning (task-external) and topic familiarity (task-internal) on participants with different proficiency levels are explored and compared. Eighty L2 English participants (forty medicine majors and forty computer majors from a major university in Hong Kong) performed different experimental tasks, in which topic familiarity types, planning conditions and proficiency levels constitute a 2 x 2 x 2 design. Topic familiarity was realized by giving each participant a natural virus topic and a computer virus topic. The topic that matched the participant's academic training was regarded as "familiar", and visa versa. There were two types of planning conditions, namely a non-planning (control) group and a ten-minute strategic planning group. Within each planning condition, the participants were further dichotomized into two different proficiency groups by a proficiency test that was administered prior to the tasks.
Bei, Xiaoyue = 探索任務內與任務外預備 : 主題熟悉程度和策略性構想對不同英語水準學習者話題性任務表現的效應研究 / 貝曉越.
Adviser: Peter Skehan.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-04, Section: A, page: .
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-206).
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstract also in Chinese.
Bei, Xiaoyue = Tan suo ren wu nei yu ren wu wai yu bei : zhu ti shu xi cheng du he ce lüe xing gou xiang dui bu tong Ying yu shui zhun xue xi zhe hua ti xing ren wu biao xian de xiao ying yan jiu / Bei Xiaoyue.

碩士
國立屏東教育大學
英語學系碩士班
101
The aim of this study is to investigate students’ frequent topics, the influence of discussion roles and interactions in literature circles. The participants were 10 National Pingtung Senior High Girls’ School students. They went through 2 try-out sessions for practice and 6 students-led literature circles. In this study, video- recording, the survey, informal and semi-structure interviews were employed to collect data. Students’ talk in literature circles was video-recorded and the recorded data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The survey was used for understanding students’ personal information and reading experiences. Interviews were audio-recorded to supplement the researcher’s interpretation of recorded data. The researcher also had students check the transcriptions during the informal interviews. The finding shows that there were two types of topics in literature circles: topics as text understanding and topics as extension. The frequent topics centering on text understanding are talking about the protagonists, discussing the literal meaning and conversing on the plot. The frequent topics centering on extension are connecting personal life experiences, putting themselves into the protagonist’s shoes and expressing personal emotion towards the protagonists. By talking about the protagonists, students could understand the development of the story. Connecting their life experiences with the texts helped them initiate a topic easier and made reading and discussions more interesting and meaningful. In this study, the factors that influenced the amount of conversational topics included topic preference, text readability, familiarity with the theme and the author’s writing style. The finding also shows that discussion roles dominated students’ topics. Although students expressed positive attitudes towards discussion roles, some students lacked confidence in playing the roles of discussion director and illustrator. There were also two instances where students posed topics irrelevant to their discussion roles. First, some connectors found it hard to connect their life experiences with the texts. Second, some vocabulary enrichers placed less value on discussing unfamiliar words. In this study, students initiated topics with open questions most frequently. Moreover, students took more turns talking when the topics were initiated with open questions. There were three reasons for this finding. Firstly, open questions elicited open answers from peers. Secondly, students verbally and non-verbally invited their peers to participate in the conversations. Thirdly, open questions triggered students’ disagreement and provoked students’ interests in topics. Based on the findings, the researcher suggests that educators should help student practice raising topics by talking about the protagonists and their life experiences. To make sure students have equal opportunity, educators should take time management and the order of discussion roles into consideration. Moreover, students should not be limited in discussing certain topics. Finally, educators should teach students verbal and non-verbal discussion skills. Further study is suggested in talk involving all male and mixed-gender groups, the number of students who join a topic, and talk involving controversial issues in literature circles to see if there are differences in results.

碩士
銘傳大學
應用英語學系碩士在職專班
104
This research is a case study to explore one complied corpus of 36 transcripts of TED Talks related to the ‘energy’ topic in terms of corpus-based genre analysis. The results reported that nouns take up the highest portion of keywords and the analysis of word clusters revealed that most speakers invited people to take actions. In addition, the study showed that most speakers addressed their main theme in their opening section in order to catch attention of their audiences. This study provides some insights and implications that can help learners to study spoken English as well as one specific genre related to English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

This study investigated the participant structure and content of discourse in five high-school science classrooms and their connection to scientifically literate practices for talking, reasoning, and evaluating claims. Through a detailed exploration of the way teachers introduced classes to the topic of evolution, I was able to examine how teachers used language to build a social framework for participation, examined the opportunities and challenges stemming from their various approaches, and explored how the structure and content of classroom talk contributed to framing science. This study used techniques from interactional sociolinguistics and conversational analysis to examine videos of interaction in five secondary biology classrooms on the day teachers introduced their students to lessons focused on the topic of evolution. Implications of this study focus on how teacher's discourse moves could open or close a discussion to student knowledge contributions, and emphasize how open discussions offer both challenges and opportunities to teachers wishing to facilitate scientifically literate discourse practices in their classroom.
text

碩士
國立中正大學
戰略暨國際事務研究所
100
Kim Jong-il has been promoting “military-first politics” as the guidance for North Korea since he came to power in 1994. North Korea launched a satellite missile test in 2009 while withdrawing from the Six-Party Talks in the same year to carry out a nuclear test, resulting in United Nations Security Council sanctioning on North Korea with Resolution 1874. After the first nuclear crisis, North Korea signed a “Nuclear Agreed Framework ” with the United States in Geneva in 1994, followed by establishing the “Korea Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO)” in 1995. After the second nuclear crisis, The United States, North Korea, and China held a tripartite talks in Beijing; however no concrete results have been reached under the lack of consensus from affiliated parties. In 2003, China launched a Six-Party Talks in attempt to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The negotiation lasted up to 6 years before reaching joint statement and the implementation of actions. However this objective not only failed to accomplish concrete results but also seemed to deviate from the target even further after North Korea withdrew from the Six-Party Talks. The situation in the Korean Peninsula could not be analyzed simply using single international relations theory. Due to Kim Jong-il’s Juche Idea and the foreign policy of military-first politics that led Korea, Six-Party Talks ultimately failed to bring its function into full play while none of the States has benefited from the Six-Party Talks. North Korea in the contrary has become the biggest winner. After North Korea withdrew from the Six-Party Talks, the foreign policies adopted by all States have oppressed the economic development of North Korea, leading North Korea to take further transformation.

