Sociocultural influences on the development of child language skills have been widely studied, but the majority of the research findings were generated in Northern contexts. The current crosslinguistic, multisite study is the first of its kind in South Africa, considering the influence of a range of individual and sociocultural factors on expressive vocabulary size of young children. Caregivers of toddlers aged 16 to 32 months acquiring Afrikaans, isiXhosa, South African English, or Xitsonga as home language completed a family (...) background questionnaire and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory about their children. Based on a revised version of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, information was obtained from the family background questionnaire on individual factors, microsystem-related factors, and exosystem-related factors. All sociocultural and individual factors combined explained 25% of the variance in expressive vocabulary size. Partial correlations between these sociocultural factors and the toddlers’ expressive vocabulary scores on 10 semantic domains yielded important insights into the impact of geographic area on the nature and size of children’s expressive vocabulary. Unlike in previous studies, maternal level of education and SES did not play a significant role in predicting children’s expressive vocabulary scores. These results indicate that there exists an interplay of sociocultural and individual influences on vocabulary development that requires a more complex ecological model of language development to understand the interaction between various sociocultural factors in diverse contexts. (shrink)

This study linked background TV and socioeconomic status to minority children’s Persian vocabulary development. To this end, 80 Iranian preschool children from two minority groups of Arabs and Turks were selected using stratified random sampling. They were simultaneous bilinguals, i.e., their mother tongue was either Arabic or Azari and their first language was Persian. Language sample analysis was used to measure vocabulary development through a 15-min interview by language experts. The LSA measures included total number of (...) utterances, total number of words, total number of new words, and mean length of utterance. A series of independent-samples t test, paired-samples t test, and repeated measures MANOVA tests were ran to examine data. Results showed significant improvements in children’s vocabulary scores from pretest to posttest for all children. In addition, high-SES children scored higher on the vocabulary measures in pretest and posttest. Moreover, background TV was associated with higher means in the TNW and the NDW in groups. The researchers concluded that background TV may be related to higher vocabulary scores in low-SES families as it may compensate for some linguistics gaps in these families including lower amount of child-parent interaction, play, and parents’ level of literacy. (shrink)

The objective of the presented research was to test whether working memory, measured using the Spin the Pots task, is an important factor in passive vocabulary development in 2- and 3-year-old children. Two longitudinal studies were conducted. In the first, 135 children participated in the first study. At 18 months their responding to joint attention was measured, and then at 24 months their working memory and passive vocabulary was tested. It was demonstrated that responding to joint attention (...) predicts the level of development of working memory, which in turn influences the extent of the passive vocabulary. In the second study, 113 children participated - at 30 months their working memory was measured, and at 24 months and then 36 months their passive vocabulary was tested. It was observed that at the age of 3 working memory is still a significant predictor of passive vocabulary. The usefulness of the Spin the Pots task for measuring the working memory of young children was shown and discussed in conclusions. (shrink)

How many words is a bilingual 2-year-old supposed to know or say in each of her languages? Speech and language therapists or researchers lack the tools to answer this question, because several factors have an impact on bilingual language skills: gender, amount of exposure, mode of acquisition, socio-economic status and the distance between L1 and L2. Unfortunately, these factors are usually studied separately, making it difficult to evaluate their weight on a unique measure of vocabulary. The present study measures (...) the contribution of the following factors to the vocabulary scores of bilingual toddlers: i) gender; ii) sibling ranking; iii) relative amount of exposure to each language; iv) mode of exposure; v) SES; vi) linguistic distance; vii) language spoken between parents. Close to the child’s second birthday, parents of 278 UK-based bilinguals completed successively: a 100-word version of the Oxford-CDI, the CDI in the child’s Additional Language, a family questionnaire, and the Language Exposure Questionnaire. Thirty-six British-English-AL pairs were considered, with languages contrasted on a second-language-learning scale : for example, Dutch and French are close to British-English, while Polish or Cantonese are more distant. Data from the corpus were included in two mixed-effect models, one with the English scores in comprehension as the dependent variable, and the other with production scores. The seven factors listed above were included as predictors. The amount of English exposure was the strongest predictor of comprehension scores = 9.35, p <.005, β = 0.02, t = 3.08, p <.005), followed by the language that parents speak between themselves = 14.94, p <.001, β = 1.37, t = 3.76, p <.0005), linguistic distance = 6.92, p <.01, β = -0.74, t = -2.66, p <.01) and age = 4.86, p <.05, β = 0.55, t = 2.17, p <.05). In production, gender = 13.57, p <.0005, β = -0.91, t = -03.72, p <.0005), amount of exposure to English = 13.57, p <.0005, β = -0.91, t = -03.72, p <.0005), the language that parents speak between themselves = 11.85, p <.005, β = 1.09, t = 3.41, p <.001), and the mother’s occupation = 4.51, p <.05, β = 0.63, t = 2.13, p <.05) were the significant predictors. The more English parents use to address one another, the more English words the child says and understands. This surprising result could be simply explained by the fact that parents who speak English together are also more likely to speak English to their child. The main results of this study is that linguistic distance is a powerful predictor of toddlers’ vocabulary in English, with children learning two close languages growing their vocabulary faster than those learning distant languages. (shrink)

