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. / 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.

Despite firm knowledge of the instructional actions taken by skillful teachers, the evidence of persistently low levels of literacy achievement among urban secondary students underscores the complexity of achieving meaningful change in routine teaching practices. This study was motivated by the need to improve teaching practices and improve literacy achievement among Black and Latino youth. In this mixed-methods study, I researched the extent to which the understandings about effective instruction guided the instruction of two highly-regarded secondary English language arts classroom teachers. The data for this study included initial teacher interviews, videos of classroom observations, teacher and researcher reflections of practice, and teacher retrospective interviews. The analyses included identifying, analyzing, and classifying: (1) the occurrence of explicit instruction of reading strategies, development of requisite background knowledge, culturally responsive pedagogy, and disciplinary literacy in English language arts secondary classrooms, (2) the types of decisions teachers make related to these factors when enacting a standards-based curriculum, and (3) how these decisions affect student achievement. The analyses led to two major findings: (1) both teachers modified the new standards-based language arts curriculum, but in varied ways and for substantially different reasons; and (2) the students whose instruction included the use of research-based strategies to access and build requisite background knowledge along with disciplinary literacy strategies made significant gains in reading achievement. The overall results of this study confirm and expand the existing literature in several ways: (1) by calling attention to how curricular modifications related to the development of requisite background knowledge and instruction in disciplinary literacy strategies serve to facilitate students’ access to complex texts; (2) by identifying some of the reasons for and obstacles to curricular modification for particular teachers in particular contexts; and (3) by providing preliminary evidence of positive reading outcomes for Black and Latino students who read complex texts in classrooms in which teachers emphasize disciplinary literacy practices, development of requisite background knowledge, and explicit instruction in comprehension strategies.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2017-06-29T13:56:38Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 871101 bytes, checksum: a9b35b3a9f68a5f416dae837f77d9645 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-29T13:56:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 871101 bytes, checksum: a9b35b3a9f68a5f416dae837f77d9645 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-31 / The power of interaction between internet users has grown since the appearance of tools aligned with the principles of WEB 2.0, including blogs, forums and social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This kind of application is based on frequent message exchanges between users, generating large quantities of textual data comprised of small messages. Text classification techniques allow the extraction of relevant information from such messages. In this context, the challenges are related to the fact that the short messages common in social networks contain, individually, too little data for the traditional analyses. In this work a new technique for improving topic classification in short texts is proposed. This technique is based on the idea of combining a standard text classifier with a keywords-based simple classification scheme; the novelty here beyond the combination of two classification schemes is the use of a semi-automated, unsupervised technique for building the list of keywords reated to the desired topic; this technique is based on the use of topic modeling using the LDA algorithm. To demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach, a Corpus of twitter messages was built around the topic “violence”. This Corpus was used in experiments to assess the performance of the proposed classification technique. Results show that topic classification for short texts is improved by the proposed technique. / O poder da interação entre usuários na internet aumentou consideravelmente através do surgimento de ferramentas alinhadas com os conceitos da WEB 2.0, a exemplo dos blogs, fóruns de discussão, e redes sociais como o Facebook e Twitter. Estas aplicações são constituídas por uma troca contínua de mensagens entre os usuários, gerando com isso, uma expressiva massa de dados formada por várias pequenas mensagens. Estudos mostram que informações podem ser extraídas com base em tais dados através da classificação de textos. O desafio da classificação de texto nesse contexto é que as mensagens dos usuários nas redes sociais são curtas, por exemplo o twitter, que possui apenas cento e quarenta caracteres, fazendo com que ocorra o problema de escassez de dados e ausência de similaridade entre palavras relevantes. Nesta dissertação é apresentada uma técnica que propõe uma melhoria na classificação de tópicos em textos curtos usando background knowledge. A técnica proposta consiste em realizar a classificação de textos curtos em três etapas, usando um algoritmo de classificação de texto convencional, sendo o NaiveBayes escolhido para esta dissertação, realizando uma comparação simples de texto, aqui denominada de “Contador de Palavras” que verifica a existência ou não das palavras-chave da background knowledge nos textos e, finalmente, ao término das duas etapas, os resultados são combinados para que o texto seja efetivamente classificado. Para demonstrar a eficiência da melhoria proposta, foram extraídos mensagens do Twitter e construído um Corpus em português tendo como tema a “Violência”. Esse Corpus foi utilizado em um experimento para determinar o desempenho de classificação da técnica proposta. Os resultados demonstram que a técnica de classificação proposta consegue melhorar o desempenho de classificação de tópicos em textos curtos.

