The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on…

President Barack Obama's use of the hedging language is an evidence of his unique mastery of rhetorical strategies, power of persuasion and an influential speaker. The purpose of this study was to identify and retrieve the hedging devices contained in President Obama's speeches. For this purpose, his most important and decisive speeches were…

This study analyzes the linguistic features of counter-arguments and support arguments using two computational linguistic tools: Coh-Metrix and Gramulator. The research question investigates whether counter-argument paragraphs and support paragraphs are different in terms of their linguistic features. To conduct this study, a corpus of 78…

This study probed EFL learners' negotiation of meaning and negotiation strategy in two unfocused and two focused tasks using a counterbalanced design. Each of the focused/unfocused tasks included one opinion-exchange and decision-making task type, which resulted in four particular task conditions. To this end, 36 Iranian intermediate EFL learners…

Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little…

Metadiscourse, or metatalk, is a discursive resource used in virtually any text or conversation to organize its content or signal the author's stance toward the content. Despite its prevalence in classroom talk, few have examined the role of metadiscourse and how it assists teachers and students to manage classroom communication of scientific…

Introduction: The aim of this study was to analyze how oral argumentative strategies, argumentative sequences and interaction patterns relate to argumentative content and the required learning objectives. Method: Two different kinds of debates were analyzed. In the first, the participants defended one point of view, while in the second the…

The increasing prevalence of mandatory Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) policies has ushered in rather dramatic dissertation genre change. The affordances of the medium offer expanded access and audience, availability of new compositional tools, and alternate formats, the implications of which are just beginning to appear in…

Automation can mitigate issues when scaling and managing quality and identity in public discourse on the web. Discourse needs to be curated and filtered. Anonymous speech has to be supported while handling adversaries. Reliance on human curators or analysts does not scale and content can be missed. These scaling and management issues include the…

This paper presents the author's response to Xiaoming Xi's article titled "How do we go about investigating test fairness?" In this response, the author focuses on test fairness and Toulmin's model of argument structure, Xi's proposal, and the challenges the proposal brings. Xi proposes an approach to investigating test fairness to guide…

A study investigated the effects of instruction on students' persuasive writing at two grade levels (third and fifth), and determined the categories and types of written persuasion used by students at four grade levels (3rd, 5th, 10th, and 12th). The first objective, determining instructional effects, was accomplished by specifically instructing…

A historical review of theories of persuasion and its relationship to such areas as argument and propaganda indicates a number of inherent weaknesses in the definitions and taxonomies which have been proposed. Definitions and classifications have been sometimes circular in nature, have reflected the special interests of their authors, have been…

The approach taken to discourse analysis that classifies text types according to isolated linguistic features is criticized, and an alternative approach to argumentative texts is proposed. This approach looks at the process of argumentation as an instance of the problem-solving process. The argumentative text is then seen as moving from the…

Acceptance of claims made in scientific research articles depends on the "stance" authors take and their resources for "appraisal" (Martin and White, http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal). "Stance" has been defined as "the ways authors project themselves into their texts to communicate their relationship to subject matter and the readers",…