Morphology is the study of word forms and the ways in which words are varied and related to other words in a language. It has been regarded as an essential discipline that is indispensable in language acquisition. It helps learners to figure out the word structure and meaning, particularly the meaning changing of morphemes, which is pivotal for defining words. The present study focuses on developing morphological knowledge with online corpora which are the useful tools for teaching and learning the (...) changes happened in English. Given this light, this research reports an ESL vocabulary classroom in which the instructor designs vocabulary classroom activities with COCA, BNC, TIME MAGAZINE corpus to enrich students' English vocabulary knowledge, help them master word usage, and foster their corpus literacy. This study is oriented by the framework of Classroom Action Research (CAR). Students' classroom performances were recorded and their self-reflections of learning experiences were collected for thematic analysis. The results indicate that, firstly, students' morphological knowledge has been developed as well as their vocabulary knowledge; secondly, their vocabulary self-regulated learning motivation has been incentivised that they are able to answer their own queries about words; thirdly, students' corpus literacy has been fostered, which facilitates their ongoing vocabulary learning; last but not least, a community of inquiry has been established in which students collaborate to construct vocabulary knowledge. The study has wider implications for constructing the student-centered vocabulary classroom and implementing corpus-based instruction in other second language vocabulary classrooms. (shrink)

The book offers a novel exploration into the semantic development of English terms concerning the concept of 'joy' (bliss, cheer, delight, dream, game, gladness, glee, joy, and mirth). The author adopts a panchronic perspective, according to which language reflects the way speakers experience the world.

Nuovo Soggettario is a verbal subject indexing system renewing the existing Soggettario used in many Italian libraries. The renewal work consists of substantive improvements in the structure and the relationships of the system, now making it a true faceted thesaurus. Facet analysis is a key part of this development, both in identifying a set of facets and categories to which terms in the thesaurus belong, and in providing a scheme of the roles they can play within a subject string, (...) as well as rules for their citation order. (shrink)

We discuss a research project that develops and applies algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning the meaning of unknown words from context. We try to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and secondlanguage acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms: We use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build an educational curriculum for enhancing students’ abilities to use CVA strategies in their reading of science (...) texts at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques feeds back into further development of our computational theory. Keywords: artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, reading, reasoning, science education, vocabulary acquisition. (shrink)

The automatic integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging goals facing biomedical informatics today. Controlled vocabularies have played an important role in realizing this goal, by making it possible to draw together information from heterogeneous sources secure in the knowledge that the same terms will also represent the same entities on all occasions of use. One of the most impressive achievements in this regard is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is rapidly acquiring the (...) status of a de facto standard in the field of gene and gene product annotations, and whose methodology has been much intimated in attempts to develop controlled vocabularies for shared use in different domains of biology. The GO Consortium has recognized, however, that its controlled vocabulary as currently constituted is marked by several problematic features - features which are characteristic of much recent work in bioinformatics and which are destined to raise increasingly serious obstacles to the automatic integration of biomedical information in the future. Here, we survey some of these problematic features, focusing especially on issues of compositionality and syntactic regimentation. (shrink)

