Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Year of publication
- 2021 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2) (remove)
Keywords
- construction (2) (remove)
Institute
There has been a growing awareness that graphing is an essential part of the science curriculum. While much research has focused on student conceptions and abilities regarding graphical representations, only few studies have investigated what teachers think about them and how they use graphs in science class. The purpose of this study is to explore educational beliefs, motivation, and teaching practices of German secondary biology teachers regarding graph construction. Via questionnaire surveys, 71 teachers from different regions in Germany rated their beliefs and motivation as well as the frequency of different graph construction activities in biology class. The teachers surveyed in this study were quite motivated in their teaching of graph construction. Furthermore, they tended to believe that graph construction should be practiced explicitly in biology class and that students should learn clear strategies for constructing graphs. We found that teaching subjects and own research experience make a difference in teachers' beliefs and motivation regarding graph construction in biology class. The self-report on classroom practices revealed that participants may provide limited opportunities for students to experience graphing as a social and iterative practice. Implications are drawn for teacher education and professional development as well as for further research in teacher education contexts.
Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices
(2021)
This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.