Literary texts offer rich opportunities for language learning. However, can second language (L2) learners fully understand L2 literary texts? According to Bernhardt (2001):"the act of reading in a second language is extremely tricky -- is even trickier with literary texts that are inherently ambiguous, full of metaphor and intertextual relations to texts to which the readers have no access" (p.198). In other words, L2 readers are often poorly equipped grammatically, linguistically and culturally to cope with literary texts in which it might be difficult to recognize figurative language, to comprehend metaphors, to identify underlying cultural assumptions and above all to think critically while navigating those complexities. Therefore, during the reading process, L2 readers encounter gaps in the text which necessarily compel them to use whatever background knowledge they possess in order to create meaning. The purpose of this research is to see exactly how post-secondary L2 readers use their existing background knowledge to understand literary texts and what they do when confronted with text passages for which they lack such knowledge.

Šiame moksliniame darbe Rogerio Fowlerio naujosios stilistikos mokslinėje perspektyvoje nagrinėjama, kaip pamatinės skaitytojo žinios įtakoja literatūrinio kūrinio teksto pradžios interpretaciją. Darbe tiriamas pragmatinių prielaidų veikimas poezijoje ir prozoje (romanuose); ištirti 437 eilėraščiai ir 223 romanai, o gauti duomenys lyginami su šešių žanrų trijų šimtų neliteratūrinių kūrinių pragmatininių prielaidų kūrimo duomenimis. Visi tyrimui atsitiktinai parinkti tekstai buvo sukurti anglakalbių dvidešimtojo amžiaus autorių. Pragmatinių prielaidų kūrimą siekiama kvantifikuoti, naudojantis Van Rooijaus ir Pottso pragmatinių verčių tyrimo strategija. Išskiriami keturi pagrindiniai pragmatinių prielaidų iššaukimo būdai – nestandartinis (1) veiksmažodžių formų, (2) artikelių ir (3) deiktinių elementų vartojimas bei (4) mišrus metodas – pirmųjų trijų metodų kombinacija arba nestandartinis leksinių priemonių vartojimas. Tyrimu siekiama patikrinti, ar skirtingų žanrų literatūriniuose tekstuose pastebimi bendri pragmatinių prielaidų iššaukimo dėsningumai, ar teksto žanras esmingai įtakoja pragmatinių elementų parinkimą. / In the framework of new stylistics as developed by Roger Fowler, this scientific work researches the impact of the background knowledge of the reader on the interpretation of the beginning of a literary text. The functioning of pragmatic presuppositions in poetry and non-poetic fiction (novels) is explored; 437 poems and 223 novels are analyzed, and the obtained data is compared with the statistical values of the development of pragmatic presuppositions in six genres of non-fictional texts, 300 texts in total. All the sample of the thesis represents works of the twentieth century English-writing authors. Development of pragmatic presuppositions is sought to be quantified by employing the strategy of the research of pragmatic values as developed by van Rooij and Potts. Four main ways of triggering pragmatic presuppositions are singled out in the thesis: non-standard use of (1) verb forms, (2) articles and (3) deictic elements as well as (4) the mixed method represented by combinations of the first three methods or non-standard use of lexical elements. The research strives to verify whether fictional texts of different genres maintain the same trends of triggering pragmatic presuppositions or the genre of a text imposes upon the choice of pragmatic elements.

Learners often have difficulty finding and retrieving relevant learning materials to support their learning goals because of two main challenges. The vocabulary learners use to describe their goals is different from that used by domain experts in teaching materials. This challenge causes a semantic gap. Learners lack sufficient knowledge about the domain they are trying to learn about, so are unable to assemble effective keywords that identify what they wish to learn. This problem presents an intent gap. The work presented in this thesis focuses on addressing the semantic and intent gaps that learners face during an e-Learning recommendation task. The semantic gap is addressed by introducing a method that automatically creates background knowledge in the form of a set of rich learning-focused concepts related to the selected learning domain. The knowledge of teaching experts contained in e-Books is used as a guide to identify important domain concepts. The concepts represent important topics that learners should be interested in. An approach is developed which leverages the concept vocabulary for representing learning materials and this influences retrieval during the recommendation of new learning materials. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on a dataset of Machine Learning and Data Mining papers, and our approach outperforms benchmark methods. The results confirm that incorporating background knowledge into the representation of learning materials provides a shared vocabulary for experts and learners, and this enables the recommendation of relevant materials. We address the intent gap by developing an approach which leverages the background knowledge to identify important learning concepts that are employed for refining learners' queries. This approach enables us to automatically identify concepts that are similar to queries, and take advantage of distinctive concept terms for refining learners' queries. Using the refined query allows the search to focus on documents that contain topics which are relevant to the learner. An e-Learning recommender system is developed to evaluate the success of our approach using a collection of learner queries and a dataset of Machine Learning and Data Mining learning materials. Users with different levels of expertise are employed for the evaluation. Results from experts, competent users and beginners all showed that using our method produced documents that were consistently more relevant to learners than when the standard method was used. The results show the benefits in using our knowledge driven approaches to help learners find relevant learning materials.

The current approaches for the induction of medical procedural knowledge suffer from several drawbacks: the structures produced may not be explicit medical structures, they are only based on statistical measures that do not necessarily respect medical criteria which can be essential to guarantee medical correct structures, or they are not prepared to deal with the incremental arrival of new data. In this thesis we propose a methodology to automatically induce medically correct clinical algorithms (CAs) from hospital databases. These CAs are represented according to the SDA knowledge model. The methodology considers relevant background knowledge and it is able to work in an incremental way. The methodology has been tested in the domains of hypertension, diabetes mellitus and the comborbidity of both diseases. As a result, we propose a repository of background knowledge for these pathologies and provide the SDA diagrams obtained. Later analyses show that the results are medically correct and comprehensible when validated with health care professionals.