Infants acquire their first words through interactions with social partners. In the first year of life, infants receive a high frequency of visual and auditory input from faces, making faces a potential strong social cue in facilitating word-to-world mappings. In this position paper, we review how and when infant gaze to faces is likely to support their subsequent vocabulary outcomes. We assess the relevance of infant gaze to faces selectively, in three domains: infant gaze to different features within a (...) face ; then to faces ; and finally to more socially relevant types of faces. We argue that infant gaze to faces could scaffold vocabulary construction, but its relevance may be impacted by the developmental level of the infant and the type of task with which they are presented. Gaze to faces proves relevant to vocabulary, as gazes to eyes could inform about the communicative nature of the situation or about the labeled object, while gazes to the mouth could improve word processing, all of which are key cues to highlighting word-to-world pairings. We also discover gaps in the literature regarding how infants’ gazes to faces or to different types of faces relate to vocabulary outcomes. An important direction for future research will be to fill these gaps to better understand the social factors that influence infant vocabulary outcomes. (shrink)

Natural language contains many examples of sound-symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears to promote learning category distinctions, which may become more important as the vocabulary grows. In this study, we tested the relative costs and benefits of sound-symbolism for word learning as vocabulary size varies. Participants learned form-meaning mappings for (...) words which were either congruent or incongruent with regard to sound-symbolic relations. For the smaller vocabulary, sound-symbolism facilitated learning individual words, whereas for larger vocabularies sound-symbolism supported learning category distinctions. The changing properties of form-meaning mappings according to vocabulary size may reflect the different ways in which language is learned at different stages of development. (shrink)

The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about (...) when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from “past/future” and “anticipation/unexpected” to “extinction/adaptation” and “serial/simultaneous.” Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time—not space, as the postmoderns had it—is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live. (shrink)

This text explores a set of key concepts in Marxist theory as developed and read by Lacan, demonstrating links and connections between Marxist thought and Lacanian practice. The book examines the complexity of these encounters through the structure of a comprehensive vocabulary which covers diverse areas, from capitalism and communism to history, ideology, politics, work, and family. Offering new perspectives on these concepts in psychoanalysis, as well as in the fields of political and critical theory, the book brings together (...) contributions from a range of international experts to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between Marx and Lacan, as well as illuminating 'untranslatable points' which may offer productive tension between the two. The entries trace the trajectory of Lacan's appropriation of Marx's concepts and analyses how they were questioned, criticized and reworked by Lacan, accounting for the wide reach of two thinkers and worlds in constant homology. Each entry also discusses psychoanalytic debates relating to the concept and seeks to refine the clinical scope of Marx's work, demonstrating its impact on the social and individual dimensions of Lacanian clinical practice. With a practical and structured approach, The Marx Through Lacan Vocabulary will appeal to psychoanalysts and researchers in a range of fields, including political science, cultural studies, and philosophy. (shrink)

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, where “context” includes: (1) the reader’s “internalization” of the surrounding text, i.e., the reader’s “mental model” of the word’s “textual context” (hereafter, “co-text” [3]) integrated with (2) the reader’s prior knowledge (PK), but it excludes (3) external sources such as dictionaries or people. CVA is what you do when you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, realize (...) that you don’t know what it means, decide that you need to know what it means in order to understand the passage, but there is no one around to ask, and it is not in the dictionary (or you are too lazy to look it up). In such a case, you can try to figure out its meaning “from context”, i.e., from clues in the co-text together with your prior knowledge. Our computational theory of CVA—implemented in a the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system [28]—begins with a stored knowledge base containing SNePS representations of relevant PK, inputs SNePS representations of a passage containing an unfamiliar word, and draws inferences from these two (integrated) information sources. When asked to define the word, definition algorithms deductively search the resulting network for information of the sort that might be found in a dictionary definition, outputting a definition frame whose slots are the kinds of features that a definition might contain (e.g., class membership, properties, actions, spatio-temporal information, etc.) and whose slot-fillers contain information gleaned from the network [6–8,20,23,24]. We are investigating ways to make our system more robust, to embed it in a naturallanguage-processing system, and to incorporate morphological information. Our research group, including reading educators, is also applying our methods to the develop-. (shrink)

Vocabulary knowledge affects any learner’s general language proficiency and the lack of vocabulary is often seen as an obstacle in a student’s progress. This statement becomes even truer when considering languages for specific purposes as the knowledge of technical vocabulary is closely connected to mastering professional skills. The research on vocabulary learning distinguishes two types of learning, incidental and intentional, which should complement each other. One of the most efficient intentional strategies proved to be the use (...) of flashcards. Modern technologies have contributed to further development of this rather popular method by offering new ways of vocabulary consolidation as well as novel forms of interaction. The main objective of the paper is to introduce a teaching methodology aimed at the intentional building of students’ vocabulary, however, at the same time making students being aware of a broader context in which a word or a collocation is used. The presented methodology involves student generated and recycled content as well as the use of electronic tools, namely Google docs and Quizlet. In the course of three subsequent spring semesters, students first created a Google Docs collaborative learning log with lists of vocabulary, the following year’s students uploaded the lists of definitions and translations into Quizlet sets and in the final year the words in Quizlet flashcards where supplemented with example sentences. Students’ performance showed that both Google Docs and Quizlet are efficient tools not only for vocabulary learning, but also for language teaching. The proposed methodology was used in legal English classes, however, it can be implemented in any language course. (shrink)

