This full paper concerns an exploratory study that investigates students' reasoning about torsion. Mechanical reasoning is critical to engineering applications and yet students still struggle to accurately predict, analyze, and model mechanical systems using formal symbolic notations (i.e., formalizations). To understand the nature of students'…

Childcare centres in Norway, which serve children from 0 to 5 years, are obliged to prepare an annual plan and to involve children in the planning process. Based on a systematic Internet search carried out in 2015-2016, this article describes children's participation in annual plans through representations of their direct speech. Internet searches…

This paper displays a Systemic Functional Linguistic and Critical Discourse Analysis of Boris Johnson's first public speech on COVID-19. COVID-19 is a very dangerous infectious disease caused by the last discovered virus of the Coronavirus strain. This virus began in Wuhan's Chinese city in December 2019. COVID-19 has spread from Wuhan to the rest…

Drawn from a larger project on reported speech in parliamentary interaction (Reber, forthcoming), this paper studies visuo-material performances of so-called "literalized" (Rumsey, 1992) quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances. Taking an interactional-linguistic perspective, I analyze how participants accomplish…

Poetic structures emerge in spoken language when speakers repeat grammatical phrases that were spoken before. They create the potential to amend or comment on previous speech, and to convey meaning through the structure of discourse. This paper considers the ways in which poetic structure analysis contributes to two perspectives on emergent…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the performance of adolescents with acquired brain injury (ABI) during a spoken persuasive discourse task. Persuasive discourse is frequently used in social and academic settings and is of importance in the study of adolescent language. Method: Participants included 8 adolescents with ABI and 8 peers…

The present study explores the use of conjunctions in simple versus complex argumentative tasks performed by second language (L2) learners as a specific measure for the amount of reasoning involved in task performance. The Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2005) states that an increase in cognitive task complexity promotes improvements in L2…

This study investigated how task complexity affected native and non-native speakers' speaking performance in terms of a measure of communicative success (functional adequacy), three types of fluency (breakdown fluency, speed fluency, and repair fluency), and lexical diversity. Participants (208 non-native and 59 native speakers of Dutch) carried…

The experience of teaching informal logic (sometimes called practical logic) at the introductory level over the last fifteen years has allowed the author the opportunity to identify some interesting problems. These problems have been encountered by students attempting to understand some of the ideas presented in the informal logic course and by…

In order to clarify and define the subject matter of argumentation, this paper examines the two senses of argument identified by D. J. O'Keefe and then proposes a third sense of argument as another legitimate perspective in argumentation. As discussed in the paper, O'Keefe's two senses of argument are a thing people make and a kind of interaction…

The Intensify/Downplay schema is a useful pattern for analyzing communication, persuasion, and propaganda. All people intensify and downplay as they communicate in words, gestures, numbers, and so on. But, "professional persuaders" have more training, technology, money, and media access than the average citizen. The three most common…

A discussion of ellipsis, the omission of information from a communication, argues that the fairly precise logical notion of ellipsis as used in philosophical analysis can be applied in the sociological study of ideology. It is proposed that ellipsis is a simple explanation of the workings of the language in which much potent ideology is embodied,…

To test whether verbal choices in a persuasive setting would show less diversity and more qualification than those in a nonpersuasive setting, a study involving 24 college students was undertaken. The subjects were divided into five groups and each group was asked to role play two situations: one calling for the subjects merely to be…

Political language employed in serious inquiry differs systematically from language employed to promote loyalty to authority in respect to syntax; grammatical completeness and complexity; proportion of nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech; and forms of qualification. Formal language entails continuous effort at verfication or falsification and…

Discusses "language-in-use" as an index of rhetorical efficacy, suggesting that the substance and form of verbal reactions to discourse may reflect the degree of audience internalization. Concludes that language-in-use assists the critic in determining whether changes in thinking and behavior are occasioned by words or actions, or both. (JMF)