A Matter Of Choice: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of ECEC Policy In Canada'S 2006 Federal Election

This paper used a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Using Fairclough’s approach to CDA, the study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and Conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. The “choice” discourse was found to be dominant in the majority of texts examined. A dominant discourse is one that is created and sustained by those with power thus contributing to hegemony in society. Three textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the “choice” discourse and contribute to its dominance: rationalization, nominalization and conversationalization. It is suggested that the language used in public documents throughout this election and the subsequent dominance of the “choice” discourse may have had a significant impact on citizens’ understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the ECEC issue.

A Matter Of Choice: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of ECEC Policy In Canada'S 2006 Federal Election

This paper used a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Using Fairclough’s approach to CDA, the study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and Conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. The “choice” discourse was found to be dominant in the majority of texts examined. A dominant discourse is one that is created and sustained by those with power thus contributing to hegemony in society. Three textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the “choice” discourse and contribute to its dominance: rationalization, nominalization and conversationalization. It is suggested that the language used in public documents throughout this election and the subsequent dominance of the “choice” discourse may have had a significant impact on citizens’ understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the ECEC issue.

A matter of choice : a critical discourse analysis of ECEC policy in Canada's 2006 federal election

This paper used a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Using Fairclough's approach to CDA, the study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. The "choice" discourse was found to be dominant in the majority of texts examined. A dominant discourse is one that is created and sustained by those with power thus contributing to hegemony in society. Three textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the "choice" discourse and contribute to its dominance: rationalization, nominalization and conversationalization. It is suggested that the language used in public documents throughout this election and the subsequent dominance of the "choice" discourse may have had a significant impact on citizens' understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the ECEC issue.

A matter of choice : a critical discourse analysis of ECEC policy in Canada's 2006 federal election

This paper used a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Using Fairclough's approach to CDA, the study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. The "choice" discourse was found to be dominant in the majority of texts examined. A dominant discourse is one that is created and sustained by those with power thus contributing to hegemony in society. Three textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the "choice" discourse and contribute to its dominance: rationalization, nominalization and conversationalization. It is suggested that the language used in public documents throughout this election and the subsequent dominance of the "choice" discourse may have had a significant impact on citizens' understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the ECEC issue.

A Matter of Choice : a Critical Discourse Analysis of ECEC Policy in Canada's 2006 Federal Election

This paper used a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the representation of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in the 2006 federal election in Canada. Using Fairclough's approach to CDA, the study analyzed written documents including newspaper articles from The Globe and Mail and The National Post, the policy platforms of the Liberal and conservative parties, and political speeches from party leaders. The "choice" discourse was found to be dominant in the majority of texts examined. A dominant discourse is one that is created and sustained by those with power thus contributing to hegemony in society. Three textual and discourse processes were found to legitimize the "choice" discourse and contribute to its dominance: rationalization, nominalization and conversationalization. It is suggested that the language used in public documents throughout this election and the subsequent dominance of the "choice" discourse may have had a significant impact on citizens' understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the ECEC issue.

The “we” vs. “they” distinction in Slovakia Hungarians' discourse

Linguistic differentiation is a basic component of sociocultural differentiation: social processes create the social and linguistic meanings of variants, sometimes also contributing to language change through discourse processes. In addition to being continuously constructed, discourse is in a dialectic relationship with extra-discursive factors and can therefore be studied only when embedded in its social and linguistic contexts (cf. Fairclough 2010: 3–5, Laihonen 2009). In this article I investigate how the notion of “we” occurs in the metalinguistic discourse of Hungarian speakers in Slovakia (with reference to Slovakia Hungarians and their Hungarian language use) (cf. Kontra 2006) in contrast with the notion of “they” (with reference to Hungary Hungarians and their Hungarian language use) in lay speakers' utterances referring to language. The study reported on in this article uses directed interviews and employs discourse analysis to provide insight into the use of “we” vs. “they” and their meanings in the Slovakia Hungarian variety. It also seeks to show how certain expressions become indexical in conceptualizations of identity and how the distinction of “we” vs. “they” is created by language.

Semantic Entropy in Language Comprehension

Language is processed on a more or less word-by-word basis, and the processing difficulty induced by each word is affected by our prior linguistic experience as well as our general knowledge about the world. Surprisal and entropy reduction have been independently proposed as linking theories between word processing difficulty and probabilistic language models. Extant models, however, are typically limited to capturing linguistic experience and hence cannot account for the influence of world knowledge. A recent comprehension model by Venhuizen, Crocker, and Brouwer (2019, Discourse Processes) improves upon this situation by instantiating a comprehension-centric metric of surprisal that integrates linguistic experience and world knowledge at the level of interpretation and combines them in determining online expectations. Here, we extend this work by deriving a comprehension-centric metric of entropy reduction from this model. In contrast to previous work, which has found that surprisal and entropy reduction are not easily dissociated, we do find a clear dissociation in our model. While both surprisal and entropy reduction derive from the same cognitive process—the word-by-word updating of the unfolding interpretation—they reflect different aspects of this process: state-by-state expectation (surprisal) versus end-state confirmation (entropy reduction).

Creating and Testing Specialized Dictionaries for Text Analysis

Practitioners in many domains–e.g., clinical psychologists, college instructors, researchers–collect written responses from clients. A well-developed method that has been applied to texts from sources like these is the computer application Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). LIWC uses the words in texts as cues to a person’s thought processes, emotional states, intentions, and motivations. In the present study, we adopt analytic principles from LIWC and develop and test an alternative method of text analysis using naïve Bayes methods. We further show how output from the naïve Bayes analysis can be used for mark up of student work in order to provide immediate, constructive feedback to students and instructors. References Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3, 993-1022. Boot, P., Zijlstra, H., & Geenen, R. (2017). The Dutch translation of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) 2007 dictionary. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(1), 65-76. Chung, C. K., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language. Journal of research in personality, 42(1), 96-132. Hsieh, H-F., & Shannon, S. E. (2005).Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative health research, 15(9), 277-1288. Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W., & Laham, D. (1998). An introduction to latent semantic ana­lysis. Discourse processes, 25(2-3), 259-284. Lund, K., & Burgess, C. (1996). Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 28(2), 203-208. Massó, G., Lambert, P., Penagos, C. R., & Saurí, R. (2013, December). Generating New LIWC Dictionaries by Triangulation. In Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (pp. 263-271). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Newman, M., Groom, C.J., Handelman, L.D., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2008). Gender differences in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes, 45(3), 211-236. Pennebaker, J.W., Boyd, R.L., Jordan, K., & Blackburn, K. (2015). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC 2015. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin. Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of language and social psychology, 29(1), 24-54. Van Wissen, L., & Boot, P. (2017, September). An Electronic Translation of the LIWC Dictionary into Dutch. In: Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: Proceedings of eLex 2017 Conference. (pp. 703-715). Lexical Computing.