"Any linguistic study of the Greek verb be is essentially conditioned, and perhaps ultimately motivated, by the philosophic career of this word. We know what an extraordinary career it has been. It seems fair to say, with Benveniste, that the systematic development of a concept of Being in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle, and then in a more mechanical way from the Stoics to Plotinus, relies upon the pre-existing disposition of the language to make a very general and (...) diversified use of the verb einai. Furthermore, insofar as the notions expressed by on, einai, and ousia in Greek underlie the doctrines of Being, substance, essence, and existence in Latin, in Arabic, and in modern philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger and perhaps to Quine, we may say that the usage of the Greek verb be studied here forms the historical basis for the ontological tradition of the West, as the very term "ontology" suggests. At the same time it is generally recognized that this wide range of uses for the single verb eimi in Greek reflects a state of affairs which is "peculiar to Indo-European languages, and by no means a universal situation or a necessary condition." (1) The present monograph series on "the verb 'be' and its synonyms" shows just how far the languages of the earth may differ from one another in their expression for existence, for predication with nouns or with adjectives, for locative predication, and so forth. The topic of be can itself scarcely be defined except by reference to Indo-European verbs representing the root *es-. The question naturally arises whether an historical peculiarity of this kind can be of any fundamental importance for general linguistics and, even more pressing, whether a concept reflecting the Indo-European use of *es- can be of any general significance in philosophy.". (shrink)

The present study investigated the impacts of mobile assisted vocabulary learning via digital flashcards. The data were collected from 44 adult English as Foreign Language learners in three intact classes in a private language teaching institute in Iran, randomly assigned to experimental and control learning conditions. The experimental group used a freely available DF application to learn items from a recently developed corpus-based word list for high-frequency vocabulary in English. The treatment was implemented as out-of-the-classroom learning activities where (...) the EFL learners used DFs to augment their vocabulary knowledge, and their learning gains were compared to the control group that received regular English language education. The participants’ vocabulary knowledge was tested in pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests, and the findings indicated that using DFs for outside the classroom vocabulary learning contributed significantly to short- and long-term improvements in the knowledge of high-frequency words. The study provided empirical evidence for the affordances of mobile assisted vocabulary learning for learning a considerable proportion of core vocabulary and has some implications for addressing the vocabulary learning needs of EFL learners. (shrink)

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West (...) Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day. (shrink)

This dissertation is concerned with normativity both as an explanatory device in the philosophy of language, logic and epistemology and as a philosophical issue in its own right. Following later Wittgenstein and Sellars, it is argued that language is normative, in the first instance because of the fact that speech acts take place within a structure of social norms and institutions. This fact is then utilized to show that important features of semantic content can be explained in terms of such (...) norms. ;This Sellarsian conception of linguistic usage as the performance of acts within a linguistic game of giving and asking for reasons, leads us to focus on inferential proprieties as central to semantic content. It is, then, natural to look at logical vocabulary, paradigmatically 'entails', as expressing the very normative relations definitive of this content. An idea of Brandom's is developed in providing a formal theory of the inferential content of logical vocabulary. Such normative-inferentialist semantic analyses are developed for a wide range of logical systems. ;A certain conception of justification also falls naturally out of this general theory of language. If asserting is an act performed within a linguistic game, then justification can be thought of as a matter of winning such a game, a successfully defending one's assertion in the face of licensed challenges to it. This account is developed, drawing consequences for the theory of rationality and knowledge. ;The second major issue of the dissertation is the theory of the normative itself and much of the constructive work in the philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and epistemology forms a case study for a particular theory of the normative. On the basis of Wittgensteinian considerations, it is argued that normativity must be understood as resting ultimately on social practice. ;We solve problems of earlier accounts of norms by introducing a novel normative relation between assertions of normative propriety and social practices. Normative assertions do not describe existing social standards, but do nonetheless derive their semantic content from those standards. This argument carried through in detail for cases of logical and epistemic vocabulary in the dissertation. (shrink)

