Cognitive Strategies and Textual Genres in the Teaching and Evaluation of Advanced Reading Comprehension (ARC)

In the last decade, published data on the performance of Colombian students have concerned educators and researchers, making critical reading one of the priorities of Colombian education. That is why this article presents the results of a study carried out in a Latin American university in which the perceptions of students and professors are analyzed regarding the strategies and textual genres used to work and cross-evaluate the advanced reading comprehension (ARC). This study is materialized in the application of an ad hoc online questionnaire, in its two versions (students and teachers), designed through Survey Monkey. For this, it has the participation of 182 teachers and 2,775 students. There are several trends in the use of specific textual strategies and typologies to work and evaluate ARC, by both, depending on the department of assignment. The evidence found is provided and evaluated considering the implications for cross-curricular instruction and assessment in higher education in Latin America, including study limitations and prospects for overcoming them.

Officiality and strategic ambiguity in language policy: exploring migrant experiences in Andorra and Luxembourg

This article examines de jure language officialization policies in Andorra and Luxembourg, and addresses how these are discursively reproduced, sustained or challenged by members of resident migrant communities in the two countries. Although the two countries bear similarities in their small size, extensive multilingualism and the pride of place accorded to the ‘small’ languages of Catalan and Luxembourgish respectively, they have adopted different strategies as regards according official status to the languages spoken there. We start by undertaking a close reading of language policy documents and highlight the ways that they are informed by ‘strategic ambiguity’, wherein certain key elements are deliberately left open to interpretation via a range of textual strategies. We then conduct a thematic analysis of individual speaker testimonies to understand how this strategic ambiguity impacts on the ways that speakers negotiate fluid multilingual practices while also having to navigate rigid monolingual regimes. In given contexts, these hierarchies privilege Catalan in Andorra and Luxembourgish in Luxembourg, particularly in relation to the regimentation of migrants' linguistic behaviour. In this way, the paper provides insights into the complex ideological fields in which small languages are situated and demonstrates the ways in which language policy is intertwined with issues of power and dominance.

Annotating Colonialism

This exhibition review essay compares three recent interventions into historic cultural representations at the American Museum of Natural History: the Digital Totem that was placed in the Northwest Coast Hall in 2016 to partially modernize its content, the 2018 reconsideration of the Old New York Diorama, which attempts to correct its stereotypical representations of Native North American peoples, and the 2019 exhibition Addressing the Statue providing context for the Theodore Roosevelt statue. Paying attention to visual and textual strategies, I characterize these three interventions as temporary annotations to what have been remarkably static, long-term cultural representations. I argue that, through these annotations, the museum acknowledges the misrepresentations but does not resolve them. The case studies show varying degrees of critical historical reflection expressing the complexities of negotiating different approaches and agendas to engaging with the museum’s past. I also comment on the pervasiveness of a digital aesthetics in all three projects, even though only the Digital Totem was produced as a digital, interactive intervention into the museum space. The invocation of a digital design vocabulary enhances the impression of annotation.

Association between teachers’ shared book reading strategies and children’s vocabulary development in rural China preschools

Shared book reading is among the most common activities in preschools and is a key teaching practice to improve children’s language and literacy skills. The purpose of this research is to investigate the association between teachers’ shared book reading strategies and preschoolers’ language skills in rural China. We coded shared book reading class videos of 10 village-level kindergarten classrooms and divided teachers’ strategies into two categories – textual and extratextual strategies. This study analyzed the correlation between teachers’ choice of shared book reading strategies and children’s language skills among 10 teachers and 94 children. We found that teachers’ use of textual strategies was a strong predictor of children’s language skills. Implications for teaching skills during shared book reading in rural China preschools are discussed.

Hippologischer Fachdiskurs und dialogische Fiktion

This contribution analyses the textual strategies in Danup’s literary dialogue, which is enriched in many ways with literary topoi and rhetorical devices. It is, in fact, a specialised text on the art of horsemanship, which proves to be surprisingly innovative in this regard. However, it is not only relevant to the hippological, but also to the political culture of the early modern period. For the author updates a literary genre pattern, takes up literary traditions and uses aesthetic means for successful self-promotion as an expert.