Jeg har i denne bacheloroppgaven valgt å fordype meg i den russiske komponisten Pjotr Iljitsj Tsjajkovskijs liv og virke, hans kulturelle bakgrunn og den musikkhistoriske epoken han levde i. Jeg valgte to av hans verker, hans "Romanse nr. 6 op. 6 Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" og "Souvenir de Florence op 70." Målet var å finne ut om musikalske tolkning ville endres etter en inngående studie i komponistens liv. Som et resultat av studien så jeg på verkene i et annet lys, og jeg spilte dem også annerledes. Dypdykket gjorde at jeg innlemmet flere nye konkrete elementer i min tolkning. Jeg tror også jeg har funnet metoder for å gjøre slik bakgrunnskunnskap om til noe "musikalsk klingende". / This bachelor thesis aims at giving me a deepened awareness in the interpretation of the music of P. I Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), with his cultural background and the music his- torical epoch in which he lived. I have focused on two of his works: “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt op. 6” and ”Souvenir de Florence, op 70”. My main goal was to see if div- ing more deeply into Tchaikovsky`s life and history would have an impact on my musical interpretation. As a result of this study, I made several changes in my interpretation. I also see both the composer and his musical works in a different light. As a bonus, I found some methods to use when transferring this kind of background knowledge into “sound- ing music”.

No description available.

The study reported here tests a model that includes several factors thought to contribute to the comprehension of static multimedia learning materials (i.e. background knowledge, working memory, attention to components as measured with eye movement measures). The model examines the effects of working memory capacity, domain specific (biology) and related domain (geoscience) background knowledge on the visual attention to static multimedia text, and their collective influence on reading comprehension. A similar model has been tested with a previous cohort of students, and has been found to have a good fit to the data (Fitzhugh, Cromley, Newcombe, Perez and Wills, 2010). The present study tests the efficacy of visual cues (signaling) on the comprehension of multimedia texts and the effects of signaling on the relationships between cognitive factors and visual attention. Analysis of Covariance indicated that signaling interacts with background knowledge. Signaling also changes the distribution of attention to varying components of the multimedia display. The path model shows that signaling alters the relationship between domain specific background knowledge (biology) and comprehension as well as that of related background knowledge (geoscience) on comprehension. The nature of the relationships indicates that the characteristics of the reading material influence the type of background knowledge that contributes to comprehension. Results are discussed in terms of their application to a classroom setting. / Psychology

Les sciences de la vie produisent de grandes masses de données (par exemple, des essais cliniques et des articles scientifiques). L'intégration et l'analyse des différentes bases de données liées à la même question de recherche, par exemple la corrélation entre phénotypes et génotypes, sont essentielles pour découvrir de nouvelles connaissances. Pour cela, la communauté des sciences de la vie a adopté les techniques du Web sémantique pour réaliser l'intégration et l'interopérabilité des données, en particulier les ontologies. En effet, les ontologies représentent la brique de base pour représenter et partager la quantité croissante de données sur le Web. Elles fournissent un vocabulaire commun pour les humains, et des définitions d'entités formelles pour les machines.Un grand nombre d'ontologies et de terminologies biomédicales a été développé pour représenter et annoter les différentes bases de données existantes. Cependant, celles qui sont représentées avec différentes ontologies qui se chevauchent, c'est à dire qui ont des parties communes, ne sont pas interopérables. Il est donc crucial d'établir des correspondances entre les différentes ontologies utilisées, ce qui est un domaine de recherche actif connu sous le nom d'alignement d'ontologies.Les premières méthodes d'alignement d'ontologies exploitaient principalement le contenu lexical et structurel des ontologies à aligner. Ces méthodes sont moins efficaces lorsque les ontologies à aligner sont fortement hétérogènes lexicalement, c'est à dire lorsque des concepts équivalents sont décrits avec des labels différents. Pour pallier à ce problème, la communauté d'alignement d'ontologies s'est tournée vers l'utilisation de ressources de connaissance externes en tant que pont sémantique entre les ontologies à aligner. Cette approche soulève plusieurs nouvelles questions de recherche, notamment : (1) la sélection des ressources de connaissance à utiliser, (2) l'exploitation des ressources sélectionnées pour améliorer le résultat