This paper motivates and develops a novel semantics for several epistemic expressions, including possibility modals and indicative conditionals. The semantics I defend constitutes an alternative to standard truth conditional theories, as it assigns sets of probability spaces as sentential semantic values. I argue that what my theory lacks in conservatism is made up for by its strength. In particular, my semantics accounts for the distinctive behavior of nested epistemic modals, indicative conditionals embedded under probability operators, and instances of constructive dilemma (...) containing epistemic vocabulary. (shrink)

Over the past years, Massive Open Online Courses have emerged as new competitive advantages in the digital economy of higher education globally. Accordingly, an increasing number of individuals are attracted to these new learning environments for developing their knowledge and skills in a variety of subject areas. Despite these developments, research on linguistic features of MOOCs lectures as the main mediums for delivering the course contents remained limited. To address this gap, the present study analyzed a corpus of MOOCs lectures (...) with around 4.45 million words to determine the size of vocabulary knowledge needed for 95 and 98% coverages. The findings revealed that sufficient coverage of the course contents requires knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent words in English. Nonetheless, achieving adequate coverage level requires a much larger vocabulary size of around 9,000 most frequent words in English. The study also found that widely used word lists for general and academic vocabulary fail to support MOOCs learners with sufficient vocabulary knowledge for adequate lexical coverage. Based on these findings, the study draws a number of implications for preparing non-native English speakers to use MOOCs effectively and setting research-informed vocabulary learning goals in instructional programs and materials. (shrink)

While extremes tend to capture attention, the ordinary is often most of the story. So it may be with the structure-mapping process. The structure-mapping process can account for such pinnacles of thinking as analogy and metaphor, which can lead to overlooking the mundane, incremental use of structure mapping. Consequently, the current discussion shifts focus to the value of close comparisons between literally similar items for the development of knowledge. The intent is to foster greater integration between process and content (...) as well as between individuals and collectives. The payoff is identifying some undue simplifications and some promising new directions. (shrink)

Across languages, lexical items specific to infant‐directed speech (i.e., ‘baby‐talk words’) are characterized by a preponderance of onomatopoeia (or highly iconic words), diminutives, and reduplication. These lexical characteristics may help infants discover the referential nature of words, identify word referents, and segment fluent speech into words. If so, the amount of lexical input containing these properties should predict infants’ rate of vocabulary growth. To test this prediction, we tracked the vocabulary size in 47 English‐learning infants from 9 to (...) 21 months and examined whether the patterns of growth can be related to measures of iconicity, diminutives, and reduplication in the lexical input at 9 months. Our analyses showed that both diminutives and reduplication in the input were associated with vocabulary growth, although measures of iconicity were not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonological properties typical of lexical input in infant‐directed speech play a role in early vocabulary growth. (shrink)