When given a multiple-choice test over unfamiliar material, students may score significantly above chance levels. This performance may be explained by prior knowledge of the material or by “test-wiseness,” determining the correct answer by using cues present in the test. Participants answered questions from an introductory psychology test-bank in two formats: a question stem with a single alternative and a traditional four alternative multiple-choice, reporting what sources of information they used to answer each question. For the single-alternative condition, participants had an accuracy of 42.2%, 17.2% higher than the base chance of 25%, with an average accuracy of 40.75% for the multiple-choice condition. Participants who stated they had previously learnt the material showed no significant difference in accuracy than those who stated they had guessed. These findings suggest that tests may have inflated scores which reflect test-wiseness and prior knowledge more than formal learning of the test materials.

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The results from the international surveys PISA 2011 and PIRLS 2011 shows that Swedish students have been deteriorating in reading comprehension. The main purpose of this literature study was to do a research review over different methods that intend to increase students’ reading comprehension by including students’ background knowledge. The method that is applied is a systematic literature study. The result of the study shows two bigger specializations of teaching methodics within reading comprehension, strategy oriented, and contextual teaching methods. The difference between these methods is hardly worth mentioning, but the contextual method is proven to be more efficient. Despite this the strategy oriented teaching method is to a great extent more researched. The result also shows that a new orientation within the research of reading comprehension is growing, where the focus is on the teachers’ knowledge and competence, instead of on teaching methods. A conclusion of the study is that all teaching methods that have been presented in the study develop the students’ reading comprehension in an effective way. It is also shown that the teacher has a big responsibility for the development within students’ reading comprehension. / Resultaten av de internationella undersökningarna PISA 2011 och PIRLS 2011 visar att de svenska elevernas resultat inom läsförståelse försämrats. Syftet med denna litteraturstudie var att göra en forskningsöversikt för att kunna ge en fördjupad bild av olika metoder som inkluderar elevers tidigare kunskaper inom läsförståelse, och som anses öka elevernas läsförståelse. Metoden som används är en systematisk litteraturstudie. Resultatet av studien visar på två större inriktningar av undervisningsmetodik inom läsförståelse, strategiinriktad, och innehållsbaseras undervisningsmetodik. Skillnaderna mellan dessa är minimala, men den innehållsbaserade undervisningsmetodiken har visat sig vara lite effektivare. Trots detta är den strategiinriktade undervisningsmetodiken i stor utsträckning mer beforskad. Resultatet visar även att en ny inriktning inom forskningen av läsförståelse växer fram, där fokuset ligger på lärarens kunskaper och kompetens, istället för undervisningsmetoder. En slutsats av studien är att samtliga undervisningsmetoder som presenterats i studien utvecklar elevers läsförståelse på ett effektivt sätt, samt att läraren har ett stort ansvar för elevernas läsförståelseutveckling. / <p>svenska</p>

In this essay I examine the plausibility of theism and naturalism. I will do this by applying the principle of simplicity as a criterion for measuring the probability of these two worldviews. Theism is the view that God exist as a transcendent being and that the ultimate reality is personal. Naturalism on the other side opposes theism and postulate that only the natural world exist and that the ultimate reality is impersonal. The principle of simplicity measures which of competing theories is simpler and one aspect of simplicity is that if a theory F is simpler than a competing theory H, then F postulates none or fewer ad hoc hypotheses than H. Another aspect of simplicity is that if H means postulating an explanation that goes beyond necessity and F does not, then F is simpler than H.    It is easy to think that theism, because it postulate a supernatural being, is more complex than naturalism. It is tempting to make the fast conclusion that theism is more ad hoc than naturalism, and because we can understand nature by using the naturalistic method that assumes that God does not intervene in nature, has the conclusion that theism is unnecessary. One of the reasons for making the above conclusion is because theism does not correspond well with background knowledge i.e. facts we know by experience to be true. Some philosophers assumes that we can use background knowledge to measure whether F is simpler than H. They assume that simpler metaphysical theories are those with more background assumptions into the body of the metaphysical theory. A crucial task in this essay will be to evaluate that assumption.   I propose that it is problematic to apply background knowledge when assessing the simplicity of metaphysical theories because assuming that one can measure metaphysical simplicity with background knowledge is to assume that all that exist is relatively symmetrical. Also, I suggest that naturalism is more ad hoc than theism when it comes to explain diverse phenomena in the world.

This study aimed to examine the relationship of background knowledge in relation to topic interest and reading performance of English language learners at TOBB University of Economics and Technology. For that, a reading interest questionnaire and three reading comprehension tests, which were accompanied with a 2-item background &amp / interest questionnaire, were developed by the researcher. These instruments were implemented on 75 English language learners studying at TOBB ETU Preparatory School. The results obtained from the instruments were analyzed through SPSS 15.0. In analyzing the data, descriptive statistics as average and standard deviation besides inferential statistics as one-way ANOVA and Spearman&rsquo / s correlation test were used. The results of the study revealed that there is a significant difference among the three reading performance scores of the language learners. Besides, the correlation of topic background knowledge and interest is highlighted for each of three reading comprehension tests, so are the significant relationships of (a) background knowledge and reading performance as well (b) topic interest and reading performance also among the results for the moderate-interest &amp / background knowledge and high- interest &amp / background knowledge tests.