d'alignement. Plusieurs travaux de recherche ont traité ces problèmes conjointement ou séparément. Dans notre thèse, nous avons fait une revue systématique et une comparaison des méthodes proposées dans la littérature. Puis, nous nous sommes intéressés aux deux questions.Les ontologies, autres que celles à aligner, sont les ressources de connaissance externes (Background Knowledge : BK) les plus utilisées. Les travaux apparentés sélectionnent souvent un ensemble d'ontologies complètes en tant que BK même si, seuls des fragments des ontologies sélectionnées sont réellement efficaces pour découvrir de nouvelles correspondances. Nous proposons une nouvelle approche qui sélectionne et construit une ressource de connaissance à partir d'un ensemble d'ontologies. La ressource construite, d'une taille réduite, améliore, comme nous le démontrons, l'efficience et l'efficacité du processus d'alignement basé sur l'exploitation de BK.L'exploitation de BK dans l'alignement d'ontologies est une épée à double tranchant : bien qu'elle puisse augmenter le rappel (i.e., aider à trouver plus de correspondances correctes), elle peut réduire la précision (i.e., générer plus de correspondances incorrectes). Afin de faire face à ce problème, nous proposons deux méthodes pour sélectionner les correspondances les plus pertinentes parmi les candidates qui se basent sur : (1) un ensemble de règles et (2) l'apprentissage automatique supervisé. Nous avons expérimenté et évalué notre approche dans le domaine biomédical, grâce à la profusion de ressources de connaissances en biomédecine (ontologies, terminologies et alignements existants). Nous avons effectué des expériences intensives sur deux benchmarks de référence de la campagne d'évaluation de l'alignement d'ontologie (OAEI). Nos résultats confirment l'efficacité et l'efficience de notre approche et dépassent ou rivalisent avec les meilleurs résultats obtenus. / Life sciences produce a huge amount of data (e.g., clinical trials, scientific articles) so that integrating and analyzing all the datasets related to a given research question like the correlation between phenotypes and genotypes, is a key element for knowledge discovery. The life sciences community adopted Semantic Web technologies to achieve data integration and interoperability, especially ontologies which are the key technology to represent and share the increasing amount of data on the Web. Indeed, ontologies provide a common domain vocabulary for humans, and formal entity definitions for machines.A large number of biomedical ontologies and terminologies has been developed to represent and annotate various datasets. However, datasets represented with different overlapping ontologies are not interoperable. It is therefore crucial to establish correspondences between the ontologies used; an active area of research known as ontology matching.Original ontology matching methods usually exploit the lexical and structural content of the ontologies to align. These methods are less effective when the ontologies to align are lexically heterogeneous i.e., when equivalent concepts are described with different labels. To overcome this issue, the ontology matching community has turned to the use of external knowledge resources as a semantic bridge between the ontologies to align. This approach arises several new issues mainly: (1) the selection of these background resources, (2) the exploitation of the selected resources to enhance the matching results. Several works have dealt with these issues jointly or separately. In our thesis, we made a systematic review and historical evaluation comparison of state-of-the-art approaches.Ontologies, others than the ones to align, are the most used background knowledge resources. Related works often select a set of complete ontologies as background knowledge, even if, only fragments of the selected ontologies are actually effective for discovering new mappings. We propose a novel BK-based ontology matching approach that selects and builds a knowledge resource with just the right concepts chosen from a set of ontologies. The conducted experiments showed that our BK selection approach improves efficiency without loss of effectiveness.Exploiting background knowledge resources in ontology matching is a double-edged sword: while it may increase recall (i.e., retrieve more correct mappings), it may lower precision (i.e., produce more incorrect mappings). We propose two methods to select the most relevant mappings from the candidate ones: (1) based on a set of rules and (2) with Supervised Machine Learning. We experiment and evaluate our approach in the biomedical domain, thanks to the profusion of knowledge resources in biomedicine (ontologies, terminologies and existing alignments).We evaluated our approach with extensive experiments on two Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) benchmarks. Our results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach and overcome or compete with state-of-the-art matchers exploiting background knowledge resources.