BackgroundThe association between language and mental health may be connected to several aspects of language. Based on the known associations, emotional vocabulary could be an important contribution to mental health and act as a risk, protective or resilience factor for mental health in general. As a preliminary test of this hypothesis, an assessment of emotional vocabulary was constructed and used among youths in school age. Cross-sectional associations and prediction models with parent-reported youth mental health as outcome were examined (...) for emotional vocabulary as well as general vocabulary, non-verbal problem solving and social communication, controlled for age, gender and subsamples.ResultsEmotional vocabulary, general vocabulary and non-verbal problem solving were directly associated with each other and similarly associated with age and gender. However, they were not significantly associated with social communication skills or mental health in the expected direction. Only social communication skills showed significant negative associations with behavioral mental health problems, suggesting these skills to be potential resources related to mental health.ImplicationFuture research should investigate whether behavioral problems may be prevented or improved by developing better social communication skills among community school-age youths. However, our results suggest that merely expanding emotional vocabulary is not likely to produce such effects unless this is integrated with improving social communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Merging Traditional Technique Vocabularies with Democratic Teaching Perspectives in Dance EducationA Consideration of Aesthetic Values and Their Sociopolitical ContextsBecky Dyer (bio)IntroductionConventional aesthetic values in dance traditionally have been wed to long-established authoritarian teaching approaches in American professional dance companies and university dance programs. Developed over time from a mixture of enduring cultural tastes, aesthetic ideals, and historical influences, aesthetic values play a significant role in teaching and learning processes (...) in the classroom, although the impact of their presence on learning is often indiscernible or paid little attention. As dance educators in higher education make efforts to move toward more democratic teaching perspectives, they often find themselves philosophically lodged between established approaches to teaching traditional, codified vocabularies and aesthetics and more contemporary, student-centered, and democratically oriented perspectives to teaching and learning dance. Attention to the sociopolitical contexts of dance training gives practitioners opportunities to consider aesthetic values of dance from differing cultural vantage points and the perspectives by which these values are taught and learned.Each learning circumstance in dance is a complex weaving of personal and social experience involving individuals, communities, movers, and viewers. Movement aesthetic values emerge from personal and communal morals and ideals as well as social mores of the body, which create contextual lenses for experiencing, interpreting, and making meaning of movement vocabularies created and perpetuated in dance communities. It is important that teachers who seek to incorporate more democratically oriented, student-centered teaching perspectives become mindful of ways social values and perceptual/contextual frameworks impact personal [End Page 108] and communal practices in dance. Approaches to learning technique that consider sociocultural factors of dance movement aesthetics—wherein teachers and learners are led to recognize and reflect upon personal, social, and aesthetic values embodied in movement and embedded in movement vocabularies—can lead teachers and learners to better understand the significance of learning in dance as it relates to personal and social worlds beyond the classroom.This article will suggest how movement analysis from a socially contextualized perspective can inform understanding about the significance of sociopolitical contexts and aesthetic values in Western dance training. Perspectives of movement analysis will provide groundwork for discussing perceivable ways to address discrepancies between democratic and authoritarian teaching viewpoints and to challenge the prominent linking of conventional aesthetic values and vocabularies, as well as codified techniques, to authoritarian practices. The discussion will address relationships between pedagogical perspectives and ideologies held by teachers concerning the place and worth of conventional aesthetic values and the nature of aesthetic experiences in the dance technique classroom, and the potential understandings and meanings their students construct.Foundations of Movement Analysis: The Ideas and Practices of Rudolf LabanRecognizing embedded personal and social aesthetic values in movement is an important initial stage in developing more critically reflective practices that promote meaning, agency, and student interest in learning. The task is challenging because the only values accessibly evident to the bystander, and often the mover, are visual ones. Yet, as Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) suggested, intangible values also inspire movement. Laban created a theoretical framework—referred to as Laban Movement Analysis—for movement exploration, description, and analysis to consider both noticeably apparent and less-tangible values of movement by investigating movement phenomena and factors that generate them.1 The praxis-oriented system involves reflecting on movement observations, considering emotional and mental facets of movement, and taking into account experiential bodily perspectives of the mover.2Although one of Laban's fundamental purposes for developing a descriptive vocabulary for movement was to facilitate the mastery of dance technique,3 his teaching emphasized the "harmonious expressiveness of the whole individual," as he aimed to facilitate dancers' ability to understand and use their bodies in order to discover individual ways of expressing themselves and communicating.4 Laban's attitudes toward training were in sharp contrast to approaches of the day, yet interestingly, they were not [End Page 109] opposed to them. For example, common dance gestures and postures were expanded into free exploration and studied from diverse points of view rather than a narrow range of perspectives, aesthetic values, and movement qualities.5Laban's theory of "Effort," which he linked to emotions as well as... (shrink)

That the Eudemian Ethics is a genuine work of Aristotle, belonging to a middle stage in his development, is now widely accepted on the various grounds advanced by Jaeger and others from 1909 onwards. I want to show that, quite apart from those considerations, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of E.E. on the ground of peculiarities in its vocabulary, as these can be explained in various ways. A presentation of the evidence as regards special (...) class='Hi'>vocabulary may in any case be of interest, and may throw some light eventually on its position among Aristotle's writings, if it belongs among them; and for this reason I add a further section on words in E.E. uncommon in Aristotle. (shrink)

