The Stylistics of ‘You'

This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting across a wide range of genres (ads, political slogans, tweets, news presentation, literary genres etc.), and bringing together print and digital texts under the same theoretical banner. Drawing on recent research into intersubjectivity in neuropsychology and socio-cognition, it delves into the relational and ethical processing at work in the reading of a second-person pronoun narrative. When 'you' takes on its more traditional deictic function of address, the author-reader channel can be opened in different ways, which is explored in examples taken from Fielding, Brontë, Orwell, Kincaid, Grimsley, Royle, Adichie, Bartlett, Auster, and even Spacey's 'creepy' 2018 YouTube video, ultimately foregrounding continuities and contrasts in the positioning of the audience.

COMPUTING NUMERICAL IMAGES OF STUDENT WRITING

With the rapid increase in the number of available digital texts in schools, new methodological approaches to studying writing development in education are now emerging. However, with new methodological approaches follow new epistemological challenges. In this article, I examine some of these challenges and discuss how they affect the role of computational linguistics within the field of educational writing research. The article is structured around three main sections. First, I position computational linguistics within the wider field of educational writing research with particular focus on L1 writing and K12 education. Second, I discuss to what extent methods from computational linguistics can provide us with new insights into different aspects of educational writing. Third, I discuss the potential of the concept of affordance to bridge between technology-centered and human-centered methodological approaches, and I relate this idea to recent theoretical developments in the digital humanities. Based on this discussion, I conclude the article with suggestions for possible directions in future writing research.

Wag the Dog: A Digital Literacies Narrative

In the spring of 2020, schools across the country and world closed. COVID-19 reached pandemic proportions. Were schools prepared? Was there a research base available to help schools prepare students for reading and writing digital texts? The ability to read, analyze, compose, and communicate with digital texts requires digital literacies. However, the rapid-fire development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) makes the identification of digital literacies and the development of curriculum and instruction a moving target. In her Literacy Research Association Presidential Address, Dr. Betsy Baker asserts that digital literacies are no longer an entity separate from reading and writing instruction, they are no longer a technology issue, students live in a digital world, and digital literacies are not optional. Digital literacies have become the literacies of our culture. Baker synthesizes over 25 years of research to propose that digital literacies are persistently public, semiotic, product-oriented, and transitory. Researchers, educational leaders, and teachers can leverage these characteristics as footholds to identify ever-changing digital literacies, design curricula, and provide instruction so that all students can be autonomous as they seek to thrive in a digital world. Dr. Baker’s Presidential Address is available online (see https://youtu.be/Avzup21ZnA4 ).

Epatage as a Characteristic Feature of Digital Media

The article discusses the features of modern digital communication, which the author understands as social interaction of communicants aimed at informing the addressee and influencing him/her. Digital media genres have a set of features that allow them to be distinguished from many other media genres (intertextuality, hypertextuality, creolization). Competing with each other, the creators of digital texts try to make their texts more vivid, interesting, and memorable. It is for this purpose that many of them turn to such a phenomenon as outrage. After analyzing the texts of digital media (tweet reports, instagram texts and texts posted on the social network Facebook), the author concludes about the ways to create epatage at the lexical level. They included the use of reduced vocabulary, the use of words in a figurative meaning that is not fixed by explanatory dictionaries, the use of occasional and emotive vocabulary.

I Suck at This Game: “Let’s Play” Videos, Think-Alouds, and the Pedagogy of Bad Feelings

This article explores the pedagogical usefulness of “Let’s Play” videos (LPs), a wildly popular paratext in which video gamers record and narrate their gameplay. I designed and implemented an LP creation assignment in two English Literature classes that focused on digital children’s literature and culture. I imagined my LP assignment as a variation on a cognitive “think-aloud” activity, wherein students and/or instructors vocalize their approach to solving a particular problem. I was curious how these habits of mind might differ when students engage with interactive digital texts as opposed to print literature. What this study exposed is the centrality of feelings—in particular, “bad” feelings like anxiety and frustration, and the silences that often accompany these feelings—to the initial stages of critical thinking. When students contemplated bad feelings and their origins, eventually they were able to offer incisive analyses of their digital texts. Ultimately, this study argues that cognitive and affective “think-and-feel-aloud” activities such as the LP exercise, which allow students to dwell momentarily in bad feelings and silence, create rich teaching and learning opportunities.

