The technological revolution and transformation in schools transforms the practices of literacy and poses tremendous challenges to literacy educators and researchers to rethink their basic tenets, to integrate technology and literacy in creative and productive ways. The aims of this study are to examine the characteristics of literacy practices in…

The technological revolution and transformation in schools transforms the practices of literacy and poses tremendous challenges to literacy educators and researchers to rethink their basic tenets, to integrate technology and literacy in creative and productive ways. The aims of this study are to examine the characteristics of literacy practices in…

It is recognised that verbal texts do not result only from words. They may involve the mental manipulation of other modes of representation such as images and sounds. If this is the case, we must consider what is not operating with writers who find it extraordinarily difficult to produce verbal texts. Are they failing to mentally code or…

Advance organizers activate the most suitable schema to learn new material. Poetic images are signified in schemata and the elements which are not expressed may be called by advance organizers. The purpose of this investigation is to discern the effectiveness of advance organizers on the signification of poetic images. Pretest-posttest…

Despite the best of intentions, qualitative researchers can be faced, in some circumstances, with having to make meaning from thin, or less than optimal, data. Using a real study as context, the authors describe the ways that they made sense of their thin data on teachers' perceptions of a large-scale evaluation instrument. They propose a…

For most of the 20th century, Roman Jakobson's name will have been synonymous with the definition of communication as a human science, i.e., communicology. Jakobson is the modern source of most of what communication scholars theorize about and practice as human communication, and he will be the source of how communication scholars shall come to…

Using the viewpoint of semiotics, this paper "re-reads" Karl Marx's labor theory of value and suggests a "triple triangle" model for commodity production and shows how this model could be a model for semiosis in general. The paper argues that there are three advantages to considering homogeneity of the sign production and the…

(Text is in French.)

This paper asks in turn: (1) What is phenomenology? (2) What is a phenomenology of communication? and (3) What is a phenomenology of human communication? The progressive application of the three questions represents an explicit use of the phenomenological method, involving description, reduction and interpretation. The phenomenological reduction…

Attempts to answer the questions "why study Saussure?" and "how?" through an historical analysis of Saussure's work, based on the "langue/parole" distinction. (AM)

This paper explores the relationship between the structure of orthographies and the way they are laid out spatially. In most written systems, consonantal alphabets have been written right to left, while vocalic ones have been written left to right, suggesting directional properties are the consequences of different processing strategies.…

The implications of some major linguistic and semiotic concepts for the machine manipulation of natural language text are examined. It is proposed that the study of meaning should contribute to the development of sophisticated algorithms for machine indexing. (Author)

Pragmatics, often defined as the study of language use and language users, sets out to explain what people wish to achieve and how they go about achieving it using language. The thirteen chapters in this volume show how translation (skill, art, process, and product) is affected by pragmatic factors such as the acts performed by people when they…