In business schools, there is a persistent myth according to which management education is, and should be, ‘value-free’. This article reflects on the experiences of two business schools from Finland and Australia in which the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education have been pragmatically used as a platform for breaking with this institutionalized guise of positivist value neutrality. This use of PRME makes it possible to create learning environments in which values and value tensions inherent in management education can be (...) explored and exposed. Inspired by Rorty’s understanding of ethics—notably his discussion of ‘final vocabularies’ and ‘moral imagination’—and Flyvbjerg’s reading of phronēsis, the article discusses an approach to learning that helps both teachers and students in exploring and exposing values in management education by problematizing dominant business school vocabularies, thereby leading to moral development, in the Rortian sense. The article presents a number of final vocabularies that business students come to class with, some learning methods used to challenge these vocabularies through discussion of alternative vocabularies, and the new directions for moral imagination that may result. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons ed. by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru and Andrei TerianLaura Elena Savu WalkerMatei, Alexandru, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, editors. Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons. Bloomsbury, 2021. 376pp.Far from “mourning” the demise of theory, this timely and thoughtfully curated essay collection testifies to its “renewed vitality,” its compelling (...) presence “across fields, domains of life, and geocultural boundaries,” and its power to build an ever-expanding world community of practioners who are forming what has come to be known as a “theory commons” (ix). As the collection’s editors point out, theory’s new lease on life hinges on ensuring both the democratic workings of this “world discourse formation” (1) and on the responsible theorizing of the very notion of community in “a world threatened by all kinds of anti-communal actions and reactions, from runaway globalization to exacerbated tribalism and tunnel-vision politics” (x). Working on the margins, specifically, out of a Romanian “lab” called The Critical Theory Institute (CTI), which opened its doors in early 2000, the contributors seek to revise the “standard history of theory,” one whose “Western origins, authority, and cultural compass ” strike them as “exceedingly reductive” (3). This project of geotheoretical repositioning and recalibration aims to recast theory as a “quintessentially cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, trans- and intercontinental undertaking” (4). As such, it carries on the project, launched in a previous volume, Romanian Literature as World Literature (2018), of fashioning an alternative to the nation-state paradigm that has long shaped literary and intellectual histories. In both of these works, Romanian critics and theorists have tuned into a wide range of voices, and tapped into a shared conceptual and methodological apparatus—itself the product of “an ethno-linguistic medley of traditions” (8). This approach informs what editors see as the “epoch-making” (17) discursive paradigm that has taken shape in globally networked post-Cold War societies (17), a viral model of cultural influence that fosters an ontology of “contact, contagion, of infection, dissemination, and horizontal accumulation” (15).To give us a sense of theory’s complex genealogy and evolution, the editors reference the Bulgarian critic Galin Tihanov, who has attributed [End Page 122] important developments in contemporary theory to the achievements of theorists (Nikolai Trubetskoi, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Georg Lukács) and schools of thought (Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle). In “Traveling Theory” (1983) and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (2000), Edward Said called attention to the migratory nature of contributions made, for instance, by Georg Lukács, whose theories moved across different European locales in this period. Since then, contemporary theory has branched out to integrate the travels and travails of scholars affiliated with theory labs located in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and last, but not least, Romania (10).Theory in the “Post” Era highlights five characteristics that distinguish theory in the “post” era from earlier forms: 1) It has a “reluctantly epoch-alist” thrust (19; original italics), which assumes that the “post” lexicon entails “rupture, discontinuity, and opposition” (19), radical departures, tentative claims, provisional conclusions, and ex-centric perspectives; 2) it adopts a “self-reflexive and experimental” (20; original italics) stance in which theorists invoke inherited approaches or invent new ones; 3) it introduces a “transdisciplinary” (21; original italics) scope that allows authors to interrogate the foundations, aims, and methods of theoretical discourse and practice across several knowledge domains, from which they “borrow whole vocabularies and toolkits” (21); 4) it is “nationally, transnationally, and ecologically affiliative” (20) in ways that allow theorists to “think with others at a distance” (21) about global issues; and 5) it is programmatic, placing critical and theoretical concerns in the service of “the ethical, the political, and the communal” (22). Organized around three main themes (“Aesthetics,” “Temporalities,” and “Critical Modes”), the essays juxtapose discussions of pivotal historical events and cultural phenomena with literary analyses of Romantic era “classics,” modernist experiments, and postmodern works of the post-Communist era, a corpus that includes, but is not limited to, landmark works of national culture that are now part of a fast-expanding planetary... (shrink)

That the Eudemian Ethics is a genuine work of Aristotle, belonging to a middle stage in his development, is now widely accepted on the various grounds advanced by Jaeger and others from 1909 onwards. I want to show that, quite apart from those considerations, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of E.E. on the ground of peculiarities in its vocabulary, as these can be explained in various ways. A presentation of the evidence as regards special (...) class='Hi'>vocabulary may in any case be of interest, and may throw some light eventually on its position among Aristotle's writings, if it belongs among them; and for this reason I add a further section on words in E.E. uncommon in Aristotle. (shrink)