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
美術研究所
88
Spatial representation in drawing： the influence of topic, task on spatial representation strategies of occlusion in children’s drawings Bor - Song You Abstract The purpose of the study to investigate the strategies of spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings. The influence of topic, task on spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings were considered. One hundred and eighty subjects aged 5, 7, 9 years were selected from five primary schools and two kindergardens in Keelung, Taiwan. They were randomly assigned to two groups, one took Topic 1 test (one ball behind another ), another took Topic 2 test (a girl behind the wall ). All subjects participated in three tasks, including drawing from memory (Task 1), drawing from observation (Task 2), and graphic judgment (Task 3). A 3 × 2 × 3 (age × topic × task) mixed experimental design was used. All subjects’ spatial representation of occlusion on 2 topics, 3 tasks were treatmented. Age, topic, and task as independent variables. Subjects’ three scores on treatment classified by criteria of spatial representation of occlusion as dependent variables. After collecting datas, using three-way ANOVA to identify the influence of topic, task on spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings. As following shows the main discoveries in this study: 1. The strategies of spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings were classified as in essential “Segregation”, “Transparency”, and “Occlusion”. 2. The strategies of spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings were “Partial occlusion” and “Horizontal segregation” two kinds mainly. 3. There was no significant interaction between age, topic and task. 4. The influence of topic, task on spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings. (1) There was significant interaction between two topics and three tasks. The effect of topic on spatial representation of occlusion depended on task. The effect of task on spatial representation of occlusion depended on topic. (2) The children’s spatial representation of occlusion in graphic judgment task were better than they did in observation task. The children’s spatial representation of occlusion in observation task were better than they did in memory task. (3) Above 7 years, children’s spatial representation of occlusion in drawings would faced the challenge of skills of representation by visual stimuli. 5.The influence of age, task on spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings. (1) There was significant interaction between age and task. The effect of age on spatial representation of occlusion depended on task. The effect of task on spatial representation of occlusion depended on age. (2) The elder children’s spatial representation of occlusion were better than younger children in three tasks. (3) The children’s spatial representation of occlusion in graphic judgment task were better than they did in observation task. The children’s spatial representation of occlusion in observation task were better than they did in memory task. 6.The influence of age, topic on spatial representation of occlusion in children’s drawings. (1) Under 7 years, the effect of children’s spatial representation of drawings depended on “difference between shapes”of topic, not the visual stimuli. (2) Until 9 years, the children’s spatial representation of drawings on 2 topics could reversed by the visual stimuli. Finally, the suggestions for instructional method, evaluation, and advanced research in children’s drawings are discussed. Keywords: children’s drawings, spatial representation, strategies in drawings, occlusion

In every setting of human space there is hierarchy. At home there are parents and children while in social structures there are organisations/institutions and leaders, all of whom carry their positions with them. All these hierarchies are embedded in a web of mutual relations, but to a greater extent, power relations as others abuse their positions while some are subjugated and controlled. This study critically analyses talk exchanges in power relations within topic development. It draws its analytical viewpoint from twelve selected IsiZulu drama books with an aim of demonstrating power relations as embedded in language and literature in particular. The following are some of the elements of the discussion that highlight talk exchanges and power relations, namely, maxim of conversation, interruptions and interjections, dominance and control, power of language and turntaking, to name a few. To analyse data, written conversations are clustered based on themes as expounded by (Vaismoradi, et al, 2016:101). Themes were then analysed using the conditions of agreement (similar cases) and differences within the scope of Analytical Comparisons. As the findings, the study revealed that talk exchanges are elements of power relations in topic development. Further, the findings also contributed to the understanding that power abuse has beeninstitutionalised along the line of institutions, race, gender and age. The findings further highlight that most drama books have themes that share method of agreement and lesser of the condition of difference. The study further highlights that written texts of human engagement keep records of social cohesion and cohabitation. Furthermore, if such coexistence is discorded by power (dominance and control), resistance interjects.
African Languages
D. Litt. et Phil. (Language, Linguistics and Literature)

The Framework Education Programme for Preschool Education is a legislative curriculum document which establishes the basic requirements for the state preschool education. The educational objectives and requirements are binding for the teachers. However, the way in which those objectives and requirements are met, is fully in the hands of each nursery school. This diploma thesis illustrates one of the possible ways of educating preschool children, namely the dramatic education. The dramatic education is presented here not only as an educational method but also as a style of pedagogical work. This particular style respects individuality and originality of each child with the intention of developing his/her potentials and with the effort to equip the child with necessary social skills. The practical part of the diploma thesis offers insight into the authentic dramatic and educational process which explores topics of human life. During this process, each child goes through a full-fledged personal and social development by means of dramatic activities, which are based on topics of literary text