Search results for " Communication"
showing 10 items of 4937 documents
Indigenous Identity in Print: Representations of the Sami in News Discourse
2003
This article examines news representations of the indigenous Sami people in the Finnish news discourse and the role of the representations in the politics of Sami identity. Through critical discourse analysis of Finnish newspaper texts collected from the leading daily Helsingin Sanomat, I analyse the representations by examining how the journalists utilized textual and linguistic resources available to them, how journalistic practices limited and enabled choices made and, finally, how the textual choices contributed to the representations. The study suggests that a combination of the minority position of the Sami, journalistic practices and an unawareness of or insensitivity towards the re…
Too good to be true: The effect of conciliatory message design on compromising attitudes in intractable conflicts
2019
The aim of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the use of experimental methods challenges the implicit assumption of progressive discourse analysts that ‘inspiring’ messages will have a positive effect on political attitudes and trust regardless of the recipients’ early political dispositions, and second, to examine the power of conciliatory message design to change political attitudes in favor of a peaceful solution to intractable conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. By employing the conceptual frameworks of progressive discourse analysis and experimental critical discourse analysis, we examined the most comprehensive hypothesis formulated thus far in the lit…
Exploring translanguaging in CLIL
2016
After reviewing the concepts of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Translanguaging, this article presents an exploratory study of translanguaging in CLIL contexts. Employing illustrative extracts from a collection of CLIL classroom recordings in Austria, Finland and Spain, we argue that both pedagogic and interpersonal motivations can influence language choices. We suggest that the L1 should be appreciated as a potentially valuable tool in bilingual learning situations and that there is a need for increased awareness-raising around this question. peerReviewed
Being a good neighbour: developing intercultural understanding through critical dialogue between an Australian and Finnish cross-case study
2020
Language educators in Australia and Finland are expected to foster intercultural understanding within foreign language education. This paper presents findings from a qualitative case study focusing on theoretical and practical intercultural understanding in secondary school language education. The data for this study includes lesson observations as well as student and teachers interviews collected in two secondary schools in Australia and Finland. The findings demonstrate the complex resources teachers and students draw on to develop and share intercultural understanding. The discussion addresses the value of different perspectives and the need for a new metaphor to conceptualise intercultu…
Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot
2020
Abstract The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after presenting an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in NLG, we explain systematically how we identified and then recontextualized the determinant aspects of the genre of an online news story in the algorithm of our NLG software. In the discussion, we introduce the key results of a user test we carried out and some improvements that these re…
Professional Embodiment: Walking, Re-engagement of Desk Interactions, and Provision of Instruction during Classroom Rounds
2018
Abstract Unlike continuous whole-class (plenary) interaction, independent task work involves incipient teacher–student talk, as the teacher typically ‘makes rounds’ to engage in brief desk interactions with students. This article draws on multimodal conversation analysis to investigate how teacher movement during tasks offers resources for re-engaging in desk interactions and offering task-related guidance. The focus is on teachers’ walking trajectories and ways of positioning the body, and students’ orientation to them, in (i) (pre-)opening moments of a desk interaction, and (ii) during a subsequent instructional turn that guides students with the ongoing task. The analysis shows how the p…
Policing language in the world of new work : the commodification of workplace communication in organizational consulting
2021
Abstract This paper examines how the shift to knowledge and innovation economy has created new sites for the commodification of language and communication in the context of organizational consulting. The data come from a consultant-led development and training program of the management teams of a Finnish educational organization. In the study, the year-long training was videotaped (45 h) and followed ethnographically. By using rhetorical discourse analysis as a method, we examine how the consultant-led training activities present the role of language and communication in changing working life. The results show how the activities factualize the transformation of work and the centrality of la…
How Trump tweets: A comparative analysis of tweets by US politicians
2021
This paper analyses tweets sent from Donald Trump’s Twitter account @realDonaldTrump and contextualises them by contrasting them with several genres (i.e. political and ‘average’ Twitter, blogs, expressive writing, novels, The New York Times and natural speech). Taking common claims about Donald Trump’s language as a starting point, the study focusses on commonalities and differences between his tweets and those by other US politicians. Using the sentiment analysis tool Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and a principal component analysis, I examine a newly compiled 1.5-million-word corpus of tweets sent from US politicians’ accounts between 2009 and 2018 with a special focus on the q…
Graphic emotion: a critical rhetorical analysis of online children-related charity communication in poland
2019
This study explores dominant applications of graphic affordances in a sample of children-related charity appeals collected from the official websites of nine prominent Polish foundations in late 2016. It provides a systematic description of salient typographic and iconographic resources and an assessment of their rhetorical potential to solicit donations. The analysis focuses on three dominant discursive strategies used by charity communicators, namely how graphic affordances project utility (logos), confidence (ethos) and engagement (pathos). The article offers a critique of strategic emotional stimulation through aestheticized imagery and infantilizing graphics that replace arguments with…
Empowerment as an affective-discursive technology in contemporary capitalism: insights from a play
2019
Over recent years, an increasing body of research in social and cultural studies has investigated the contemporary processes of social change from the point of view of affective capitalism. In this article, we take under scrutiny one of its technologies, namely, empowerment, by which we mean a state characterised by feelings of strength, ability and power that enable agency. More specifically, we investigate the way empowerment is presented in a cultural product, a play that tells a story about personnel training in a factory, shown in a city theatre in Finland. By linking recent theorisation of affective capitalism with an investigation of the intertextual and interdiscursive relations of …