“Contextual” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from textual clues and prior knowledge, including language knowledge and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization” (...) of the text “integrated” into the reader’s “prior” knowledge via belief revision. (shrink)

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English‐acquiring 30‐month‐olds. The children participated in a visual world looking‐while‐listening task, in which (...) their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30‐month‐olds exhibit lexical‐level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size. (shrink)

This study investigates the effectiveness of integrating short stories with task-based learning activities in English as a foreign language (EFL) class to promote vocabulary development and motivation among L2 learners. Six short stories were selected by the participants based on their interests, pre- and post-tests were conducted to evaluate vocabulary acquisition and a questionnaire was used to gather information about the perception of task-based activities after reading short stories among students. The study involved 60 intermediate level English (...) students at the SEEU Language Center, assigned to either the control or experimental group. The experimental group completed post-reading tasks such as keeping vocabulary notebooks, reading circle discussions, sequencing activities, plot structure understanding, and group poster presentations after reading each story. The findings suggest that the incorporating engaging reading activities had a favorable effect on language learning. The experimental group exhibited greater vocabulary acquisition and comprehension than the control group. The follow-up tasks created a sense of achievement, improved communication and interaction among the students. According to the study, including comprehensible input through extensive reading along with constructive output from task-oriented exercises can effectively promote language progress and enhance students’ motivation thus effectively facilitating language development in L2 learners. (shrink)

When a toddler knows a word, what does she actually know? Many categories have multiple relevant properties; for example, shape and color are relevant to membership in the category banana. How do toddlers prioritize these properties when recognizing familiar words, and are there systematic differences among children? In this study, toddlers viewed pairs of objects associated with prototypical colors. On some trials, objects were typically colored ; on other trials, colors were switched. On each trial, toddlers were directed to find (...) a target object. Overall, recognition was disrupted when colors were switched, as measured by eye movements. Moreover, individual differences in vocabularies predicted recognition differences: Toddlers who say fewer shape-based words were more disrupted by color switches. “Knowing” a word may not mean the same thing for all toddlers; different toddlers prioritize different facets of familiar objects in their lexical representations. (shrink)

This research explores current controversies within country dance communities and the implications of cultural and ethical issues related to representation of gender and race in a KOS for an ICH, while investigating the importance of context and the applicability of semantic approaches in the implementation of synonym rings. During development of a controlled vocabulary to represent dance concepts for country dance choreography, this study encountered and considered the importance of history and culture regarding synonymous and near-synonymous terms used (...) to describe dance roles and choreographic elements. A subset of names for the same choreographic concepts across four subdomains of country dance (English country dance, Scottish country dance, contra dance, and modern western square dance) were used as a case study. These concepts included traditionally gendered dance roles and choreographic terms with a racially pejorative history. Through the lens of existing research on ethical knowl­edge organization, this study focused on principles and methods of transparency, multivocality, cultural warrant, cultural hospitality, and intersectionality to conduct a domain analysis of country dance resources. The analysis revealed differing levels of engagement and distinction among dance practitioners and communities for their preferences to use different terms for the same concept. Various lexical, grammatical, affective, social, political, and cultural aspects also emerged as important contextual factors for the use and assignment of terms. As a result, this study proposes the use of semantic annotation to represent those contextual factors and to allow mechanisms of user choice in the design of a country dance knowl­edge organization system. Future research arising from this study would focus on expanding examination to other country dance genres and continued exploration of the use of semantic approaches to represent contextual factors in controlled vocabulary development. (shrink)

This longitudinal study investigated how different mediums of word explanation affected the use of English vocabulary strategies among Chinese Grade-7 students. 170 students were tested on their English receptive vocabulary size and vocabulary strategy application before and after an 8.33-month intervention. Students were divided into three experimental groups and one control group. The three experimental groups were provided with learning materials that explained the target vocabulary in three mediums respectively: English-only, English-and-Chinese, and Chinese-only. Results showed that, (...) after the intervention, receptive vocabulary size did not have any direct significant impact on vocabulary strategy development, whereas mediums of word explanation materials impacted students' application of vocabulary learning strategies in different ways. Our findings showed that the English-only medium significantly enhanced students' use of metacognition, cognition, and memorization strategies, but decreased social strategy development. Chinese-only medium significantly facilitated cognition and memorization strategy development. Implications for L2 vocabulary education are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCurrently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)