The paper reports on a study of emergent adult instructed L2 German writing ability in a college-level program that developed an explicit curriculum-based approach to supporting L2 writing. It uses systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as its theoretical framework and traces writing development through a central construct in the theory, the…

Four experiments support the view of negation as mitigation (Giora, Balaban, Fein, & Alkabets, 2004). They show that when irony involves some sizable gap between what is said and what is criticized (He is exceptionally bright said of an idiot), it is rated as highly ironic (Giora, 1995). A negated version of that overstatement (He is not…

This paper about consumption as a metaphor for learning follows from some ideas about learning and space that emerged from a research project concerned with everyday learning at work. These learning/work spaces have drawn our attention to the significant consumption (eating and drinking) occurring within them. We suggest that linking everyday…

The class-inclusion model claims that metaphors (e.g., That exam is a filter) are comprehended by inclusion of the topic (or subject) as a member of an attributive category named after and exemplified by the vehicle (or predicate). In three experiments, participants rated the extent to which a topic concept (e.g., exam) was a member of a vehicle…

We report three eye-movement experiments that investigated whether alternative syntactic analyses compete during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Previous research (Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998; Van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001) has shown that globally ambiguous sentences are easier to process than disambiguated sentences, suggesting…

Three experiments assessed how speakers avoid linguistically and nonlinguistically ambiguous expressions. Speakers described target objects (a flying mammal, bat) in contexts including foil objects that caused linguistic (a baseball bat) and nonlinguistic (a larger flying mammal) ambiguity. Speakers sometimes avoided linguistic-ambiguity, and they…

This article examines the significance of how learning objects have come to be conceptualized and utilized, particularly in higher education. While many articles critique the term and its origins, an examination of the role metaphor plays in our conceptualization of "data", "information" and "learning objects" helps us move beyond a fixation on…

Linguistic and psycholinguistic research has documented that there exists a close relationship between a verb's meaning and the syntactic structures in which it occurs, and that learners and comprehenders take advantage of this relationship both in acquisition and in processing. We address implications of these facts for issues in structural…

This article undertakes a close rhetorical reading of the speeches given by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Francis Collins, and Craig Venter on June 26, 2000, at the White House ceremony announcing the completion of the Human Genome Project. Specifically, it looks at the metaphors used by each speaker to describe the activity of genomic scientists.…

The challenge in designing organizational interventions lies in making explicit and available what is usually implicit. Accordingly, a contribution to the understanding of complex and implicit practices such as gossip and rumor, the conditions responsible for their origin, as well as the relation they sustain to the outcome of group survival,…

The author builds on arguments he has made elsewhere that good commercial video games foster deep learning and problem solving and that such games in fact promote mastery as a form of play. Here he maintains that some good video games engage players with an important type of play, namely of play as discovery, of play as surmising new possibilities…

Universities today need to become quicker on their toes. They must continually scan the environment and seize emerging opportunities--and institutional advancement must lead this effort. An unfortunate number of institutional advancement operations are ill equipped for the task at hand. Many suffer from high staff turnover and overly hierarchical…

The work reported here takes place in the educational domain. The authors propose a learning environment based on a graphical representation of a course. The emergence of online multiplayer games led the authors to apply the following metaphor to the digital work environments: The method of acquiring knowledge during a learning session is similar…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of game-like activities on adult learning during a computer-based simulation. This research also studied the use of visual metaphors as graphic organizers to help make the underlying science principles explicit without interfering with the interactive nature of the simulation. A total of…

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien "mort"], in English, the "dead" little dog, vs.…