Com a crescente demanda por certificações como pré-requisito para o acesso aos cursos de pós-graduação para profissionais de diferentes áreas, a habilidade de leitura tornou-se um campo de grandes possibilidades para a pesquisa de ensino-aprendizagem para fins específicos. O objetivo desta pesquisa é fazer um levantamento das estruturas léxico-gramaticais que possam impedir a fluência da leitura dos diferentes gêneros relacionados à área médica. A partir daí, oferecer ao professor maiores subsídios na preparação e na organização do conteúdo programático em cursos de leitura instrumental, além de possibilitar a elaboração de atividades que possam auxiliá-lo nessa tarefa. Para tanto, foi compilado um corpus de estudo composto por três subcorpora: um acadêmico (NEJM) e dois de divulgação na área de saúde (Health News e WebMD), a partir de textos disponíveis na internet. A compilação do corpus foi feita de forma manual e automática, esta com a ajuda da ferramenta BootCat. A análise do corpus foi feita de forma semiautomática por meio do AntConc 3.3 w 2012. A metodologia baseada em corpus permitiu que o levantamento de alguns padrões léxico-gramaticais recorrentes fosse feito de uma forma adequada e eficiente, além de ter demonstrado ser possível a elaboração de um corpus individualizado, não muito laborioso, que possa atender às necessidades dos aprendizes de leitura com necessidades específicas. Diferenças significativas foram encontradas na comparação dos três subcorpora. Confirmando estudos anteriores, como, por exemplo, o de Biber (1998), a forte presença da voz passiva nos textos acadêmicos demonstrou ser uma característica importante para a organização de um conteúdo programático, bem como a forte presença dos verbos regulares. A ordem dos adjetivos nesse tipo de gênero foi outro tópico levantado. Nos textos de divulgação, a presença de características da linguagem falada, como a omissão do that nas orações substantivas e a sequência to be likely, apresentou um forte indício da dificuldade encontrada pelos aprendizes brasileiros de inglês na leitura desse tipo de gênero textual. / Given the growing number of certification in the academic area in English, reading has become of utmost importance for professionals in different areas. Brazilian professionals in the area of health are required to get a proficiency certificate to be accepted in the post graduate programme of an important university in São Paulo. Having that in mind, the aim of this study is to analyse the lexico-grammatical structures and items that can hinder reading comprehension of texts in the medical area. Results may aid teachers in getting more subsidies for the preparation and organisation of their reading syllabi in a course for specific purposes. To be able to accomplish that task we have compiled a corpus which is composed of three subcorpora: one with research articles from the New England Journal of Medicine online version and the two other ones with articles also published on the internet (Health News and WebMD). The compilation was both manual and automatic using the Bootcat. The corpus analysis was initially performed with the help of Wordsmith Tools 5.0 and continued with the AntConC 3.3.w 2012. The use of Corpus Linguistics has allowed the researcher to observe more effectively some of the lexico-grammatical patterns which were typical and recurrent in the analised genres. Besides, this study has demonstrated that it is possible to build a specialized corpus without much effort so as to help teachers and students alike. Significant differences were found as a result of the comparison of the three subcorpora. This study has confirmed the massive presence of the passive voice in academic texts (Biber, 1998). In the information genre, it has revealed its proximity to the spoken variety, which might be the cause for the difficulty encountered by most Brazilian students when reading this kind of articles.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T20:04:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2 / Nenhuma / Esta pesquisa tem como foco de investigação a universidade e a aprendizagem significativa, ouvindo professores universitários sobre os saberes por eles produzidos, em sua ação pedagógica. O estudo faz um recorte em relação ao tema, envolvendo três eixos fundantes: A Universidade e a Formação de Professores, os Saberes da Profissão Docente e a Aprendizagem Significativa, examinados com apoio em Gimeno Sacristán (1998, 2005, 2007), Cunha (1989,1998,1999,2001,2006,2007), Rios (1993, 2006), Pérez Gómez (2001), Tardif (1991,2000,2002), Nóvoa (1989,1990,1991,1992,2008), Freire (1986,1994,1996) Pimenta (1999,2002,2005), Marcelo García (1999), Schön (1992,2000), Ausubel (1968,1978,2003), Anastasiou (2002, 2007). O estudo usa, como lócus de análise, coleta de dados, espaço de compreensão da formação inicial, os cursos de licenciatura em Letras, Pedagogia, História e Ciências Biológicas da Universidade Regional Integrada do Alto Uruguai e das Missões-URI, Campus de Santo Ângelo-RS. O trabalho constitui-se num estudo qu / This research aims to investigate the university and a meaningful learning process, hearing from university professors the way they conduct the learning process. The study is divided into three axes: The University and the acquisition of knowledge by Professors, The Professional Knowledge in the Teaching Process and the significant Learning, examined after a deep study of Gimeno Sacristán (1998, 2005, 2007), Cunha (1989, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2006, 2007), Rios (1993, 2006), Pérez Gómez (2001), Tardif(1991, 2000, 2002), Nóvoa (1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 2008), Freire (1986, 1994, 1996) Pimenta (1999, 2002, 2005), Marcelo García(1999), Schön (1992,2000), Ausubel (1968,1978,2003), Anastasiou (2002, 2007). The research uses data sampling, first educational years, Language graduation courses, Pedagogy, History and Pedagogy offered at the Universidade Regional Integrada do Alto Uruguai e das Missões - URI de Santo Ângelo-RS. The research is based on a qualitative study in which questionnaires were used by undergraduate s

