Center for Language Acquisition at the Pennsylvania State University

After contrasting the complexities of present-day conversation and academic writing, the talk goes on to briefly trace the historical development of these discourse styles, showing how academic writing has evolved to become increasingly ‘compressed’ over the last three centuries. The most dramatic changes have occurred in the last 100 years. Many of these historical changes have also resulted in a loss of explicitness, again challenging the stereotypical view of writing as being maximally explicit in meaning.

Finally, I will discuss the implications of these findings for standard practice in the research and assessment of writing development, which usually employs t-unit-based measures to evaluate grammatical complexity and fluency. In particular, I will show how t-unit based measures fail to distinguish between the complexities of speech and writing, and actually favor the types of complexity that are common in conversation rather than the types that are common in professional academic writing.

Wolff-Michael Roth, the Lansdowne Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Victoria will be presenting a paper titled "Dialogism: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Learning in Science"

Location: 220 Hammond Building

Abstract:

Wolff-Michael Roth takes a 38-minute conversation in one science classroom as an occasion for analyzing learning and development from a perspective by and large inspired by the works of Mikhail Bakhtin but also influenced by Lev Vygotsky and 20th century European phenomenology and American pragmatism. He throws a new and very different light on the nature and use of language in science classroom, and its transformation. In so doing, he not only exposes the weaknesses of existing theoretical frameworks, including radical and social constructivism, but also exhibits problems in his own previous thinking about knowing and learning in science classrooms. The talk particularly addresses issues normally out of the light of sight of science education research, including the material bodily principle, double-voicedness, laughter, coarse language, swearing, the carnal and carnivalistic aspects of life, code-switching, and the role of vernacular in the transformation of scientific language. The author suggests that only a unit of analysis that begins with the fullness of life, singular, unique, and once-occurrent Being, allows an understanding of learning and development, emotion and motivation, that is, knowing science in its relation to the human condition writ large. In this, the book provides responses to questions that conceptual change research, for example, is unable to answer, for example, the learning paradox, the impossibility to eradicate misconceptions, and the resistance of teachers to take a conceptual change position.