I Suck at This Game: “Let’s Play” Videos, Think-Alouds, and the Pedagogy of Bad Feelings

This article explores the pedagogical usefulness of “Let’s Play” videos (LPs), a wildly popular paratext in which video gamers record and narrate their gameplay. I designed and implemented an LP creation assignment in two English Literature classes that focused on digital children’s literature and culture. I imagined my LP assignment as a variation on a cognitive “think-aloud” activity, wherein students and/or instructors vocalize their approach to solving a particular problem. I was curious how these habits of mind might differ when students engage with interactive digital texts as opposed to print literature. What this study exposed is the centrality of feelings—in particular, “bad” feelings like anxiety and frustration, and the silences that often accompany these feelings—to the initial stages of critical thinking. When students contemplated bad feelings and their origins, eventually they were able to offer incisive analyses of their digital texts. Ultimately, this study argues that cognitive and affective “think-and-feel-aloud” activities such as the LP exercise, which allow students to dwell momentarily in bad feelings and silence, create rich teaching and learning opportunities.

Modelizing epistemologies: organizing Catholic sanctity from calendar-based martyrologies to today’s mobile apps

The Catholic concept of “sanctity” can be thought of as a “cultural unit” (Eco) composed of a wide variety of “grounds” (Peirce) or distinctive features. The figures of individual saints, i.e., tokens of sanctity, are characterized by a particular set of grounds, organized and represented in texts of different genres. This paper presents a semiotic study of texts seeking to offer an encompassing view of “sanctity” by listing all the saints and supplementing their names with a short description of their lives emphasizing the grounds characterizing each of them. The analysis focuses on a seminal liturgical text, the Martyrologium Romanun (1584–2004), and the first official encyclopedia of saints, the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (1961–2013), as well as a sample of digital texts and media such as websites and mobile apps. While the first text offers a dogmatic perspective on sanctity and saintly figures and the second offers a historical and culturological one, websites succeed in reconciling the two paradigms into a single syncretic form of interactive fruition in which the more up-to-date encyclopedic model subsumes the traditional calendar one and, in the case of apps, adds a glocal dimension, enhancing situated cognition. The analysis shows that the introduction of the encyclopedic genre and subsequent proliferation of digital repertoires is connected to a shift in the Catholic “episteme” (Foucault) of sanctity and a growing tendency to consider saints as not (only) religious characters and objects of cult, but (also) as historical individuals and components of a culture and, consequently, as suitable objects of critical discourse.

Teaching Reading Digital Texts within Neuroscientific Achievements

The authors consider the process of teaching learners reading digital texts as pedagogical support for their search activity. Taking into account psychophysiological regularities and psychological mechanisms a teacher gets an opportunity to simulate the environment and conditions for learners to form implications, formulate questions and implement research and search for new questions based on the obtained results with the help of hypertextuality, multimedia and interactivity of digital texts in a real educational process. The purpose of the study is to identify a strategy for reading digital text. The simulation experiment for senior learners includes two opposite ways of teaching reading digital text. He/she had to start first with the short text reading, then with the corresponding picture and vice versa. The personal significance of the read text or picture, understanding of the text content and the accuracy of its reproduction were taken into account. Experimental evidence suggests the importance of using strategies for teaching reading a digital text as strategies allow the learner to act as a subject of attitude to the subject of knowledge. Teacher’s digital text-based sequencing of learning situations, based on the principle of integrity, provides a sequence of future-oriented behavioral acts in the context of neuroscience achievements.