This research is aimed at obtaining a better understanding of the impact of the use of collaborative and simulation sessions for learning lean principles and methods. Study participants were enrolled in a Lean Manufacturing System Engineering (IE436/536) course at Oregon State University or at three other business and engineering universities where lean manufacturing or related courses focusing on lean principles and methods were taught, including Oakland University's Pawley Lean Institute, University of Pittsburgh, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Lean principles and methods have been documented as an effective improvement methodology and have been applied by many organizations globally since the late 1970s. With the widespread application and potential benefit of lean principles and methods, several professional centers, engineering schools, and some business schools, have taught lean principles and methods in order to educate and train learners in lean knowledge and skills before and/or after entering the workplace. Non-traditional teaching methods e.g., collaborative learning activities and simulation activities aimed at improving training and teaching have been widely used and have been shown to be successful in some studies (e.g., Verma, 2003; Armstrong, 2003; Nikendei, 2007). Little research, however, has focused on how these non-traditional teaching methods might affect learner perceptions e.g., self-efficacy beliefs and attitudes. The relationship between learning and learner perceptions related to the learning of lean principles and methods when using non-traditional teaching methods is also not well understood. The purpose of this research study was three fold: first, to examine the impact of lean collaborative and simulation sessions on lean learning, self-efficacy beliefs, and attitudes; second, to determine whether or not learner background knowledge had an impact on lean learning, self-efficacy beliefs, or attitudes; and, finally, to explore the relationships between lean learning, self-efficacy beliefs, and attitudes. In the first study, data were collected from students who took IE436/536 Lean Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Oregon State University during the Fall term of 2010 or the Fall term of 2011. In the second study, data were collected from students who enrolled in three other engineering or business schools where lean manufacturing systems or related courses that included content involving lean principles and methods were taught using collaborative and simulation sessions. Data from the first study were used to examine the impact of lean collaborative and simulation sessions on learning, self-efficacy beliefs, and attitudes; data from the second study were used to examine on self-efficacy beliefs and attitudes. Results from the first study point out the importance of the use of collaborative sessions on learning for both lean methods studied (Jidoka and pull); whereas, the use of simulation, following collaborative sessions, provided benefits only to those students learning Jidoka methods. The research revealed that the content plays a role in the effect of the use of collaborative and/or simulation sessions. Overall, analysis of individual self-efficacy beliefs revealed no significant self-efficacy differences after participants engaged in simulation sessions. The results did indicate that there were significant differences in intrinsic goal motivation after participating in simulation sessions. The level of background knowledge demonstrated a mixed effect on learning and on attitudes. The findings showed a significant difference in learning pull only for some students. The level of background knowledge did impact learner intrinsic goal motivation, but did not impact other attitudes. In addition, the results indicated that the type of session and background knowledge impacted learning; whereas, only self-efficacy beliefs was shown to impact learner attitudes. In the second study, the overall research findings show that significant differences in learner extrinsic goal motivation resulted from the use of collaborative and simulation sessions. The findings revealed that the sequencing of the teaching methods influenced learner attitudes and self-efficacy beliefs. For example, significant differences in learner task value were found only when participants participated in simulation sessions first, followed by collaborative sessions. Similarly, the results showed that participants from universities, in which learners participated in collaborative sessions first, followed by simulation sessions, had higher levels of self-efficacy beliefs when compared with participants from a university in which learners participated in simulation sessions first and then collaborative sessions. Taken together, these research findings provide evidence that the use of collaborative and simulation session, as supplemental tools for teaching lean principles and methods, is beneficial. Based on these results lean educators should consider the content areas, the sequence of the use of non-traditional teaching methods, and self-efficacy beliefs as important potential factors in teaching and training lean principles and methods. / Graduation date: 2013