The article analyses the term discourse and discourse analysis with reference to Foucault and other critics. Foucault used the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating power, and emphasizing the construction of current truths. The article argues that discourse analysis, as employed by Foucault, concentrated on analysing power…

Based on a report on Dr. Li Wenliang in the British mainstream BBC media under the epidemic of COVID-2019, this paper analyzes from three perspectives guided by Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar: transitivity, mood and personal pronoun. It is found that the material process appears most frequently which shows that the news reports mainly…

Largely due to technological advances, methods for analyzing readability have increased significantly in recent years. While past researchers designed hundreds of formulas to estimate the difficulty of texts for readers, controversy has surrounded their use for decades, with criticism stemming largely from their application in creating new texts…

Two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the speed with which readers were sensitive to discourse-level anomalies. An account arguing for delayed sensitivity (Guzman & Klin, 2000) was contrasted with one allowing for rapid sensitivity (Myers & O'Brien, 1998). Anomalies related to spatial information (Experiment 1) and…

Explains how the Sophistic tradition, an alternative to the Platonic-Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, provides the historical foundation for a paralogic rhetoric that treats discourse production and analysis as open-ended dialogic activities and not as a codifiable system. Argues that teachers must examine the powerful paralogic/hermeneutic…

Reading and writing have traditionally been treated as separate processes, but some research on the relationship suggests that the two processes should be taught together. It is also proposed that skill in recognizing a text's main idea is a summarizing skill, demanding the cognitive and linguistic prerequisites appropriate to the text type. Good…

Analysis of several texts simplified to teach reading comprehension to college second language students shows that simplification affects both textual cohesion and coherence. Moreover, simplification restricts the amount of significant semantic information and creates a more transparent pattern of reference. The use of cohesive conjunctions varies…