From Pausanias to Baedeker and Trip Advisor: Textual proto-tourism and the engendering of tourism distribution channels

The key aim of this article is to provide an interdisciplinary look at tourism and its diachronic textual threads bequeathed by the ‘proto-tourist’ texts of the Greek travel author Pausanias. Using the periegetic, travel texts from his voluminous Description of Greece (2nd century CE) as a springboard for our presentation, we intend to show how the textual strategies employed by Pausanias have been received and still remain at the core of contemporary series of travel guides first authored by Karl Baedeker (in the 19th century). After Baedeker, Pausanias’ textual travel tropes, as we will show, still inform the epistemology of modern-day tourism; the interaction of travel texts with travel information and distribution channels produces generic hybrids, and the ancient Greek travel authors have paved the way for the construction of networks, digital storytelling and global tourist platforms.

Biografia jako figura myśli – założenia badań i narracji biograficznych

Beginning with a discussion of the peculiarities of biographical work, this article systematizes the field of Biography Studies by distinguishing several approaches, and then focuses on biographies as narratives. Although textual and other biographical narratives are unmistakably mediated constructions, the contents presented are often received as ‘truth’. Which textual strategies do biographies use to evoke this mode of reception, and how do they try to realize it? Finally, the article addresses the unique position of the biography between text and life, as well as their complex interactions.

The Blood in the Feud

This chapter focuses on the staple form of violence in the sagas: feud. Feud was medieval Iceland’s most important organizing metaphor, at whose core lay individuated enforcement of the social contract through tit-for-tat reciprocity. The chapter examines two paradigmatic feuding episodes, one from the Family Sagas (Þorsteins þáttr stangarhǫggs), the other from the Contemporary Sagas (Íslendinga saga’s account of events centred around Sæmundr Jónsson, c.1215–22). Interlacing these case studies sheds light on how textual strategies converge and diverge across the two genres (and in other, related genres, such as Iceland’s law code, Grágás). Accident is central to both episodes, as is the violent response to it, underscoring the intimate involvement of violence with risk. When misfortune struck, Icelanders faced, first, uncertainty about how to understand what had just happened. Their choices tended to read the past as violent. Second, they needed to decide what do to next. Again, their inclination was towards responding violently. Finally, hard times provided opportunities for social engineering: costs and burdens had to be shared, avoided, or redirected among allies and onto adversaries. Feud, whose logic was well established and widely embraced, proved a versatile solution for channelling such social risks and opportunities, whether through opting into elective affinities (redefining one’s own group boundaries) or by enforcing passive solidarity on others. Icelanders distinguished drengir, ‘gentlemen’, from ójafnaðarmenn, ‘bullies’, by the skill with which they did or did not make their feuding claims seem plausible

Death Games and the Persistence of Memory: J. G. Ballard’s World War II Fictions

This article is a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s (semi-)autobiographical war narratives, with a focus on the different textual strategies and processes of signification Ballard employs from his avant-garde novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) to the feverish fictional account of his time in World War II China in “The Dead Time” (1977) and Empire of the Sun (1984) to his more reflective autobiographical texts The Kindness of Women (1990) and Miracles of Life (2008). Ballard’s obsessive repetition of many of the same images and attest to a problematics of representation of the traumatic event, and ultimately they represent a complex and rich work of fabulation that escape categorizations of fiction and autobiography.

The Songs of Fanny Hensel

Fanny Hensel is arguably the most gifted female composer of the nineteenth century—a composer of over 450 works, including 249 songs, who created some of the most pathbreaking music of her era. As much as Hensel has finally moved out from behind the shadow of her more famous brother, however, and as much as we now know about her life, there is one aspect of this astonishing composer that still remains understudied: her music. This book focuses on Hensel’s contributions to the genre of song, the art form that she said “suits her best,” where her gifts as a composer are especially evident. Its twelve chapters consider such topics as Hensel’s fascination with certain poets and poetic themes; her innovative harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textual strategies; her connection to larger literary and musical trends; her efforts to break free the constraints placed on her as a woman; and her place in the history of nineteenth-century Lieder. No matter their particular topics of inquiry, the authors are guided by the conviction that the best way to honor Hensel’s achievements as a composer and to appreciate her historical importance is to thoroughly examine what she wrote within its many diverse contexts, be they biographical, historical, cultural, or musical.